Craig Lysy accepted to IFMCA
It is with great pleasure that I announce that my friend and colleague, and master Golden Age expert for Movie Music UK, Craig Richard Lysy, has been accepted as a new member of the International Film Music Critics Association (IFMCA), and will be eligible to vote for the upcoming 2011 IFMCA Awards, and beyond. Craig has been an invaluable asset to the site since joining a year ago, expanding the site’s reach in terms of Golden and Silver Age coverage and reviews, and providing a more balanced outlook for the site, which had previously concentrated on only newer material.
Congratulations, Craig, and welcome to the club!
PUSS IN BOOTS – Henry Jackman
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Given the worldwide success of the Shrek franchise, it was only a matter of time before we started seeing spinoffs, and so it comes as no surprise that the fall of 2011 sees the release of Puss in Boots. The feline lover-and-fighter quickly became an enormously popularly character following his initial appearance in Shrek 2, with his swashbuckling ways, his flirtatious voice (provided by Antonio Banderas), and his secret weapon – big, adorable eyes which turn grown men to jelly – and this new movie focuses solely on him. Directed by Chris Miller, the film again features Banderas as the leading voice, and is a prequel of sorts, telling the story of the events leading up to Puss’s introduction to Shrek and Donkey, from Puss’s point of view. The cast features the voices of Salma Hayek as Puss’s paramour Kitty Softpaws, Zach Galifianakis as Humpty Dumpty, Billy Bob Thornton and Amy Sedaris as Jack and Jill, and even Guillermo Del Toro as the mysterious Moustache Man. Read more…
THE ADVENTURES OF TINTIN: THE SECRET OF THE UNICORN – John Williams
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
I think you have to be Belgian, or at least a Francophone, to fully appreciate all the subtleties and nuances of Tintin. Created by the Belgian artist and author Georges Rémi under his pen name Hergé, the character first appeared in print in 1929 and went on to appear in 23 adventure novels spanning a 46-year period up until 1975, followed by the posthumous publication of a final story in 1986, three years after Hergé’s death. Not only that, the stories have been adapted for radio, theatre, and a popular 1960s animated television show with its famous voiceover proclaiming that you are watching “Hergé’s Adventures of Tintin!” Despite all that, and for reasons I have never fully understood I was never a fan of the franchise – unlike Hollywood giant Steven Spielberg, who is not a Francophone, but who is adapting the story for its first major big screen adventure using state of the art-motion capture technology. Read more…
LE GRAND PARDON/THE BIG PARDON – Serge Franklin
MOVIE MUSIC UK CLASSICS
Original Review by Craig Lysy
Le Grand Pardon is, for all practical purposes, a Jewish version/variation of the famous 1972 film “The Godfather”. The story focuses on the Bettouns, a family of Sephardic Jews and the expanding criminal enterprise run by head of the family Raymond, their godfather. Growing tensions play out as we see Raymond’s inability to compartmentalize his criminal enterprise from the intimacy of his family life as a turf war develops and escalates with a rival Arabic gang. It suffices to say unlike director Alexandre Arcady’s first film, the successful “Le Coup de Sirocco”, that “Le Grand Pardon” was unsuccessful both critically and commercially. Read more…
THE THING – Marco Beltrami
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Director Matthijs van Heijningen Jr.’s The Thing is a prequel to the popular and influential 1982 film of the same name, which was directed by John Carpenter and starred Kurt Russell and Wilford Brimley. The first few moments of that film show a Norwegian man in a helicopter shooting at a dog barreling across the frozen wastes of the Antarctic; the next 20 minutes reveal that the Norwegian was part of a scientific team, all of whose members have been gruesomely killed, and their research station burned to the ground. This film looks at the circumstances leading up to that awful discovery – who the Norwegians were, what they found buried deep beneath the ice, and more importantly, what killed them. The film stars Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Joel Edgerton, Ulrich Thomsen, and a whole host of Norwegian character actors in the smaller roles, and has an original score by Marco Beltrami, who spends part of his time channeling Ennio Morricone, and the rest of the time drawing upon his considerable horror movie music experience. Read more…
DESCENTE AUX ENFERS/DESCENT INTO HELL – Georges Delerue
MOVIE MUSIC UK CLASSICS
Original Review by Craig Lysy
The 1986 film Descente Aux Enfers was adapted from the murder mystery novel by author David Goodis. It tells the story of Alan Kolber (Claude Brasseur), a middle-aged alcoholic French crime novelist and his wife Lola (a very young Sophie Marceau in one of her first film roles), a young woman half his age who are struggling in an unhappy marriage. They resolve to take a holiday to Haiti in an attempt to reset their marriage. Things go terribly awry when a drunken Alan kills a mugger and ends up being blackmailed for murder when he fails to report the incident. What unfolds is a tale of drama and hidden secrets as aspects of Lola’s past come to light as they struggle to find funds to pay the blackmailer. Read more…
MONEYBALL – Mychael Danna
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
You would think it would be quite difficult to make an interesting film about baseball statistics, but that’s what the makers of Moneyball have done. It tells the story of the wonderfully-named Billy Beane who, in 2002, having been recently made the general manager of the struggling Oakland Athletics MLB franchise, rocks the baseball world to its core by embracing a controversial new statistical method of choosing players to sign called sabermetrics in an attempt to turn around the fortunes of his team. Directed by Bennett Miller and based on a popular book by Michael Lewis, the film stars Brad Pitt as Beane, Jonah Hill as his assistant Peter Brand, and features Robin Wright, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Chris Pratt and Casey Bond in supporting roles. Read more…
20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA – Paul J. Smith
MOVIE MUSIC UK CLASSICS
Original Review by Craig Lysy
This classic Jules Verne’s novel was adapted to the screen by Earl Felton. It tells the story of the adventure of Professor Aronnax (Paul Lukas), Ned Land (Kirk Douglas) and Conseil (Peter Lorre) whom Captain Nemo (James Mason) captures after he sinks their ship. Aboard his submarine the Nautilus, they explore the underwater wonders of the sea and battle amazing sea creatures. But all is not well as Nemo, despite his scientific genius, is quite mad and uses the power of the Nautilus to pursue a course of vengeance upon humanity. Ultimately Nemo is undone by his own demons and arrogance as he and the Nautilus perish into the ocean depths as our three heroes escape. The film was the first to use the new Cinemascope technology and was both a commercial and critical success, earning Oscars for Best Art Direction and Best Special Effects. Read more…
A SYMPHONY OF HOPE: THE HAITI PROJECT – Christopher Lennertz et al.
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
On January 12, 2010, the city of Port-au-Prince in Haiti was effectively flattened when it was struck by a magnitude 7.0 earthquake. Within a matter of seconds over 50,000 people had been killed, and over a million people left homeless. Diseases such as cholera blighted the survivors and thwarted relief efforts, and since then the humanitarian crisis in the country has reached staggering proportions, with over 250,000 residences destroyed and basic services and infrastructure left in ruins. Reacting to the global call for help, film composer Christopher Lennertz was inspired to act. Calling upon his fellow composers and other members of the Los Angeles film music community of musicians and engineers, Lennertz teamed up with the charity Hands Together to create A Symphony of Hope: The Haiti Project, a musical fundraising project intended to help the people of Haiti. Read more…
STRAW DOGS – Larry Groupé
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The original Straw Dogs, which was directed by Sam Peckinpah, hit unsuspecting cinema goers like a hammer in 1971, and was an incredibly controversial film in it’s time. The film tells the story of a mild mannered American academic David (originally played by Dustin Hoffman) and his pleasant English wife Amy (originally played by Susan George), who move to a rural part of England and immediately become the subject of increasingly intense harassment by the locals. Things come to a head after Amy is brutally raped by several local men who are ostensibly working on the house, and before long David finds himself having to defend his house, his family, and his life, from circumstances that are spiraling out of control. The original film’s controversy arose due to the fact that, during the rape sequence, it was left intentionally ambiguous as to whether the Amy character actually enjoyed being raped, and this possible misogynism left a nasty taste in the mouths of censors and cinema viewers at the time. This remake of the film is directed by Rod Lurie, stars James Marsden and Kate Bosworth in the lead roles, and relocates the action from rural England to the Deep South of Mississippi, a regular location for the cinematic depiction of shitty-shoed rednecks and their unsavory sexual proclivities. Read more…
THE GREAT SANTINI – Elmer Bernstein
MOVIE MUSIC UK CLASSICS
Original Review by Craig Lysy
The Great Santini was adapted from Pat Conroy’s semi-autographical tribute to his father Bull Meechum, a tough, and hard-edged Marine fighter pilot. The film explores how he struggles in peacetime to adapt to his new life as well as to be a loving father and husband without relinquishing his tough guy warrior image. The film starred Robert Duvall as Col. “Bull” Meechum, Michael O’Keefe as his eldest son, Ben and Blythe Danner as his wife, Lillian. Although the film was a critical success and earned Oscar nominations for both Duvall and O’Keefe, it was a commercial failure, never able to resonate with the viewing public. Read more…
FRIGHT NIGHT – Ramin Djawadi
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The original Fright Night was one of my favorite scary movies of the 1980s, a wonderfully grotesque comedy horror about a teenage movie nerd named Charley Brewster who finds out that a real live (dead?) vampire is living next door; in order to stop the evil vampire from taking over the neighborhood – and, more importantly, turning his cute girlfriend into a bloodsucking fiend – Charley teams up with aging TV anthology host and one-time vampire-hunter Peter Vincent to take on the forces of darkness. The 2011 remake is directed by Craig Gillespie (the creator of United States of Tara), and stars Anton Yelchin as Charley, David Tennent as Vincent, and Colin Farrell, hamming it up as the suave, but deadly Jerry Dandridge. Read more…
THE BLACK HOLE – John Barry
MOVIE MUSIC UK CLASSICS
Original Review by Craig Lysy
The Black Hole was to be Disney’s effort to take the successful disaster movie genre into outer space. Conceived in 1975 as a “Poseidon Adventure in Space”, the film was never able to germinate until the Star Wars phenomenon served to catalyze a resurgence of the space epic genre. Gary Nelson was hired to direct with Jeb Rosebrook given the task of adapting the earlier disaster in space script to a more epic adventure tale involving a monstrous black hole. The movie had a stellar cast that included Ernest Borgnine, Yvette Mimieux, Anthony Perkins and Maximillian Schell, as well as Roddy McDowall who provided the voice of the robot VINCENT. Set in the year 2130 C.E. aboard the USS Palomino, the story details the discovery of the lost USS Cygnus, which is seen apparently derelict, orbiting a massive black hole just beyond its event horizon. An investigation into the mystery that was the Cygnus leads to a grim discovery that threatens to end the lives of all involved. Although Disney conceived the film as an epic much in the mold of 2001: A Space Odyssey and provided a story replete with symbolic references to Dante’s Inferno, uninspired directing and a truly poor script resulted in critical failure. The film was nevertheless a commercial success due to its amazing special effects and myriad of robots that won the hearts of the audience. Read more…
GAME OF THRONES, SEASON 1 – Ramin Djawadi
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Game of Thrones is a sprawling fantasy drama television mini-series made by HBO, based on the popular first novel in the Song of Ice and Fire series by George R. R. Martin. Set in a fictional ancient kingdom similar to medieval Britain, it follows the fortunes of four noble families – the solid and gritty Starks, the manipulative and cunning Lannisters, the warlike but faded House Baratheon, and the proud and mysterious House Targaryan, the last surviving members of which have been banished overseas, but who have joined forces with the vicious and nomadic Dothraki clan and are looking to return home for revenge. The show has a sprawling, labyrinthine plot of murder, betrayal, sex, violence, magic and superstition, but at its core is about the four houses and their various political machinations to gain control of the fabled Iron Throne, and with it the monarchy of the kingdom. The show stars Sean Bean, Mark Addy, Lena Headey, Peter Dinklage, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Kit Harington, Harry Lloyd, Emilia Clarke and Jason Momoa, and received rave reviews when it premiered on US television in April 2011. Read more…
PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: ON STRANGER TIDES – Hans Zimmer
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The fourth Pirates of the Caribbean movie, subtitled On Stranger Tides, came a little belatedly, four years after the conclusion of the well-received third entry in the record breaking series, At World’s End. Although Johnny Depp and Geoffrey Rush return at the strutting Captain Jack Sparrow ad his nemesis Barbossa, gone are co-stars Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley, as is director Gore Verbinski. In their place is new director Rob Marshall – whose last film, the musical Nine, couldn’t have been more different – while the new supporting players include Penelope Cruz and Ian McShane. The story follows the search for the mythical Fountain of Youth; Cruz plays Angelica, one of Captain Jack’s old flames, while McShane plays the legendary Blackbeard, Angelica’s father and Jack’s rival in the hunt for eternal life. Read more…
Shop at the Movie Music UK Store
Member of the
MOVIE MUSIC UK 