JENNIFER’S BODY – Theodore Shapiro, Stephen Barton
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
A lascivious comedy horror from Oscar-winning screenwriter Diablo Cody and directed by Karyn Kusama, Jennifer’s Body stars the delectable Megan Fox as the eponymous high school cheerleader who, following an encounter with a member of a rock band whose bite is worse than his bark, becomes a literal man-eater, and begins seducing, and then slaughtering her male classmates. The film, which also stars Amanda Seyfried as Jennifer’s geeky best friend Needy and Johnny Simmons as the ill-fated boyfriend Chip, has an original score co-composed by Theodore Shapiro and Stephen Barton.
Channeling its self-aware, hipster attitude, the score is actually a rather unconventional horror effort; low on theme, high on atmosphere, and with a definite rocker’s edge to go with the film’s contemporary style. Read more…
INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE – Elliot Goldenthal
MOVIE MUSIC UK CLASSICS
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
It’s interesting how my musical tastes have altered and refined over the years. When I first started listening to film music properly, in the mid 1990s, I typically only listened to sweeping theme-led romance scores, or the best action music. I didn’t really know a lot about dissonance, avant-gardeism, or more progressive styles of writing, and tended to dismiss anything that didn’t have a huge theme or enormous action writing as noisy, or boring, or both. Such was the case with Elliot Goldenthal’s score for Interview With the Vampire, which had caught my ear in the cinema when I saw it back in 1995, but which I completely disrespected on CD, calling it “a bit of a mess”. Oh, how times have changed. Read more…
WHITEOUT – John Frizzell
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Contrary to popular belief, Whiteout is not a film about man struggling to come to terms with his addiction to correction fluid, but is in fact a new action thriller directed by Dominic Sena and starring the comely Kate Beckinsale as a US Marshal who follows a murderer to the American-administered part of Antarctica, and must track him down before the sun sets for six months over the frozen wastes. The film also stars Gabriel Macht and Tom Skerritt, and features an original score by John Frizzell, his first mainstream work of this high a profile for quite some time.
I don’t quite know what happened to John Frizzell. When he first burst onto the film music scene in the late 1990s with scores like Dante’s Peak, I Still Know What You Did Last Summer and Alien Resurrection, he looked destined to become one of film music’s major players Read more…
9 – Deborah Lurie, Danny Elfman
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
A post-apocalyptic animated adventure, 9 is the first feature length film from director Shane Acker, who received a Best Animated Short Film Oscar nomination in 2005 for the short film on which this movie is based. The film is set in a future time when humanity has been wiped out following a devastating war, and has been replaced by a new species: sentient rag-doll like creatures known as Stitchpunks. The Stitchpunks – who are all named for the numbers 1 to 9 – spend most of their time running from the massive roving animal-shaped robots hunting them, until the youngest Stitchpunk, the 9 of the title, encourages the others to fight back. The film has an impressive voice cast including Elijah Wood, Jennifer Connelly, Christopher Plummer, Martin Landau and John C. Reilly, is produced by Tim Burton and Timur Bekmambetov, and has an original score by comparative newcomer Deborah Lurie. Read more…
GAMER – Geoff Zanelli, Robb Williamson
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The official website for Gamer calls it a “high-concept action thriller set in a near future when gaming and entertainment have evolved into a terrifying new hybrid where humans can control other humans in mass-scale, multi-player online gaming environments”. Directed by Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, it’s basically an excuse for lead actors Gerard Butler, Michael C. Hall and Terry Crews to run around shooting things, making things explode, and generally behaving in an unseemly manner ill-befitting a gentleman.
I was going to write a long and vociferous diatribe on everything that is wrong with the score for Gamer, which was written by Geoff Zanelli and Robb Williamson. Read more…
ADAM – Christopher Lennertz
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
A small scale romantic drama about a man suffering from Asberger’s Syndrome, Adam stars Hugh Dancy as the titular character, an introverted young man with awkward social graces, who develops a relationship with equally shy Beth (Rose Byrne), a young woman who lives in the same apartment building, who is recovering from her own damaged past relationship. Director Max Mayer’s film, which also stars Peter Gallagher and Amy Irving, takes a gentle look at the life of Asberger’s sufferers, proving that all relationships – no matter what the hurdles – can be overcome by love.
The score for Adam is by Christopher Lennertz, who has hitherto been better known for his large-scale action scores for video games and for his work on big-budget comedies such as Alvin and the Chipmunks and Meet the Spartans. Read more…
THE FINAL DESTINATION – Brian Tyler
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
As if they hadn’t squeezed enough life out of this franchise yet, The Final Destination – the fourth film in the horror movie franchise – again follows the fortunes of a set of teenagers who cheat death, but then find that Death doesn’t like being cheated, and sets out to claim them anyway. The film is directed by David R. Ellis and stars Bobby Campo as college student Nick O’Bannon who, while attending a NASCAR race, has a premonition that a car wreck will cause a stand to collapse, killing himself and his friends; he convinces everyone to leave before the disaster occurs, but in the weeks following the event, his friends all die one by one in freak accidents.
The late, great Shirley Walker set the musical tone for the first three Final Destination films prior to her untimely death in 2006, and her mantle has now been picked up by the resourceful Brian Tyler Read more…
HALLOWEEN II – Tyler Bates
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Cult director Rob Zombie’s ultra-violent re-imagining of the classic Halloween legend continues with Halloween II. Picking up immediately from where the last film left off, the film stars Scout Taylor-Compton as Laurie Strode, who has been taken to hospital to recover from the wounds inflicted on her by her psychotic, murderous brother Michael Myers (Tyler Mane). However, Laurie’s recuperation is short lived when the supposedly dead Michael returns, very much alive, intent on reuniting with his sister, even if it means murdering everyone in the hospital who stands in his way. Read more…
TAKING WOODSTOCK – Danny Elfman
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
I missed out on being a part of the Woodstock generation by a good decade or more, having been born six years after it took place, but growing up I was acutely aware on how much the seminal 1969 music festival shaped the musical, social and political mindset of a generation. Calling Woodstock a ‘music festival’ is to underplay its significance: not only did it popularize the music of artists as varied as Jimi Hendrix, Crosby Stills & Nash, the Grateful Dead, Joan Baez and Janis Joplin, it also became a cultural touchstone for the hippie movement and the anti-Vietnam War movement. Ang Lee’s new film Taking Woodstock takes a gently comedic look at the events leading up to the festival; it stars Demetri Martin as Elliot Tiber, the actual organizer of the festival, Eugene Levy as Max Yager, on whose farmland the festival took place, and features Dan Fogler, Imelda Staunton, Henry Goodman, Liev Schreiber and Emile Hirsch in supporting roles. Read more…
INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS – Ennio Morricone/Various Artists
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Writer-director Quentin Tarantino’s sixth film, Inglourious Basterds is a World War II movie with attitude. Set in mainland Europe at the height of the conflict, it stars Brad Pitt as Aldo Raine, the leader of a crack platoon of Jewish-American soldiers who have dubbed themselves ‘the Basterds’, and who actively seek out and savagely kill as many German servicemen as possible, with the intent of creating fear and discord amongst the troops. His opposing number is Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz), a cruel and ruthless SS officer also known as ‘The Jew Hunter’, whose actions in murdering the family of a young Franco-Jewish family comes back to haunt him when the only survivor, a young girl named Shosanna (Mélanie Laurent), embarks on a plot to assassinate Hitler at the premiere of a Nazi propaganda film. Read more…
CAPTAIN ABU RAED – Austin Wintory
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The first film made in Jordan for over 50 years, Captain Abu Raed was that country’s first ever Foreign Language Film submission, at the 2008 Academy Awards. Directed by Amin Matalqa, the film stars Nadim Sawalha as the titular character, a cleaner at Amman’s International Airport, who after finding a discarded pilot’s hat in the trash, is mistaken for a pilot by some local children, who he then regales with fantastical stories of his world travels. Eventually, Abu strikes up a friendship with a boy named Murad, who is being abused by his drunken father. After one particularly violent episode, Abu vows to try to help Murad and his mother escape from their domestic hell. Read more…
DISTRICT 9 – Clinton Shorter
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Each cinematic year seems to produce a “sleeper hit”, a little film which comes out of nowhere, captures the public’s imagination, and strikes box office gold, often as a result of creative marketing and positive word of mouth. Sleeper hits over the years have included little films like The Terminator, The Blair Witch Project and The Full Monty; if the early buzz is anything to go by, 2009’s sleeper hit looks likely to be District 9, a South African science fiction allegory written and directed by Neill Blomkamp, and executive produced by Peter Jackson.
The film is a damning indictment of the apartheid regime which blighted South Africa for almost 50 years, dressed up as a science fiction action movie. Read more…
THE TIME TRAVELER’S WIFE – Mychael Danna
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The belief that true love can conquer the boundaries of time and space is not a new one in the world of romantic cinema. Films like Somewhere in Time and Ghost have all toyed with the notion that a powerful interpersonal connection can survive beyond the realms of reality, beyond the realms of linear time, reveling in the strong emotions that such stories elicit. The latest such film to tackle the subject is The Time Traveler’s Wife, directed by Robert Schwentke and based on the popular novel by Audrey Niffenegger. Eric Bana stars as Henry DeTamble, a Chicago librarian with one unique feature: he involuntarily travels backwards and forwards in time, which obviously causes great problems for himself and his true love, Clare Abshire (Rachel McAdams). Read more…
G.I. JOE: THE RISE OF COBRA – Alan Silvestri
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Looking back at my childhood, I now realize that I was probably very unconventional in how I spent my time. I never read comic books. With the exception of the classic Kenner Star Wars ones, I never played with action figures very much. I was never really into guns and army toys and ninjas and whatnot. I played soccer and tennis, watched a lot of movies and sports on TV, read a lot, and wrote a lot. All this probably goes to explain why, when I first heard that they were making a big budget G.I Joe movie (and unlike several of my friends, who were positively giddy with excitement), my response was a disinterested shrug. Read more…
JULIE & JULIA – Alexandre Desplat
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
There aren’t many mainstream movies about cooking. There are even less movies about the lives celebrity chefs and bloggers who are inspired by them – but that basically sums up the plot of Julie & Julia, the latest comedy/drama from director Nora Ephron. The film tells two parallel stories: firstly that of the life of chef Julia Child (Meryl Streep), who became America’s first celebrity chef in the 1950s when she wrote her groundbreaking French cookbook ’Mastering the Art of French Cooking’; and that of Julie Powell (Amy Adams), whose quest to cook all 524 recipe’s in Child’s cookbook, and her blog about her experiences, made her famous within the modern New York foodie crowd. It’s a quirky little film, but a critically acclaimed one nonetheless, with Streep’s performance as Child receiving notable praise. Read more…
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