THE SECRET LIFE OF BEES – Mark Isham
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The Secret Life of Bees is a familial/racial drama based on the novel by Sue Monk Kidd and directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood. Set in South Carolina in 1964, it stars Dakota Fanning as 14-year-old Lily Owens who, following the accidental death of her mother, escapes with her negro caregiver Rosaleen (Jennifer Hudson) from the clutches of her abusive father (Paul Bettany), and travels across the rural South heading for the home the intelligent and independent Boatwright sisters – Queen Latifah, Sophie Okonedo and Alicia Keyes. As the unlikely pair travel, Lily learns from Rosaleen a number of harsh lessons about the realities of life, love, race, and what it means to embrace and acknowledge your past. Read more…
W. – Paul Cantelon
Original Review by Clark Douglas
Oliver Stone’s “W.” is a fascinating mess of a movie. There are a lot of things to complain about here. One could argue that the elements of satire and tragedy don’t blend particularly well. One could accurately note that the psychology employed in the film is speculative and simplistic. One could also marvel at the fact that the film never really addresses such important moments as September 11th and Hurricane Katrina, focusing instead to center only on the Iraq War and a series of personal moments. One could say that the film has been made too soon. All of these complaints are fair, and yet this is a resonant and compelling film. Read more…
BODY OF LIES – Marc Streitenfeld
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Director Ridley Scott’s feature film for 2008 is Body of Lies, a high-tech espionage thriller based on the best selling novel by Washington Post columnist David Ignatius. Leonard Di Caprio stars as Roger Ferris, a covert CIA operative working in Jordan searching for terrorists who have been bombing civilian targets. When Ferris uncovers information on the Islamist mastermind Al-Saleem (Alon Aboutboul), he devises a plan to infiltrate Al-Saleem’s terrorist network with the help of his boss back in the USA, Ed Hoffman (Russell Crowe). However, Ferris’s plan brings him into close contact with the Chief of Jordanian Intelligence, Hani Salaam (Mark Strong). Despite their enormous cultural and moral differences, the two are forced to work together, but neither fully trusts the other. With a screenplay by Oscar-winner William Monaghan, Body of Lies has all the pedigree to be a box office success; for the score, Scott again turned to his current composer du jour, Marc Streitenfeld. Read more…
CITY OF EMBER – Andrew Lockington
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
A lavish sci-fi fantasy based on the novel by Jeanne Duprau, City of Ember is the second film from director Gil Kenan, following his animated 2006 debut, Monster House. The film stars Saoirse Ronan and Harry Treadway as Lina and Doon, two teenagers who live in the underground city of Ember, built several centuries previously when the surface of the Earth was left uninhabitable by an unspecified disaster. Lina and Doon begin to discover some dark secrets about Ember: the city is crumbling, both physically and morally, and the corrupt mayor Cole (Bill Murray) doesn’t seem to care. Taking the advice of several similarly disillusioned inhabitants of Ember, Lina and Doon take it upon themselves to escape from Ember, and a way back to the surface. The film, which also stars Mackenzie Crook, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Martin Landau and Tim Robbins, boasts dazzling production design and special effects, and features an original score by up-and-coming Canadian composer Andrew Lockington. Read more…
THE EXPRESS – Mark Isham
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The Express is an inspirational sports drama about the life of Ernie Davis who, while playing for Syracuse University in 1961, became the first African-American college football player to win the prestigious Heisman Trophy, and the trials and hardships he endured to break this sporting color barrier. The film is directed by Gary Fleder, stars Rob Brown and Dennis Quaid, and features a lovely score from Mark Isham. Read more…
RACHEL GETTING MARRIED – Donald Harrison Jr., Zafer Tawil
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Rachel Getting Married is a gritty, adult drama directed by Jonathan Demme and starring Anne Hathaway in a breakout role which is tipped for Oscar success in 2009. Shot in faux-documentary style, Hathaway stars as Kym, a troubled, self-absorbed young woman who has been in and out from rehab for the past 10 years, who returns home for the weekend for her sister Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt)’s wedding, causing long-standing family tensions to rise to the surface.
The film, which also stars Bill Irwin and Debra Winger, has original music from two very diverse sources: Louisiana-born jazz saxophonist Donald Harrison Jr., who is a contemporary of Terence Blanchard, and New York-based Palestinian musician Zafer Tawil Read more…
BLINDNESS – Marco Antônio Guimarães
Original Review by Clark Douglas
Just what exactly is director Fernando Meirelles trying to say with “Blindness”? I’m not sure that I know, and I’m not sure that I care. The film is a poorly organized cluster of symbols, metaphors, and painfully obvious statements about humanity that is often quite torturous to sit through.
The movie starts out on something of an intriguing note. A man suddenly goes blind. He doesn’t know why this happened. He was just driving down the road, and suddenly he couldn’t see anything. Curiously, rather than seeing nothing but blackness, he sees nothing but a bright white light. He pays a visit to a doctor (Mark Ruffalo), who can’t figure out what on earth could be wrong with this man’s eyes. A few hours later, the doctor goes blind. So do numerous other people he has been in contact with. Read more…
FLASH OF GENIUS – Aaron Zigman
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
You wouldn’t think that a film about the life of a man who invented windshield wipers would be very interesting, but that is exactly what Flash of Genius is. Directed by Marc Abraham, the film stars Greg Kinnear as Robert Kearns, a businessman and engineer and amateur inventor in the 1950s, who embarks on a personal crusade for justice against the Detroit automakers who, he claims, stole his idea for the intermittent windshield wiper. Not unexpectedly the score, by the even-busy Aaron Zigman, is that of a small-scale drama, but even within the confines of the story, he still finds a number of effective ways to express himself. Read more…
HOW TO LOSE FRIENDS AND ALIENATE PEOPLE – David Arnold
Original Review by Clark Douglas
“How to Lose Friends and Alienate People” is based on the life of Toby Jones, a writer for Vanity Fair magazine who did indeed lose a lot of friends and alienate a lot of people. For all of Jones’ faults, at least he was honest enough about himself to write a very unflattering autobiography of sorts. The film is a little kinder to Jones than the book was, largely because the role of Jones is played by Simon Pegg, an actor who is rather difficult to dislike completely. This creates a lead character that is more appealing than he might have been, but perhaps that reward is earned at the expense of the film as a whole. Here, Pegg’s character goes by the name of “Sydney Jones”, and he goes to work for a magazine that is essentially Vanity Fair in all but name. The magazine is run by a fellow played by Jeff Bridges, who is one of the few actors who can seem both irritated and relaxed at the same time. Read more…
EAGLE EYE – Brian Tyler
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
As good a composer as Brian Tyler is – and, make no mistake about it, he is a great composer – it’s been quite a while since he knocked my socks off. His monumental first ‘big’ scores Darkness Falls and Children of Dune in 2003 were the high water mark of his early career; since then, scores like Godsend, Constantine, Partition and Alien vs. Predator Requiem contained a number of memorable moments, but never quite attained the heights those initial impressive works attained. With Eagle Eye, Tyler has changed that: for the first time in half a decade, Tyler’s music reaches those lofty perches and, most importantly, sustains them over the course of a long album. Read more…
MIRACLE AT ST. ANNA – Terence Blanchard
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
When thinking about popular and enduring composer-director collaborations, a number of names are mentioned regularly: Steven Spielberg and John Williams, Tim Burton and Danny Elfman, Robert Zemeckis and Alan Silvestri, Alfred Hitchcock and Bernard Herrmann. It would take a while for anyone to get to Spike Lee and Terence Blanchard, but these two have collaborated on over a dozen films since their first work together in 1990 on Mo’ Better Blues, and since then have quietly become one of the most enduring artistic collaborators in Hollywood. Titles such as Jungle Fever, Malcolm X, Crooklyn, Clockers, 25th Hour and Inside Man have cemented their relationship. Read more…
NIGHTS IN RODANTHE – Jeanine Tesori
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
A romantic melodrama based on the novel by Nicholas Sparks and directed by George C. Wolfe, Nights in Rodanthe stars Richard Gere as a doctor who travels to the outer banks of North Carolina to see his estranged son, and embarks on a romantic relationship with an unhappily married woman (Diane Lane), who runs an inn on the Atlantic coast. The score for Nights in Rodanthe is by Tony Awards winning Broadway composer Jeanine Tesori, for whom this is her film music debut.
Her score is generally very pleasant and romantic, although not quite as lush and emotionally overwhelming as I had anticipated (especially considering that two other Sparks stories resulted in the scores for Message in a Bottle and The Notebook). Read more…
APPALOOSA – Jeff Beal
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
A traditional, old-fashioned western based on the novel by Robert Parker, Appaloosa is the story of a tough marshal, Virgil Cole, and his deputy, Everett Hitch, two friends who are hired to defend a lawless 1880s wild west town from a ruthless rancher who is terrorizing the citizens. The film has an absolutely astonishing cast – Ed Harris, Viggo Mortensen, Jeremy Irons, Renee Zellweger, Timothy Spall, Lance Henriksen – and is also directed by Harris, in his second outing behind the lens after his 2000 debut, Pollack. For the score, Harris turned once more to composer Jeff Beal, who also scored Pollack. Read more…
THE DUCHESS – Rachel Portman
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The Duchess is what’s known colloquially in Britain as a ‘bodice-ripper’ – a period drama with strong romantic and sexual overtones, in which the corset-clad leading lady is repeatedly ravished by a previously refined gentleman, much to the collective outrage of the aristocracy. Keira Knightly plays the lady in question: Georgiana, the real life 18th century Duchess of Devonshire, who was reviled for her extravagant political and personal life. The film, which was directed by Saul Dibb, also stars Ralph Fiennes, Charlotte Rampling, Dominic Cooper and Hayley Atwell, and features a new original score by the Queen of the English Costume Drama, Rachel Portman. Read more…
IGOR – Patrick Doyle
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Pity the poor sidekick. Throughout literary history, the role of the sidekick has been one of benign subservience, forever scuttling away to do the master’s bidding, or bear the brunt of the master’s ire, never allowed to express an opinion, or to become a true, rounded personality. In the world of classic literary horror, the sidekick role was invariably filled by an Igor, a hunchbacked, lazy-eyed, nasal-voiced nobody, assisting Victor Frankenstein or Count Dracula with their nefarious plans. In Anthony Leondis’s new animated film, Igor, the sidekick finally steps into the sunlight; this is a story where the clichéd hunchbacked evil scientist’s assistant finally has his own story – one in which he aspires to become a scientist himself, much to the displeasure of the rest of the evil science community. The film features a star-studded voice cast that includes the likes of John Cusack, John Cleese, Steve Buscemi, Sean Hayes, Eddie Izzard, Jay Leno and Christian Slater, and has been roundly praised for being a funny, clever movie, with plenty of subversive humor to keep the adults happy. Read more…
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