TRAITOR – Mark Kilian
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Traitor is an espionage action thriller directed by Jeffrey Nachmanoff and starring Don Cheadle as Samir, an arms dealer and former US Army Special Forces Operative who joins an Islamic Brotherhood organization which conducts suicide bombing missions against western targets; however, unknown to the terrorists, Samir is actually a deep cover intelligence operative, who is actually working to undermine the terrorists for the US government. However, when the only federal agent who knows his true identity is killed, Samir finds himself caught between the Americans and the Muslims, both of whom seem to want him dead. Read more…
PONYO ON THE CLIFF – Joe Hisaishi
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The creative partnership between filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki and composer Joe Hisaishi, despite existing strictly outside the Hollywood world, it nevertheless one of the most fruitful and fulfilling in all of film music. Since first scoring Miyazaki’s 1984 film Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, Hisaishi has scored all of their collaborations since then, including the likes of Laputa, Princess Mononoke, the Oscar-winning Spirited Away, and Howl’s Moving Castle. Ponyo on the Cliff – or ‘Gake No Ue No Ponyo’ to give it its proper Japanese title – is their ninth film together. It tells the story of a young boy named Sosuke who, while out walking near his cliff top home, finds a mermaid stranded on the beach. The mermaid, who Sosuke names Ponyo, is actually a princess, the daughter of the mermaid king Fujimoto, and has run away from her undersea home after she declared her desire to be human. Sosuke and Ponyo become close friends, but soon find that Ponyo’s defection to the human world is throwing nature into an imbalance, and could cause devastating environmental effects on the planet. The film has already become the biggest-grossing Japanese film of 2008, and is scheduled to be released in the United States in 2009. The voice cast for the English-language version will apparently include Matt Damon, Tina Fey, Cate Blanchett, Liam Neeson, Lily Tomlin, Betty White, Frankie Jonas, Noah Cyrus and Cloris Leachman. Read more…
FLY ME TO THE MOON – Ramin Djawadi
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
An animated adventure about three flies who become astronauts on the Apollo 11 moon mission – yes, you did read that correctly – Fly Me to the Moon has an impressive voice cast (Tim Curry, Robert Patrick, Christopher Lloyd, even Buzz Aldrin himself) and even more impressive 3D visual effects, but apparently suffers from a lack of sophistication in its childish writing, and even more worrying lack of a world view in its depiction of the space race – but what do you expect when your lead hero is a musca domestica!
The score for Fly Me to the Moon is by Ramin Djawadi, flying high following his commercial success on Iron Man, and tackling the animated adventure genre for the second time after Open Season in 2006. Read more…
MIRRORS – Javier Navarrete
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Yet another American remake of an Asian horror film, Mirrors is loosely based on the 2003 Korean film Geol Sokeuro (Into the Mirror), is directed by Alexandre Aja, and stars Kiefer Sutherland as a troubled ex-cop, now working as a security guard in a high-end department store, who finds himself drawn into a horrific mystery when people start being murdered in grisly fashion by their own mirror images.
The score for Mirrors is by Spanish composer Javier Navarrete, his first major international work since his Oscar nomination for Pan’s Labyrinth in 2006. Read more…
STAR WARS: THE CLONE WARS – Kevin Kiner
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Well, ladies and gentlemen, the Star Wars saga has finally lost the plot. After captivating the world between 1977 and 1983 with the original trilogy, and again in 1999 prior to the release of The Phantom Menace, the magic touch of George Lucas has finally vanished following the release of the animated feature The Clone Wars, a badly-rendered adventure telling the story of what happened to Anakin Skywalker in between Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith. It looks like something that would be more at home on the Cartoon Network – in fact, that is where the spin-off TV series ended up – but with a wisecracking Jedi padawan who sounds like Miley Cyrus and a farting baby Jabba the Hutt, the whole think reeks of a franchise stuttering to its final, floundering demise. Read more…
TROPIC THUNDER – Theodore Shapiro
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
A puerile, abysmally unfunny ‘comedy’ starring Ben Stiller, Robert Downey Jr., Jack Black, Nick Nolte, Matthew McConaughey and Tom Cruise, Tropic Thunder tells the story of a group of pampered, self-absorbed actors making “the ultimate Vietnam movie”, who inadvertently become caught in the middle of a real-life drug war which they mistakenly believe to be part of their hyper-realistic set. Despite deriving the majority of its humor from incessant bad language and gratuitous gore, the film became one of the biggest-grossing comedies of 2008.
One of the few things to work superbly in context, and on CD, is Theodore Shapiro’s score, which follows the tried and tested format of treating the movie absolutely seriously, and as a result is probably the most successful thing about the entire project. Read more…
THE SISTERHOOD OF THE TRAVELING PANTS 2 – Rachel Portman
Original Review by Clark Douglas
Once upon a time, four teenage girls shared a pair of pants over the course of one memorable summer. Now they’re a little older and a little wiser, they’re starting to fall in love and discover new things, and they’re taking turns wearing the pants again. Yes, it’s called “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2.” Bearing that in mind, it’s not surprise to discover that the score has been provided by Rachel Portman, who is drawn to romantic movies like a paper clip to a magnet. Even so, I found the choice of Portman to be a particularly disappointing one in this case. The first film was scored by the perpetually overlooked Cliff Eidelman, whose pleasant music served the film well. Read more…
THE MUMMY: TOMB OF THE DRAGON EMPEROR – Randy Edelman
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The fourth film in the Mummy franchise, The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, was unceremoniously ripped apart by film critics as by the far the weakest link in the franchise. The films have been getting progressively worse and worse as they made their way from The Mummy to The Mummy Returns to The Scorpion King to this film, and straight-to-DVD sequels notwithstanding, director Rob Cohen’s film looks to have finally sounded the death knell over what was once a successful set of films. Brendan Fraser returns as adventurous archaeologist Rick O’Connell, who this time finds himself in the far east in the company of his wife Evie (Maria Bello) and almost-adult son Alex (Luke Ford), crossing paths with the resurrected mummy of an ancient Chinese emperor named Han (Jet Li), whose vengeful spirit was encased – along with his vast army – inside terracotta statues by a sorceress (Michelle Yeoh). Read more…
SWING VOTE – John Debney
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
A timely film in Barack Obama’s election year, Swing Vote is a conceptually preposterous but light and breezy comedy directed by Joshua Michael Stern starring Kevin Costner as a good natured blue collar guy who, following an unexpected turn of events, finds himself holding the single deciding vote in the US presidential election, and subsequently being courted by both candidates – incumbent Kelsey Grammar, and challenger Dennis Hopper. The film features a stellar supporting cast (Nathan Lane, Stanley Tucci, George Lopez) and a whole host of real life politicos as themselves, notably Arianna Huffington, Larry King, Bill Maher and Chris Matthews. Read more…
BRIDESHEAD REVISITED – Adrian Johnston
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
A romantic drama based on Evelyn Waugh’s 1945 classic British novel, Brideshead Revisited stars Ben Whishaw and Matthew Goode as Sebastian Flyte and Charles Ryder, two young men who meet at Oxford University, and experience love, life and aristocratic decadence in England prior to the Second World War. Having already been turned into an acclaimed TV series in 1981 with classic music by Geoffrey Burgon, Julian Jarrold’s big screen update boasts an impressive supporting cast – Emma Thompson, Michael Gambon, Greta Scacchi – and new music by composer Adrian Johnston, who seems to excel at writing music for these very austere, very English costume dramas. Read more…
THE X-FILES: I WANT TO BELIEVE – Mark Snow
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
A very belated second sequel to the classic X-Files sci-fi TV series, “I Want to Believe” reunites director Chris Carter with stars David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson who, as paranormal investigators Mulder and Scully, are seeking to uncover the details of a mystery involving defrocked priests, missing FBI agents, and black market organ donation rings. Also returning to his most celebrated project is composer Mark Snow, for whom this the most high-profile cinematic score since the teen thriller Disturbing Behavior back in 1998.
Outside of the classic whistled main theme, I’ve never been a fan of Snow’s dark, synthetic music for the original X-Files series or the subsequent movie, and this is no exception. Read more…
THE DARK KNIGHT – Hans Zimmer, James Newton Howard
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The Dark Knight, the second film in the new rebooted Batman franchise, is a truly great motion picture. Since Christopher Nolan picked up the twitching remnants of the series from out of the hands of Joel Schumacher in 2005’s Batman Begins, the character has again become a cinematic force, free of the gaudy neon excesses of Batman & Robin, and back to the dark, gritty, tortured origins people like Bob Kane and Frank Miller envisaged.
Christian Bale again returns as the caped crusader, who this time has to save Gotham from a villainous new adversary: the Joker (a superb Heath Ledger), whose anarchic reign of terror and seemingly mindless spates of violence is causing chaos in the city. Read more…
MAMMA MIA! – Benny Andersson, Björn Ulvaeus
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Mamma Mia was one of the first of the current spate of “jukebox musicals”, which take existing pop or rock music – in this case from 70s Swedish super-group ABBA – and write a loose story around a framework of songs by the band in question. Since Mamma Mia premiered on stage in 1999 it has been followed by productions featuring music by everyone from Rod Stewart to Queen and Elvis Presley, but Mamma Mia is also the first one to jump to the big screen. The film stars Meryl Streep as Donna, a middle-aged woman who owns a taverna on a Greek island, whose daughter (Sophie) is getting married. Sophie harbors dreams of having her father walk her down the aisle, but Donna has never revealed who her real father is; despite this, Sophie has tracked down the three men who could possible be the father – Sam (Pierce Brosnan), Harry (Colin Firh) and Bill (Stellan Skarsgård) – and invited them all to the wedding, much to Donna’s dismay. Read more…
DEATH DEFYING ACTS – Cezary Skubiszewski
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Death Defying Acts is a romantic thriller directed by Gillian Armstrong and starring Guy Pearce and Catherine Zeta Jones, which charts the life of the legendary escapologist and illusionist Harry Houdini in the height of his career in 1920s England, and specifically his relationship with Scottish con artist Mary McGarvie.
The music for Death Defying Acts is by Polish/Australian composer Cezary Skubiszewski; despite having worked in the Australian film industry since the mid 1990s, this film represents one of his first internationally recognized works. Surprisingly, there is quite a bit of Philip Glass in Skubiszewski’s work, from the precise rhythmic element that runs through the score, to the little thematic blocks from which the melodic element of the score is derived. Read more…
HELLBOY II: THE GOLDEN ARMY – Danny Elfman
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
After my first few listens through Danny Elfman’s score for Hellboy II: The Golden Army, I had pretty much decided that too much of it was unfocused noise; it was certainly written in Elfman’s easily-identifiable sound, but never quite seemed to gel together as a cohesive score. But then, quite suddenly, the whole thing opened up, and it hit me. I got it, and the wonders of this quite excellent work were revealed. This is probably the best Elfman super-hero score since Batman Returns some fifteen years ago, eclipsing such fan-favorites as Hulk, and his two massively popular Spider-Man scores. Read more…
Shop at the Movie Music UK Store
Member of the
MOVIE MUSIC UK 