IL SOLE NERO/THE BLACK SUN – Wojciech Kilar
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
As much as I love Wojciech Kilar’s film scores, he does have a tendency to stick to writing music that is well within his comfort zone; such is the case with his score for Il Sole Nero, a revenge drama directed by Krzysztof Zanussi and starring Valeria Golino as Agata, a young widow who, after the learning the identity of her husband’s killer, struggles with whether to forgive the killer or avenge her husband’s death.
Kilar and Zanussi have worked together on 45 different films over the years, so the two know each other well, and Zanussi clearly knows what he wants his composer to provide in terms of music; a modest, introspective meditation on whatever meaningful facet of life is being explored at any given time Read more…
HOSTEL PART II – Nathan Barr
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
I have never fully appreciated, nor understood, the general public’s lust for the new ‘torture porn’ genre of films. I saw the first Saw, but none of its sequels. I saw Cabin Fever, and thoroughly disliked it. I have not seen any of the Hostel movies, and have no intention of doing so. Nevertheless, the box office takings don’t lie, so here we have Hostel Part II, directed by Eli Roth, and starring Lauren German, Bijou Phillips and Heather Matarazzo as three young women who, over the course of 93 minutes, are systematically bound, gagged, tortured, murdered and mutilated by a succession of sick individuals who pay good money to Slovakian criminals to enable them to do this kind of thing. Wholesome fun for all the family. Read more…
SURF’S UP – Mychael Danna
Original Review by Clark Douglas
Yeah, I know, I know, yet another talking animal movie. There’s very few species left that haven’t all ready been covered by some sort of cutesy kid’s flick. And penguins… well, it’s not like we need more penguins. So, it was a nice surprise to discover that “Surf’s Up” offers a convincing argument for the worthiness of it’s existence. It tries to offer something new to the well-worn genre, and turns out feeling like a very good-natured cross between Christopher Guest and the Coen Brothers… it just happens to be animated, and features penguins.
The movie is creatively “filmed” in a documentary style, complete with lots of shaky, grainy footage and interviews throughout the proceedings. We are told the story of young Cody Maverick, voiced with refreshing calmness by Shia LaBeouf Read more…
GRACIE – Mark Isham
Original Review by Clark Douglas
Another review, another description of a paint-by-numbers-based-on-a-true-story-sports-saga flick. They seem to keep coming so quickly, don’t they? “Gracie” is loosely based on the real-life events of actress Elisabeth Shue and her brother Andrew. The movie was directed by Shue’s husband, Davis Guggenheim, and stars both Elisabeth and Andrew in supporting roles. It’s definitely a very personal movie for these folks, but critics were not very kind to the film, dismissing it as another ho-hum sports tale. The plot is a mesh of uplifting drama and family tragedy, as a teenage girl aspires to become a soccer star after the death of her brother. Her mother tells her it’s too dangerous, her father won’t support her. Who wants to bet that overcomes some obstacles and wins the love of everybody around her in the end? Read more…
KNOCKED UP – Loudon Wainwright III
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
One of the surprising comedy successes of 2007, director Judd Apatow’s Knocked Up starred Katherine Heigl as successful TV presenter Alison Scott, who has a one-night-stand with layabout, perennially high party animal Ben Stone (Seth Rogen) – and ends up pregnant. What follows is a hugely funny, surprisingly touching and romantic comedy about two clearly mis-matched parents-to-be learning to love each other despite their differences, for the good of their unborn child.
Knocked Up’s music was provided by sardonic singer-songwriter Loudon Wainwright III, who wrote a handful of original songs for the film, as well as a small amount of transitional score music for guitars and a small string quartet Read more…
MR. BROOKS – Ramin Djawadi
Original Review by Clark Douglas
I don’t know how true it is, but I’ve heard this rumor that actor/director Kevin Costner is the sort of guy who is very picky about the music for films he is involved in. I have no idea how much trouble he’s given composers, or how much he knows about music, but I do know that the vast majority of Costner films have featured solid scores by solid composers. It’s interesting to note that the likes of Bruce Broughton, Alan Silvestri, James Horner, James Newton Howard, Ennio Morricone, Maurice Jarre, John Barry, John Williams, Michael Kamen, Thomas Newman, William Ross, Gabriel Yared, George S. Clinton, John Debney, Alexandre Desplat, Trevor Jones, and Basil Poledouris are among those who have scored the actor’s movies. I seriously doubt many modern actors can match that kind of list. Read more…
BURY MY HEART AT WOUNDED KNEE – George S. Clinton
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
It’s been interesting to see how the perception of the Native American, or the American Indian, or however you want to describe them, has changed in Hollywood over the years. At the birth of cinema, movies tended to depict them the same way as the United States as a whole did: troublesome, violent, dirty savages who stood in the way of the white man’s inevitable progress across the American continent, and who had to be eradicated as necessary. By the 1950s, the attitude had softened somewhat: characters like Tonto were portrayed as subservient lackeys to the heroic Lone Rangers of the world, almost as a variation on Stepin Fetchit, or Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom. I don’t know when the perception of native Americans made its most radical shift, but the by the time Dances With Wolves rolled around in 1989, the Indian had become a noble, almost mythic figure: honorable, family-oriented, dependable, spiritual, deeply in touch with the land around him, and bearing all the qualities humanity itself aspires to have. This is certainly the standpoint Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee takes. Read more…
BUG – Brian Tyler
Original Review by Clark Douglas
On a purely technical level, William Friedkin’s “Bug” is one of the simplest films you will see this year, if you see it at all. It has only seven speaking roles and takes place almost entirely on one fairly ordinary set. It is being released in the middle of a summer movie season full of action-packed blockbusters, and has no special effects or star power to its advantage (unless you count Ashley Judd as star power). It is being billed as a terrifying horror film, and promises the sort of torturous jolts provided to audiences by the “Saw” films, but there is really very little of that, either. “Bug” is merely an incredibly effective observation of sad, lonely people taking a desperate journey into madness. Read more…
PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: AT WORLD’S END – Hans Zimmer
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The third and (at the time of writing) final Pirates of the Caribbean movie promises to be the biggest and best of them all. With Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) having vanished during his battle with the Kraken at the end of Dead Man’s Chest, the remainder of the gallant crew – Will Turner (Orlando Bloom), the lovely Elizabeth Swann (Kiera Knightley), former Commodore Norrington (Jack Davenport) – agree to accompany Jack’s former nemesis, Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush) to “the end of the world” to rescue him from oblivion. In order to achieve this, the hearty band of brigands must travel to Singapore to enlist the help of Sao Feng (Chow-Yun Fat), a ruthless pirate who rules the South Seas, while avoiding the attentions of Lord Cutler Beckett (Tom Hollander), who wants to end the pirate way of life once and for all, and especially Davy Jones (Bill Nighy), the captain of the accursed Flying Dutchman, who still seeks revenge against Jack and his crew… Read more…
SHREK THE THIRD – Harry Gregson-Williams
Original Review by Clark Douglas
In this reviewer’s humble opinion, the “Shrek” franchise had just about run it’s course after the second movie… but because nobody asked my opinion, they went ahead and made a third one, and a fourth is in the works. I was a fan of the original “Shrek” score, written by Harry Gregson-Williams and John Powell. It featured some genuinely delightful themes and a lot of creative energy. For the second film, Gregson-Williams went solo, and turned in a fairly uninspired effort that merely repeated everything from the first score in a generally less energetic manner. Read more…
28 WEEKS LATER – John Murphy
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
28 Weeks Later is the sequel to Danny Boyle’s nightmarish 2002 horror movie 28 Days Later, this time directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo and starring Robert Carlyle, Rose Byrne, Jeremy Renner, Harold Perrineau and Catherine McCormack. Set in the immediate aftermath of the horrific ‘Rage’ virus that either wiped out the majority of Britain’s population or turned them into rabid zombies, it tells the story of a family of survivors who were neither killed nor ‘infected’, and their efforts to re-integrate into a similarly uninfected community being protected by US and NATO troops, while all the while avoiding the still ever-present threat posed by the remaining plague zombies. Read more…
AWAY FROM HER – Jonathan Goldsmith
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
A small-scale US/Canadian drama directed by one-time child actress Sarah Polley, Away From Her would likely have passed straight under everybody’s radar if it wasn’t for Julie Christie’s emotionally shattering, Oscar-nominated leading performance. She plays Fiona Anderson, a loving wife and mother, whose happy married life is shattered when she is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Reluctantly, Fiona’s husband Grant (Gordon Pinsent) places her into a nursing home – and for the first time in five decades they are forced to undergo a long-time separation since the nursing home has a “no-visitors” policy for the first 30 days of a patient’s stay. However, when Grant visits Fiona after the orientation period, he is devastated to find out that not only has the disease caused her to seemingly forget him, but that she has transferred her affections to another man – Aubrey (Michael Murphy), a wheelchair bound mute patient at the nursing home. Read more…
LUCKY YOU – Christopher Young
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
In addition to his horror and thriller scores, for some reason, Christopher Young often gets hired to score films about playing cards, or which are set in Las Vegas: titles like Shade, Rounders, and The Big Kahuna, for example. Lucky You, the latest film from director Curtis Hanson, is both about playing cards AND set in Las Vegas, so it’s almost inevitable that Young would end up scoring it!
The film stars Eric Bana as hotshot poker player Huck Cheever, who arrives in Nevada to play in a major tournament. However, Huck has personal demons – recklessness, compulsiveness, and a long-term rivalry with his poker-playing father (Robert Duvall). Just as Huck seems to be fighting a losing his battle, waitress Billie (Drew Barrymore) enters his life, who inspires him to turn things around and set him on the road to both personal and professional recovery. Read more…
SPIDER-MAN 3 – Christopher Young
Original Review by Clark Douglas
Is there any film in 2007 that has generated more simultaneous anticipation and dread than “Spider-Man 3”? Sam Raimi’s “Spider-Man” was a very good superhero movie, and his stunning “Spider-Man 2” raised the bar to a dizzying new level. After seeing the second film, I had two thoughts on my mind. The first was, “Wow, I can’t wait to see the next one!” The second was, “How on earth is he going to top that?” As someone once said, “With great power comes great responsibility.” Considering this situation, let’s go ahead and defuse a few bombs. Is “Spider-Man 3” as good as “Spider-Man 2”? Well, the answer is of course subjective, but in my humble opinion… no, it isn’t. Is it a round three stinker on the level of “X-Men: The Last Stand”? No, it most certainly is not. Read more…
THE INVISIBLE – Marco Beltrami
Original Review by Clark Douglas
Let’s just take a moment to be frank and honest here. I’m having a heck of a time trying to figure out how to start this review. I’ve got a few things to say about “The Invisible”, but I’m not really sure how to start saying them, or how to string them together in a particularly interesting way. I suppose the first thing that my mind is pondering is what led David S. Goyer to direct this film. For those of you who haven’t heard of the man, he’s been involved as a writer, director, and/or producer on such films as “Batman Begins”, the “Blade Trilogy”, “Ghost Rider”, “The Crow: City of Angels”, “Dark City”, and he’s currently writing “The Dark Knight” and “The Flash”. He’s an action movie/superhero guy. What on earth possessed him to make a moody teenage ghost story like “The Invisible”? *the critic paused, and decided to abandon that train of thought*. Read more…
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