THE ILLUSIONIST – Philip Glass
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
I make no secret of the fact that, for the most part, I’m not a huge fan of Philip Glass’s music. Over the years, scores such as Kundun, The Hours, and his ‘qatsi’ trilogy, which were all acclaimed by the mainstream music media, have generally left me cold and un-moved. His style of writing, the repeated rhythmic patterns, the micro-motifs, and the entrenched ‘minimalism’ just doesn’t appeal to my ear. As far as Philip Glass the composer is concerned, however, I gained a great deal of respect for him as a person when, several years ago, he began conducting a fascinating ‘experiment’ on himself by agreeing to score mainstream Hollywood studio movies – the Angelina Jolie thriller Taking Lives, the Stephen King adaptation Secret Window, and so on – simply to see whether he could do it or not. Whereas the contemporary classical music world tends to sneer at film music as being a lesser art form, Glass took the trouble to discover for himself just how difficult a job being a mainstream film composer can be, and in doing so endeared himself to many who have been arguing this very point for years – myself included. It perhaps comes as no surprise, therefore, to discover that his latest effort is a very high-profile, mainstream studio picture: the elegant magical romantic adventure, The Illusionist. Read more…
PULSE – Elia Cmiral
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Once upon a time, for a short period, Elia Cmiral was considered a ‘hot property for the future’ in Hollywood music circles. Having taken a tortuous circuit to the mainstream – via his Czech homeland, his adopted country of Sweden, and work on the TV show Nash Bridges – his first major film, the 1998 Robert De Niro thriller Ronin was pretty much roundly praised. Then, two years later, came the nadir: the ill-fated, critically derided Battlefield Earth, which almost single-handedly re-destroyed John Travolta’s career, and catapulted Cmiral into the realms of straight-to-video Z-grade horror movies. Pulse is only his fourth cinematic feature since the turn of the millennium and, unfortunately, neither the film or the score is likely to alter his career trajectory. Read more…
THE DESCENT – David Julyan
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
One of the best received and acclaimed British horror movies in many years, The Descent is the sophomore effort of young British director Neil Marshall, who looks set to become a hot cinematic property in years to come if his first two movies are anything to go by. Following on from his hugely popular debut Dog Soldiers, The Descent is a gut-wrenching, viscerally terrifying, white-knuckle rollercoaster of a movie which manages to terrify its audience despite its deceptively simple plot. After the death of her husband and daughter in a freak car accident a year previously, one-time thrill seeker Sarah (Shauna MacDonald) agrees to visit a gang of her old friends on holiday in the Appalachian mountains for a pot-holing expedition, hoping that rekindling the camaraderie will shake her out of her post-traumatic funk. The group – which includes her best friend Beth (Alex Reid), team leader Juno (Natalie Mendoza), and adrenaline junkie Holly (Nora-Jane Noone) – head off into the hills and, at first everything goes to plan. However, a few wrong turns and a freak accident later, the friends find themselves trapped deep in an underground cave system with no obvious way out. Worse yet, someone – or something – seems to be down there with them. Read more…
LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE – Mychael Danna
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The ‘big movie’ at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival, Little Miss Sunshine is the first feature film from acclaimed directors, husband-and-wife team Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, who have helmed countless music videos and TV commercials over the years. The film is a road movie comedy with an intellectual heart, and follows the fortunes of a dysfunctional family who are driving cross-country in a VW bus to enter their daughter in the California Little Miss Sunshine pageant: dad Greg Kinnear, mom Toni Collette, Nietzche-loving son Paul Dano, pre-teen beauty queen Abigail Breslin, suicidal uncle Steve Carell, and coke-snorting grandpa Alan Arkin. It all sounds rather contrived, but by all accounts the film is a heart-warming comedy which also has the academic chops to tackle such meaty subjects as philosophy, family values, and the inherent exploitativeness of child beauty pageants. Read more…
MONSTER HOUSE – Douglas Pipes
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Discovering the work of a brand new composer is always an exciting event, especially when that composer’s debut score is a success. So, I hereby introduce the film music world to Douglas Pipes, composer of the new animated comedy-horror from Sony Pictures, Monster House. The film is a computer generated fable about a group of teenagers in suburban America who discover that their neighbour’s dilapidated, scary old house is really a living, breathing, monster – which has a penchant for devouring anyone, or anything, which ventures too close! Although the film owes a great deal to both Ray Bradbury and Rod Serling in terms of its story and overall tone, the film has been roundly praised for its excellent animation, multi-faceted appeal for both children and adults, witty screenplay, excellent voice cast (which includes Steve Buscemi, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Kevin James, Catherine O’Hara, Kathleen Turner and Jon Heder), as well as its music. Read more…
LADY IN THE WATER – James Newton Howard
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The critics have not been kind to N. Night Shyamalan of late. Ever since he burst onto the scene in 1999 with The Sixth Sense and was immediately hailed as the new wunderkind in Hollywood, the Indian-American writer/director has come under increasing fire for his subsequent projects, many of which were criticised for tricking the audience and relying on ‘last minute twist’ gimmicks. His seventh film as director, Lady in the Water, has come in for the harshest criticism of all; Shyamalan has been accused of everything from narcissism to self-indulgence, having cast himself in a significant pivotal role, and freely admitting that the entire story was cooked up from a bedtime story he made up for his children. Needless to say, I personally think it’s his best film since The Sixth Sense. Read more…
PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: DEAD MAN’S CHEST – Hans Zimmer
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
When I wrote my review of Klaus Badelt’s score for Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl back in 2003, my opening paragraph read: “In giving Pirates of the Caribbean a four-star review, I’m making myself undergo a crisis of conscience. How can I, as a “respected” reviewer of film music, give such a high rating to a score which is quite blatantly inappropriate for the movie, predictable to the extreme, and derivative of virtually every major Media Ventures action score written in the last ten years?”. Three years later, and Hans Zimmer’s score for the sequel, Dead Man’s Chest, has me thinking the exact same thing. Yet again, though, the bottom line is this: it may be inappropriate, and simplistic, and bear no relation to either the Disney ride or the musical genre conventions of pirate movies, but each and every time I listen to it, I have a bloody good time, and thoroughly enjoy the experience. Read more…
SUPERMAN RETURNS – John Ottman
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
As much as Marco Beltrami was walking into a film music minefield by being asked to follow on from Jerry Goldsmith’s score for The Omen, John Ottman’s task following in the footsteps of John Williams on Superman Returns was probably too daunting to imagine. John Williams between the mid 1970s and the early 1980s was enjoying arguably the most creatively fruitful period of his career, writing Jaws, Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Raiders of the Lost Ark and E.T. within eight years of each other. The original Superman came right in the middle of this golden period in 1978, and became an instant classic, with Williams’ music providing the right amount of thrills and spills and heroic ebullience the film required. The Superman March has since gone on to become one of film music’s most well-loved and recognisable themes. Read more…
THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS: TOKYO DRIFT – Brian Tyler
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
I’ve never actually seen any of the films, so it’s quite possible I could be missing something, but I’ve never fully understood how The Fast and the Furious became a franchise. The films themselves seem to be little more than elongated car chases filled with various kinds of sexy imagery – shiny chrome bodywork on the autos, scantily clad women draped over them – and star increasingly anonymous hunky male leads caught up in some kind of flaccid crime plot which involves having to drive at ludicrous speeds. Having already gone through Paul Walker, Vin Diesel and Tyrese Gibson, the third instalment stars Lucas Black (all grown up after his performance as a kid in the Oscar-winning Sling Blade), as Sean Boswell, a teenage troublemaker sent to live with his strict military father in Japan, and who gets caught up in the underground world of ‘drift racing’ round the streets of Tokyo. Read more…
THE OMEN – Marco Beltrami
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
When Marco Beltrami was asked to score director John Moore’s remake of The Omen, it’s difficult to know whether he jumped for joy, or groaned in dismay. Jerry Goldsmith won his one and only Academy Award for his score for the original Omen in 1976, and in doing so added a new dimension to the way horror movies are scored: the ‘Latin Chant’ has become so-over used these days that it’s almost a cliché, but back in the day when Goldsmith first used them, they were groundbreaking. Beltrami is, of course, a former student of Goldsmith’s at USC, and so stepping into his great teacher shoes must have been a daunting prospect indeed. The wonderful news is that, ultimately, Beltrami has produced a wonderful modern horror score which is original to Beltrami’s musical sensibility, but can also stand as a loving homage to his mentor. Read more…
X-MEN: THE LAST STAND – John Powell
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The third, and possibly most eagerly-awaited X-Men movie yet, The Last Stand ushers in the 2006 summer season as one of the first genuine blockbusters of the year. Directed by Brett Ratner, it sees the returning cast of the previous instalments (Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, Halle Berry, Famke Janssen, Rebecca Romijn, Anna Paquin) joining up with some new faces (Kelsey Grammer, Vinnie Jones, Olivia Williams, Shohreh Aghdashloo) in a complicated plot involving a cure for mutantism, a resurrected mutant whose powers are out of control, and a powerful war between the good and evil mutants for the fate of humanity. It’s all lofty, exciting-sounding stuff, and deserving of a score to match its epic aspirations. Read more…
THE DA VINCI CODE – Hans Zimmer
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
It’s not often that a work of fiction generates such a frenzy of attention that the Vatican itself is compelled to comment on its contents, but that’s what happened in the aftermath of the release of Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code in 2003. The book, which offers controversial theories about subjects as wide ranging as the life of Jesus Christ, the nature of the Holy Grail, corruption within the Catholic church, the roles of several Masonic orders, and the legacy of artists and scholars such as Isaac Newton, Claude Debussy, Victor Hugo, and Da Vinci himself, has sold more than 40 millions copies world-wide, making it one of the most successful books of the 21st century. Critics have denounced it as a work of poorly-written fiction whose subject matter is tantamount to blasphemy; admirers of Brown’s work have lauded it as an enjoyable work in its own right, which as well as being a thrilling page-turner, highlights a number of important questions which scholars of world history have been asking for many years. I personally enjoyed it immensely. Read more…
POSEIDON – Klaus Badelt
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The latest addition to the ever-growing list of unnecessary Hollywood remakes (following hot on the heels of the likes of The Pink Panther and When a Stranger Calls), Poseidon is a big-budget action-adventure disaster movie directed by Wolfgang Peterson – who is himself no stranger to watery problems, having previously directed Das Boot and A Perfect Storm. When a luxury cruise liner is capsized by a massive tidal wave on New Year’s Eve, the surviving revellers – Josh Lucas, Kurt Russell, Richard Dreyfuss, Emmy Rossum – find themselves desperately climbing through the wrecked ship, trying to escape before the whole thing sinks and drowns them all… and that’s basically it. It’s a very simple plot, which sticks close to director Ronald Neame’s 1972 original (which starred Gene Hackman, Ernest Borgnine, Shelley Winters and Roddy McDowall among others), but will be totally redundant for anyone who remembers it, or its classic John Williams score. Read more…
THE PROMISE – Klaus Badelt
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
So, here’s a statement you won’t see me make very often: The Promise is the best score of Klaus Badelt’s career, and one of the best scores to be released in the first half of 2006. As I have written on many, many occasions, one of my favourite styles of film music is the combination of a western orchestra with solo performances by Chinese instruments, and Badelt’s score for director Chen Kaige’s visually sumptuous film is the latest to join a long and distinguished list, along with the likes of Rachel Portman’s The Joy Luck Club, Conrad Pope’s Pavilion of Women, Basil Poledouris’s The Touch, and Tan Dun’s Oscar-winning Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. Read more…
MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE III – Michael Giacchino
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
It’s not so long ago that JJ Abrams was just another budding writer/director in Hollywood, and Michael Giacchino was a promising young composer writing music for video games. However, following the huge success of Abrams’ TV shows Alias and Lost, and Giacchino’s work on the box-office blockbuster The Incredibles, the pair of them are now cinematic hot properties, working together on one of summer 2006’s most-eagerly awaited and high-profile action movies: Mission Impossible III. The third film based on the classic 1960s spy thriller show, Mission: Impossible III once again stars Tom Cruise as special agent Ethan Hunt, trotting around the globe to all manner of exotic locations, on a secret mission to thwart the nefarious plans of the film’s arch-villain, Owen Davian, played by recent Oscar-winner Philip Seymour Hoffman. Along for the ride is a big name supporting cast which includes Ving Rhames, Laurence Fishburne, Billy Crudup and Jonathan Rhys Meyers, and by all accounts the film is a spectacular, gadget-filled, explosion-laden thrill ride which pushes all the right blockbuster buttons. Read more…
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