JOHNNY ENGLISH – Edward Shearmur
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Every now and again, a score of such life and energy and surprising brilliance comes out of left field and restores your faith in modern film music. Emerging out of the predictable banality of the early months of 2003 is Johnny English, the latest score from British composer Edward Shearmur, hitherto best known for his work on the Charlie’s Angels series and for raising a few eyebrows in 2002 following his scores for The Count of Monte Cristo and Reign of Fire. Basically, Johnny English is a James Bond John Barry knockoff score, in much the same way as David Arnold’s latest 007 scores have been Barry wannabes. The brilliance of Johnny English, however, lies in the fact that whereas Arnold’s works are mere pastiche, Shearmur somehow has managed to recapture the life and energy and panache and humor Barry brought to his works, while at the same time giving it a modern spin and making it musically relevant for millennium audiences. Read more…
THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN – Trevor Jones
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
It’s been a quiet couple of years for Trevor Jones. The excellent Jack the Ripper thriller From Hell notwithstanding, the talented South African has limited himself to small-scale features and TV fare since the turn of the millennium, with titles such as Dinotopia, the Britney Spears vehicle Crossroads and the Charlotte Church movie I’ll Be There to his name. He wasn’t even the first choice composer for The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, with director Stephen Norrington originally approaching Mark Isham, with whom he had worked on Blade. But, with disastrous floods destroying sets in Prague, performers and directors clashing with each other on location, and a drawn out post-production period, LXG (the short-form acronym for the movie) eventually fell into the lap of Jones, who took it as another opportunity to create one of his well-liked action thriller scores. Read more…
PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: THE CURSE OF THE BLACK PEARL – Klaus Badelt
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
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? The answer, simply, is that it is a whole lot of fun. Pirates of the Caribbean is possibly the ultimate soundtrack guilty pleasure. Directed by Gore Verbinski, Pirates of the Caribbean is a large-budget action film based on the classic ride at the Disneyland theme park in Anaheim, California, in which visitors are treated to a stately underground boat ride through the old Caribbean, where animatronic pirates shiver their timbers on a daily basis. Read more…
SWIMMING POOL – Philippe Rombi
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Unlike twenty or thirty years ago, when composers such as Maurice Jarre and Georges Delerue were in the ascendancy, French film music today seems to be in a bit of a lull. There are certainly some extremely talented individuals writing music for French cinema at the moment – names such as Bruno Coulais, Jean-Claude Petit, Alexandre Desplat and Yann Tiersen spring to mind – but no-one from that part of the world has really taken the world by storm, in a soundtrack sense, for quite a while. This could all change if Hollywood ever discovers the work of Philippe Rombi. This album is actually subtitled “Music from the films of François Ozon”, and features score cuts from four of the talented young director’s most successful films – Swimming Pool (2003), Sous le Sable (2000), Les Amants Criminels (1999) and 8 Femmes (2002). It is Rombi’s music which dominates the CD, with sixteen minutes of his music from the headlining Swimming Pool, and a further 12 minutes of score from Sous Le Sable taking center stage. Read more…
SINBAD: LEGEND OF THE SEVEN SEAS – Harry Gregson-Williams
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The second of summer 2003’s pirate movies, Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas, is by a long way one of the most enjoyable orchestral romps to emerge from the Hollywood studio system in several years. What’s ironic is that both this score and its sibling, Pirates of the Caribbean, should both have been written by Media Ventures alumni, Harry Gregson-Williams and Klaus Badelt. What’s most impressive is that they are as different as chalk and cheese, with Gregson-Williams treading a well-worn path of orchestral exuberance, dating back to the time of Korngold and Rozsa, and the old Sinbad scores of Bernard Herrmann and Roy Budd. Read more…
HULK – Danny Elfman
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Call me old fashioned, but I miss the old Danny Elfman. I miss his bittersweet sweeping melodies, his lyrical touch, the music he used to compose for films like Edward Scissorhands, Sommersby, Black Beauty, or The Nightmare Before Christmas. In recent years, Elfman has undoubtedly become more intellectual and technically adept in his scores, but in doing so he has lost some of the enthusiastic magic that so enlivened his earlier works. He seems much more interested in creating interesting orchestral effects, or new ways of using percussion, than on eliciting emotions. His score for Hulk is a case in point. Read more…
WHALE RIDER – Lisa Gerrard
Original Review by Peter Simons
Despite winning both the World Cinema Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival and the People’s Choice Award at the Toronto Film Festival, Whale Rider is a little known, and even less seen film. Based on the novel by Witi Ihimaera and directed by Niki Caro, it slowly and beautifully tells a mythological story of the Whangara people of New Zealand. Debutante Keisha Castle-Hughes stars as Pai, a young girl from a rural community in modern New Zealand. According to tradition, Pai’s family, the Whangara, are directly descended from Paikea, the legendary leader who arrived in their country on the back of a whale thousands of years ago (in Maori mythology, the whale is said to be a guardian spirit who watches over his people at sea). Every generation, the first born son of the bloodline is destined to become chief of the tribe. However, Pai’s older baby brother died at birth, leaving her the sole heir to the chiefhood, and Pai’s loving but stubbornly traditional grandfather Koro (Rawiri Paratene) refuses to accept that a girl can be their leader. Sensing that hers is an important position, and acknowledging her heritage, Pai embarks on a quest to prove that she can undergo the rigorous training that will allow her to take her rightful place as head of the Whangara people. Read more…
FINDING NEMO – Thomas Newman
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The last person you would expect to score a Disney family movie would be Thomas Newman; the last person you would expect to score a Pixar movie would be Thomas Newman, especially when the monopoly on these has hitherto been held by his cousin Randy. But, in an attempt to break away from the usual sound and go down a different road, Pixar and director Andrew Stanton asked Newman to score Finding Nemo, the excellent animation studio’s offering for summer 2003. The truly unexpected thing about the end result is twofold: firstly, it has provided Newman with a perfect opportunity to employ the services of a much larger orchestra, and to write broad themes and largely more upbeat music. The surprising thing is that, by and large, is also a little disappointing. Read more…
THE MATRIX RELOADED – Don Davis
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The original Matrix movie was a bona-fide phenomenon when it was released in 1999, breaking new ground in many areas: the level and depth of the story by directors Andy and Larry Wachowski; the mysticism and theology that peppers the story; the fetish chic “look” of the film; the once-innovative special effects, with the now passé bullet-time slow motion sequences; and Don Davis’s lavish, electronically enhanced orchestral score, which was lauded by fans but which I personally didn’t care for. Whatever your feelings about its artistic merits, the impact of The Matrix was and is impossible to ignore – and the sequel raises the bar again. Beginning where the original movie left off, The Matrix Reloaded sees Neo (Keanu Reeves) now an established member of the crew of the Nebuchadnezzar, one of many ships under the control of human freedom fighters who are striving to rid the world of the race of machines who have enslaved humanity and tricked them into thinking they are free by creating “the matrix”, a vast computer programme designed to simulate reality. Along with crewmembers Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne), Trinity (Carrie Anne Moss) and Link (Harold Perrineau), the crew seek to fulfill the prophecy of “The One” by tracing the Matrix to its source and freeing humanity… but this is only the beginning. Read more…
X-MEN 2 – John Ottman
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Following the musical debacle of the original X-men movie in 2000, in which the studio heads at Fox meddled so much with Michael Kamen’s score it rendered it almost redundant, it stands to reason that director Bryan Singer would return to composer John Ottman, for the sequel. Ottman, who had worked with Singer previously on The Usual Suspects and Apt Pupil, had been away making his own movie, Urban Legends: Final Cut, and was unavailable to score X-Men 1. His efforts here bear all the hallmarks of a composer trying to stamp his own musical authority upon a series, and establish himself as the obvious composer of choice for future movies in the franchise. He has only partly been successful. X-Men 2 picks up where the original movie left off: the evil Magneto (Ian McKellen) is incarcerated in a plastic prison; Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) is scouring the globe trying to unravel the mysteries of his past; and the various other mutant members of the X-Men continue to fight the fight against evil, under the benign authority of Dr. Xavier (Patrick Stewart). However, when a renegade mutant attempts to assassinate the President of the United States, it becomes apparent that past differences must be put aside, and the mutants loyal to Magneto and Xavier must join forces to stop a new enemy which could destroy all mutants. Read more…
Johnny Douglas, 1920-2003
Composer, arranger and conductor Johnny Douglas died at his home in Bognor Regis, West Sussex, England, on April 20, 2003, at the age of 82, following a battle with prostate cancer.
One of the stalwarts of British light music, Douglas wrote scores for around three dozen feature films while maintaining an enormous career in radio, recordings and television. He is remembered above all for Lionel Jeffries’s The Railway Children, whose warmly nostalgic score earned him a BAFTA nomination.
John Henry Douglas was born in Hackney, London, on June 19, 1920, and grew up in Bermondsey. A musical prodigy, he began piano lessons at four and was studying arranging and orchestration before his teens. He formed a dance band while still at school and made his professional debut in 1939 with the Neville Hughes Sextet. During World War II he served in the RAF, where an arm injury temporarily prevented him from playing and encouraged him to concentrate on arranging and composition.
After the war Douglas arranged for bandleaders including Ambrose, Ted Heath and Edmundo Ros before becoming heavily involved in recording. He provided hundreds of arrangements for Decca and in 1958 began a long association with RCA’s Living Strings series, ultimately arranging and conducting more than 80 albums for the label. His polished string writing and gift for melody made him one of Britain’s busiest practitioners of easy-listening orchestral music. Read more…
GHOSTS OF THE ABYSS – Joel McNeely
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Following his Oscar winning 1997 movie Titanic, director James Cameron has since become very interested in the shipwreck of the real life ocean liner, which struck an iceberg on 14 April 1912, while on its maiden voyage from Southampton to New York, and sunk beneath the freezing waters of the north Atlantic, killing almost 1,500 passengers. In Ghosts of the Abyss, Cameron, along with a team of the world’s foremost historic and marine experts and his friend, actor Bill Paxton, embarks on an unscripted adventure back to where some of the footage for his dramatic film was shot. Using state-of-the-art technology and new 3-D IMAX cameras developed expressly for this expedition, Cameron and his crew explore virtually all of the wreckage, inside and out, as never before. In addition, actors re-create key moments from the Titanic’s last moments (in a way similar to Discovery Channel documentaries), breathing life and immediacy to the science. Read more…
Academy Award Winners 2002
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) have announced the winners of the 75th Academy Awards, honoring the best in film in 2002.
In the Best Original Score category, American composer Elliot Goldenthal won the Academy Award for his score for Julie Taymor’s Frida, the biopic of artist Frida Kahlo. In his acceptance speech Goldenthal said:
Wow. To be around such remarkable women: Julie Taymor, Salma Hayek, Sarah Green, Margie Perenchio. Thank you, Miramax. But what I really want to say, and I’ll do it quickly, is I want to dedicate this award to the bridges that we try to build, to the people of Mexico, to the artistic tradition and legacy of personal and political art. For you, Mexico.
The other nominees for Best Original Score were John Williams for Catch Me If You Can, Elmer Bernstein for Far from Heaven, Philip Glass for The Hours, and Thomas Newman for Road to Perdition.
In the Best Original Song category, Marshall Mathers III (Eminem), Jeff Bass and Luis Resto won the Academy Award for “Lose Yourself” from the hip-hop themed drama 8 Mile. The victory made “Lose Yourself” the first rap song to win the Academy Award for Best Original Song.
The other nominees for Best Original Song were Elliot Goldenthal and Julie Taymor for “Burn It Blue” from Frida; Paul Simon for “Father and Daughter” from The Wild Thornberrys Movie; Bono, The Edge, Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen from U2 for “The Hands That Built America” from Gangs of New York; and John Kander and Fred Ebb for “I Move On” from Chicago.
NIRGENDWO IN AFRIKA/NOWHERE IN AFRICA – Niki Reiser
Original Review by Peter Simons
Nowhere In Africa (or, in its native German, “Nirgendwo In Afrika”) tells the tragic story of a Jewish family that moves from Germany to Kenya just before WWII in 1938. There, in Africa, they start a farm, but not all members of the family can get used to their new lives. However, the war in Europe makes it impossible for them to return back home. So, all anyone can do is try and make the best out of things. The film was written and directed by Caroline Link, who based her screenplay on the book by Stefanie Zweig. Quite surprisingly, this German film nabbed the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film at this year’s ceremony. This is the third time Swiss composer Niki Reiser composed a score for director Link. They previously worked together on Jenseits Der Stille (Beyond The Silence, 1996) and Pünktchen Und Anton (Annaluise & Anton, 1999). The soundtrack for Nowhere In Africa is a lovely combination of European and African music. There are bittersweet string chords that could have sprung from the minds of James Horner or Rachel Portman, a theme for oboe that’s quite reminiscent of the theme from The English Patient and there’s quite a bit of mellow African percussion and chanting. There are, unfortunately, a few things working against this score, but ultimately the music is just too darn nice to be really upset by its shortcomings. Read more…
TEARS OF THE SUN – Hans Zimmer
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
War movies seem to be the new oeuvre at Media Ventures, especially war movies which take place in far-flung corners of the world. Following their contribution to Terence Malick’s Thin Red Line, Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down, their latest project is Tears of the Sun, which basically tells the same story of American soldiers caught in the crossfire of a bloody civil war – but this time the setting is the inhospitable jungles of west Africa as opposed to the dusty streets of Mogadishu. Directed by Antoine “Training Day” Fuqua, Tears of the Sun stars Bruce Willis as Lt. Waters, the leader of an American special-ops group who are sent into the dense jungles of Nigeria to rescue Médecins Sans Frontières doctor Lena Kendricks (Monica Bellucci), who finds herself in danger when rebels overthrow the Government. However, Kendricks refuses to leave her isolated hospital unless Waters and his men agree to help transport 70 refugees to the nearby Cameroonian border, else they be slaughtered by the vicious, unforgiving rebel army. Reluctantly, Waters agrees, and soon he and his men are trekking through the forest with a large group of scared Nigerian men and women – all the while being pursued by the rebels. Read more…
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