THE CONTENDER – Larry Groupé
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Established orchestrators often find it difficult to disassociate themselves and carve out a solo composing career for themselves, out of the shadow of the (usually) more famous composer they have assisted for many years. Over the years, Jerry Goldsmith, Alexander Courage and the late Arthur Morton have been perfect examples. In recent years, artists such as Nicholas Dodd, Tim Simonec, Thomas Pasatieri and Ken Kugler have remained firmly behind their employers, while others such as Mark McKenzie, Hummie Mann and most noticeably Don Davis have emerged as composing talents in their own right. Larry Groupé looks likely to join this latter group very shortly; finally appearing from out of composer/director John Ottman’s backroom and taking center stage on a project worthy of his talents. Read more…
TOM’S MIDNIGHT GARDEN – Debbie Wiseman
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
I first heard Debbie Wiseman’s score to Tom’s Midnight Garden way back in the fall of 1998, at a special concert she gave at London’s Royal Festival Hall. It has taken well over two years for the film to be released, and for her lavish, sumptuous music to finally become available for all to enjoy. Scores of the quality of Tom’s Midnight Garden are rare indeed, and are worth waiting for. The film is based on the classic children’s novel by Philippa Pearce, and stars Anthony Way (the child star of the popular series The Choir) as Tom, one of many young boys who were sent away into the English countryside to escape the horrors of war raining down on the cities where they lived. Tom is sent to stay with his prissy Aunt and Uncle (Greta Scacchi and James Wilby) in a rambling old house away from London, and at first Tom is unhappy at being separated from his parents and his friends. But soon Tom discovers that unusual things happen in the old house: when the antique grandfather clock in the hall strikes thirteen instead of twelve, a magical gateway appears in the house’s walled garden, which takes him back in time – and into the company of a beautiful young girl named Hatty. Read more…
MEET THE PARENTS – Randy Newman
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Daft comedies have never been my favorite genre, but I have to admit Meet the Parents made me laugh – a lot. It is surely one of the most nerve-wracking days of any young man’s life when he goes home to meet his fiancé’s folks. First impressions count for a lot, and if the woman you are with is the one you intend to marry, having a healthy relationship with her family is of paramount importance. All these things are weighing heavily on nurse Greg Focker (Ben Stiller)’s mind when he accompanies his girlfriend Pam (Teri Polo) home to meet her retired mother Dina and father Jack (Robert De Niro and Blythe Danner). Unfortunately, Greg’s weekend plans for presenting himself as the “model son” go seriously awry in the face of her father’s overbearing presence. You see, Jack is not a florist, as Greg first believed: he is, in fact, a former CIA agent – who takes his daughter’s marital welfare very seriously! Read more…
Remembering Werner Janssen, 1899-1990
Composer and conductor Werner Janssen died ten years ago today, on September 19, 1990, in Stony Brook, New York, following a brief illness, at the age of 91,
A distinguished symphonic conductor as well as a Hollywood film composer, Janssen enjoyed an unusually varied career, earning six Academy Award nominations for his film music while also championing contemporary concert music in the United States and Europe.
Janssen was born in New York City on June 1, 1899, the son of German immigrants. He studied at Dartmouth College and the New England Conservatory, and later pursued conducting studies in Europe. After winning the Rome Prize in 1930 he studied orchestration in Rome, and during the early 1930s established an international reputation as a conductor. In 1934 he became the first American-born conductor to lead the New York Philharmonic, and subsequently served as conductor of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra from 1937 to 1939.
Janssen entered Hollywood relatively late. His first major film score was Lewis Milestone’s The General Died at Dawn (1936), starring Gary Cooper. The film’s Chinese setting gave Janssen an opportunity to incorporate Asian-influenced colors into an otherwise large-scale symphonic score, while its combination of romance, political intrigue and action brought out the dramatic instincts he had developed in the concert hall. The score immediately earned him an Academy Award nomination. Read more…
P. T. BARNUM – Hummie Mann
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
P.T. Barnum is the first movie in the Hallmark Entertainment series not to have its music released on CD. Quite why this should be the case is unknown because, by and large, it is one of the best scores written for the excellent string of TV films and mini-series that have included Merlin, Moby Dick, Noah’s Ark, Animal Farm, Alice In Wonderland and Durango. The music for P.T. Barnum was written by Canadian composer Hummie Mann, whose work in Hollywood to date has mostly been limited to writing Mel Brooks comedies, small-scale features and undertaking orchestration duties for Marc Shaiman and others. Read more…
NURSE BETTY – Rolfe Kent
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
It’s been said a hundred times before, but sometimes the most unlikely movies get great scores. Neil La Bute, having contributed two of the nastiest relationship movies in recent memory with In The Company of Men (1998) and Your Friends and Neighbors (1999), both of which told twisted little stories of manipulation, verbal assault and a total lack of moral fiber, is the last man you would expect to helm a sweet-natured road movie. Therefore it comes as something of a surprise to discover that his third feature, Nurse Betty, is a generally wholesome romantic fable – with just a hint of subversion to keep it interesting. Renee Zellweger stars as Betty Sizemore, a put-upon waitress obsessed with the daytime soap opera A Reason to Love, and its star Dr David Ravel (Greg Kinnear). Betty’s life is drastically altered when she witnesses her lowlife husband Del (Aaron Eckhart) being murdered by two bickering hitmen (Morgan Freeman and Chris Rock) over a drug deal gone wrong. Shocked into a “fugue state” by the trauma, Betty goes AWOL and heads off across America to LA, convinced that she is in fact a nurse at the fictional hospital from A Reason to Love, and that Dr Ravel is her real-life former fiancé. Unaware that the two killers are hot on her trail – and that a cache of cocaine is stowed in her trunk – Betty’s odyssey picks up pace as she traverses the country, imparting her tale to a variety of bemused on-lookers, and becoming increasingly determined to rekindle her imaginary relationship. Read more…
THE WATCHER – Marco Beltrami
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
I’m starting to get worried by the way Marco Beltrami’s career is progressing – or isn’t progressing, as the case may be. When Beltrami first burst onto the scene five years ago with the arrival of Scream, it seemed as though a great new talent in the soundtrack world had arrived. A composer with talent, a gift for melody, and who knew how to write for a big orchestra. A dozen or so movies later, and Beltrami is still scoring more horror movies than anything else, and herein lies the problem. With just a couple of exceptions – like the disco drama 54 and the Emmy Award winning Tuesdays With Morrie – the vast majority of the Italian-American’s work has been in the horror and thriller genres, and if he’s not careful he’s going to end up in the same situation Chris Young was in ten years ago: a great composer stuck in a pigeonhole from which he can’t escape. Read more…
HIGHLANDER: ENDGAME – Stephen Graziano, Nick Glennie-Smith
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Back in 1986, when the original Highlander series began, Queen’s classic soundtrack song “It’s a Kind of Magic” proudly proclaimed that there can be only one. Fourteen years, three sequels and two TV series later, I still think they were right. Christopher Lambert has never bettered his original performance as the immortal clansman Connor MacLeod, both The Quickening and The Sorcerer were woefully poor movies compared to the hugely entertaining original, and Adrian Paul’s turn in the first of the two spin-offs contained more wood than your local branch of B&Q. Highlander Endgame, the fourth big-screen outing for the franchise, sees Connor MacLeod (Lambert – the cinematic hero) teaming up with Duncan MacLeod (Paul – the small screen hero) for the first time, to take on a new all-powerful and extremely evil immortal named Kell (Bruce Payne). Although the producers wax lyrical about the two actors being the “yin and yang, a symbol of wholeness”, it personally strikes me as being nothing more than a piece of opportunistic film-making by Miramax, eager to cash in on the popularity of the TV series and to give Adrian Paul a movie vehicle. And I thought they’d gotten rid of the last evil immortal when Mario van Peebles got chopped in half at the end of Highlander III… oh, well. There’s love interest in the form of actress Lisa Barbuscia, plenty of sword-wielding action, and the whole thing is directed by Douglas Aarniokoski. Read more…
LOVER’S PRAYER – Joel McNeely
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
It’s not very often that I’m forced to eat my words, but I have to admit that Joel McNeely has astounded me recently. It’s common knowledge that I came down like a ton of bricks on The Avengers, Virus and Soldier, three scores hardly worth the manuscript they were written on. I considered his return to form on the TV movie Sally Hemings, while undoubtedly a lovely piece of work, as nothing more than a long-overdue redressing of balance: easily his best score since the days of Iron Will, but nothing to get excited about. Against all expectations, especially my own, his new score for Lover’s Prayer is better yet, a full-bodied orchestral romance that completely knocks the stuffing out of everything he has written in the past. Read more…
Jack Nitzsche, 1937-2000
Composer Jack Nitzsche died on August 25, 2000, in hospital on Los Angeles, of cardiac arrest brought on by a recurring bronchial infection. He was 63.
Bernard Alfred Nitzsche was born in Chicago, Illinois, in April 1937, the son of German immigrants, and raised on farm in Michigan. He moved to Los Angeles in the late 1950s with aspirations of becoming a jazz saxophonist, but soon found his calling in arranging and studio work. He initially worked for Sonny Bono, but later found his niche working as an arranger for producer Phil Spector. He played a pivotal role in shaping Spector’s the “Wall of Sound,” and was an important contributor to legendary recordings by pop and rock artists including The Ronettes, The Righteous Brothers, Jackie De Shannon (‘Needles and Pins’), and Ike and Tina Turner (‘River Deep Mountain High’).
Later, in the 1960s and ’70s, he collaborated with a wide array of artists, including The Rolling Stones – contributing keyboards and orchestration on several albums, especially songs such as ‘Paint It, Black’ and ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’ – and Neil Young, with whom he had a long and occasionally volatile creative partnership.
Nitzsche’s film work was equally distinguished. His first important score was for the 1970 thriller Performance starring Mick Jagger, and he provided ‘uncredited contributions’ to the soundtrack for The Exorcist in 1973. He received his first Oscar nomination for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in 1975, and he won an Oscar for the song “Up Where We Belong” from An Officer and a Gentleman in 1982, which he co-wrote with Buffy Sainte-Marie and Will Jennings.
His other important scores include Cruising (1980), Starman (1984), The Razor’s Edge (1984), The Jewel of the Nile (1985), 9½ Weeks (1986), Stand By Me (1986), Revenge (1990), Mermaids (1990), and Blue Sky (1994). His last major score was the for the Sean Penn-director drama The Crossing Guard in 1995; he suffered a stroke in 1998 which ended his scoring career. Read more…
Remembering David Rose, 1910-1990
Composer, arranger, conductor and orchestra leader David Rose died ten years ago today in Burbank, California, on August 23, 1990, at the age of 80, from heart failure.
One of Hollywood’s busiest musical craftsmen, Rose scored 36 films and wrote themes and background music for 24 television series, while also enjoying major success as a recording artist. His best-known compositions included “Holiday for Strings” and the chart-topping instrumental “The Stripper.”
David Daniel Rose was born in London on June 15, 1910, and grew up in Chicago. He began playing piano professionally as a teenager and by the early 1930s was leading the house orchestra at radio station WGN. Moving to California in 1940, he became increasingly active in radio and subsequently joined MGM as a musical director. During World War II he served in the U.S. Army and worked on the musical Winged Victory, where he met comedian Red Skelton.
Rose’s first major popular composition was “Holiday for Strings,” recorded in the early 1940s and soon established as one of the most familiar pieces of American light orchestral music. His Hollywood career developed alongside his recording work, and in 1944 he received an Academy Award nomination for the Bob Hope comedy The Princess and the Pirate. The following year, “So in Love,” written with lyricist Leo Robin for Wonder Man, brought him a second Oscar nomination. Read more…
THE GREEN BIRD – Elliot Goldenthal
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
One of the best things about being a fan of such a broad genre as film music is that, occasionally, you get to branch out and follow a composer best known for his soundtrack work into another arena entirely. Elliot Goldenthal, for the best part of twenty years, has been as musically active in the theatre as he has in the cinema. His stage works have include original scores for the plays ‘The King Stag” and “The Serpent Woman”, the concert works “Juan Darien” and “Fire Water Paper”, as well as his acclaimed ballet “Othello” which was released by Varèse Sarabande to great acclaim. The Green Bird marks the third time he has tackled the work of 18th-century playwright Carlo Gozzi, and once again features the idiosyncratic direction of his real-life partner and regular professional collaborator, Julie Taymor. Read more…
THE CELL – Howard Shore
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Writing a review of a film score like The Cell is a very difficult thing to do. The music is so challenging and abstract it almost defies conventional description, and unless you have seen the film it is difficult to appreciate Howard Shore’s scoring techniques which, away from the screen, seem to be made up of mere random noise and ear-shattering dissonance. It’s also a very difficult score to “enjoy” on any kind of emotional, or thematic level, simply because the music is so consistently harsh. Instead, where The Cell’s brilliance lies is in its complexity and structure, and for the thought processes that went into its creation. Read more…
BLESS THE CHILD – Christopher Young
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Having passed the turn of the millennium without so much as a hint of Armageddon, it may seem a little odd for a film dealing with the end of the world on 31 December 1999 to make an appearance now – but Bless the Child has suffered such a turbulent post-production, with re-shoots, re-editing and re-writing galore, that this troubled supernatural thriller is only just now beginning to visit cinema screens across the world. Directed by Chuck (“The Mask”) Russell and starring Kim Basinger, Jimmy Smits, Rufus Sewell, Ian Holm and Christina Ricci, Bless the Child tells the story of Maggie O’Connor (Basinger), a comparatively normal working woman whose world is turned upside down when her six year old niece Cody is kidnapped. As Maggie frantically searches for Cody, she slowly learns that the young girl is not all she seemed: apparently, Cody has special psychic powers which, when applied in a certain manner, can open a gateway between Earth and the Netherworld, where legions of evil demons are waiting to invade. Turning to a paranormal investigator (Smits) as a last, vain hope, Maggie tracks Cody down to the lair of a group of devil worshippers (led by Sewell) and engages in a battle for the soul of the child. Read more…
DRAGONHEART: A NEW BEGINNING – Mark McKenzie
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
I’m going to start my review of Dragonheart II with the old chestnut “why doesn’t this composer get more work?” But you have to understand that, when I say that, I really do mean it. It pains me to see talentless hacks rise to the top of the scoring ladder writing bland action music for bland action movies, while imaginative, artistic composers like Mark McKenzie are stuck doing orchestrations for other people and scoring straight-to-video sequels like this movie. Other than the score and the special effects, there was very little going for the original Dragonheart – and certainly not enough to warrant a sequel. The screenplay was poor, the execution left a lot to be desired, and as a result it didn’t do particularly well at the box office. But despite all that, here it is – director Doug Lefler’s sword and sorcery follow-up that sees the original dragon’s son, Drake, teaming up with a young vagabond to do battle against evil knights and mysterious Chinese monks in an ancient kingdom. It’s got a great cast – anyone ever heard of Chris Masterson, Henry Van Gorkum or Matt Hickey? – and features Robby Benson (who regularly contributes to Disney animated features) as the voice of the fire-breathing lizard himself. Read more…
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