THE PERSONAL HISTORY OF DAVID COPPERFIELD – Christopher Willis
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The great English author Charles Dickens wrote David Copperfield in 1849, and it is considered by many respected authorities to be one of his finest works. It is one of the few Dickens novels that is considered semi-autobiographical; it follows the life and adventures of the titular David, who is forced to spend time as a child in a London workhouse, and eventually grows up to become a writer. It charts everything about David’s life: his relationships with his gentle mother and his domineering stepfather, his affection for the optimistic and affable Mr. Micawber and his slightly daffy but loving Aunt Betsey, his life-long rivalry with the bitter and duplicitous Uriah Heep, and of course his many romantic dalliances. It is also a wonderfully rich reflection of life and society in Victorian England, and its legacy continues to inspire art to this day. There have been several cinematic and televisual adaptations of the story, but this latest one – The Personal History of David Copperfield – is directed by Armando Iannucci and stars Dev Patel in the title role, with support from an array of British character actors including Tilda Swinton, Hugh Laurie, Peter Capaldi, and Ben Whishaw. Read more…
CAPTAIN BLOOD – Erich Wolfgang Korngold
GREATEST SCORES OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Original Review by Craig Lysy
The commercial success of Treasure Island and The Count of Monte Cristo in 1934 inspired Warner Brothers Studio executives to remake their earlier silent film of Captain Blood, which first hit the silver screen in 1923. They tasked producers Harry Joe Brown and Gordon Hollingshead to manage the project with a generous $1.24 million budget and hired Michael Curtiz to direct. They would again adapt the film from the 1922 novel Captain Blood by Rafael Sabatini and hired Casey Robinson to write the screenplay. However, casting got off on the wrong foot; Robert Donat and Jean Muir were originally sought for the lead roles, but when Donat declined the offer, the studio decided to bypass Muir and recruit new young talent. 24-year-old Australian actor Errol Flynn would make his Hollywood debut, cast in the titular role supported by 19-year-old Olivia de Havilland, who would play Arabella Bishop. Joining them would be Lionel Atwill as Colonel Bishop, Basil Rathbone as Levasseur, Ross Alexander as Jeremy Pitt, and Henry Stephensen as Lord Willoughby. Read more…
MOUNTAINS OF THE MOON – Michael Small
THROWBACK THIRTY
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Mountains of the Moon is an adventure-drama directed by Bob Rafelson, based on the novel Burton and Speke by William Harrison. A passion project for the director, it starred Patrick Bergin and Iain Glen as the real-life explorers Richard Francis Burton and John Hanning Speke, and is a dramatic chronicle of their expedition to Central Africa in 1857 which culminated in Speke’s discovery of the source of the River Nile. Although it was well received when it originally opened in February 1990 – it was described as ‘an epic of sweep and intimacy’ by Peter Travers in Rolling Stone – it is virtually unknown today, which is a shame because it is a film of genuine visual grandeur (it boasts cinematography by Roger Deakins), and has a terrific supporting cast including Richard E. Grant, Fiona Shaw, Omar Sharif, and Delroy Lindo in a very early role. Read more…
THE CHARGE OF THE LIGHT BRIGADE – Max Steiner
MOVIE MUSIC UK CLASSICS
Original Review by Craig Lysy
Warner Brothers Studio executives saw the success of Paramount Studio’s Lives of a Bengal Lancer in 1935 and decided to cash in on the British Empire Adventure Tales genre. It was decided that their vehicle would be a retelling of the epic charge of the Light Brigade during the Crimean War. Screenplay writer Michael Jacoby’s script for the story found favor with the studio and was purchased, although Rowland Leigh was brought in to make some edits. Samuel Bischoff and Hal Wallis were given the reigns to produce the film with a generous $1.33 million budget. Michael Curtiz was tasked with directing and a stellar cast was assembled, including Errol Flynn as Major Geoffrey Vickers, Olivia de Havilland as Elsa Campbell, Patric Knowles as Captain Perry Vickers, Henry Stephensen as Sir Charles Macefield, Nigel Bruce as Sir Benjamin Warrenton, Donald Crisp as Colonel Campbell, David Niven as Captain Randall, Robert Barrat as Count Igor Volonoff, and C. Henry Gordon as Surat Khan. Read more…
Under-the-Radar Round Up 2020, Part 1
Original Reviews by Jonathan Broxton
With the COVID-19 Coronavirus having decimated the 2020 theatrical movie schedule, as well as the general mood of the world, good music is more important than ever when it comes to getting us all through these difficult times. As such (and as I did last year under much different circumstances) I am very pleased to present the latest installment in my ongoing series of articles looking at the best “under the radar” scores from around the world – this time concentrating on the first quarter of 2020!
The titles include romantic comedies from both China and Vietnam, children’s fantasy films from both Germany and France, a serious drama from Japan, a period murder-mystery from Australia, and a children’s adventure from the Netherlands. I heartily recommend all of these scores to anyone who needs some outstanding film music to ease them though their quarantine period!
JOE VERSUS THE VOLCANO – Georges Delerue
THROWBACK THIRTY
GREATEST SCORES OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
After receiving his first Oscar nomination for Big in 1988, but before he became an established box office draw with titles like Sleepless in Seattle and Philadelphia, Tom Hanks spent a couple of years trying to find his niche. One of the projects he tried which never took off was Joe Versus the Volcano, a highly peculiar comedy written and directed by John Patrick Shanley. Hanks plays Joe Banks, a luckless everyman who works a terrible dead-end job and is chronically sick. One day Joe is told he is dying of a mysterious and incurable rare disease, and accepts a financial offer from billionaire Samuel Graynamore (Lloyd Bridges) – he can live like a king for a short period, but then has to travel to a South Pacific island and throw himself into a volcano to appease the superstitious natives. With nothing to lose, Joe agrees, but when he meets and falls in love with Patricia (Meg Ryan), Graynamore’s daughter, who is captaining the yacht taking him to the island, he realizes he may have something to live for after all. The film was a critical and commercial flop when it was first released, but has become something of a cult film in the intervening years, receiving praise for its offbeat tone and sweet nature, and for the fact that this was the first on-screen pairing of Hanks and Ryan, who would go on to be Hollywood’s romantic comedy golden couple. Read more…
EMMA – Isobel Waller-Bridge, David Schweitzer
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
What a year it has been for the Waller-Bridge sisters. Phoebe Waller-Bridge, the actress and writer, won Emmys and Golden Globes and BAFTAs galore for her work on the second season of the brilliant BBC comedy series Fleabag, and also for her work as the creator of the drama series Killing Eve, before being hired to polish the screenplay for the upcoming James Bond film No Time to Die. Now Phoebe’s composer sister, Isobel Waller-Bridge, has followed up her own success writing the ironic choral music for Fleabag with this wonderful period score for a new literary adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma. Waller-Bridge has teamed up with another English composer, David Schweitzer, a child prodigy who has a massive amount of experience writing for documentaries and animated TV series, and contributing additional music on shows like The White Princess, Vanity Fair, Victoria, and The Crown. With the possible exception of Fleabag, this is the most high profile above-the-title score of both composers’ careers, and if the music here is anything to go by, we will be hearing lots from them in the future. Read more…
DOWNHILL – Volker Bertelmann
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Downhill is an English-language remake of the Swedish film Force Majeure, which was written and directed by Ruben Östlund and was nominated for a Golden Globe for best foreign language film. The remake, which is directed by Nat Faxon and Jim Rash, stars Will Ferrell and Julia Louis-Dreyfus as Pete and Billie, a married American couple on a skiing vacation in Austria with their children. One day, while the family is having lunch at an outdoor restaurant, a controlled avalanche takes place on a nearby mountain; the snow comes perilously close to their table, to such an extent that Billie genuinely believes she is going to die. Pete, however, grabs his phone and runs away, apparently abandoning his family to save himself. Everyone survives, but this one incident proves to be the trigger for a different kind of avalanche – where simmering tensions in the marriage suddenly come roaring the surface. The film is a perfect blend of comedy and drama, and is anchored by winning performances by both Ferrell and Louis-Dreyfus, who somehow manage to make the film’s potentially jarring tonal shifts seem natural. Read more…
THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER – Basil Poledouris
THROWBACK THIRTY
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The character Jack Ryan is ubiquitous in American popular culture. He was created by author Tom Clancy and starred in a series of ‘techno-thriller’ spy novels, the first of which was published in 1984. Depending on how old you are, most people associate two actors with the character: either Harrison Ford, who played him on the big screen in the films Patriot Games in 1992 and Clear and Present Danger in 1994, or John Krasinski, who currently plays him on the small screen in the eponymous Amazon TV series. However, Ryan’s first appearance was actually in this film: The Hunt for Red October, which was released in theaters in the spring of 1990. Here Ryan is played by Alec Baldwin, and the plot of the film revolves around Marko Ramius (Sean Connery), the captain of the nuclear-capable Soviet submarine Red October, which has disappeared while on maneuvers in the north Atlantic. When it is eventually re-discovered, the CIA realizes that the Red October is headed directly for the US eastern seaboard, and immediately fears that an attack is imminent. However Ryan, a respected intelligence analyst, offers a different theory: that Ramius is actually trying to defect. So begins a cat and mouse game between the CIA, the KGB, Ryan, and Ramius, in which each of them is trying to uncover the truth before the incident sparks World War III. The film was directed by John McTiernan, and has an excellent supporting cast including Scott Glenn, Sam Neill, James Earl Jones, Tim Curry, and a young Stellan Skarsgård. Read more…
THE CALL OF THE WILD – John Powell
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Jack London’s The Call of the Wild has come to be regarded as one of the seminal adventure novels in the years since its first publication in 1903, and there have been several cinematic retellings of the story over the subsequent century. This latest version is directed by Chris Sanders – the director of the original How to Train Your Dragon, making his live action debut here – and it plays out sort of like a canine version of Black Beauty. The story follows Buck, a powerful St. Bernard mix dog, who is uprooted from his privileged position as a family dog on a ranch in California, pooch-napped, and sold as a working dog in the Yukon and Alaska, where the Gold Rush is in full force. Eventually Buck finds himself owned by the kind-hearted Perrault (Omar Sy), working as part of a team of sled dogs delivering mail all over the Northwest. After many adventures with Perrault, Buck eventually comes to be owned by a grizzled gold prospector named Thornton (Harrison Ford), who has a mysterious past. As Buck and Thornton bond, Buck also begins to hear ‘the call of the wild,’ an instinct speaking to his past and his innate heritage, which draws him to a more primeval existence among the mountains and with the wolves. Read more…
SONIC THE HEDGEHOG – Tom Holkenborg
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
So, I have a confession to make. I was one of those weird kids who, growing up, didn’t really play computer games. I had an Atari 800 back in the early 80s and I played precisely three games on it: Orc Attack, Zaxxon, and Paperboy, all of which came on a series of cartridges. When my friends graduated on to Commodore 64s and Sinclair ZX Spectrums, I stayed inside watching movies. I then skipped the entire console era and went straight to a Dell PC in 1995. Today, the only games I have are various iterations of FIFA Soccer, but I haven’t played them in years. I never had a Sega, I never had a Nintendo, I never even had a Game Boy, so all those classic cultural touchstones – Super Mario Brothers and Donkey Kong and so on – completely passed me by. As such, when it was announced that there was going to be a Sonic the Hedgehog movie, I was indifferent. I was similarly uninterested when a furore about the design of the little spiky speedmeister hit the internet in May 2019, causing a major delay in the film’s release due to the need for new special effects. Even now, and despite the generally positive ratings, the film holds little interest. It’s directed by Jeff Fowler, there’s a little blue hedgehog who can run incredibly fast, Jim Carrey plays the evil Dr. Robotnik who wants to capture Sonic, and James Marsden plays a kind-hearted cop who helps Sonic escape from Robotnik. Sonic runs fast, there’s action, comedy, hi-jinks, heartwarming pathos, and a set-up for a sequel… you get the idea. Read more…
LOST HORIZON – Dimitri Tiomkin
MOVIE MUSIC UK CLASSICS
Original Review by Craig Lysy
During the filming of It Happened One Night in 1934 director Frank Capra read and became inspired by the 1933 novel Lost Horizon by James Hilton. He was determined to adapt it to the big screen but had to delay production when his starring actor Ronald Coleman was contractually committed to another project. He eventually received the green light to proceed from Columbia Pictures executive Harry Cohn who provided a very generous budget of $1.25 million. The film was a passion project that Capra would produce and direct. The novel was adapted to the screen by screenwriter Robert Riskin, and a stellar cast was brought in led by Ronald Coleman as Robert Conway. Joining him would be Jane Wyatt as Sondra Bizet, H. B. Warner as Chang, Sam Jaffe as the High Lama, John Howard as George Conway, Edward Everett Horton as Alexander Lovett, Thomas Mitchell as Henry Barnard and Margo as Maria. The story centers on Robert Conway a writer and soldier set to return to England to assume the Foreign Secretary position in 1935. He is currently posted to China and ordered to evacuate 90 westerners lest they be captured by approaching Chinese revolutionaries. As they depart, the plane’s pilot has been replaced and they are hijacked, which ends with them running out of fuel and crashing deep in the Himalayas mountains. They are rescued by a mysterious man called Chang who leads them to a hidden and verdant valley called Shangri-La, where people live in idyllic peace and harmony, free of disease and blessed with unnatural long life. Read more…
STANLEY & IRIS – John Williams
THROWBACK THIRTY
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
After enjoying a 1980s which saw him score two Star Wars movies (one of which is, in my opinion, the best score ever written), three Indiana Jones films, and such standalone masterpieces as E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, Empire of the Sun, and Born on the Fourth of July, all while picking up one Oscar from eleven Best Score nominations, one could be forgiven for thinking that Williams would begin the 1990s with yet another blockbuster to put under his belt. Instead, his first score of the new decade was for Stanley & Iris, a small, intimate drama directed by his old friend Martin Ritt, for whom he previously scored Pete ‘n’ Tillie in 1973 and Conrack in 1974. The film starred Robert de Niro and Jane Fonda in the title roles, and it tells the story of the gentle romantic relationship that develops between Stanley, a kind-hearted baker who loses his job when it is discovered that he is illiterate, and Iris, a lonely widow who teaches him how to read and write. It was also the last film Ritt directed prior to his death in December of that year. Read more…
IFMCA Award Winners 2019
INTERNATIONAL FILM MUSIC CRITICS ASSOCIATION ANNOUNCES WINNERS OF 2019 IFMCA AWARDS; JOHN WILLIAMS REIGNS SUPREME WITH MULTIPLE AWARDS HONORING HIS FINAL STAR WARS SCORE, THE RISE OF SKYWALKER
FEBRUARY 20, 2020 — The International Film Music Critics Association (IFMCA) announces its list of winners for excellence in musical scoring in 2019, in the 2019 IFMCA Awards.
The award for Score of the Year goes to legendary veteran John Williams for his score for the ninth and final Star Wars film, “The Rise of Skywalker,” which concluded the sequel trilogy of adventures about the scavenger Rey, heroic former Stormtrooper Finn, and Kylo Ren, the leader of the Imperial First Order. The film is directed by J.J Abrams, and stars Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, and Adam Driver. In describing the score, IFMCA member James Southall described “The Rise of Skywalker” as ‘one last brilliant piece of musical adventure to call time on his signature work … a triumphant conclusion to an extraordinary musical saga,’ and also said that ‘it’s simply impossible to overstate Williams’s contribution to the series’ success’. The score is also named Best Original Score for a Fantasy/Science Fiction/Horror Film, while the main theme “The Rise of Skywalker” is named Film Music Composition of the Year. Read more…
DRAGONHEART VENGEANCE – Mark McKenzie
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
I’m somewhat astonished that I am able to actually write the following sentence, but here we are: there are now five Dragonheart movies in the world. This unlikely franchise began back in 1996 with the enjoyable original film, which starred Dennis Quaid, featured Sean Connery voicing the dragon Draco, and received an Oscar nomination for its special effects. The first sequel, A New Beginning, was released in 2000, and the first prequel, The Sorcerer’s Curse, came out in 2015, followed by a second prequel – Battle for the Heartfire – in 2017. This new film, Dragonheart Vengeance, is yet another prequel, and has been released straight-to-streaming. It is directed by Ivan Silvestrini and stars Jack Kane as Lukas, a young farmer whose family is killed by raiders and who sets out on an epic quest for revenge, eventually forming an unlikely alliance with a sword-fighting mercenary named Darius (Joseph Millson), and an ice-breathing dragon named Siveth, voiced by Helena Bonham-Carter. Read more…
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