Archive
THE UGLY TRUTH – Aaron Zigman
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
A modern day battle-of-the-sexes comedy, The Ugly Truth stars Katherine Heigl as Abby, a TV producer with a disastrous romantic life, whose world begins to change when a misogynistic shock-jock named Mike Chadway (Gerard Butler) is hired to present a segment on her morning news show. Mike, who claims to be an expert in knowing what a man really wants from a woman, offers to help Abby woo the man of her dreams: a hunky doctor who lives in the same apartment building. Despite her misgivings at Mike’s sexist outlook on life, Abby agrees, but in spite of their initial mutual dislike, the more time Abby and Mike spend with each other, the more romantic sparks between the mis-matched pair start to fly. Read more…
MY SISTER’S KEEPER – Aaron Zigman
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
A moving family drama directed by Nick Cassavetes from the popular novel by Jodi Picoult, My Sister’s Keeper tells the story of Anna Fitzgerald (Abigail Breslin), the youngest daughter of Sara and Brian Fitzgerald (Cameron Diaz and Jason Patric). The unique thing about Anna is that she was conceived solely to be a blood and tissue donor for her elder sister Kate (Sofia Vassilieva), who has leukemia; now, at the age of eleven and having undergone dozens of medical procedures in order to keep her sister alive, Anna seeks out successful lawyer Campbell Alexander (Alec Baldwin), with a view to hiring him to earn medical emancipation from her mother.
The sensitive score for My Sister’s Keeper is by Aaron Zigman, working with director Cassavetes for the third time following John Q and The Notebook. Read more…
FLASH OF GENIUS – Aaron Zigman
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
You wouldn’t think that a film about the life of a man who invented windshield wipers would be very interesting, but that is exactly what Flash of Genius is. Directed by Marc Abraham, the film stars Greg Kinnear as Robert Kearns, a businessman and engineer and amateur inventor in the 1950s, who embarks on a personal crusade for justice against the Detroit automakers who, he claims, stole his idea for the intermittent windshield wiper. Not unexpectedly the score, by the even-busy Aaron Zigman, is that of a small-scale drama, but even within the confines of the story, he still finds a number of effective ways to express himself. Read more…
SEX AND THE CITY – Aaron Zigman
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Four years after the enormously popular and successful TV show ended, director Michael Patrick King brought Sex and the City back, this time on the big screen, with Sarah Jessica Parker, Kim Cattrall, Kristin Davis and Cynthia Nixon reprising their roles as the four man-hungry socialites, looking for love in the Big Apple. Providing the score for Sex and the City is the ever-busy Aaron Zigman, taking over the reigns for Douglas Cuomo, who scored most of the TV series.
As one might expect, much of Zigman’s music is light and breezy, upbeat and peppy, fitting the modern tone of the protagonists adventures well. Read more…
MR. MAGORIUM’S WONDER EMPORIUM – Alexandre Desplat and Aaron Zigman
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
One of the most gratifying things in any industry is to have the respect of your peers; for Aaron Zigman, working on Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium must be one of the most gratifying projects of his career to date. French composer Alexandre Desplat was the composer first hired to work on this film (he was brought in very early in the project to compose some brief thematic material to be performed on-screen). However, when his scoring duties on Lust Caution and The Golden Compass clashed with post-production on this film, Desplat found himself unable to finish the task – so he specifically requested that Aaron Zigman be brought in to work with his themes, and flesh them out into a final score. The finished product is truly magical – a perfect amalgam of the two composer’s styles, which stands as one of the most enjoyable and excellent fantasy scores of 2007. Read more…
THE JANE AUSTEN BOOK CLUB – Aaron Zigman
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Ah, Jane Austen. She of the manners and etiquette, the unrequited love, the stoic heroes, the flighty maidens, the English countryside. Love her or loathe her, the work of popular English novelist has become a part of the modern literary – and cinematic – language through the popularity of titles like Sense & Sensibility, Pride & Prejudice, and Emma. Robin Swicord’s film The Jane Austen Book Club, based on the novel by Karen Joy Fowler, tells the story of six romantic misfits who come together to read and discuss one Austen novel per month ion the hope that it will bring some sparkle back into their lives, only to find that their relationships – both old and new – begin to resemble 21st century versions of her novels. Read more…
PRIDE – Aaron Zigman
Original Review by Clark Douglas
This movie is quite an accomplishment, one that obviously took a lot of time and energy to create. It manages the startling feat of combining numerous related genres and inserting well-worn clichés from every single one of them into a jam-packed viewing experience. Too bad the crew couldn’t have put their efforts toward coming up with something fresh. If you’ve never seen an inspirational film involving teachers, coaches, sports, racism, or teenagers, you will be blown away by “Pride”. If this is not the case, I can’t promise such amazing things.
Genre # 1 – “Overcoming Racial Hurdles”: Our story’s primary character is Jim Ellis (Terence Howard), a real-life figure. Ellis attempts to get a job at a noteworthy Philadelphia high school, and is told by evil racist Tom Arnold that the students there couldn’t possibly learn from “a man of your sort.” Read more…
BRIDGE TO TERABITHIA – Aaron Zigman
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Since first emerging as a film music composer in 2002, with his score for John Q, Aaron Zigman has quickly – and somewhat unexpectedly – become a film music everyman, this decade’s version of John Debney, Marc Shaiman or Randy Edelman: a composer who can be relied upon to deliver the goods with the minimum of fuss, but never really drawing attention to himself or his work in the wider world. In 2006 alone Zigman scored an astonishing six movies, including the moderately successful Step Up, Take the Lead and ATL, and shows no sign of slowing down in 2007, with three fairly major studio assignments already in the first couple of months of the year. The second of this trio is Bridge to Terabithia, a new fantasy adventure based on the popular novel by Katherine Paterson. Read more…
ALPHA DOG – Aaron Zigman
Original Review by Clark Douglas
If any film this year should boast an interesting “making-of-the-movie” documentary, I suspect it will be this one. Based on a true crime story from a few years ago, director Nick Cassavetes was given an unusual amount of actual case information from the prosecutors, who were hoping the movie would help bring about the capture of one of the suspects who was still at large. Over the past couple of years, Cassavetes has had a legally questionable amount of access to information surrounding this story, and while I’m not sure about the ethics involved in the creation of this film (or all the specific details, for that matter), I do know that the end result is a powerful, unflinching, yet deeply flawed motion picture. Read more…
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