Archive
RUDYARD KIPLING’S THE JUNGLE BOOK – Basil Poledouris
THROWBACK THIRTY
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Hot on the heels of Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in Hollywood’s short-lived series of supposedly faithful film adaptations of classic novels, this live-action versions of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book reimagines the classic tale as an adventurous, romantic epic. Directed by Stephen Sommers, the film focuses on Mowgli (Jason Scott Lee), a young boy raised by animals in the Indian jungle after being separated from his family. Years later, as an adult, Mowgli re-enters human civilization when he encounters Kitty (Lena Headey), his childhood friend and the daughter of a military officer working within the British Raj. As Mowgli navigates the clash between his jungle upbringing and human society, his relationship with Kitty deepens, eventually becoming a forbidden romance; however, he faces hostility from the corrupt Captain Boone (Cary Elwes), Kitty’s fiancé, who seeks to exploit Mowgli’s knowledge of the jungle to find the legendary treasure of Monkey City. Read more…
LASSIE – Basil Poledouris
THROWBACK THIRTY
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The iconic canine film star Lassie, a heroic and intelligent collie dog, was created by British author Eric Knight in a short story published in The Saturday Evening Post in 1938, which was later expanded into a novel entitled Lassie Come Home in 1940, followed then by a film adaptation of the same name in 1943. The stories were all pretty much the same – Lassie’s teenage owner Joe gets into some kind of trouble, Lassie helps him overcome the difficult situation, while showcasing his loyalty, courage, and the bond between humans and animals – but the formula was immensely popular, and resulted in several sequels, and a long-running television series which aired from 1954 to 1973. Read more…
ON DEADLY GROUND – Basil Poledouris
THROWBACK THIRTY
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
An action thriller with an environmental protection theme, On Deadly Ground marked the directorial debut of action star Steven Seagal, who was hot off the unexpected critical and commercial success of his previous film Under Siege in 1992. Here Seagal plays Forrest Taft, an expert firefighter who gets involved in a conflict between an unscrupulous Alaska oil company and a local indigenous tribe, whose lands are being damaged by the oil company’s drilling methods and poor safety record. Things escalate when the head of the oil company orders his henchmen to eliminate anyone who knows about his company’s indiscretions, and the tribal leader is murdered; angered by the injustice, Taft teams up with the tribal leader’s daughter to take down the company. Despite an excellent supporting cast that included Joan Chen, John C. McGinley, R. Lee Ermey, a young Billy Bob Thornton, and Michael Caine chewing the scenery as the despicable head of the evil oil company, the film was unfortunately a critical disaster, appearing on many end-of-year ‘worst’ lists; much criticism was leveled at Seagal’s ham-fisted and amateurish direction, as well as the preachy tone of the film’s screenplay. Read more…
FREE WILLY – Basil Poledouris
THROWBACK THIRTY
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
When the movie Free Willy played in cinemas in the UK in the summer of 1993 the title elicited a great deal of snickering from the more childishly-minded among us, but in the end it turned out to be a very heartwarming film about the relationship between a troubled young boy and an orca killer whale. The film is directed by Simon Wincer and stars Jason James Richter as Jesse, a troubled orphan, who is assigned to do community service at a marine theme park after committing a minor crime. At the park he forms a deep connection with Willy, an intelligent and sensitive orca who has just been captured in the wild by unscrupulous whalers, and is now being held in captivity. As Jesse spends more time with Willy, he observes the orca’s miserable living conditions and the park’s exploitative practices, and with the help of his friends and a sympathetic park trainer named Rae (Lori Petty), devises a plan to release Willy back into the ocean. The film ended up being a popular success at the box office, and eventually spawned two sequels in 1995 and 1997. Read more…
WIND – Basil Poledouris
THROWBACK THIRTY
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
In the years immediately prior to his death in 2006, composer Basil Poledouris essentially retired from scoring and moved from the Los Angeles area to Vashon Island, off the coast of Seattle, Washington, where he indulged in his second greatest passion after music: sailing. Many composers are well known for their non-film music endeavors. Alan Silvestri owns a vineyard and makes his own wine, for example, and James Horner famously (and tragically) loved flying vintage planes. Once in a while the two passions are able to intersect, and for Poledouris that happened with the only score he wrote in 1992 – Wind. The film is a romantic adventure set in the world of America’s Cup yachting, which stars Matthew Modine and Jennifer Grey, and was directed by Carroll Ballard. The film is mostly forgotten today, but film music fans would be remiss if they forgot Poledouris’s score for it, because it allowed him to fully embrace the emotional rush that sailing provided for him, and inspired him to write one of his most personal scores. Read more…
QUIGLEY DOWN UNDER – Basil Poledouris
THROWBACK THIRTY
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Quigley Down Under is a fun, knockabout action-western, written by John Hill, and directed by Simon Wincer. The film stars Tom Selleck as Matthew Quigley, a sharpshooter from the American west, who answers an advertisement looking for men with his skills, and finds himself traveling to Australia circa 1860. Upon arrival, he meets another American woman, Cora (Laura San Giacomo), and then his prospective employer, a rancher and ruthless local businessman named Elliott Marston (Alan Rickman). However, when Quigley is told that his job is to murder Aborigines, he refuses; enraged, Marston abandons Quigley and Cora deep in the outback. They are saved by members of the local tribe, who are subsequently attacked by Marston’s men; angered by the injustice, and by Marston’s ruthlessness, Quigley vows to put a stop to it all. Despite addressing the important topic of the genocide of the aborigines in 19th-century Australia, and despite starring Selleck (who was still a bankable box office star at the time), the film was not a great success, with many critics citing its uneven tone, which unsuccessfully combined Selleck’s roguish charm with some quite strong violence and action. 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…
LONESOME DOVE – Basil Poledouris
THROWBACK THIRTY
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Lonesome Dove, an epic western mini-series based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Larry McMurtry, was one of the television successes of the year after it premiered on CBS in the spring of 1989. Directed by Simon Wincer and starring Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones, and set in the closing years of the Old West, the story focused on the relationship between Gus (Duvall) and Call (Jones), two retired Texas Rangers who decide to leave their quiet town on the Mexican border and drive a herd of cattle north to Montana. McMurtry’s original novel – which explores themes of old age, death, unrequited love, and friendship – was based on a screenplay that he had co-written with Peter Bogdanovich for a movie that was intended to star John Wayne, James Stewart, and Henry Fonda, but the project collapsed when John Ford advised Wayne to reject the script. Prior to its airing, the ‘classic western’ was considered to be a virtually dead genre, but Lonesome Dove almost singlehandedly re-vitalized it. The series drew staggering viewership numbers of more than 20 million homes, went on to win 7 Emmys from 18 nominations (including Best Director and a slew of technical awards), and paved the way for the cinematic resurrection of the genre with Kevin Costner’s Dances With Wolves in 1990 and Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven in 1992. Read more…
FAREWELL TO THE KING – Basil Poledouris
THROWBACK THIRTY
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Farewell to the King is an action-adventure-drama written and directed by John Milius, adapted from the 1969 novel L’Adieu au Roi by Pierre Schoendoerffer. The film stars Nick Nolte as Learoyd, an American soldier during World War II, who escapes from a Japanese firing squad and flees into the jungles of Borneo. Over time, Learoyd is adopted into a tribe of Dayaks, the original inhabitants of the island, and becomes their leader, finding peace and tranquility in his new, simple life. That life is shattered, however, when British soldiers led by Captain Fairbourne (Nigel Havers) and Colonel Ferguson (James Fox), approach the tribe and try to convince Learoyd to re-join the war against the Japanese. When he refuses to do so, Learoyd quickly finds himself having to fight to protect his new tribe. The film, which shares tonal and story similarities with films ranging from The Man Who Would Be King, Heart of Darkness, and Dances With Wolves, to Avatar, is virtually forgotten today. Behind-the-scenes in-fighting between Milius and the studio led to the film staggering into cinemas in the spring of 1989, having been heavily re-edited against the director’s wishes. It was not a success, either critically or financially, and would likely not be on anyone’s radar today were it not for the score, by Basil Poledouris. Read more…
CONAN THE BARBARIAN – Basil Poledouris
GREATEST SCORES OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Original Review by Craig Lysy
Conan The Barbarian is based on the Conan stories penned by author Robert E. Howard. The movie adaptation tells the story of a young Conan who lives in the mythic Hyborean Age and suffers grievously at the hands of an evil ruler of the Snake Cult, Thulsa Doom, who kills his parents and sells him into slavery. Eventually after much suffering he gains his freedom and trains to become a mighty warrior. He then sets out to solve the riddle of steel and avenge his parent’s death. As such, this is a classic morality tale with an unambiguous hero and villain. The film was a commercial success, which spawned a sequel and served to reinvigorate the fantasy genre. Read more…
CHERRY 2000 – Basil Poledouris
THROWBACK THIRTY
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Like most composers, Basil Poledouris scored his fair share of terrible films in his career. 1977’s Tintorera, one of the first films he ever scored, was a Mexican rip-off of Jaws. Amazons, from 1984, was basically a sexier version of Conan the Barbarian with warrior women in fur bikinis. However, 1987 may have seen him reach a low point in terms of ‘quality of movie’ when he was asked to score Cherry 2000, a low-budget sci-fi thriller. Directed by Steve De Jarnatt, the film is set in a post-apocalyptic America circa 2017 and stars Don Johnson wannabe David Andrews as Sam, who sets off on a dangerous mission across the lawless wasteland of what was once Nevada in order to find someone who can repair his Cherry 2000 sex robot (Pamela Gidley); to help him, he hires a tough-but-beautiful tracker named E (a strangely-cast Melanie Griffith), and together they set off into the desert. Read more…
ROBOCOP – Basil Poledouris
THROWBACK THIRTY
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The 1980s was an especially good decade for films which blended extensive, sometimes quite brutal action with pointed social and political commentary that bordered on satire. Robocop is one of the best examples of its type; it stars Peter Weller as Alex Murphy, a dogged cop in crime-ridden Detroit in the near future. After being transferred to a new precinct, and meeting his new partner Lewis (Nancy Allen), Murphy is unexpectedly murdered during his first patrol by a gang of ruthless criminals led by the vicious Clarence Boddicker (Kurtwood Smith). Meanwhile Bob Morton (Miguel Ferrer), an ambitious executive at Omni Consumer Products, the corporate behemoth that runs Detroit’s police department, pitches his ambitious Robocop program to the head of the company after a presentation by the ruthless Dick Jones (Ronny Cox) of his competing ED-209 program goes disastrously wrong. The Robocop program would use the remains of a recently-deceased police officer to form the biological component of a near-unstoppable human-robot cyborg, controlled by OCP. After being given the green light by OCP’s chairman (Daniel O’Herlihy), Morton selects the luckless Murphy to be his test subject, and Robocop quickly embarks on a single-handed crusade to clean up the city. However Jones, never one to be outdone, plots revenge against his rivals on the other side of the boardroom, and enlists Boddicker and his gang to carry it out – bringing Robocop back into conflict with the men who killed him. Read more…
AMERIKA – Basil Poledouris
THROWBACK THIRTY
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
In the spring of 1987 viewers of the network TV channel ABC were treated to a 6-part mini-series imagining a horrific alternate reality for the United States where the country has been insidiously, but bloodlessly, overtaken by the Soviet Union. Amerika posits the country as being essentially a puppet state of Moscow, with the President and Congress mere figureheads for the Soviet regime; the population is kept under control by a UN peacekeeping force called the UNSSU, which is supposed to be multi-national but is in reality a Russian Communist military arm, which uses fear and intimidation tactics to suppress opposition. From out of this nightmare three heroes emerge: former politician Devin Mitford (Kris Kristofferson), who is released back into society after spending years in a labor camp for treason; administrator Peter Bradford (Robert Urich), who pretends to collaborate with the Soviets while working to bring down the regime from within; and Colonel Andrei Denisov (Sam Neill), a KGB agent becoming more and more disillusioned with his country’s politics. The series, which was written and directed by Donald Wrye, has been in the news of late after more than 20 years of relative obscurity, mainly due to the accusations of Russian influence in Donald Trump’s successful run for US President in 2016… this fiction couldn’t be happening in reality, could it? Read more…
RED DAWN – Basil Poledouris
THROWBACK THIRTY
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Red Dawn was a popular and successful action film, written and directed by John Milius, set in an alternate 1980s in which a Communist army, led by Russians and Cubans, launches an invasion of the United States in the aftermath of a devastating economic crisis. The story is centered around a small Colorado town, where a group of mostly teenagers embarks on a sustained campaign of guerilla warfare against the invaders, using the name ‘wolverines’, after their high school mascot. The film starred Patrick Swayze and Charlie Sheen in early career roles, co-starred C. Thomas Howell, a pre-Back to the Future Lea Thompson, a pre-Dirty Dancing Jennifer Grey, and Ben Johnson, and featured an original score by the then 39-year-old Basil Poledouris. Read more…
CONAN THE DESTROYER – Basil Poledouris
MOVIE MUSIC UK CLASSICS
Original Review by Craig Lysy
The immense worldwide success achieved by “Conan the Barbarian” lead, to the surprise of no one, to an inevitably sequel. Producer Dino De Laurentiis hired director Richard Fleischer to revisit the mythic Hyborean world and offer us the classic mythic adventure. In the tale we see that at the bequest of the evil Queen Tamaris of Zamora, Conan is promised that his dead lover Valeria will be resurrected if he would bring to her the sacred Horn of Dagoth. In reality the duplicitous Tamaris plans to betray Conan and sacrifice her niece Jehenna to reanimate the god Dagoth with whom she plans to mate and generate a new progeny of gods. A colorful and eclectic cast lead again by Arnold Schwarzenegger (Conan) was assembled and featured the fierce Amazon warrior Zula (Grace Jones), virginal Princess Jehenna (Olivia d’Abo), the wise wizard Akiro (Mako), the comic thief Malak (Jeff Corey) and the treacherous Bombaata (Will Chamberlain). A parade of directors and a truly feeble script soured Schwarzenegger as he chose to not return for a third film. Never the less, fantasy films were at their zenith in the 80s and the film was a commercial success, doubling its $18 million production costs. Read more…
Shop at the Movie Music UK Store
Member of the
MOVIE MUSIC UK 