Archive
GREYHOUND – Blake Neely
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Greyhound is a World War II action thriller directed by Aaron Schneider, and written by Tom Hanks, who adapted the novel The Good Shepherd by C. S. Forester, the creator of the great fictional British naval hero Captain Horatio Hornblower. Hanks himself plays Ernest Krause, a commander in the United States Navy, who is charged with escorting and protecting a multi-national fleet of ships across the Atlantic, while it is under attack from Nazi German U-Boats. The film co-stars Stephen Graham, Rob Morgan, and Elisabeth Shue, and is a classic claustrophobic cat-and-mouse naval thriller in the tradition of Das Boot, Run Silent Run Deep, and Sink the Bismarck, the latter of which was also based on a Forester novel. The film was initially scheduled to be released in cinemas in June 2020 but was delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and eventually premiered straight-to-streaming on the Apple TV+ platform. Read more…
THE PACIFIC – Hans Zimmer, Geoff Zanelli and Blake Neely
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
When the TV mini-series Band of Brothers first aired in 2001 it was hailed as a great piece of television art; a thoughtful, emotional, well-produced, well-acted and well-directed look at the lives – and deaths – of the men who served in the US military in Europe during World War 2. Almost a decade later, the same group of talented individuals have come together again to make The Pacific, which tells the simultaneous story of the men and women who fought in the Pacific theater against the Japanese at Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, and all across the Pacific Ocean. The series stars Joseph Mazzello, Jon Seda, William Sadler and James Badge Dale, and began airing on HBO in the United States on March 14, 2010.
The late, great Michael Kamen wrote one of the finest scores of his career for the original Band of Brothers series. For The Pacific, the producers turned to the composing trifecta of Hans Zimmer, Geoff Zanelli and Blake Neely to write almost nine hours Read more…