Archive
THE SUPER MARIO BROS. MOVIE – Brian Tyler
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
In 1981 video gaming was changed forever following the launch of Nintendo’s Donkey Kong arcade game. The game introduced two iconic characters into public consciousness: the titular antagonist, a 300-pound gorilla with a penchant for throwing barrels at people, and the hero, an Italian plumber named Mario. Since then, Mario has appeared in over 200 video games – including some of the most successful and popular titles of all time – and has become the recognizable mascot face of Nintendo as a whole. Understandably, Nintendo have been very protective of their man, and have been reluctant to allow movie adaptations featuring him (or, for that matter, many of their other characters); this reluctance was compounded following the 1993 release of the Super Mario Bros. film starring Bob Hoskins, which was a critical and commercial disaster. Now, almost 45 years after his initial appearance, Nintendo finally have a bonafide hit on their hands with this new Super Mario Bros. Movie, an animated action adventure featuring all the classic characters – Mario, Luigi, Bowser, Princess Peach, Donkey Kong, and more – and the voice talents of Chris Pratt, Anya Taylor-Joy, Charlie Day, Jack Black, Keegan-Michael Key, Seth Rogen, and Fred Armisen, among many others. Read more…
REDEEMING LOVE – Brian Tyler and Breton Vivian
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Redeeming Love is a ‘faith-based drama’ directed by D. J. Caruso, based on a popular novel by Francine Rivers, which was itself a re-telling of the biblical story of Hosea, a prophet who married an unfaithful woman. The film is set in the 1850s at the height of the California gold rush and tells the story of Angel, a woman who was sold to a brothel as a child and who has essentially spent her entire life working as a prostitute. Despite her miserable life Angel is positive and optimistic, and her prospects begins to change when she meets and falls in love with Michael, a kind-hearted farmer who ‘rescues’ her following a beating from a client. However, the road to true love and redemption is always fraught with perils, and before long Angel and Michael find themselves dealing with all sorts of trials and tribulations – not only in terms of their circumstances in the present, but also as a result of Angel’s horrific past experiences coming back to haunt them. The film stars Abigail Cowan and Tom Lewis as Angel and Michael, with Famke Janssen, Logan Marshall-Green, and Nina Dobrev in supporting roles, and has an original score by Brian Tyler and Breton Vivian. Read more…
THOSE WHO WISH ME DEAD – Brian Tyler
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Those Who Wish Me Dead is a new action/drama/thriller from director Taylor Sheridan, the man behind such acclaimed films as Sicario and Hell or High Water, as well as the popular TV series Yellowstone. The film stars Angelina Jolie as Hannah, a firefighter in rural Montana left traumatized by a tragedy during a forest fire a year previously. Hannah is forced to confront her demons and overcome her fears when she meets a teenage boy named Connor in the forest; he is being tracked by two ruthless assassins (Aidan Gillen and Nicholas Hoult), who were hired by a shadowy organization and have already eliminated Connor’s father. As Hannah and Connor attempt to reach safety, the killers set a new blaze in the forest, which quickly spirals out of control, and threatens to burn everything to the ground. The film was adapted from the popular novel by Michael Koryta, and also stars Jon Bernthal, Jake Weber, and Medina Senghore. Read more…
READY OR NOT – Brian Tyler
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Ready or Not is a fun, exciting, uproariously gory action-horror movie underpinned by a vein of black comedy. It stars Aussie actress Samara Weaving as Grace, who is about to marry Alex, the man of her dreams, the heir to the Le Domas family fortune, whose wealth comes from a multi-generational board game dynasty. However, on their wedding night, Alex reveals that his family has a tradition whereby anyone newly marrying into the family has to play a game, the nature of which is written on a card drawn from a mysterious antique box, and is unknown to everyone until the moment it is drawn. When Grace draws ‘hide and seek’ it triggers a desperate struggle for survival as the other family members – compelled by the threat of an ancient curse – have to hunt and kill Grace before dawn breaks. The film is directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, and co-stars Adam Brody, Mark O’Brien, Henry Czerny, and Andie MacDowell. Read more…
CRAZY RICH ASIANS – Brian Tyler
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
In 1993 director Wayne Wang’s film The Joy Luck Club, based on the popular novel by Amy Tan, was released in cinemas. It was a groundbreaking film as it was one of the first mainstream American films to feature an almost exclusively East Asian cast – mostly from China, Japan, Macau, and Vietnam – and at the time it was a seen as a major step forward for Asian-American cinema. It has taken until this year, 25 years later, for this feat to be repeated, with the release of Crazy Rich Asians, directed by Jon Chu from the best-selling novel by Kevin Kwan. The film is a fairly conventional romantic comedy-drama which stars Constance Wu as Rachel, an economics professor living in New York with a handsome long-term boyfriend named Nick (Henry Golding). Nick is invited to a family wedding back home in Singapore, and asks Rachel to go with him; to her shock and amazement, she discovers that Nick comes from an immensely wealthy family of real estate developers. Overwhelmed by her new surroundings, and the revelations about Nick’s family, she immediately embarrasses herself in front of Nick’s domineering mother Eleanor (Michelle Yeoh), and sets off a chain of events which threatens to derail her relationship forever. Read more…
THE MUMMY – Brian Tyler
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The Mummy is the first film in Universal Pictures’s series of new interlocking ‘Dark Universe’ films based on their roster of classic monsters. Tom Cruise stars as Nick Morton, an officer in the United States Army who moonlights as a treasure hunter. While on assignment in Iraq with his partner, Chris Vail, Nick accidentally unearths an ancient tomb containing a sarcophagus, inside of which are the mummified remains of an Egyptian princess. With the help of archeologist Jennifer Halsey, Nick determines that the princess in question is Ahmanet, who murdered her father, the Pharaoh, as part of a ritual intended to give the Egyptian god of death human form, and was buried alive as punishment. Finally freed from her prison after two thousand years, Ahmanet returns to life and unleashes her revenge upon the world; the only things standing in her way are Nick and his allies, and a mysterious organization called the Prodigium, a secret society dedicated to hunting supernatural threats, whose leader is the equally mysterious Dr. Henry Jekyll. Read more…
TRUTH – Brian Tyler
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Truth is a film about journalistic integrity and ethics, which looks specifically at the 2004 ‘Killian documents controversy’ which essentially ended the careers of veteran CBS news producer Mary Mapes and the well-respected news anchor and journalist Dan Rather. In the lead up to the 2004 US presidential election Mapes and Rather presented a report on the news magazine show 60 Minutes containing some damning allegations about then-president George W. Bush’s service in the Air National Guard in the 1970s. However, following the airing of the show, it was revealed that the documents Mapes and Rather relied upon as the basis for the report had been entirely fabricated – ostensibly to cripple Bush’s re-election campaign – and the resulting scandal was intensely damaging to CBS, who were accused of poor journalistic standards and incomplete fact-checking. The film was directed by James Vanderbilt, and has an all-star cast, including Robert Redford as Rather, Cate Blanchett as Mapes, and Topher Grace, Dennis Quaid, Elisabeth Moss, and Bruce Greenwood in supporting roles. Read more…
AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON – Brian Tyler and Danny Elfman
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The latest entry into the Marvel Cinematic Universe is Avengers: Age of Ultron, the eleventh film in the series since the first Iron Man film in 2008, and the second film featuring all the main characters after the first Avengers movie in 2012. Directed by Joss Whedon, the film sees the six heroes – Tony Stark/Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), Steve Rogers/Captain America (Chris Evans), Bruce Banner/Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) and Clint Barton/Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) – teaming up to take on Ultron (James Spader), a sentient robot created as part of an Earth defense system by Stark, which achieves consciousness and decides that the only way to save the Earth is to eradicate humanity. It’s a visual extravaganza, filled with spectacular special effects, complicated action sequences, and plenty of witty banter between the protagonists, as well as a host of cameos from earlier Marvel films, and the introduction of several new characters which will play larger roles in future movies. Read more…
TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES – Brian Tyler
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were all the rage for a few years when I was a kid in the 1980s, although to be fair I didn’t know they were ninjas until quite some time later, thanks to the busybody interference of the self-appointed guardian of Britain’s national morals, Mary Whitehouse, who decided that showing children scenes of ninjas doing things with nunchaku would contribute to the decline of a generation. To me they will always be the Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles, and no-one can tell me otherwise, although looking back I now realize I never was entirely sure how Michelangelo defeated his foes with nothing more dangerous than a slice of pizza. This has been an astonishingly long-lived franchise – with the world having already been exposed to three separate animated TV series, a Japanese anime, and a live-action TV series, we are now on our fifth movie based on the characters originally created by Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird in 1984, following the original three movies in 1990, 1991 and 1993, and the 2007 CGI flop “TMNT”. This latest installment is essentially an origin story reboot of the entire story, stars Megan Fox and Will Arnett, and is directed by Jonathan Liebesman. Read more…
THE EXPENDABLES 2 – Brian Tyler
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Had it been made in 1989, The Expendables 2 would without a doubt have been the biggest box office draw of the year. At the height of the action hero era, any film with a cast that included Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis alongside Jean Claude Van Damme, Dolph Lundgren and Chuck Norris… well, the testosterone quotient alone might have been enough to make any cinema screen explode with sheer masculinity. Add in modern action stars Jason Statham, Liam Hemsworth and Jet Li, a competent director in Simon Wells, and a concise and self-aware screenplay, and you have a film that is both a nostalgic throwback to that macho era, and an enjoyable contemporary popcorn adventure that pulls no punches when it comes to blood, bullets, fists, and slow-motion walks towards the camera. Stallone stars as the leader of a band of good-guy mercenaries for hire, who are sent by the CIA into the mountains of Albania to retrieve the contents of a safe lost in a plane crash. It looks like a walk in the park, until one of their number is killed by the suavely ruthless (and unambiguously named) arms dealer Jean Vilain – played with icy coolness by Van Damme – who is also after the contents of the safe, and all hell breaks loose as the Expendables look for revenge. Read more…
A SYMPHONY OF HOPE: THE HAITI PROJECT – Christopher Lennertz et al.
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
On January 12, 2010, the city of Port-au-Prince in Haiti was effectively flattened when it was struck by a magnitude 7.0 earthquake. Within a matter of seconds over 50,000 people had been killed, and over a million people left homeless. Diseases such as cholera blighted the survivors and thwarted relief efforts, and since then the humanitarian crisis in the country has reached staggering proportions, with over 250,000 residences destroyed and basic services and infrastructure left in ruins. Reacting to the global call for help, film composer Christopher Lennertz was inspired to act. Calling upon his fellow composers and other members of the Los Angeles film music community of musicians and engineers, Lennertz teamed up with the charity Hands Together to create A Symphony of Hope: The Haiti Project, a musical fundraising project intended to help the people of Haiti. Read more…
A Symphony of Hope: The Haiti Project
Last Saturday, March 26th, I had the honor attending the recording sessions for “A Symphony of Hope: The Haiti Project” at the Eastwood Scoring Stage at Warner Brothers Studios in Burbank, CA. The brainchild of composer Christopher Lennertz, the Symphony is musical fundraising project designed to help the people of Haiti in their desperate time of need.
A year after the terrible earthquake which destroyed the lives of thousands of Haitians, it was clear to Lennertz that the need for assistance was greater than ever. In response Lennertz came up with the idea of the “Symphony of Hope”, and invited 25 leading film composers to collaborate with him on a project to benefit the Haiti Earthquake Relief fund. Read more…
LAW ABIDING CITIZEN – Brian Tyler
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Taking its cue from 70s revenge movies like Charles Bronson’s Death Wish series, Law Abiding Citizen is the story of Clyde Shelton (Gerard Butler) an everyday joe whose life is turned upside down when his family is murdered in a home invasion. However, when district attorney Nick Rice (Jamie Foxx) plea bargains a deal to set the killers free, Clyde decides to take matters into his own hands and dispense his own kind of justice. The film is directed by F. Gary Gray, and features a new score from the absurdly busy Brian Tyler, his sixth score of 2009 following features like Dragonball Evolution, Fast & Furious and The Final Destination. Read more…
THE FINAL DESTINATION – Brian Tyler
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
As if they hadn’t squeezed enough life out of this franchise yet, The Final Destination – the fourth film in the horror movie franchise – again follows the fortunes of a set of teenagers who cheat death, but then find that Death doesn’t like being cheated, and sets out to claim them anyway. The film is directed by David R. Ellis and stars Bobby Campo as college student Nick O’Bannon who, while attending a NASCAR race, has a premonition that a car wreck will cause a stand to collapse, killing himself and his friends; he convinces everyone to leave before the disaster occurs, but in the weeks following the event, his friends all die one by one in freak accidents.
The late, great Shirley Walker set the musical tone for the first three Final Destination films prior to her untimely death in 2006, and her mantle has now been picked up by the resourceful Brian Tyler Read more…
DRAGONBALL EVOLUTION – Brian Tyler
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
A big-budget big screen version of the well-loved Japanese anime TV series, Dragonball Evolution stars Justin Chatwin as Son Goku, a young warrior sets out on a quest to collect a set of seven magical orbs that will grant their wielder unlimited power However, not only does young Goku face a race against time to find the orbs, he also faces a dangerous adversary in the shape of the evil and vengeful King Piccolo (James Marsters), who wants the orbs for his own nefarious purposes.
The film is directed by James Wong, co-stars Chow Yun Fat, Emmy Rossum and Jamie Chung, and has a lively and energetic original score by the ever-busy Brian Tyler. Read more…
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