Archive
9 – Deborah Lurie and Danny Elfman
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
A post-apocalyptic animated adventure, 9 is the first feature length film from director Shane Acker, who received a Best Animated Short Film Oscar nomination in 2005 for the short film on which this movie is based. The film is set in a future time when humanity has been wiped out following a devastating war, and has been replaced by a new species: sentient rag-doll like creatures known as Stitchpunks. The Stitchpunks – who are all named for the numbers 1 to 9 – spend most of their time running from the massive roving animal-shaped robots hunting them, until the youngest Stitchpunk, the 9 of the title, encourages the others to fight back. The film has an impressive voice cast including Elijah Wood, Jennifer Connelly, Christopher Plummer, Martin Landau and John C. Reilly, is produced by Tim Burton and Timur Bekmambetov, and has an original score by comparative newcomer Deborah Lurie. Read more…
TAKING WOODSTOCK – Danny Elfman
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
I missed out on being a part of the Woodstock generation by a good decade or more, having been born six years after it took place, but growing up I was acutely aware on how much the seminal 1969 music festival shaped the musical, social and political mindset of a generation. Calling Woodstock a ‘music festival’ is to underplay its significance: not only did it popularize the music of artists as varied as Jimi Hendrix, Crosby Stills & Nash, the Grateful Dead, Joan Baez and Janis Joplin, it also became a cultural touchstone for the hippie movement and the anti-Vietnam War movement. Ang Lee’s new film Taking Woodstock takes a gently comedic look at the events leading up to the festival; it stars Demetri Martin as Elliot Tiber, the actual organizer of the festival, Eugene Levy as Max Yager, on whose farmland the festival took place, and features Dan Fogler, Imelda Staunton, Henry Goodman, Liev Schreiber and Emile Hirsch in supporting roles. Read more…
TERMINATOR: SALVATION – Danny Elfman
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The fourth installment in the long-running Terminator film franchise, Terminator Salvation picks up the story following a nuclear holocaust, caused by the Skynet automated defense system that played an important part in the original trilogy. John Connor (Christian Bale) has survived the blast, and is now struggling to bring together a rag-tag band of human survivors to battle against the immense, unstoppable machines that now control the world. The film was directed by Charlie’s Angels helmer McG, and co-stars Sam Worthington, Anton Yelchin and Bryce Dallas Howard. Read more…
MILK – Danny Elfman
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Although many people nowadays will not know his name, Harvey Milk remains a hugely important figure in American political history. As the first ever openly gay man ever elected to public office in the United States, Milk served one term as a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in the late 1970s, and was responsible for passing a stringent gay rights ordinance for the city, before being assassinated by fellow city supervisor Dan White in November 1978. Having already been the subject of an Oscar-winning documentary, ‘The Times of Harvey Milk’, in 1984, director Gus Van Sant’s new film charts the life and death of a man who has since been labeled ‘a martyr for gay rights’ in dramatic narrative; the film stars Sean Penn as Milk, Josh Brolin as White, and features Emile Hirsch, Diego Luna and James Franco in supporting roles. Read more…
HELLBOY II: THE GOLDEN ARMY – Danny Elfman
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
After my first few listens through Danny Elfman’s score for Hellboy II: The Golden Army, I had pretty much decided that too much of it was unfocused noise; it was certainly written in Elfman’s easily-identifiable sound, but never quite seemed to gel together as a cohesive score. But then, quite suddenly, the whole thing opened up, and it hit me. I got it, and the wonders of this quite excellent work were revealed. This is probably the best Elfman super-hero score since Batman Returns some fifteen years ago, eclipsing such fan-favorites as Hulk, and his two massively popular Spider-Man scores. Read more…
WANTED – Danny Elfman
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Wanted is the American directorial debut of Timur Bekmambetov, the Kazakh director of the cult Russian-language science fiction action hits Night Watch and Day Watch. The film stars James McAvoy as Wesley Gibson, an office drone cube-jockey who lives a life of never-ending day-to-day tedium. However, everything is turned upside down when Wesley meets Fox (Angelina Jolie), a sexy assassin, who recruits Wesley into ‘The Fraternity’, an ages-old brotherhood of assassins.
Bekmambetov’s film is a flashy, glitzy, souped-up action flick, completely unlike anything one would expect from a filmmaker from the former Soviet Union, and although the film was not a groundbreaking box office success, it more than illustrates the way in which the language of cinema is becoming less and less separated. Read more…
STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE – Danny Elfman
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Watching Danny Elfman grow into a sophisticated and technically excellent film composer over the last few years has been one of the most satisfying parts of reviewing soundtracks. His score for Standard Operating Procedure – a devastating documentary by Errol Morris about the appalling events surrounding the Abu Ghraib prison torture abuse scandal in Iraq in 2004 – is probably the most mature and intellectual film score of his entire career.
Morris usually hires Philip Glass to score his films, so it perhaps comes as no surprise that a shorthand way of describing Standard Operating Procedure is ‘Elfman doing Glass’, but should in no way insinuate that Elfman is merely copying Glass Read more…
THE KINGDOM – Danny Elfman
Original Review by Clark Douglas
Peter Berg’s “The Kingdom” is a strange animal. It’s not really much of a thriller, or an educational film about another culture, or a slice-of-life movie, or a political sermon… and yet, there’s plenty of action, explosions, foreign locations, and sermonizing. The movie doesn’t quite work on any level, and yet it’s difficult to pinpoint where exactly everything went wrong. The movie fails by not succeeding, rather than by any major slip made along to road.
Danny Elfman’s score is unfortunately as underwhelming as the film itself, and also fails simply by not succeeding. Elfman manages to avoid all the usual clichés of middle-eastern scores… wailing women, duduks, and so on… but the generic thriller music he provides has very little of Elfman’s own voice Read more…
THE SIMPSONS MOVIE – Hans Zimmer
Original Review by Clark Douglas
By now the subject has been talked to death… but at a first glance, it is a little confusing that Hans Zimmer is scoring “The Simpsons Movie”. Why not Danny Elfman, who wrote the classic main theme for the television show? Was he not available, or uninterested, or what? And if not Elfman, why not Alf Clausen, who has been tirelessly writing fun music for the television show for nearly two decades? The choice of Zimmer probably comes from the fact that James L. Brooks has always been involved with the Simpsons, and Zimmer has had several successful collaborations with Brooks (“As Good as it Gets”, “I’ll Do Anything”, and “Spanglish”). Read more…
MEET THE ROBINSONS – Danny Elfman
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Walt Disney’s 46th feature length animation, and their major animated effort for 2007, Meet the Robinsons surprisingly fell under the radar, and was a comparative box office failure. It tells the story of a young orphan inventor named Lewis, who embarks on a series of extravagant, time-traveling adventures with various members of the futuristic Robinson family as he attempts to find his real family. The film was directed by Steve Anderson and featured the voice talents of the likes of Angela Bassett and Tom Selleck, as well as an original score by Danny Elfman. The film sees Elfman in what one could call “madcap mode”, in much the same way as he was on scores such as Flubber and Mars Attacks. Read more…
CHARLOTTE’S WEB – Danny Elfman
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
It’s a testament to how well-loved E.B. White’s classic children’s tale Charlotte’s Web is when Hollywood stars of the calibre of Julia Roberts, Steve Buscemi, John Cleese, Oprah Winfrey, Jennifer Garner, Kathy Bates, Dakota Fanning and Robert Redford agree to lend their voices to it. The simple tale of young girl named Fern who saves a pig named Wilbur from the chopping block, and who in turn makes friends with a wise a spider named Charlotte, has enchanted youngsters around the world since it was first published in 1952, and was previously made into an animated film in 1973 with songs by Richard and Robert Sherman. This new version, which mixes live action with Babe-like animal CGI, was directed by Gary Winick, and features a delightful score from Danny Elfman. Read more…
CORPSE BRIDE – Danny Elfman
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
With the possible exception of Steven Spielberg and John Williams, Tim Burton and Danny Elfman have by far the most creatively positive composer/director relationship in Hollywood. One glance at their mutual filmography – everything from Pee Wee to Beetlejuice to Batman to Edward Scissorhands and Sleepy Hollow – proves beyond doubt that they are a pairing in perfect synch with each other’s way of thinking, of what one needs from the other to excel. Their latest collaboration, Corpse Bride, takes inspiration from the wonderful 1993 stop-motion animation The Nightmare Before Christmas, and tells an equally beautiful and tragic tale of love, loss, longing, and unfulfilled dreams. Read more…
CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY – Danny Elfman
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
One thing you can say about Tim Burton, he isn’t afraid of taking risks. Having already re-made one of cinema’s all-time classic science fiction films in the shape of Planet of the Apes, he has again subjected himself to the wrath of fans by revisiting another well-loved classic: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, a remake of the 1971 Gene Wilder classic, which was itself based on a famous novel by Roald Dahl. Along for the ride for the tenth time is Danny Elfman, whose collaborations with Burton have resulted in some of the finest movie music heard in the last 20 years. Interestingly, on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Elfman was given the opportunity to write a number of original songs to complement his score, something he has not attempted for over a decade. It was worth the wait. Read more…
HULK – Danny Elfman
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Call me old fashioned, but I miss the old Danny Elfman. I miss his bittersweet sweeping melodies, his lyrical touch, the music he used to compose for films like Edward Scissorhands, Sommersby, Black Beauty, or The Nightmare Before Christmas. In recent years, Elfman has undoubtedly become more intellectual and technically adept in his scores, but in doing so he has lost some of the enthusiastic magic that so enlivened his earlier works. He seems much more interested in creating interesting orchestral effects, or new ways of using percussion, than on eliciting emotions. His score for Hulk is a case in point. Read more…
MEN IN BLACK II – Danny Elfman
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
It’s nice to see Danny Elfman being silly again. I don’t mean Pee-Wee Herman silly; God forbid, the music was great but if he ever scores another movie like that something very wrong will have happened to the world. It’s just that, for the last few years, Elfman seems to have become a very serious man, scoring dark and weighty films such as Proof of Life and Sleepy Hollow and Planet of the Apes. Returning to the sci-fi chaos of the Men in Black universe has allowed Elfman to metaphorically let his hair down and go a bit wacky. He’s probably at his best when he does. Read more…
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