Archive
BATMAN FOREVER – Elliot Goldenthal
THROWBACK THIRTY
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Batman Forever is the third installment in the original Warner Bros. Batman film series, following Batman in 1989 and Batman Returns in 1992, both of which were directed by Tim Burton. However, Burton left the Batman franchise during the development of the third film because Warner Bros. wanted to go in a lighter, more commercial, and family-friendly direction, which clashed with Burton’s increasingly dark, gothic depiction of Gotham City. The studio saw diminishing returns on the edgier tone and opted to reset the franchise’s style, paving the way for Joel Schumacher to come into replace him. Schumacher had directed a number of box-office hits in the decade prior, including St. Elmo’s Fire, The Lost Boys, The Client, and Falling Down, but his neon-soaked reinterpretation of the dark knight in Batman Forever was polarizing: some approved of the elaborate set designs, as well as the campier tone which more was reminiscent of the 1960s Adam West Batman TV series, while others missed Burton’s more introspective and visually dramatic approach. One person who certainly disapproved was Michael Keaton, who declined to return to the main role due to creative differences after Burton left; ultimately he was replaced by Val Kilmer underneath the mask and cowl. Read more…
ELLIOT GOLDENTHAL: MUSIC FOR FILM – Elliot Goldenthal
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Each year at the Film Fest in Ghent, Belgium, one composer is awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award by the World Soundtrack Awards committee, and as part of that experience there is a live concert of their music, and an accompanying soundtrack compilation CD. Previous Lifetime Achievement Award winners include Laurence Rosenthal, Mark Isham, Mychael Danna, Gabriel Yared, Shigeru Umebayashi, Marco Beltrami, Carter Burwell, Terence Blanchard, Ryuichi Sakamoto, and Alan Silvestri. In 2024, the recipient was Elliot Goldenthal, and this is the album celebrating him and his work. Read more…
COBB – Elliot Goldenthal
THROWBACK THIRTY
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Growing up in the United Kingdom, baseball was never a sport that was ever on my radar, but even with my limited knowledge of its history there were still some names which transcended and were familiar as icons of the game: Babe Ruth. Lou Gehrig. Joe Di Maggio. One of the most controversial players of that era was another familiar name: Ty Cobb, who played for the Detroit Tigers between 1906 and 1926 and was one of the first people inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame when it was first established in 1936. By all accounts he was a mercurial player, with especially incredible batting ability, aggressiveness, and mental toughness; such was his prodigiousness he held the record for the highest career batting average for almost 100 years until 2024, when MLB decided to include players from the Negro League in official statistics, and he was overtaken by Josh Gibson. Read more…
GOLDEN GATE – Elliot Goldenthal
THROWBACK THIRTY
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Golden Gate is a romantic drama written by acclaimed playwright David Henry Hwang, and directed John Madden. The film is set in San Francisco in the 1950s and stars Matt Dillon as FBI Agent Kevin Walker, who is sent with his partner to investigate potential links between the residents of San Francisco’s Chinatown and the emerging communist ‘threat’ posed by Chairman Mao’s China. His investigation leads to the prosecution and eventual imprisonment of several local residents on trumped-up charges, one of whom – Chen Jung Song – is clearly innocent. A decade later, Song and his cohorts are released, but Song has never recovered from his ordeal, and Walker watches as he jumps to his death from the Golden Gate Bridge. In the aftermath of this, Walker meets Song’s daughter Marilyn (Joan Chen), and the two of them unexpectedly embark on a torrid love affair – an affair which eventually causes Walker to begin to question his ethics and morals, and the part he played in her father’s death. Read more…
DEMOLITION MAN – Elliot Goldenthal
THROWBACK THIRTY
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Mellow greetings. What seems to be your boggle?
One of my favorite action movies of the 1990s is Demolition Man, directed by Marco Brambilla from a screenplay by Peter Lenkov, Daniel Waters, and Robert Reneau (the latter of whom might be better known to readers as ‘Scott Bettencourt,’ a regular contributor to Film Score Monthly magazine). It’s a dystopian, futuristic sci-fi story with a heavy dose of satire and social commentary, interspersed with several outstanding action set pieces. The film stars Sylvester Stallone as John Spartan, a renegade LAPD cop from the 1990s known as the “demolition man” for his unorthodox and sometimes brutal law enforcement tactics, especially when it comes down to catching his arch-nemesis, violent criminal Simon Phoenix (Wesley Snipes). After one such confrontation Phoenix is captured and cryogenically frozen in a ‘cryo-prison’ as punishment – but Spartan is framed for a murder he did not commit, and is frozen alongside him. In 2032, Phoenix somehow breaks out of the prison and emerges into ‘San Angeles,’ a utopian, peaceful, politically correct society run by the benevolent yet controlling Dr. Raymond Cocteau (Nigel Hawthorne). However, when Phoenix resumes his life of crime in a city with a police force that is simply unable to deal with his violence, Spartan is thawed out too, and teams up with Lenina Huxley (Sandra Bullock), a 2030s police officer who idolizes 1990s culture, to stop him. Read more…
ALIEN 3 – Elliot Goldenthal
THROWBACK THIRTY
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
When I first started writing about film music, in the summer of 1997, I tried to write a review of Alien 3. I had seen the film previously, and liked it a great deal, and I remember being especially impressed with the music in the finale, so I went out and bought Elliot Goldenthal’s soundtrack CD. This was my first experience of his music outside of film context, and my film music knowledge at that point barely extended beyond the big orchestral scores of John Williams and James Horner, and the sweeping romance of John Barry. Hearing Alien 3 for the first time was… well, it was almost indescribable. I had no idea what I was listening to. It felt like angry, vicious, random noise, and I absolutely hated it. I hadn’t yet begun to explore the darker and more atonal side of film music, I had no knowledge of Stravinsky or Penderecki, or of twentieth century avant-garde music in general. In short, I had no clue what Elliot Goldenthal was doing. I didn’t have the vocabulary to understand it. Thankfully, thirty years down the line, I now have had vastly more exposure to and tolerance of this type of aggressive music, and I can now appreciate it for the masterpiece it is. Read more…
THE GLORIAS – Elliot Goldenthal
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
As I was prepping and doing research prior to writing this review, I learned that this is the first review of a new Elliot Goldenthal score I have written since I wrote about Public Enemies in July 2009, more than 11 years ago. It’s also only the fourth new Goldenthal score I have covered since the turn of the millennium – the other two being Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within in 2001 and S.W.A.T. in 2003. Of course, Goldenthal has only written two scores since 2009 – one of which, The Tempest, I didn’t care for, while the other, Our Souls at Night, was not released on CD at all. He has been working on classical pieces and theatre works in the interim but, other than that, the most significant thing that happened to him was the potentially life-threatening head injury he suffered in 2005, when he fell off a chair in his kitchen and smacked his head on the marble floor; it caused a subdural hematoma, briefly put him in a coma, and rendered him literally speechless for several months afterwards. Whether this traumatic event was the catalyst for Goldenthal’s subsequent drift away from Hollywood is open to debate, but one thing’s for certain: I’m very glad that his wife Julie Taymor keeps hiring him to score her movies. Read more…
PET SEMATARY – Elliot Goldenthal
THROWBACK THIRTY
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Pet Sematary was an adaptation of a popular novel by horror author Stephen King. Directed by Mary Lambert from a screenplay by King himself, the film starred Dale Midkiff as Louis Creed, a doctor who moves with his family – wife Rachel (Denise Crosby), children Gage and Ellie (Miko Hughes and Blaze Berdahl) – from Chicago to rural Maine. Louis befriends his elderly neighbor Jud Crandall (Fred Gwynne), who alerts him to the existence of a pet cemetery in the woods on his new property. One day, months later, the family cat is run over and killed on the highway outside their home; wanting to save little Ellie from the pain of losing her beloved pet, Jud reveals to Louis that things that are buried in the cemetery often return from the dead, and sure enough the cat comes back, albeit with a much different, more aggressive personality. Months later still, little Gage is hit by a truck and killed on the same highway – and despite dire warnings from Jud, Louis buries his young son in the cemetery too. Sure enough, the next day, little Gage returns… but, as the film’s famous tagline suggests, sometimes dead is better. Pet Sematary was a popular success at the box office in 1989, despite many critics feeling that the sense of dread that was prominent in the book, as well as its more thoughtful ruminations on grief and death, were missing from the finished film. Read more…
INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE – Elliot Goldenthal
MOVIE MUSIC UK CLASSICS
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
It’s interesting how my musical tastes have altered and refined over the years. When I first started listening to film music properly, in the mid 1990s, I typically only listened to sweeping theme-led romance scores, or the best action music. I didn’t really know a lot about dissonance, avant-gardeism, or more progressive styles of writing, and tended to dismiss anything that didn’t have a huge theme or enormous action writing as noisy, or boring, or both. Such was the case with Elliot Goldenthal’s score for Interview With the Vampire, which had caught my ear in the cinema when I saw it back in 1995, but which I completely disrespected on CD, calling it “a bit of a mess”. Oh, how times have changed. Read more…
PUBLIC ENEMIES – Elliot Goldenthal
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Waiting for Public Enemies has been a test of patience for Elliot Goldenthal fans. It’s been a long six years since Goldenthal’s last theatrical score – S.W.A.T. in 2003 – although the intervening period has been an eventful one in Goldenthal’s life; he wrote his first opera, Grendel, in collaboration with his partner Julie Taymor, and produced the Beatles songs used in her 2007 film Across the Universe, but most seriously he suffered a potentially life-threatening head injury in 2005 when he fell off a chair and smacked his head on the marble floor of his kitchen, rendering him literally speechless for several months. So, is Public Enemies the triumphant return to the cinema fans of scores like Titus, Final Fantasy and Interview With the Vampire had wanted? The answer, a touch disappointingly, is no. Read more…
ACROSS THE UNIVERSE – Elliot Goldenthal
Original Review by Clark Douglas
Full disclosure: I love The Beatles. Also, I love Julie Taymor (if my wife or Elliot Goldenthal are reading, I only love her in the artistic sense). So, when I heard about Julie Taymor (“Titus”, “Frida”) was directing a musical centered around songs of The Beatles (Greatest Band Ever), I was pretty thrilled. Of course, as a big Beatles fan, I approached the film with a certain amount of caution, too: though I was likely to enjoy the movie more than the average person, I was also more likely to be disappointed by the songs if they turned out to be bad covers of the tunes I loved. Beatles musicals of the past (most of which starred The Beatles) were giddy, silly, joyful affairs full of campy comedy and terrific music… unless you count “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”, which was bad comedy and terrible music. Taymor’s approach to creating a musical centered around the songs is considerably different. She attempts to make her film intensely dramatic, and in doing so puts her attention a bit more on the later, more ambitious (and more drug-fueled) Beatles songs. The approach works sometimes, and sometimes it doesn’t, but it’s certainly a very compelling idea. Read more…
S.W.A.T. – Elliot Goldenthal
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
When Elliot Goldenthal won the Best Original Score Academy Award last May, and joined the hallowed ranks of the Oscar winning composers, much interest was given to the film he would choose to score next. Goldenthal is a notoriously selective composer, rarely scoring more than two films per year, and who more often than not lends his talents to meaty dramas and weighty subjects. When S.W.A.T., an action packed cop thriller, was announced as being his next project, eyebrows were raised. But, after several quite “deep and meaningful” entries over the last couple of years, S.W.A.T. was exactly what the New Yorker needed: a chance to have fun. Read more…
FINAL FANTASY: THE SPIRITS WITHIN – Elliot Goldenthal
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
It’s been a long wait since Titus for Elliot Goldenthal to spring a new score on the world, but it has been more than worth it. His work on Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within is, from a pure enjoyment perspective, possibly the best of his career to date. I say that it is his best from an enjoyment perspective not because this score is his most challenging or complex – those accolades are reserved for works such as Alien 3 and Titus – but because, in terms of themes and developments, and for old-fashioned beauty, Final Fantasy has them all licked. It’s a dark, dark, score, make no mistake, but it contains more than its fair share of moments in the light. Read more…
TITUS – Elliot Goldenthal
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
I was, quite literally, stunned into silence by Titus, both the film and the score. A visually breathtaking, emotionally shattering, conceptually brilliant restaging of William Shakespeare’s timeless play, Titus represents modern film making at its most vibrant. With Julie Taymor, the near-legendary director of several acclaimed Broadway plays (including the recent version of The Lion King) at the helm, and with an intriguing cast that mixes several heavyweight thespians with a group of talented newcomers, Titus is a film which has the power to shock and overwhelm, while still remaining entertaining and (comparatively) true to the original. Read more…
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