Archive
INCEPTION – Hans Zimmer
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
An action thriller dealing with the manipulation of dreams, Inception is the latest film from Batman Begins and Dark Knight director Christopher Nolan. Leonardo di Caprio stars as Cobb, one of an elite group of corporate espionage specialists who have mastered the technology of ‘dream invasion’, which allows him to literally enter the dream world of a subject while he is asleep. A man with a tortured past, Cobb and his cohort Arthur (Joseph Gordon Levitt) are hired by wealthy industrialist Saito (Ken Watanabe) to infiltrate the mind of Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy), a corporate rival, and perform an ‘inception’, a dangerous procedure where, rather than extracting information, an idea is surreptitiously placed into the subject’s subconscious without them realizing. After assembling his team (Ellen Page, Tom Hardy, Dileep Rao), Cobb begins his journey into dreamworld, where he not only has to contend with the dangers presented by the task, but also his own personal demons, in the form of his long-dead wife Mal (Marion Cotillard). Read more…
DRAGONSLAYER – Alex North
MOVIE MUSIC UK CLASSICS
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Dragonslayer is a difficult score for someone like me to review, and this is why: it’s because I’m not a musicologist. You can’t review scores as intellectually challenging and musically complex as Dragonslayer in the usual way, because it’s not a standard score: despite being a fantasy film set in an ancient world of dragons, sorcerers, kings, and damsels in distress, the music is about as far removed from the genre conventions as one can imagine. I don’t have the musical vocabulary, or a deep enough knowledge of the compositional techniques Alex North employs in this score, to be able to do it justice, and any attempt by me to describe it in the usual emotional terms would be laughably futile. So let me begin with this: Dragonslayer is one of the most challenging, difficult, complicated, infuriating, disturbing, chaotic scores you are ever likely to hear. It’s also quite brilliant. Read more…
CLASH OF THE TITANS – Ramin Djawadi
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
In the interest of full disclosure, I admit that I went into Clash of the Titans expecting the worst. When the news broke that Scottish composer Craig Armstrong – who had been attached to the film almost since its inception – was being replaced by Ramin Djawadi, and that the film’s release date was being delayed several months so that the producers could cash in on the Avatar effect and add new 3-D special effects to an already effects-heavy film, my heart sank. However, after my first complete listen to the score, I found myself thinking “hey, it’s not that bad”. And then I stopped and thought again; have my standards dropped so low that ‘not that bad?’ is actually seen as a positive remark? Have Hollywood’s most expensive and elaborate productions become so bloated and self-serving that the music only has to not make the film demonstrably worse for it to be seen as a success? If this is where the major studios are pitching themselves these days, things truly are going from bad to worse. Read more…
HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON – John Powell
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
We’re in a Golden Age of animated motion pictures. When I was a kid growing up in the 1980s you got one, maybe two films from Disney in a calendar year, plus the odd independent movie like Watership Down or The Secret of NIMH, or some arty foreign language thing with bad dubbing, but that was about your lot. Since the Disney renaissance began in 1989 with The Little Mermaid the strength and popularity of the animated feature has grown exponentially, to the point where every major studio has its own animation department, well over a dozen full length feature animations are released each year, and companies like Pixar break box office records with apparent ease. The competition is fierce, but the Dreamworks studio seems to have managed the right blend of hip comedy and family-friendly action, spinning off from their massively successful Shrek series with hits such as Kung Fu Panda, Madagascar, and their 20th and most recent feature, How to Train Your Dragon. Read more…
MÄN SOM HATAR KVINNOR/THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO – Jacob Groth
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
A Swedish-language murder-mystery thriller, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is the first film based on the exceptionally popular series of books by the late author Stieg Larsson. Released under its original title, Män Som Hatar Kvinnor, to great box office success in Scandinavia in the spring of 2009, it is receiving a brief theatrical run in art houses the United States in 2010. The film stars Mikael Nyqvist as investigative journalist Mikael Blomqvist, who is hired by wealthy industrialist Henrik Vanger (Sven-Bertil Taube) to investigate the disappearance of his niece Harriet some 40 years previously. Meanwhile, punk computer hacker Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) has been hired by another company to monitor Mikael’s activity, and contacts Mikael when she solves some of the puzzles that Mikael could not; working together, the unlikely pair find out more about the Vanger family than Henrik intended, involving generations of corruption and murder. Read more…
THE PACIFIC – Hans Zimmer, Geoff Zanelli, 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…
ALICE IN WONDERLAND – Danny Elfman
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Much has been written over the years about the creative partnership between director Tim Burton and composer Danny Elfman. It now stretches back 25 years and encompasses such successful and well regarded films as Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, Beetlejuice, Batman, Edward Scissorhands, Batman Returns, Sleepy Hollow, Planet of the Apes, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, as well as the animated classic The Nightmare Before Christmas. Despite it having been repeated ad nauseum to the point that it’s almost a cliché, theirs is one of the most enduring and fruitful composer/director collaborations in cinema today; the two men complement each other intellectually and stylistically, and clearly Burton’s visual style brings out the best in Elfman’s music. Alice in Wonderland is a prime example of this. Read more…
COP OUT – Harold Faltermeyer
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Nostalgia for the 1980s is all the rage these days. As someone who actually grew up in the 1980s I often find myself forgetting that it all happened almost 30 years ago, and that I remember all the new-nostalgia crazes and trends the first time around. In film music circles, the 1980s is remembered with both fondness and incredulity in equal measure, the latter due primarily to the popularity and success of a number of synth-pop composers. Harold Faltermeyer was one of those; over a six-year stretch he wrote music for box office smash after box office smash, with the likes of Beverly Hills Cop, Top Gun, Beverly Hills Cop II, Fletch and Tango & Cash. His music remains incredibly divisive, and he has as many detractors as fans who laud his creative synth programming and (at the time) cutting edge electronics. In many ways he was the Hans Zimmer of his day, and he can legitimately be considered the source of Zimmer’s über-heroic anthemic style, which originated from Faltermeyer’s collaborations with Jerry Bruckheimer and the late Don Simpson. However, for a multitude of reasons, his music fell out of fashion, and as a result he hadn’t scored an American feature film since Kuffs in 1992 – until now. Read more…
THE GHOST WRITER – Alexandre Desplat
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
It’s impossible to talk about The Ghost Writer without talking about Roman Polanski. The director of The Ghost Writer and other such excellent films as Rosemary’s Baby, Chinatown, The Ninth Gate and The Pianist was arrested in Switzerland on 25-year old sexual abuse charges during post-production on this film, and has since become a divisive figure. Whether the scandal and scuttlebutt surrounding Polanski will affect The Ghost Writer’s reception remains to be seen, but the Pole has always been an excellent cinematic mind, and his films continue to impress. As a result of his incarceration, many of the film’s ‘finishing touches’ had to be made without him, including the recording of Alexandre Desplat’s original score for the film; thankfully, despite however you may feel about Polanski and his transgressions, Desplat’s score is yet another strong one. Read more…
THE WOLFMAN – Danny Elfman
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The story of the creation of the score for The Wolfman is a long and arduous one. Danny Elfman was attached to the project pretty much from its inception, and wrote a fully orchestral, Gothic horror score at the request of the film’s director, Joe Johnston. Originally scheduled to be released in November 2008, the film suffered numerous problems in post production, and was pushed back and back in the calendar; eventually, so much re-editing was done that Elfman’s score no longer fit the timings of the movie, meaning that much of it had to be re-written. However, a scheduling conflict with Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland meant that Elfman could not undertake any re-writes, and with time running out the original score was rejected. Austrian composer Paul Haslinger was brought in to replace Elfman, but following its recording his primarily electronic score was deemed ‘wrong’ for the picture, and Elfman’s original score was restored. However, Elfman himself was still unable to re-work his music to fit the new film, so several other composers and orchestrators – including Conrad Pope and Edward Shearmur – were brought in to re-track the music, write additional cues, and basically finish off the project before its February 2010 release. It’s a mess of quite horrific proportions, and one can only hope that debacles like these are avoided in the future. Read more…
PERCY JACKSON & THE OLYMPIANS: THE LIGHTNING THIEF – Christophe Beck
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Greek mythology has proven to be a fertile breeding ground for Hollywood films for decades. From the gods of Mount Olympus – Zeus and Poseidon, Aphrodite and Apollo – to human figures such as Jason, Odysseus, Achilles and Perseus in stories such as The Iliad and The Odyssey, these names are engrained into western culture and civilization, and provide classical inspiration for storytellers across the world. When you take these myths and combine them with a very modern variation on the Harry Potter world you end up with Percy Jackson & the Olympians, a series of novels by author Rick Riordan, whose first effort, “The Lightning Thief”, has now been turned into a major motion picture. Read more…
LO – Scott Glasgow
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
“One of the band jestingly summoned him to join them, and lo, he appeared, as if by a descent from heaven”.
This quote from E.M. Butler’s “The Myth of the Magus” highlights the clever wordplay evident in the title of Travis Betz’s film Lo, a very unusual comedy-horror about the lengths to which people will go for love. The film stars Ward Roberts as Justin, a young man in love with a beautiful girl called April (Sarah Lassaez), who has had the misfortune to have been abducted by demons. Intent on rescuing his paramour, Justin finds an ancient book left behind by April, and uses it to summon a demon named Lo (Jeremiah Birkett), who is bound to obey whoever calls him. Lo, however, is a tricky little bugger, and intends to make Justin his dinner. So begins a battle of wits between the two, one intent on saving the soul of his love, the other just looking for his next meal… Read more…
CREATION – Christopher Young
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The English naturalist and scientist Charles Darwin was a controversial figure even before he published his seminal work, “On the Origin of the Species”, in 1859. Darwin’s theories on human evolution and natural selection turned him into a divisive figure, especially in religious circles, to the point that the theological validity of his work remains controversial and strongly debated to this day. Creation, the latest film from director Jon Amiel, is a fairly straightforward biographical telling of Darwin’s life, with Paul Bettany in the title role, Jennifer Connelly as Darwin’s wife Emma, and supporting performances from the likes of Jeremy Northam, Toby Jones, Benedict Cumberbatch and Jim Carter.
The music for Creation is by Christopher Young, who previously worked with Jon Amiel on films such as Copycat, Entrapment and The Core. 2009 was an especially good year for Young, with horror scores such as Drag Me to Hell and The Univited sitting comfortably alongside the jazzy Read more…
THE IMAGINARIUM OF DOCTOR PARNASSUS – Mychael Danna, Jeff Danna
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Unfortunately for director Terry Gilliam, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is destined to be remembered as ‘the film Heath Ledger was making when he died’ rather than for any artistic merit the film may have itself, which is a shame because by the looks of things the film has all the magic one has come to expect from the former Python. The film is a fantastical tale about the owner of a travelling circus who, having made a deal with the Devil, takes his audience members through a magical mirror to explore their imaginations. However, Parnassus harbors a dark secret; in exchange for immortality, he pledged the life of his daughter to the devil, and is now using the unsuspecting customers of his ‘imaginarium’ to trick the devil out of his prize. Following Ledger’s death, his part was taken over by three actors – Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell and Jude Law – all of whom apparently worked for free, alongside a quirky cast that also includes Tom Waits, Lily Cole, Verne Troyer, and Christopher Plummer as Parnassus himself. Read more…
SHERLOCK HOLMES – Hans Zimmer
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
This version of Sherlock Holmes is apparently the 223rd occasion the ubiquitous detective has been portrayed on either the big or small screen, but as far as I’m aware this is the first time Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s legendary character has been a traditional Hollywood action hero. A succession of actors – from Basil Rathbone to Peter Cushing and Jeremy Brett – have portrayed Holmes as a thoughtful, cultured, albeit rather eccentric English gentleman, and although Doyle’s novels have often spoken of his prowess as a bare knuckle fighter and swordsman, as well as his drug use, Holmes was never an ‘action man’ in the traditional sense. It seems the filmmakers have made a rather unfortunate misjudgment of character on this film, making this Holmes a young, bare-chested hunk rather than an analytical mind. Read more…
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