Archive
FLASH OF GENIUS – Aaron Zigman
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
You wouldn’t think that a film about the life of a man who invented windshield wipers would be very interesting, but that is exactly what Flash of Genius is. Directed by Marc Abraham, the film stars Greg Kinnear as Robert Kearns, a businessman and engineer and amateur inventor in the 1950s, who embarks on a personal crusade for justice against the Detroit automakers who, he claims, stole his idea for the intermittent windshield wiper. Not unexpectedly the score, by the even-busy Aaron Zigman, is that of a small-scale drama, but even within the confines of the story, he still finds a number of effective ways to express himself. Read more…
HOW TO LOSE FRIENDS AND ALIENATE PEOPLE – David Arnold
Original Review by Clark Douglas
“How to Lose Friends and Alienate People” is based on the life of Toby Jones, a writer for Vanity Fair magazine who did indeed lose a lot of friends and alienate a lot of people. For all of Jones’ faults, at least he was honest enough about himself to write a very unflattering autobiography of sorts. The film is a little kinder to Jones than the book was, largely because the role of Jones is played by Simon Pegg, an actor who is rather difficult to dislike completely. This creates a lead character that is more appealing than he might have been, but perhaps that reward is earned at the expense of the film as a whole. Here, Pegg’s character goes by the name of “Sydney Jones”, and he goes to work for a magazine that is essentially Vanity Fair in all but name. The magazine is run by a fellow played by Jeff Bridges, who is one of the few actors who can seem both irritated and relaxed at the same time. Read more…
EAGLE EYE – Brian Tyler
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
As good a composer as Brian Tyler is – and, make no mistake about it, he is a great composer – it’s been quite a while since he knocked my socks off. His monumental first ‘big’ scores Darkness Falls and Children of Dune in 2003 were the high water mark of his early career; since then, scores like Godsend, Constantine, Partition and Alien vs. Predator Requiem contained a number of memorable moments, but never quite attained the heights those initial impressive works attained. With Eagle Eye, Tyler has changed that: for the first time in half a decade, Tyler’s music reaches those lofty perches and, most importantly, sustains them over the course of a long album. Read more…
MIRACLE AT ST. ANNA – Terence Blanchard
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
When thinking about popular and enduring composer-director collaborations, a number of names are mentioned regularly: Steven Spielberg and John Williams, Tim Burton and Danny Elfman, Robert Zemeckis and Alan Silvestri, Alfred Hitchcock and Bernard Herrmann. It would take a while for anyone to get to Spike Lee and Terence Blanchard, but these two have collaborated on over a dozen films since their first work together in 1990 on Mo’ Better Blues, and since then have quietly become one of the most enduring artistic collaborators in Hollywood. Titles such as Jungle Fever, Malcolm X, Crooklyn, Clockers, 25th Hour and Inside Man have cemented their relationship. Read more…
NIGHTS IN RODANTHE – Jeanine Tesori
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
A romantic melodrama based on the novel by Nicholas Sparks and directed by George C. Wolfe, Nights in Rodanthe stars Richard Gere as a doctor who travels to the outer banks of North Carolina to see his estranged son, and embarks on a romantic relationship with an unhappily married woman (Diane Lane), who runs an inn on the Atlantic coast. The score for Nights in Rodanthe is by Tony Awards winning Broadway composer Jeanine Tesori, for whom this is her film music debut.
Her score is generally very pleasant and romantic, although not quite as lush and emotionally overwhelming as I had anticipated (especially considering that two other Sparks stories resulted in the scores for Message in a Bottle and The Notebook). Read more…
APPALOOSA – Jeff Beal
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
A traditional, old-fashioned western based on the novel by Robert Parker, Appaloosa is the story of a tough marshal, Virgil Cole, and his deputy, Everett Hitch, two friends who are hired to defend a lawless 1880s wild west town from a ruthless rancher who is terrorizing the citizens. The film has an absolutely astonishing cast – Ed Harris, Viggo Mortensen, Jeremy Irons, Renee Zellweger, Timothy Spall, Lance Henriksen – and is also directed by Harris, in his second outing behind the lens after his 2000 debut, Pollack. For the score, Harris turned once more to composer Jeff Beal, who also scored Pollack. Read more…
THE DUCHESS – Rachel Portman
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The Duchess is what’s known colloquially in Britain as a ‘bodice-ripper’ – a period drama with strong romantic and sexual overtones, in which the corset-clad leading lady is repeatedly ravished by a previously refined gentleman, much to the collective outrage of the aristocracy. Keira Knightly plays the lady in question: Georgiana, the real life 18th century Duchess of Devonshire, who was reviled for her extravagant political and personal life. The film, which was directed by Saul Dibb, also stars Ralph Fiennes, Charlotte Rampling, Dominic Cooper and Hayley Atwell, and features a new original score by the Queen of the English Costume Drama, Rachel Portman. Read more…
IGOR – Patrick Doyle
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Pity the poor sidekick. Throughout literary history, the role of the sidekick has been one of benign subservience, forever scuttling away to do the master’s bidding, or bear the brunt of the master’s ire, never allowed to express an opinion, or to become a true, rounded personality. In the world of classic literary horror, the sidekick role was invariably filled by an Igor, a hunchbacked, lazy-eyed, nasal-voiced nobody, assisting Victor Frankenstein or Count Dracula with their nefarious plans. In Anthony Leondis’s new animated film, Igor, the sidekick finally steps into the sunlight; this is a story where the clichéd hunchbacked evil scientist’s assistant finally has his own story – one in which he aspires to become a scientist himself, much to the displeasure of the rest of the evil science community. The film features a star-studded voice cast that includes the likes of John Cusack, John Cleese, Steve Buscemi, Sean Hayes, Eddie Izzard, Jay Leno and Christian Slater, and has been roundly praised for being a funny, clever movie, with plenty of subversive humor to keep the adults happy. Read more…
BURN AFTER READING – Carter Burwell
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The Coen Brothers return to the comedy arena after sweeping the 2007 Oscars with No Country For Old Men; Burn After Reading stars John Malkovich, George Clooney, Tilda Swinton, Frances McDormand and Brad Pitt and follows the fortunes of a pair of clueless health club employees who, after accidentally finding the memoirs of a retiring CIA operative, mistake the memoirs for top-secret classified information, and attempt to blackmail him. As usual, the Coens composer is Carter Burwell, whose music for Burn After Reading ignores the comedic elements in the score almost entirely, instead concentrating on the darker, more thriller-esque parts of the story. Read more…
TOWELHEAD – Thomas Newman
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Towelhead – also known as Nothing Is Private – is the theatrical directorial debut of Alan Ball, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of American Beauty, and is based on a novel by Alicia Erian. It’s another one of those stories of suburban dissatisfaction and the evil that lurks behind the face of normality in America, and tells the story of a young Arab American girl named Jasira (Summer Bishil) who is sent to live with her father in Houston, Texas during the first Gulf War. While struggling with her father’s controlling influence and the racism she encounters at school, Jasira begins to develop an unhealthy sexual fixation with a bigoted army reservist (Aaron Eckhart), who is more racist than anyone else. Read more…
BANGKOK DANGEROUS – Brian Tyler
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
A big-budget remake of the 1999 Thai film of the same name, Bangkok Dangerous stars Nicolas Cage as a hit man named Joe who finds himself in a series of increasingly dangerous situations when he is hired to carry out four assassinations by a shadowy Thai underworld gang. In remaking their own film, directors Danny Pang and Oxide Pang hired Brian Tyler to write the score; the resulting work is rooted in the same stylistics that have adorned Tyler’s scores for similar action thrillers – The Fast and the Furious – Tokyo Drift, War, Eagle Eye, and the like – albeit with a slight Oriental inflection in some of the instrumentation to reflect the geographic setting. Read more…
BABYLON A.D. – Atli Örvarsson
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
It’s funny how career trajectories change. Five years ago, Vin Diesel was a hot new action hero in Hollywood, off the back of smash hit films such as Pitch Black, The Fast and the Furious, and XXX. Recently, however, his star seems to be fading somewhat, and this downturn in popularity will not be helped by Babylon A.D. Based on the comic book by Maurice G. Dantec, the film stars Diesel as Toorop, a futuristic mercenary who takes the job of escorting a woman named Aurora (Mélanie Thierry) from Russia to New York. Initially, Toorop thinks this is just an ordinary mission, but he gradually finds out that his assignment is more dangerous than he realized – Aurora is intended to be the host for an organism that a cult wants to harvest in order to produce a genetically modified Messiah. Despite having an impressive supporting cast (Michelle Yeoh, Gérard Depardieu, Charlotte Rampling), director Mathieu Kassovitz allegedly disowned the film during post-production, stating that it had been “ruined” by the distributors, 20th Century Fox, his fellow producers and other partners, and that his film was now “like a bad episode of 24”. Read more…
TRAITOR – Mark Kilian
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Traitor is an espionage action thriller directed by Jeffrey Nachmanoff and starring Don Cheadle as Samir, an arms dealer and former US Army Special Forces Operative who joins an Islamic Brotherhood organization which conducts suicide bombing missions against western targets; however, unknown to the terrorists, Samir is actually a deep cover intelligence operative, who is actually working to undermine the terrorists for the US government. However, when the only federal agent who knows his true identity is killed, Samir finds himself caught between the Americans and the Muslims, both of whom seem to want him dead. Read more…
PONYO ON THE CLIFF – Joe Hisaishi
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The creative partnership between filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki and composer Joe Hisaishi, despite existing strictly outside the Hollywood world, it nevertheless one of the most fruitful and fulfilling in all of film music. Since first scoring Miyazaki’s 1984 film Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, Hisaishi has scored all of their collaborations since then, including the likes of Laputa, Princess Mononoke, the Oscar-winning Spirited Away, and Howl’s Moving Castle. Ponyo on the Cliff – or ‘Gake No Ue No Ponyo’ to give it its proper Japanese title – is their ninth film together. It tells the story of a young boy named Sosuke who, while out walking near his cliff top home, finds a mermaid stranded on the beach. The mermaid, who Sosuke names Ponyo, is actually a princess, the daughter of the mermaid king Fujimoto, and has run away from her undersea home after she declared her desire to be human. Sosuke and Ponyo become close friends, but soon find that Ponyo’s defection to the human world is throwing nature into an imbalance, and could cause devastating environmental effects on the planet. The film has already become the biggest-grossing Japanese film of 2008, and is scheduled to be released in the United States in 2009. The voice cast for the English-language version will apparently include Matt Damon, Tina Fey, Cate Blanchett, Liam Neeson, Lily Tomlin, Betty White, Frankie Jonas, Noah Cyrus and Cloris Leachman. Read more…
FLY ME TO THE MOON – Ramin Djawadi
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
An animated adventure about three flies who become astronauts on the Apollo 11 moon mission – yes, you did read that correctly – Fly Me to the Moon has an impressive voice cast (Tim Curry, Robert Patrick, Christopher Lloyd, even Buzz Aldrin himself) and even more impressive 3D visual effects, but apparently suffers from a lack of sophistication in its childish writing, and even more worrying lack of a world view in its depiction of the space race – but what do you expect when your lead hero is a musca domestica!
The score for Fly Me to the Moon is by Ramin Djawadi, flying high following his commercial success on Iron Man, and tackling the animated adventure genre for the second time after Open Season in 2006. Read more…
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