Archive
THE MUMMY – Jerry Goldsmith
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Jerry Goldsmith’s first effort of 1999 is a barnstorming action score of epic proportions. The density of the orchestrations and the complexity of the melodic lines put you in mind of vibrant works such as First Knight, Deep Rising, and especially The Wind and the Lion with its intoxicating ethnic percussion and pervading sense of Arabic mystique. A loose remake of Boris Karloff’s 1932 horror classic, The Mummy is an old-fashioned, tongue-in-cheek Saturday matinee flick with more than a few passing resemblances to Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Universal Pictures and director Stephen Sommers hope it will be the first big action movie to smash the box office in a summer market already dominated by the imminent release of The Phantom Menace. It stars Brendan Fraser as a treasure-seeker who travels to 1930s Egypt searching for lost artefacts. What he finds, though, is far worse – the mummified body of the ancient Egyptian priest Imhotep, who was buried alive in disgrace by the then Pharaoh, and who unleashes a terrible vengeful power on those who disturbed him from his slumber. Read more…
ENTRAPMENT – Christopher Young
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Entrapment is Chris Young’s second big-budget action score in as many years and is an ideal comparison to the work he undertook for Hard Rain because, if nothing else, it effectively demonstrates Young’s ability to tackle similarly-themed movies in vastly different ways. Whereas Hard Rain was firmly rooted firmly in the musical traditions of the American midwest, Entrapment is a fluid, hi-tec action score which combines efficient, modern orchestral grooves with the some unexpected textures and styles. The film itself is a flawed, but audience-friendly thriller about a beautiful insurance investigator who teams up with an aging breaking-and-entering expert with the express intent of fingering him for the high-profile robbery she thinks he has committed. Things become a little more complicated, though, when he persuades her to join him in undertaking a final, ambitious break-in, and then get even worse when she inexplicably finds herself falling for him in a big way. Disregarding the unlikely love interest between sixty-something Sean Connery and twenty-something Catherine Zeta-Jones, Entrapment works well as an “event picture”, providing the right combination of thrills, spills and technobabble to keep increasingly touchy viewers happy. Most of all, though, it is highly satisfying to finally see Young getting a much-deserved and long overdue shot at the Hollywood big time. Read more…
DURANGO – Mark McKenzie
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Some composers need to get more work, and to be given better projects. Mark McKenzie is one of a small band of excellent writers who, through no fault of their own, are overlooked by Hollywood and spend most of their time toiling away on small-scale features that do not deserve to have their considerable talents wasted on them. After a career that has seen him rise from orchestrating scores for Danny Elfman, Bruce Broughton and others, to writing great music for terrible films such as Warlock: The Armageddon and Dr. Jekyll and Ms. Hyde, McKenzie seems finally to be heading down the right path with Durango, the latest TV movie in the Hallmark Hall of Fame series that, over the last year or so, has included Merlin, Moby Dick, Alice in Wonderland and Cleopatra. Read more…
EXISTENZ – Howard Shore
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
David Cronenberg inspires Howard Shore to compose some of his best and most memorable movie music. Through such notable works as The Brood, Scanners, Videodrome, The Fly, Dead Ringers, Naked Lunch, M. Butterfly and Crash, Cronenberg had always allowed Shore plenty of room to manoeuvre and stretch his musical muscles. eXistenZ is probably the most approachable and, from a soundtrack fan’s perspective, enjoyable work that has resulted from their collaboration to date. An original science fiction tale, eXistenZ is a film which again merges humanity and technology and blurs the lines between reality and fantasy. It stars Jennifer Jason Leigh as the designer of a virtual reality video game played through a genetically modified organism known as a “Game Pod”, which inserts an umbilical cord into a special socket inserted into the base of the player’s spinal column and taps into the player’s mind. When the game’s first demonstration goes wrong, Leigh and her bodyguard Jude Law are forced to run for their from various violent factions, all of whom want to stop eXistenZ from becoming a reality. Read more…
THE RED VIOLIN – John Corigliano
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
It is very rare for a soundtrack to be embraced wholeheartedly and celebrated loudly by aficionados of both classical music and film music, but this is what has happened to John Corigliano’s The Red Violin. Despite being arguably one of the most brilliant and talented American composers of his generation, this is only John Corigliano’s third film score – his others being the wildly impressionistic, abstract, Oscar-nominated Altered States (1980) and the largely unknown Revolution (1985). Instead, Corigliano became an established member of the New York musical circle, writing original pieces, ballets, operas and suchlike, and it has taken fourteen years to tempt Corigliano back to the podium. It has been worth the wait for, as well as his own musical genius, he has brought with him some of the best and brightest talents of the classical world, including the brilliant Finnish conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen and the incredibly talented virtuoso violinist Joshua Bell. Read more…
COOKIE’S FORTUNE – David A. Stewart
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Director Robert Altman is equally known for his for his “eclectic” tastes in casting and subject matter as he is for brilliance as a visual dramatist and storyteller. Altman is the man who, in the past, has helmed such notable works as M*A*S*H, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, The Long Goodbye, Nashville and the ill-fated Popeye. Recently, Altman has brought us a scathing satire of the Hollywood studio system in The Player, an examination of life in suburban American in Short Cuts, a look inside the world of high fashion with Pret-A-Porter, and a relatively straightforward court room thriller with The Gingerbread Man. For his latest effort, Altman is returning to the location he visited in Short Cuts by taking a look behind the white picket fences of small town USA in the critically acclaimed Cookie’s Fortune. Read more…
NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR – Dominic Muldowney
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The thought police. Big brother is watching you. Who, if anyone, can claim to be unaware of the legacy left by George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which he outlined his terrifying vision of a totalitarian, oppressive future in the land of Oceania. Director Michael Radford, who would later go on to helm the recent Oscar winner Il Postino, adhered faithfully to the guidelines set out by Orwell during filming, using the precise locations and dates set out in the text, assembling a stellar cast including Richard Burton, John Hurt and Cyril Cusack to breathe life into the classic prose.
Upon its release, Nineteen Eighty-Four was a critical and commercial smash hit, but one of the most debated elements of the film surrounded the eventual removal of the original score in favour of pop songs by the British rock group, the Eurythmics. Since the release of Nineteen Eighty-Four, Dominic Muldowney has become one of the most influential composers in English theatre, but has limited his screen work to a few feature films and episodes of the TV series Sharpe. Nineteen Eighty-Four remains his most celebrated cinematic work to date, but until now has been unavailable on CD. This release from the Airstrip One company and producer Christopher Landry marks the first time the complete score has ever been heard on CD. Read more…
AMERICAN HISTORY X – Anne Dudley
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Tony Kaye, the director of American History X, was so incensed when New Line Pictures re-edited his film against his wishes, he threatened to remove his name from the final cut and replace it with Humpty Dumpty. He believed that the core of the film, its very essence, had been stripped away by the barbarous production company, and that the finished product was now only half the movie it used to be. Having seen New Line’s end result, I can only wonder just what Kaye’s original cut was like, because as it stands American History X is still one of the most emotionally shattering, intellectually stimulating, totally amazing movies I have seen in years. Read more…
ARMAGEDDON – Trevor Rabin
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
In the all-spectacle, no-brains world of the Hollywood summer blockbuster, Armageddon became the antithesis of everything that people find wrong with commercial film making. Even the title – “commercial” film making – smacks of financial return being held in higher esteem than artistic merit. Everyone hated it, from the critics at Cannes who laughed during the premiere, to the newspaper hacks who decried the banal dialogue, Bruce Willis’ wooden lead performance, and the glaring implausibilities in the plotline. Despite this, audiences loved it. For all its shortcomings, Armageddon was an out-and-out crowdpleaser, with genuinely spectacular special effects, plenty of action and romance and, in the shape of Ben Affleck and Liv Tyler, two cover-story attractive protagonists. Read more…
BATMAN – Danny Elfman
MOVIE MUSIC UK CLASSICS
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
In 1989 Danny Elfman was a 36-year old newcomer to the world of film music, still better known for his days as the lead singer of the alternative rock band Oingo Boingo than his scoring exploits, which by then had included titles such as hit films like Back to School, Beetlejuice, Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure and Scrooged, but gave no indication of the composer he would become. Then came Batman, director Tim Burton’s gothic re-imagining of the old camp Batman story that, prior to this movie, was something of a joke, known for Adam West and his day-glo costume and Neal Hefti’s kitsch theme music. To say that Burton took the Batman story in a different direction was an understatement in the extreme: instead of being a wisecracking comic figure with a Bat-gadget for every occasion, he became a tortured, tragic anti-hero clad in black leather, struggling with his own inner demons while simultaneously dealing with master criminals in a dirty, dangerous Gotham City. Read more…
Shop at the Movie Music UK Store
Member of the
