Archive
A HAUNTING IN VENICE – Hildur Guðnadóttir
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
A Haunting in Venice is the third adaptation of an Agatha Christie novel by director Kenneth Branagh, after Murder on the Orient Express in 2017, and Death on the Nile in 2022. It’s also, by quite some significant margin, the worst. It’s very loosely based on Christie’s 1969 work Halloween Party and sees the Belgian master detective Hercule Poirot living in semi-retirement in Venice, when he is convinced to attend a Halloween party by his old friend novelist Ariadne Oliver; also at this party will be a supposed psychic medium, Joyce Reynolds, and Ariadne wants Poirot to help her unmask Reynolds as a fraud. However, as the night unfolds, Poirot gets drawn into a sinister plot involving murder, hidden family secrets, and a supposed curse of ghostly children haunting the palazzo where the séance takes place. The film stars Kenneth Branagh as Poirot, Tina Fey as Oliver, and Michelle Yeoh as Reynolds, plus Kelly Reilly, Jamie Dornan, Jude Hill, and Camille Cottin in supporting roles. Read more…
Golden Globe Winners 2019
The Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA) have announced the winners of the 77th Golden Globe Awards, honoring the best in film and American television of 2019.
In the Best Original Score category composer Hildur Guđnadóttir won the award for her challenging score for the comic book action-drama film Joker, a revisionist look at the origin story of Batman’s arch-nemesis. This is Guđnadóttir’s first Golden Globe, and in winning the award becomes the first solo female composer to win Best Score. The only other female composer to win was Lisa Gerrard, who shared the award for Gladiator with Hans Zimmer in 2000. In her acceptance speech, Guđnadóttir said:
“Wow. I thought they forgot the music! Well, this is truly… I’m speechless. This is unbelievable. Thank you Hollywood Foreign Press. Thank you Todd (Phillips) for inviting me on the journey of a lifetime, for all the trust and faith and your openness. Thank you, Joaquin (Phoenix) for making my job really easy with a spectacular, unbelievable performance. It’s mindblowing. Thank you Jason Ruder, music editor, for your fantastic job. Truly incredible. Conductor Jeff Atmajian. My brothers Gunnartin, Asthor, and Gunnarsson. My agent Patty, of course. My incredible family, and my mother, my husband and score producer Sam, my beautiful son Cody. That’s everything!”
The other nominees were Alexandre Desplat for Little Women, Randy Newman for Marriage Story, Thomas Newman for 1917, and Daniel Pemberton for Motherless Brooklyn
In the Best Original Song category, the winners were Elton John and Bernie Taupin for their song “I’m Gonna Love Me Again” from Rocketman, the biopic of John’s life starring Taron Egerton.
The other nominees were Cynthia Erivo and Joshuah Brian Campbell for “Stand Up” from Harriet; Beyoncé Knowles-Carter, Timothy McKenzie, and Ilya Salmanzadeh for “Spirit” from The Lion King; Robert Lopez and Kristin Anderson-Lopez for “Into the Unknown” from Frozen II; and Taylor Swift and Andrew Lloyd Webber for “Beautiful Ghosts” from Cats.
JOKER – Hildur Guðnadóttir
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
In this era where super hero movies are a dime a dozen, where in the past 30 years we’ve had at least three Supermen, five Batmen, three Spider-Men, and innumerable iterations of other DC and Marvel comic book characters, it was only a matter of time before someone tried to do something completely out-of-the-box different. While the majority of these films concentrate on the heroes, perhaps the most iconic villain in all of comic book history is the Joker, the long-standing nemesis of Batman. He has been portrayed on film multiple times himself; by Cesar Romero in 1966, by Jack Nicholson in 1989, by Heath Ledger in 2008, and by Jared Leto most recently in 2016, with Ledger’s Oscar-winning performance in The Dark Knight coming to be considered the gold standard. There have been multiple origin stories for the character, but he has never been the sole focus of a film before – until now. Read more…
CHERNOBYL – Hildur Guðnadóttir
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
On April 26, 1986, the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, close to the Ukraine-Belarus border in what was then the Soviet Union, suffered a catastrophic accident in which one of the plant’s four nuclear reactor cores exploded. The explosion started a fire and released massive amounts of nuclear radiation into the atmosphere and across most of Eastern Europe; it entirely irradiated the nearby city of Pripyat and, although official totals are much lower, may have directly and indirectly lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. The new mini-series Chernobyl, produced jointly by HBO in the United States and Sky in the UK, is a detailed look at what happened: the events leading up to the disaster, the work of the emergency services in the immediate aftermath, the work of the scientists tasked with finding out what happened, and the fates of those directly affected. Many people have taken Chernobyl to be a cautionary tale about the dangers of nuclear power, but director Johan Renck and screenwriter Craig Mazin say that is not what the show is about at all. Instead, it’s supposed to be a damning indictment of government corruption, lies, and abuse of power, with parallels echoing the current situation involving global warming and climate change. Read more…
MARY MAGDALENE – Hildur Guðnadóttir and Jóhann Jóhannsson
Original Review by Anže Grčar
The unfortunate and unexpected passing of Jóhann Jóhannsson in early February, sent shockwaves through the film community, and lovers of modernist music at large. Not only was he flourishing and enjoying a fruitful career highlight since the indie world took his scores for mainly Denis Villeneuve-helmed films to the heart, but the death of any person at barely 48 years of age is a sad reminder of how fragile our existence can be. Jóhannsson is leaving behind a stunning body of work, ranging from independent studio albums in his native Iceland, that gained a loyal following due to their experimental sonic blends of traditional orchestration with contemporary electronic elements, to his recent film scores, which exposed so many traditional scoring aficionados to variety of post-modernist styles – all coming from an artist who always managed to encapsulate life from a different, more introverted angle that was singular only to him. Read more…
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