Archive
THE KING’S SPEECH – Alexandre Desplat
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The United Kingdom suffered one of its worst constitutional crises in living memory in the early 1930s. Following the death of King George V, his eldest son David ascended to the throne as King Edward VIII, but his insistence on marrying Wallis Simpson – a commoner, a divorcee, and worst of all an American – brought criticism from the political and religious leaders of the time. Forced with a choice between his kingdom and the woman he loved, Edward chose the latter, leaving his younger brother Bertie to reluctantly take over as King George VI. However, suddenly becoming the monarch of over a third of the world’s population did not sit well with the new king, who was forced to deal with two issues at the beginning of his reign: firstly, the growing influence of German chancellor Adolf Hitler threatening peace in Europe, and secondly the King’s own terrible stutter, which often rendered him literally speechless on important occasions. To counteract the latter, the King sought out the help of an unconventional Australian speech therapist named Lionel Logue. Director Tom Hooper’s excellent film The King’s Speech tells the story of the unconventional friendship of the pair; it stars Colin Firth as George VI, Geoffrey Rush as Logue, and Helena Bonham-Carter as Queen Elizabeth, Guy Pearce as Edward, and Michael Gambon as the ailing George V. Read more…
THE SOCIAL NETWORK – Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
A film about Facebook, the online phenomenon of the 21st century, doesn’t sound especially interesting when you first think about it, but the history of its creation is actually quite fascinating. Mark Zuckerberg was a 20-year-old student at Harvard University when he and his roommate Dustin Moskovitz launched the first incarnation of Facebook into the world in 2004; despite various lawsuits, development problems, and other issues, Facebook eventually became the dominant social networking website with 500 million users worldwide, and eventually making Zuckerberg the world’s youngest multi-billionaire, worth $6.9 billion according to the Forbes 2010 Rich List. The film is directed by David Fincher from a screenplay by Aaron Sorkin, and stars Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, Justin Timberlake and Rooney Mara. Read more…
127 HOURS – A. R. Rahman
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The true story of Aron Ralston is one of human fortitude, bravery, defiance in the face of death, and incredible bad luck. A young and healthy daredevil with a penchant for extreme sports, Ralston took a brief weekend hiking trip to the canyons around Moab, Utah in the summer of 2003, and had the singular misfortune of suffering an accident which left his right arm pinned against a canyon wall by a large boulder, with no way of extricating it. After five lonely days, and hovering close to death, Ralston eventually took the unimaginable decision to amputate his own arm – with no anesthetic – using nothing more than a blunt Swiss Army knife, and staggered out of the canyon, where he was rescued and ultimately made a full recovery. Read more…
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…
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…
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…
AVATAR – James Horner
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
James Cameron makes a habit of being groundbreaking. Whether he is creating a planet full of ferocious xenomorphs in Aliens, experimenting with liquid metal robots in Terminator II, or making a realistic recreation of a sinking boat in Titanic, the Canadian director has always been at the forefront of cutting edge cinematic technology, pushing the envelope of what is creatively and technologically possible on the screen. His latest film, Avatar, continues that trend; with an estimated budget of $320 million, it’s the most expensive film ever made, and looks set to become one of the biggest grossing films of all time too. Read more…
FANTASTIC MR. FOX – Alexandre Desplat
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
I grew up reading and loving Roald Dahl’s stories; everything from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The Witches and The Twits to The BFG, James and the Giant Peach and Matilda, his words (as well as Quentin Blake’s incomparable illustrations) were an indelible part of my childhood, and remain beloved to this day. Strangely, the one Roald Dahl story I don’t think I ever read was Fantastic Mr. Fox, written by Dahl in 1970 and which has now been turned into an animated feature film by directed Wes Anderson with a voice cast that includes such luminaries as George Clooney, Meryl Streep, Bill Murray, Michael Gambon, Owen Wilson, Willem Dafoe, and Jarvis Cocker from the English rock band Pulp. The story – as is always the case with Dahl’s work – is a dark morality tale dressed up as an innocent children’s story. The plot concerns Mr. and Mrs. Fox, a pair of wily and cunning animals who feed their family by stealing chickens, ducks and cider from under the noses of three despicable farmers named Boggis, Bunce and Bean. Read more…
THE HURT LOCKER- Marco Beltrami, Buck Sanders
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
REVIEW COMING SOON.
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UP – Michael Giacchino
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
When we look back on his career, 2009 could well be seen as a watershed year for Michael Giacchino in terms of public awareness and his place in the film music hierarchy. Film music fans have known about Giacchino for a long time, of course, initially through his work on the Medal of Honor video game series and the TV shows Lost and Alias. This year alone he has already scored the rebooted Star Trek movie and a new big screen version of Land of the Lost. However, it is his new status as one of Pixar’s go-to guys (alongside Randy and Thomas Newman) that may cement his reputation. The Incredibles was a critical and commercial success, Ratatouille earned Giacchino his first Academy Award nomination, and now he has Up, which many writers have acclaimed as the best Pixar movie to date. Read more…
THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON – Alexandre Desplat
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
A film by David Fincher based on the 1922 short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is the tale of a man who is born old, and gets younger as his life progresses. Set in Louisiana in the late 1800s, it stars Brad Pitt as the titular Button, who is born with the physical appearance of an 80 year old man, much to the shock and embarrassment of his parents. As the years pass, Button gets younger and younger, fighting in wars, attending college, and falling in love – but backwards, and with the knowledge that, the longer time passes, the closer he is to losing everything and everyone around him. The film also stars Cate Blanchett, Julia Ormond, Jason Flemyng, Elias Koteas and Tilda Swinton, and is tipped to be a major player at the 2009 Academy Awards. Read more…
DEFIANCE – James Newton Howard
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
One of the less well-known stories of heroism in World War 2 is that of the Bielski Partisans, a family of Jewish brothers who, following the invasion of Poland by the Nazis in 1941, managed to flee the advancing troops and make their way to the inhospitable forests of what is now western Belarus. Over the course of the next two years, the Bielski brothers rescued and sheltered more than 1,200 Polish Jews from the Nazis, often fighting in hand-to-hand skirmishes alongside Soviet forces, and survived the war, and in doing so made one of the most significant contributions to the Jewish cause in the Holocaust in terms of lives saved. Director Edward Zwick’s acclaimed film Defiance stars Daniel Craig, Liev Schreiber, and Jamie Bell as the Bielski brothers, and has an emotional, powerful, Oscar-nominated score by composer James Newton Howard. Read more…
MILK – Danny Elfman
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Although many people nowadays will not know his name, Harvey Milk remains a hugely important figure in American political history. As the first ever openly gay man ever elected to public office in the United States, Milk served one term as a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in the late 1970s, and was responsible for passing a stringent gay rights ordinance for the city, before being assassinated by fellow city supervisor Dan White in November 1978. Having already been the subject of an Oscar-winning documentary, ‘The Times of Harvey Milk’, in 1984, director Gus Van Sant’s new film charts the life and death of a man who has since been labeled ‘a martyr for gay rights’ in dramatic narrative; the film stars Sean Penn as Milk, Josh Brolin as White, and features Emile Hirsch, Diego Luna and James Franco in supporting roles. Read more…
SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE – A. R. Rahman
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Bollywood music has never really crossed over into the film music mainstream, despite being an enormous industry on the Indian sub-continent; the closest Bollywood has to a composer superstar is A.R. Rahman, so it perhaps stands to reason that he should really be the first one to make any kind of impact on the Hollywood mainstream. Rahman has worked in the Indian film industry since the early 1990s, and has since gone on to score over 100 films, some of which – Taal from 1999, Lagaan from 2001, Rang De Basanti from 2006, and Jodhaa Akbar from earlier this year – have enjoyed a modicum of international success. He has even dabbled in the Hollywood world before, working with Mychael Danna on Water in 2006 and with Craig Armstrong on Elizabeth: The Golden Age in 2007. In his homeland, however, Rahman is revered: he has personally sold 100 million records of his film scores and soundtracks worldwide, and sold over 200 million solo albums, officially making him one of the world’s all-time top selling recording artists. No wonder he is often called the “John Williams of Bollywood” and the “Mozart of Madras”. It’s just surprising that it has taken this long for the West to recognize him. Read more…
WALL·E – Thomas Newman
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
If one was to try to work out the most financially successful film production company (adding up all the grosses, and dividing by the number of films), I would hazard a guess that Pixar would be up there with the most successful of all time. Since first appearing on the scene in 1995 with Toy Story, every single one of their films has grossed over $200 million at the US box office, with the highest – Finding Nemo – ratcheting up $389 million in 2003. Similarly, the scores for Pixar films have been almost universally lauded amongst critics; seven of the eight films to date have received Oscar nominations for score, or song, or both. Randy Newman won his first (and only) Oscar for Monsters Inc in 2001. The only score to miss out was Michael Giacchino’s The Incredibles in 2004. Read more…
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