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WRATH OF THE TITANS – Javier Navarrete
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
I have to admit, when I learned that Javier Navarrete was scoring Wrath of the Titans, I was pretty excited. The original film to which this is a sequel – 2010’s Clash of the Titans – was solidly panned by the majority of film critics, and had a pretty risible score by Ramin Djawadi that adhered to every Remote Control cliché ever invented. Everything was revamped this time, with a new director in the shape of Jonathan Liebesman, a new supporting cast including Rosamund Pike and Bill Nighy behind leads Sam Worthington, Liam Neeson and Ralph Fiennes, and a brand new composer, whose track record promised to provide everything that Djawadi’s score was lacking in terms of thematic identity and orchestral intelligence. Navarrete is, of course, the Spanish composer of such excellent works as Pan’s Labyrinth, Inkheart, Mirrors and Cracks, and this would be far his biggest assignment in the Hollywood mainstream to date. Read more…
EMMANUELLE 4/S.A.S. À SAN SALVADOR – Michel Magne
MOVIE MUSIC UK CLASSICS
Original Review by Craig Lysy
The original Emmanuelle (1974) was adapted from the novel by Emanuelle Arsan. It proved to be a box office sensation, which spawned a franchise. Director Francis Leroi, well known for his work with erotica, took up the Opus 4 story line with an added twist. Sylvia (Sylvia Kristen) is desperately trying to escape from her former lover Marc, and so she goes to Brazil where renowned plastic surgeon Dr. Santamo transforms her into the beautiful Emmanuelle. Her new more youthful identity now played by Mia Nygren potentiates a profound sexual awakening, which is complicated by her memories of Marc. It suffices to say that the plot offers unexpected plot twists, which provide multiple opportunities to fully explore the characters.
Pierre Bachelet, Francis Lai and Serge Gainsbourg had respectively scored the first three films of the franchise. Michel Magne, well known for his neo-romantic style was a natural choice for the film. Like his predecessors, he infused his writing with a modern romanticism and provided a number of beautiful songs. You will notice immediately how Magne provides a rich musical palate, which spans from the chaotic, to the playful, to the sensual erotic. Read more…
A TROLL IN CENTRAL PARK – Robert Folk
MOVIE MUSIC UK CLASSICS
Original Review by Craig Lysy
Producers Don Bluth and Gary Goldman had a long history of successful animated films that included “An American Tail” and “The Land Before Time”. With their company now set in Ireland, Bluth decided to utilize traditional Celtic mythology for his next film. In this new story, Stanley is a friendly troll blessed with the gift of a wondrous and magical green thumb that allows him to grow flowers by merely sticking it into the ground. Unfortunately the evil troll Queen Gnorga banishes him from her realm to modern day Manhattan for his life generating gift and kindness to humans. Stanley adapts to his new cave home in Central Park and befriends Gus and Rosie who unknown to their parents have set out on a magnificent adventure. But all is endangered when Queen Gnorga journeys to Manhattan, armed with her purple thumb intent on turning everything she touches to stone. As is fitting, goodness prevails and our heroes defeat and overthrow the evil Queen. The film was not a critical success and failed at the box office, not even coming close to recovering its production costs. Read more…
JOHN CARTER – Michael Giacchino
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Already tainted as one of the biggest box-office disasters in cinema history, John Carter looks set to go down in negative notoriety rather than with the acclaim and applause many expected at Disney when the project was first announced. A large scale action science-fiction epic, the film is a big screen mishmash adaptation of several of Tarzan creator Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Barsoom novels, which were first written in 1912 and stand as some of the first works of interplanetary science fiction ever written. The film, which is directed by Andrew Stanton, stars newcomer Taylor Kitsch as the eponymous Carter, a civil war veteran from Virginia who, while prospecting out west, finds himself inexplicably transported to Mars, where he becomes embroiled in a second civil war between the planet’s inhabitants, who call their world Barsoom. The film co-stars Lynn Collins as the beautiful princess Dejah Thoris, Ciaran Hinds and Dominic West as the two rival jeddak kings in whose lengthy battle Carter gets caught, and Willem Dafoe and Samantha Morton in motion-capture as two of the multi-armed Tharks, who help and hinder Carter in his quest with equal measure. Read more…
STAR TREK IV: THE VOYAGE HOME – Leonard Rosenman
MOVIE MUSIC UK CLASSICS
Original Review by Craig Lysy
Coming off his directorial success with Star Trek III, Leonard Nimoy again assembled our iconic crew for a thoughtful eco-story that spoke to humanity’s poor stewardship of the Earth. The film opens with a massive space probe of unknown origin en route to Earth. When it arrives it delivers a cryptic message in a language that seems unintelligible. In addition, its power system neutralizes the Earth’s power grid and begins to vaporize its oceans. The exiled Captain Kirk and his fugitive crew correctly determine that the message is directed not to humanity, but instead to an extinct species, the Humpback whale. As such, they resolve to time travel back to late 20th century Earth to recover two humpback whales, hoping to bring them back to the future so they can respond to the probe’s message. Set in 20th century urban San Francisco, this new adventure was comic, light-hearted and proved to be a huge commercial success, earning profits of more than five times it’s production costs. Read more…
CONAN THE DESTROYER – Basil Poledouris
MOVIE MUSIC UK CLASSICS
Original Review by Craig Lysy
The immense worldwide success achieved by “Conan the Barbarian” lead, to the surprise of no one, to an inevitably sequel. Producer Dino De Laurentiis hired director Richard Fleischer to revisit the mythic Hyborean world and offer us the classic mythic adventure. In the tale we see that at the bequest of the evil Queen Tamaris of Zamora, Conan is promised that his dead lover Valeria will be resurrected if he would bring to her the sacred Horn of Dagoth. In reality the duplicitous Tamaris plans to betray Conan and sacrifice her niece Jehenna to reanimate the god Dagoth with whom she plans to mate and generate a new progeny of gods. A colorful and eclectic cast lead again by Arnold Schwarzenegger (Conan) was assembled and featured the fierce Amazon warrior Zula (Grace Jones), virginal Princess Jehenna (Olivia d’Abo), the wise wizard Akiro (Mako), the comic thief Malak (Jeff Corey) and the treacherous Bombaata (Will Chamberlain). A parade of directors and a truly feeble script soured Schwarzenegger as he chose to not return for a third film. Never the less, fantasy films were at their zenith in the 80s and the film was a commercial success, doubling its $18 million production costs. Read more…
THE IRON LADY – Thomas Newman
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Even though, technically, I was born when Harold Wilson was Prime Minister, I grew up in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain. All of my earliest memories of major socio-political stories – the Falklands War with Argentina in 1982, the Brighton hotel bombing of 1984, the miner’s strike and general industrial unrest of 1984 and 1985, the Poll Tax riots of 1990, and various international issues involving the IRA and the former Soviet Union – all occurred during her tenure. Whether you love her or loathe her (and many people do genuinely loathe her and what she did to the country), there is no escaping the fact that she was a massively influential and important person: the first woman ever to be Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, the seventh-longest serving Prime Minister in history, and the longest serving since Queen Victoria was on the throne. Read more…
WAR HORSE – John Williams
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
A variation on the classic Black Beauty tale about of the life of a heroic horse, filtered through the cinematic lens of director John Ford, War Horse is director Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of the well-regarded novel by Michael Morpurgo about the adventures of a horse named Joey during World War I. The action moves from rural Devon, where young Joey is raised as a plow horse by Albert Narracott (Jeremy Irvine) to work on his father’s farm, to the battlefields of central Europe after he is sold to the British Army upon the outbreak of war and is adopted by a kindly cavalry officer as his personal mount. Moving from adventure to adventure, Joey makes his way through the mire of The Great War, serving on both sides of the conflict – and all the while young Albert, now himself serving in the trenches, never gives up hope of being reunited with his equine friend. The film co-stars Peter Mullan, Emily Watson, David Thewlis, Niels Arestrup, Tom Hiddleston and Benedict Cumberbatch, and of course has a score by the venerable John Williams, his second score of 2011 after several years away from the podium. Read more…
THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO – Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
There’s a lot of discussion going on in film music circles these days about the direction the art is taking, and a lot of it stems from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s Oscar win for their score for The Social Network last year. Amongst many mainstream film critics, Reznor and Ross’s ambient drones are seen as ushering a newer, better way of scoring films, one that moves away from the “schmaltzy emotional manipulation” written by the likes of John Williams and James Horner, and instead embraces a cold, clinical musical style that is more akin to sound effects than traditional film music. In his review of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Variety film critic Justin Chang said the score “blends dread with driving momentum, establishing a richly unsettling mood with recurring dissonances, eerie wind chimes and pulsating reverb effects”. In his simultaneously-published review of War Horse, he criticized the film for “a cloying strain of bucolic whimsy driven by John Williams’ pushy score”, so you see what we’re up against. Read more…
THE DARKEST HOUR – Tyler Bates
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
As a general rule, and if I can help it, I don’t engage in hyperbole on Movie Music UK. A recurring cliché is that predominantly web-based reviewers are prone to proclaim every new thing “Best Something Ever” or “Worst Something Ever”, with no real sense of the history of whatever they are reviewing, and it’s a difficult stigma to overcome. Having said that, and with those points in mind, you will understand what it means why I say that Tyler Bates’ score for The Darkest Hour is one of the worst film scores I have ever heard. The last time I wrote something along these lines was when I reviewed Geoff Zanelli’s awful effort for the film Gamer in 2009. In my review of it I posted a picture of a polar bear with a migraine to illustrate how it made me feel; as such, here is a similarly illustrative visual representation of how I felt after listening to The Darkest Hour: Read more…
OVERBOARD – Alan Silvestri
MOVIE MUSIC UK CLASSICS
Original Review by Craig Lysy
Director Gary Marshall, who was well known for his comedic success on TV with shows like Happy Days, Laverne and Shirley, Mork and Mindy, hired writer Leslie Dixon to write a new romantic comedy, Overboard. This outrageous story concerns a wealthy and pretentious married couple, Joanna Stayton (Goldie Hawn) and Grant Stayton III (Edward Herrmann) and Dean Proffitt (Kurt Russell) a local redneck carpenter. Joanna is a bitch of a woman who, after stiffing Dean for carpentry work, happens to fall overboard. She wakes up with amnesia and so begins a comic and outrageous story. Grant takes the opportunity to deny knowing her and seizes his long desired chance to escape a horrific marriage. Meanwhile Dean falsely claims to be her husband – seeking her household care of his four kids as recompense for his unpaid job. Well, be careful what you ask for! As the plot develops Joanna and Dean begin to fall in love, Joanna’s mother closes in on a search for her daughter, and the return of Joanna’s memory looms. To say the plot was silly and contrived is an understatement! Nevertheless the chemistry between Hawn and Russell worked and it suffices to say that Americans just love a romantic comedy. As such the film went on to become a big commercial success. Read more…
TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY – Alberto Iglesias
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
A slow burning thriller based on the classic espionage novel by John le Carré, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is a film about corruption at the highest level of the British spy game. Influenced in part by the real-life exploits of the British-Soviet double agent Kim Philby and set in Britain in the mid 1970s, the film stars Gary Oldman as George Smiley, a taciturn, but brilliant secret agent who becomes embroiled in a labyrinthine plot of bluff and double-bluff when he discovers that there is a mole leaking classified information to the Soviets, and that the mole might well be one of the highest ranking agents in MI5, Britain’s elite intelligence agency. This is not the secret world of James Bond however: these spies are thinkers and manipulators rather than men of action, with a strategic mind more akin to chess than swordplay and gunfights, and much of the film develops via hushed conversations in darkened corridors and furtive rifling through filing cabinets. The film features an all star cast including Colin Firth, Benedict Cumberbatch, John Hurt, Toby Jones, Tom Hardy, Mark Strong, Simon McBurney and Ciaran Hinds, and is directed by Swede Tomas Alfredsson, making his English-language debut following his spectacular success with the original Swedish version of Let The Right One In. Read more…
BREAKING DAWN, PART I – Carter Burwell
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The fourth of the projected five Twilight movies, Breaking Dawn Part I is the first of a two-part series concluding the cinematic saga based on Stephanie Meyer’s massively popular horror-romance novels. Teen heartthrobs Robert Pattinson, Kristin Stewart and Taylor Lautner return as Edward, Bella and Jacob, the three protagonists in the never-ending love triangle between a vampire, a werewolf and the human object of their desires. The story revolves around Edward and Bella’s marriage and her subsequent pregnancy with a half-human half-vampire baby; not only does she have to contend with the implications of this hybrid, but Jacob’s werewolf clan – mortal enemies of the Cullen vampires – are planning to kill Bella and her unborn child before it becomes a threat to them. The film is directed by Bill Condon, and features the usual supporting cast – Nikki Reed, Peter Facinelli, Elizabeth Reaser, Kellen Lutz, Ashley Greene, Jackson Rathbone – as well as Michael Sheen as the leader of the enigmatic vampire clan, the Volturi. Read more…
THE ARTIST – Ludovic Bource
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Each year, around this time, an unexpected art house film emerges as a critical darling with Academy Awards potential. It happened to Life is Beautiful in 1998, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon in 2000, Brokeback Mountain in 2005, Juno in 2007, Slumdog Millionaire in 2008, Precious in 2009… the list goes on and on. In 2011, that film could be The Artist, director Michel Hazanavicius’s story about a silent movie matinee idol in 1920s Hollywood whose career is threatened by the advent of sound in motion pictures. The difference here, unlike those other films, is that The Artist is a silent film itself, shot in black and white and in such a way that the style and tone of the piece mirrors the very films in which Hazanavicius’s protagonist appears. The movie stars Jean Dujardin, Berenice Bejo, John Goodman, James Cromwell, Missi Pyle and Penelope Ann Miller, and has already opened to great critical acclaim in the United States. Read more…
55 DAYS AT PEKING – Dimitri Tiomkin
MOVIE MUSIC UK CLASSICS
Original Review by Craig Lysy
55 Days at Peking is an epic film which joined politics and a love story as it explored European imperialism at the dawn of the 20th century. Set in Peking (now Beijing) we see the capital city occupied and under the financial domination of eleven European countries and Japan. They exploit the populace, are immune from Chinese laws and compete for economic control. A populist peasant rebellion called the Boxers rises up with fury and covert support from the Dowager Empress to expel the foreigners and restore Chinese honor and sovereignty. Producer Samuel Bronston assembled a stellar cast that included Charlton Heston as U.S. Major Matt Lewis, Ava Gardner as Russian Baroness, Natalie Ivanoff with whom he falls in love and David Niven as Sir Arthur Robinson, head of the British delegation. Regretfully despite the grandeur of its sets, its splendor and pageantry, the film’s narrative was uninspired, its script weak, and it suffered massive production challenges; implacable hostility between Heston and Gardner (she quit the film and they were forced to kill off her character!), went through four directors and ended up being both a commercial and critical failure. Read more…
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