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CROCODILE DUNDEE IN LOS ANGELES – Basil Poledouris
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Paul Hogan must have had an especially large electric bill last year – otherwise why on Earth would he resurrect his now rather dated character Crocodile Dundee for a third outing, 13 years after the first sequel. Hogan said, in defense of his movie, that he thought people might be interested in where “Mick had been for the last decade; what had happened to him and his life”. Well, flogging a dead horse is one thing, if it makes a buck or two for the people involved, I have nothing against shameless capitalism. But Crocodile Dundee has no redeeming features – its not funny, its not very interesting and, worst of all, its not even particularly well made. Read more…
SPY KIDS – Robert Rodriguez
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
There’s a saying in Britain – I don’t know how widespread it is in the rest of the English-speaking world – which states that “too many cooks spoil the broth”. What this means, basically, is that if too many people try to take part in one thing at once, the end result can be diminished by the contributions of its many creators. This old adage can be applied to Spy Kids, an enjoyable children’s action score which is rendered just a little overly-schizophrenic through the use of eight – count ’em – eight different composers. Basically, Spy Kids is a James Bond adventure story with a difference – the protagonists are pre-teens. What some people may find surprising is the fact that it was written and directed by Robert Rodriguez, the man who previously brought the world such dark, violent movies as El Mariachi, Desperado, From Dusk Till Dawn and The Faculty. The plot is simple: Gregorio and Ingrid Cortez (Antonio Banderas and Carla Gugino) are semi-retired spies with two precocious children, Carmen (Alexa Vega) and Juni (Daryl Sabara). Gregorio and Ingrid still occasionally blast off on an adventure when duty calls but unfortunately, their sabbatical has made them a little rusty – so much so that they end up being captured by the diabolical Fegan Floop (Alan Cumming), a children’s TV show host who is planning to use an army of robot children to take over the world. The only solution? The kids to rescue, armed with a load of cool gadgets and the espionage know-how inherited from mom and dad. Read more…
THE DISH – Edmund Choi
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Composer Edmund Choi has had an unusual career to date. After graduating, he wrote music for Praying With Anger and Wide Awake, Sixth Sense director M. Night Shyamalan’s first two films, and the romantic comedy Down To You in early 2000. However, it was his re-scoring of the Australian comedy The Castle in 1999 (Miramax asked him to replace Craig Harnath’s original music for the American market) that landed him this assignment writing the score for Rob Sitch’s follow-up. Unfortunately, despite his undoubted talent, Choi has fallen into the trap many fledgling composers find themselves facing, and succumbed to a bad case of temp-track fever. Set in 1969, The Dish is a warm and appealing comedy starring Sam Neill as Cliff Buxton, an amateur astronomer from rural Parkes, NSW, Australia, who is the man in charge of the large satellite transmitter which sits proudly in the community’s main sheep paddock. Then, suddenly, Parkes is put on the map when NASA contacts Buxton to ask him to provide backup technology for Neil Armstrong’s historic walk on the face of the moon. With the help of his good natured but slightly inept assistants (Kevin Harrington, Patrick Warburton), Buxton is only too pleased to be of service to the Americans – but gets more than he bargained for when a technical glitch back home in Houston leaves the Parkes Dish solely responsible for sending out the lunar TV pictures to a world holding its collective breath. Sitch’s endearing film was one of 2001’s sleeper successes, at least critically – it did very little at any box-office, despite receiving glowing reviews – and boasts a charming lead performance from Neill, a world away from the histrionics of Jurassic Park and its sequels. Read more…
AFRICA – Alex North
MOVIE MUSIC UK CLASSICS
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
I so much want to like Alex North’s music. Every bone in my body tells me that, technically, he was one of the most gifted and creative composers every to work in Hollywood. Modern luminaries laud his work as being some of the most groundbreaking ever written for the Silver Screen. Jerry Goldsmith was a close friend and ardent admirer. As a 14 time Oscar nominee, the esteem in which he is held speaks for itself. But, with a few notable exceptions, I never have been able to actually sit and “enjoy” an Alex North score. He didn’t write that kind of music. Read more…
ROBOCOP: PRIME DIRECTIVES – Norman Orenstein
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Preconceptions are funny things, especially in film music. When Robocop: Prime Directives dropped through my door, with the name Norman Orenstein adorning the package, my first instinct was to dismiss it as cheesy TV music. Without wanting to sound unkind, Canadian composer Norman Orenstein’s career to date has hardly been stellar. A series of cut-price straight-to-video classics such as Ski School II, Mask of Death and The First 91/2 Weeks have been the highlights of his film music career so far – until Robocop Prime Directives came along. Working with a comparatively small budget, and out of his personal studio in Toronto, Orenstein emerged with a surprisingly vibrant, large-scale, enjoyable series of cues which mix electronics with sampled acoustics and a smattering of live instruments. It’s a world away from the classic march Basil Poledouris wrote for the film series, but as TV music goes this is as solid a score as you would expect. Read more…
THE CLAIM – Michael Nyman
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
I’m not really given to making lofty proclamations here, but this is one guaranteed to ruffle a few feathers: The Claim is Michael Nyman’s best score to date. I’m not talking best as in the complexity of the music, or the craftsmanship: rather, The Claim is Nyman’s first film score in the sense that it overflows with emotion. It’s lush, it sweeps, and it features one of the most attractive central themes the enigmatic Englishman has ever written. Michael Nyman writing for a big-screen adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge; that I can believe. Michael Nyman writing for an epic Western set at the height of the gold rush; well, that’s another proposition entirely. Read more…
ALL THE PRETTY HORSES – Marty Stuart, Kristin Wilkinson, Larry Paxton
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
I’ve spoken about preconceptions many times before on Movie Music UK; pre-judging a score based on what you know about the movie, and the composer, before you hear the music. Once again, I have been found guilty of negatively pre-judging a particular score, only to hear the thing and be totally blown away. The score in question this time is All the Pretty Horses, written by Marty Stuart, with additional music by Larry Paxton, Kristin Wilkinson and Daniel Lanois. All the Pretty Horses is director Billy Bob Thornton’s sophomore effort, following his critically acclaimed, Oscar-winning debut Sling Blade. It’s a rites-of-passage Western, adapted from the popular novel by Cormac McCarthy and starring Matt Damon as John Grady Cole, a young man in rural 1940s Texas who, after being made homeless following his grandmother’s death, heads off to Mexico with his best buddy Lacey Rawlins (Henry Thomas) to seek his fortune. Unfortunately, fortune is not what Cole and Rawlins find south of the Rio Grande, instead becoming involved in the affairs of a teenage gunslinger Blevins (Lucas Black), a Mexican rancher’s daughter (Penelope Cruz), with whom Cole falls in love, and the local police, who take exception to the blossoming romance between the handsome American and the beautiful señorita. Read more…
THE GIFT – Christopher Young
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
It may be my imagination, or my personal tastes, but during the last year or so Christopher Young finally seems have found himself a series of good movies to score. From The Hurricane last year, though Wonder Boys and The Big Kahuna this year, the quality and profile of each consecutive assignment seems to have been greater than the previous, almost to the stage where Young can genuinely class himself as an A-list composer. This latest effort is The Gift, a dark thriller starring Cate Blanchett and Keanu Reeves, and directed by directed by Sam Raimi, in what was his big Oscar push for the year 2000. Read more…
MALÉNA – Ennio Morricone
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Ennio Morricone’s fifth and final score of 2000 is for the Italian romantic-comedy-drama Maléna, directed by Giuseppe Tornatore, for whom Morricone has written several classic scores, not least the incredible Cinema Paradiso. What’s interesting about Maléna is the fact that, unlike 99% of Morricone’s output of late, it has been the recipient of quite a bit of publicity, mainly through its association with the Miramax marketing machine. A second Golden Globe Best Score nomination in a row has been secured for the Italian maestro – following his success with The Legend of 1900 last year – and is backed up by a high profile soundtrack release. The only difference between this and 1900, though, is that Maléna is worthy of the praise. Read more…
CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON – Tan Dun
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
After spending much of its history consigned to art-houses, lauded by critics but unseen by the masses, Chinese cinema is suddenly big business. The emigration west of some of its biggest names, notably action stars such as Jackie Chan and Chow Yun Fat, has undoubtedly paved the way for Chinese-language movies to reach a wider audience, and now the first true crossover hit seems to have come: Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. Director Lee has, of course, been making critically popular films in English for a number of years, from the Oscar winning costume drama Sense & Sensibility to the drama The Ice Storm and the civil war epic Ride With The Devil. Throughout his career, though, Lee has harbored a desire to make a wuxia pian, a Chinese costume drama combining traditional drama with martial arts. Lee has described Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon as “Jane Austen meets Bruce Lee”. Read more…
PROOF OF LIFE – Danny Elfman
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Proof of Life: The Movie has been overtaken in the world’s press by Proof of Life: The On-Set Romance to such an extent that director Taylor Hackford’s espionage thriller has almost become an unimportant by-product of the Meg and Russell Show. Meg divorced Dennis Quaid to be with Crowe, who then left Meg to be with his cattle in Australia… it’s certainly one of Tinseltown’s more unusual love triangles. But Movie Music UK is not concerned with tabloid tittle-tattle, instead preferring to judge things on their artistic merits. Unfortunately, as far as the music is concerned at least, Proof of Life doesn’t have many. The film Russell Crowe stars as Terry Thorne, a private investigator and hostage negotiation specialist who is hired by Alice Bowman (Meg Ryan) to find her engineer husband Peter (David Morse), who has been kidnapped by guerrillas in South America. Terry and Alice head deeper into danger, locking horns with Ecuadorian freedom fighters and corrupt government officials as they try to obtain some kind of reassurance that Peter is alive, and worth searching for. However, as the two of them endure life-threatening situation after life-threatening situation, a tentative romantic relationship develops, jeopardizing both the mission and Terry’s professional integrity. Read more…
VERTICAL LIMIT – James Newton Howard
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
By popular consensus, James Newton Howard has finished the year 2000 as one of the strongest and most consistent composers in Hollywood. The 49-year old Californian wrote three stellar scores in 2000 – Dinosaur (my personal favorite of the entire year), Unbreakable, and Vertical Limit, the latter being an epic mountaineering score for the film directed by Martin Campbell. The undoubted high quality of his work, the critical acclaim it has received amongst score fans, and the old-fashioned enjoyment derived from his work of late has thrust him into the limelight; Vertical Limit is just the latest in a long line of excellent works from the man with three names. Read more…
THE LOST CHILD – Mark McKenzie
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
It’s quite an amazing career that Mark McKenzie is building for himself, especially considering the fact that it has only been around six years since he stopped being a full-time session orchestrator and started writing for himself. Now, it seems, with every score e writes, he just gets better and better. Durango was lovely. Dragonheart II was lovelier still. His score for the new Hallmark TV movie The Lost Child could well be his best yet. A dreamy, unashamedly romantic, heartbreaking string and piano score that swells, swoops and swoons with every lick of the orchestra, it’s a score which transports you into another world. Fans of lush orchestral romance will be jumping up and down with delight at the sounds on offer here. Read more…
BOUNCE – Mychael Danna
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The more of Mychael Danna’s music I hear, the more I am of the opinion that he is one of the most talented – and versatile – practitioners of film music working today. Having become noted for composing minimalist, ethnically-inflected scores for films such as Exotica, Kama Sutra and The Ice Storm, Danna bucked his own trend by writing two of the most interesting and challenging scores of 1999: the vivid, confrontational 8MM, and the sweeping, epic Ride with the Devil. The musical development of Danna continues with his lovely score for Bounce, the Canadian’s first mainstream romance. Bounce is directed by Don Roos (previously responsible for The Opposite of Sex) and stars Ben Affleck as businessman Buddy Amaral, who finds himself delayed at an airport while waiting for an overbooked flight to Los Angeles. Striking up a conversation with fellow passenger Greg Janello (Tony Goldwyn), Buddy thinks he is doing a good turn when he offers Greg his seat so he can get back in time to see his young son. In a tragic twist of fate, the plane Buddy should have been on then crashes, killing all on board. Racked with guilt and remorse, descending into alcoholism and quitting his job, Buddy seeks out Greg’s widow Abby (Gwyneth Paltrow) looking for some kind of redemption and forgiveness… and certainly not expecting to end up falling in love. Read more…
HOW THE GRINCH STOLE CHRISTMAS – James Horner
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The problem with reviewing this kind of album is whether to review the score, or the package as presented to us by the record label. Interscope Records’ release is a curious hybrid of pop, dialogue and score that never quite gels together as a product – although the three elements, in themselves, are good, the end result of an album that falls short on virtually all levels, each part never quite complementing each other, and leaving score fans with a definite sense of being short-changed. How the Grinch Stole Christmas, shortened to simply “The Grinch” over here, is the first live-adaptation of the classic children’s story by Theodor S. Geisel, aka Dr Seuss. The story was famously rendered in cartoon form by the legendary Chuck Jones in 1966, and went on to become a perennial Yuletide favorite in the United States, but has never captured the imagination of children in the UK in quite the same way. We know who Dr Seuss was, and all about The Cat in the Hat and so forth… it just never really caught on. Besides, we’ve got Raymond Briggs and The Snowman to keep up happy over the festive period. It’s actually rather surprising, therefore, that the movie has gone on to become a massive smash in this country, sitting at the number one slot for several weeks and taking in millions of pounds at the box office. Read more…
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