Archive
ARLINGTON ROAD – Angelo Badalamenti
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Arlington Road, directed by hot young independent filmmaker Mark Pellington, is a disturbingly convincing suburban fairy tale starring Jeff Bridges as a widowed college professor who slowly begins to suspect that his seemingly innocuous next door neighbors, Tim Robbins and Joan Cusack, may actually be terrorists involved in a bombing campaign across the United States. Composer Angelo Badalamenti, best known for his work with cult director David Lynch on films such as Blue Velvet, Wild At Heart and the Twin Peaks TV series, has collaborated with computer technology composers Tomandandy for the score which, while you’re hearing it in the cinema, sounds absolutely astounding. Alternatively, a friend describes the CD as “appropriately atmospheric” – his own expression which can be translated as meaning “a load of rubbish”. Personally, I quite enjoy it. Read more…
SOUTH PARK: BIGGER, LONGER & UNCUT – Marc Shaiman, Trey Parker, Matt Stone
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
For anyone who has been living in a cocoon for the last few years, South Park is an animated TV series created by Trey Parker and Matt Stone, set an the isolated Colorado town, and is all about four eight-year-old friends (Stan Marsh, Kyle Broflovsky, Eric Cartman and the immortal Kenny McCormick) who, quite simply, wreak havoc in every episode, aided and abetted by recurring characters such as the sex machine school Chef (voiced by Isaac Hayes), Stan’s girlfriend Wendy Testaburger (who gets puked upon whenever Stan talks to her because he’s so nervous), and kooky schoolteachers Mr. Mackey and Mr. Garrison, who wears a puppet on his left hand called “Mr. Hat”. The thing about South Park is the style – the animation is extremely crude and simplistic, but the scripts are ironic, satirical, and surprisingly intelligent, with messages and morals easily identifiable in amongst each episode’s gross-out gags. Read more…
WILD WILD WEST – Elmer Bernstein
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
When Elmer Bernstein scores a western, you know exactly what you’re going to get. With a track record that includes scores like The Magnificent Seven, The Commancheros, True Grit and The Shootist (his last “true” western back in 1976), it is obvious that Bernstein is a master of the musical depiction of the vast open prairie, of six-shooters and ten-gallon hats, and Wild Wild West is a welcome return to the genre which made him world famous. Read more…
STAR WARS: THE PHANTOM MENACE – John Williams
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
At long, long last, the waiting is over. I don’t think I can ever remember a soundtrack being as highly anticipated as The Phantom Menace was – not even Titanic. Ever since George Lucas announced his intentions to make a second Star Wars trilogy, score fans the world over literally started drooling as they pondered the possibilities. Of course, John Williams would write the music, but what would he do? Would any of the familiar themes make an appearance? Would the full score be released? Would it be a 2-CD release? What would be the cue titles? Such has been the speculation and avid discussion, especially on the Internet, that with only a few weeks to go until its premiere, it has almost become a frenzy. As such, reviewing a score like this impartially and without bias is now virtually impossible – even I have been caught up in Phantom Menace fever, especially with the tantalizing glimpses of the trailer in my local multiplex. Read more…
L’ASSEDIO/BESIEGED – Alessio Vlad
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The curse of Bernardo Bertolucci strikes again. Bernardo – or, as one British film critic recently called him Bore-nardo Bertolucci – has never recreated the masterful triumphs of Last Tango in Paris or The Last Emperor, despite having an excellent eye for detail and a sumptuous cinematic style. Besieged (also known as L’Assedio), his latest offering, is the story of a love triangle between an English composer and pianist (David Thewlis), his black African housekeeper (Thandie Newton), and her unseen political prisoner husband. The crux of the film is to do with love, and how it is expressed in different ways by different people. It’s all very stately and very “arthouse”, and has been dismissed by many as being nothing more than a dry and dusty character study. Read more…
A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM – Simon Boswell
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
A film score that opens with the entire 11-minute Overture from Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream can’t be all bad, and in fact this album from Decca is one of the finest examples I have heard with regards to combining true classical music with modern film music into a satisfying, enjoyable whole. Director Michael Hoffman restaged Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream in renaissance-era Tuscany, allowing him to shroud his film in the sights and sounds of one of the history’s most romantic periods. As a result, the images on screen glow with vivid shades of green and gold, reveling in the opulence of luxurious production design, glittering costumes and natural, healthy beauty. For those who don’t know the play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream follows the fortunes of four bickering lovers: Helena (Calista Flockhart), who loves Demetrius (Christian Bale), who loves Hermia (Anna Friel), who loves Lysander (Dominic West). One midsummer’s night, the four venture into the woods near their home and become embroiled in the war of words between Oberon (Rupert Everett), the king of the fairies, and his bride Titania (Michelle Pfeiffer). Receiving instructions from Oberon, the mischievous sprite Puck (Stanley Tucci), casts a spell which causes the four to fall regularly in and out of love with each other, turns an innocent weaver named Bottom (Kevin Kline), who is rehearsing a play in the same woods, into an ass, and causes Titania to fall in love with him. Read more…
THE CASTLE – Edmund Choi
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Initially, the music for the quirky Australian comedy The Castle consisted of a few original cues by composer Craig Harnath and a multitude of “library cues” picked arbitrarily to fill the gaps in the dialogue. It was released across most of the world in this original format but when the might Miramax corporation bought the film for distribution in the USA, the head honchos decided that a new musical approach was needed. Enter Edmund Choi, a young, talented 28 year old, whose remit was to take the orchestration of the original score, but write his own new themes to fit the bill. Choi, whose only previous scoring work was for Sixth Sense director M. Night Shyamalan’s earlier features Praying With Anger and Wide Awake, responded with a lovely, lush orchestral work which pegs him as a talent to watch. Read more…
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…
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…
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…
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