Archive
THE BIRTH OF A NATION – Henry Jackman
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
In 1915 the pioneering film director D. W. Griffith released The Birth of a Nation, which he had adapted from the novel The Clansman by T. F. Dixon Jr. Looking back on it now, it is clearly one of the most groundbreaking and important films ever made, but at the same time it is one of the most abhorrent too. Despite being a silent film shot in black and white, it broke ground in terms of cinematic artistry; Griffith essentially invented many of the filmmaking tools we take for granted today, including pans and zooms, close-ups, cross-cut editing in order to tell parallel stories simultaneously, and choreographed action sequences. It also featured one of the first ever commissioned film scores, written by composer Joseph Carl Breil. As a technological achievement, the original Birth of a Nation is an absolute masterpiece. Unfortunately, it’s also one of the most racist films in the history of cinema. To boil it down to its nuts and bolts, it’s a heroic tale about the Ku Klux Klan, who become righteous freedom fighters in the aftermath of the Civil War, saving the noble white folk in the south from the “insolent niggers” from the north, most of whom were played by white actors in eye-rolling, mugging blackface. Time has not been kind to Griffith’s film, and rightfully so; today most film scholars praise its technological achievements, but utterly denounce its content, although Roger Ebert did write of it: “The Birth of a Nation is not a bad film because it argues for evil. Like Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, it is a great film that argues for evil. To understand how it does so is to learn a great deal about film, and even something about evil”. Read more…
THE TEN COMMANDMENTS – Elmer Bernstein
MOVIE MUSIC UK CLASSICS
Original Review by Craig Lysy
Legendary producer-director Cecil B. DeMille, who at 72 was nearing the end of a great career, sought to reclaim past glory with a film that would serve as his crowning achievement. After much thought, he found his answer, in his past. He announced to the world in 1952 of his intention to remake his 1923 film, “The Ten Commandments.” DeMille stated that his retelling of the story would focus exclusively on the life of Moses. This epic film’s preparation took five years, with the script alone requiring three years to write, and the actual filming taking two years. DeMille insisted on a timeless script and so hired a quartet of screenplay writers headed by Aeneas MacKenzie to accomplish the task. The team drew upon three contemporary novels; “Prince Of Egypt” by Dorothy Clarke Wilson, “Pillar Of Fire” by Reverend J. H. Ingraham and “On Eagle’s Wing” by Reverend A. E. Southon. Lastly, DeMille insisted on historical accuracy and fidelity to the ancient texts, which included the works of Philo, Josephus, Eusebius, The Midrash and The Holy Scriptures. Read more…
MISS PEREGRINE’S HOME FOR PECULIAR CHILDREN – Mike Higham and Matthew Margeson
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children is the latest fantasy film from director Tim Burton. The film was adapted by Jane Goldman from the 2011 novel by Ransom Riggs, and stars Asa Butterfield as Jacob, a young man who, throughout his life, has been regaled with tall tales about his grandfather’s childhood at a home for “special children”. After his grandfather is killed by a mysterious monstrous creature, Jacob is compelled to visit Wales and seek out the home; eventually, Jacob discovers the house, its owner Miss Peregrine (Eva Green), and the children who still reside there – all of whom have mutations or abilities which make them unique. Gradually, Jacob learns the secrets of the house and its inhabitants, and the constant dangers they face from outside forces who want to obtain the powers of the ‘peculiars’ for their own ends. The film co-stars Ella Purnell, Samuel L. Jackson, and Judi Dench, and has been a popular success at the box-office, where audiences have responded well to Tim Burton’s eye-popping visual style. Read more…
ROUND MIDNIGHT – Herbie Hancock
THROWBACK THIRTY
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
During the 1980s the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences made some truly baffling decisions with regard to the Oscar for Best Original Score. In 1980 Michael Gore’s light pop score for Fame beat out The Empire Strikes Back. In 1981 Vangelis’s one-theme electronic noodling on Chariots of Fire somehow defeated Raiders of the Lost Ark. In 1988 Dave Grusin won for The Milagro Beanfield War – a film and score which, at least amongst my casual acquaintances, virtually no-one has seen or heard. Perhaps the strangest decision, however, came in 1986 when jazz composer and musician Herbie Hancock won for his score for Round Midnight, beating composers of such eminence as James Horner, Jerry Goldsmith, and Ennio Morricone, whose losing score for The Mission was not only the best score of 1986, but is on the list of the best scores ever written. Read more…
THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN – Danny Elfman
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The Girl on the Train was one of the best-selling and most controversial novels of 2015, a psychological thriller about the murder of a beautiful young woman, and the mystery surrounding her death; the inevitable film version stars Emily Blunt in the lead role as Rachel Watson, whose life fell apart when she separated from her husband Tom (Justin Theroux), due to a combination of his infidelity, their inability to conceive a child, and her increasing alcoholism. A year later, Tom is happily re-married to Anna (Rebecca Ferguson), and has a young daughter; Rachel, however, is unable to let go, and repeatedly turns up at her old house, which she passes every day on the train during her morning commute. Rachel also fantasizes about Megan and Scott (Haley Bennett and Luke Evans), a seemingly perfect couple who live two houses away from Tom and Anna, and who she also sees from her train carriage. Things come to a head when Megan disappears and Rachel, who blacked out from drinking on the day of her disappearance, genuinely believes she may have had something to do with it. The film was directed by Tate Taylor, written by Erin Cressida Wilson from Paula Hawkins’s novel, and has an original score by Danny Elfman. Read more…
CHILDREN OF A LESSER GOD – Michael Convertino
THROWBACK THIRTY
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Children of a Lesser God is a thoughtful, powerful romantic drama directed by Randa Haines, based on the Tony Award–winning stage play of the same name by Mark Medoff, adapted for the screen by Medoff and fellow writer Hesper Anderson. It stars William Hurt as James Leeds, a teacher who starts a new job as an instructor at a New England school for the deaf. One day James meets Sarah Norman (Marlee Matlin), a young deaf woman who works at the school as a member of the janitorial staff. Sarah is a sign language user, and refuses to speak out loud. As James and Sarah slowly develop a romance, it is gradually revealed that her silence is due in part to her difficult relationship with her mother (Piper Laurie), who is domineering and unreasonable, as well as her sexual history – Sarah has been raped before, and is struggling to come to terms with the repercussions of this in her life. The film was a critical success, receiving five Oscar nominations, including one for Best Picture, and special praise was reserved for Matlin, who made her acting debut in this film, is deaf in real life, and went on to win the Academy Award for Best Actress at the age of just 21. Read more…
DEEPWATER HORIZON – Steve Jablonsky
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
In April 2010 the Deepwater Horizon – an oil rig owned by the British Petroleum company (BP) and located in the gulf of Mexico – suffered a catastrophic mechanical failure, resulting in an enormous explosion, the deaths of eleven engineers who worked on the rig, and an ecological disaster of astronomical proportions, with more than 210 million gallons of oil spilling into the ocean and eventually onto the southern coasts of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. Director Peter Berg’s film looks at the events surrounding the disaster, focusing mainly on the men and women whose lives were impacted most by the event; the film stars Mark Wahlberg, Kurt Russell, John Malkovich, Gina Rodriguez, Dylan O’Brien, and Kate Hudson, and has been the recipient of mainly positive reviews, who praised its realism, accuracy, and emotional portrayal of the disaster’s human cost. Read more…
IVAN THE TERRIBLE – Sergei Prokofiev
100 GREATEST SCORES OF ALL TIME
Original Review by Craig Lysy
Josef Stalin had always admired Tsar Ivan IV, AKA Ivan Grozny (Ivan the Terrible), for his brilliance, decisiveness, and success as a powerful and resolute leader of the Russian people. Stalin saw himself as the incarnation of Ivan and when he became aware that filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein was also interested in the man, he ordered him to make a film with himself as author and director. Eisenstein understood his task and sought to create a narrative that extolled Ivan as a national icon and hero. The story would offer a trilogy of films, which covered the three stages of his life; part 1 would portray his childhood, coronation and early reign. Part 2 would focus on the Boyar plot, and Part 3 would cover his final days. The right cast was needed to realize his vision, so he brought in Nikolay Cherkasov to play the titular role. Joining him would be Serafima Birman as Efrosinia Staritska, Pavel Kadochnikov as Vladimir Staritsky, Mikhail Zharov as Malyuta Skuratov, Amvrosi Buchma as Alexei Basamanov, Mikhail Kuznetsov as Fyodor Basamanov and Lyudmilia Tselikovskaya as Tsarina Anastasia. Read more…
FERRIS BUELLER’S DAY OFF – Ira Newborn
THROWBACK THIRTY
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
If you ask anyone who grew up in the 1980s to name the sausage king of Chicago, chances are they will immediately reply Abe Froman, such is the enduring legacy of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. A raucous comedy written and directed by John Hughes – hot off the success of Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, and Weird Science – the film stars Matthew Broderick as the eponymous hero, a smart-mouthed high school slacker who fakes an illness to take a day off school; after convincing his girlfriend Sloane (Mia Sara) and his uptight best friend Cameron (Alan Ruck) to join him, they take Cameron’s father’s beloved Ferrari into Chicago for a day of mischief. However, high school teacher Mr. Rooney (Jeffrey Jones) is wise to Ferris’s antics, and is determined to put a stop to his delinquency once and for all. The film was an enormous critical and popular success, raking in millions of dollars at the box office over the summer of 1986, and making a star of its charismatic young leading man, while many of the film’s scenes and catchphrases became cultural touchstones for American kids. Personally, however, I have never been a huge fan of the film; I always found Ferris and his antics to be annoyingly egotistical, completely oblivious to the genuine protestations of his friends regarding his behavior, although I do find some of the set-pieces and one liners to be pretty amusing. Read more…
SNOWDEN – Craig Armstrong
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Director Oliver Stone has been making films about American politics for more than 30 years, ruminating on the events and repercussions of American wars (Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, Heaven & Earth), looking at the lives of Presidents (Nixon, JFK, W.), or exposing significant events in recent US history (World Trade Center). His most recent film falls into that latter category, and revolves around the life of Edward Snowden, a brilliant computer scientist who worked for the CIA and the NSA until 2013, when he leaked classified information to the Guardian newspaper about the extent of the US government’s numerous global surveillance programs. Opinion about Snowden remains polarized. Some consider him to be a hero and a patriot, whose disclosures about the US’s use of mass surveillance on its own citizens rightfully bring to light the issues of government transparency and an individual’s right to privacy; others consider him to be a criminal and a traitor, whose illegal actions jeopardized national security and put lives at risk. This smart, timely film stars Joseph Gordon Levitt as Snowden, and has a strong supporting cast of character actors including Shailene Woodley, Zachary Quinto, Melissa Leo, Tom Wilkinson, Rhys Ifans, and Nicolas Cage. Read more…
THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN – James Horner and Simon Franglen
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The death of James Horner in June 2015, in a plane crash at the age of 61, was one of the most shocking events to hit the film music community in many, many years. It wasn’t just the fact that Horner was seemingly on the verge of a comeback, having written several classical pieces and new scores in the preceding year, and having signed to write several new works (Mel Gibson’s Hacksaw Ridge, Zhang Yimou’s The Great Wall, and several Avatar sequels among them); it was the suddenness, the randomness of it all, coming completely out of the blue with no time to prepare for a film music world without him. At the time, once the immediate grief and concern for his family had been addressed, thoughts naturally turned to his musical legacy, and all the great music he was yet to write, and which we would now never get to hear. As it turns out, Horner had one last gift to share – the score for director Antoine Fuqua’s remake of the great western The Magnificent Seven, starring Denzel Washington, Chris Pratt, and Ethan Hawke as three members of a gang of gun-slinging heroes who team up to protect a town from ruthless industrialist Peter Sarsgaard, who is forcibly removing the inhabitants of a small Old West community for his own nefarious purposes. Read more…
LINK – Jerry Goldsmith
THROWBACK THIRTY
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Despite being generally regarded as one of the most brilliant and groundbreaking composers in the history of cinema, Jerry Goldsmith scored some absolute stinkers when it came to the quality of the actual movies themselves. The 1980s was particularly fertile ground for terrible films; the decade saw him working on such ignominious titles as The Challenge, Baby: The Secret of Lost Legend, King Solomon’s Mines, Rent-a-Cop, and Warlock, but perhaps no film sums up this rather unfortunate aspect to his legacy as Link, a movie about a monkey that embarks on a killing spree. The film was directed by Richard Franklin, for whom Goldsmith scored Psycho II in 1983, and starred Elizabeth Shue as Jane, a young American anthropology student, who travels to England to work with a brilliant but reclusive professor (Terence Stamp) at his remote Victorian mansion/research facility. However, once Jane gets to know the mansion’s simian inhabitants, she begins to notice unusual events occurring, and suspects that an aged orangutan named Link, who is basically the facility’s butler, may be responsible… Read more…
THE NIGHT OF – Jeff Russo
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The Night Of is one of the more critically acclaimed TV dramas of 2016. It’s an American remake of the 2008 British drama series Criminal Justice, and was adapted for broadcast on HBO by Richard Price and Steven Zaillian, the director/screenwriter behind such excellent films as Schindler’s List, Searching for Bobby Fischer, Moneyball, and many others. Essentially, the show is an unflinchingly realistic look at the American justice system as seen through the eyes of Nasir Khan (Riz Ahmed), a Pakistani-American college student accused of murdering a girl in New York City. As Naz makes his way through the system he encounters numerous individuals who have control over his destiny: the lead detective on his case (Bill Camp), a scrappy ambulance-chasing lawyer (John Turturro), the dogged district attorney seeking a conviction (Jeannie Berlin), a hardened prisoner who takes Naz under his wing and teaches him how to survive in jail (Michael Kenneth Williams), and an idealistic young defense attorney (Amara Karan) who shares Naz’s ethnic heritage. But the show is more than simply a murder-of-the-month whodunit; Zaillian and Price use Naz’s story to spotlight the unfairness, harshness, and occasional corruption of the justice system, as well as the cultural and political overtones of being a Muslim man accused of murder in contemporary America. Read more…
SPELLBOUND – Miklós Rósza
100 GREATEST SCORES OF ALL TIME
Original Review by Craig Lysy
The 1945 Alfred Hitchcock mystery/suspense film Spellbound dealt with the new field of psychoanalysis and the inner workings of the human mind. The story offers testimony to Hitchock’s supreme mastery of suspense, camera work, and cinematography. The stellar cast included Ingrid Bergman playing Dr. Constance Peterson, a psychoanalyst working at the Green Manors mental hospital and Gregory Peck playing her love interest, the dashing Dr. Edwards. This is at its crux a love story. We see a cool and analytical Constance lose her professional detachment and immediately fall in love with Dr. Edwards upon his arrival. Sadly unsettling aspects of his personality slowly begin to slowly reveal themselves. As the story unfolds she discovers that her love interest is really an imposter, an outsider trying to falsely portray himself as Dr. Anthony Edwards. Driven by love, Constance seeks to illuminate his path back to sanity by trying to resurrect repressed memories without shattering him in the process, as such the story is a classic commentary on the eternal conflict of heart vs mind. Read more…
CROCODILE DUNDEE – Peter Best
THROWBACK THIRTY
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Up north in the Never-Never, where the land is harsh and bare, lives a mighty hunter named Mick Dundee, who can dance like Fred Astaire.
In the late summer of 1986 the world went crazy for an Australian comedian and actor named Paul Hogan and his cinematic creation, Michael J. “Crocodile” Dundee. A fish-out-of-water comedy with a healthy dose of unconventional romance, Crocodile Dundee made a bonafide star out of its rough-and-tumble leading man, with his salty catchphrases and easy charm. The film’s plot is a fairly straightforward one: New York magazine reporter Sue Charlton (Linda Kozlowski) travels to the remote Northern Territory in Australia to interview bushman Mick Dundee, the subject of many tall tales regarding his adventures in the outback. After experiencing first hand Mick’s prowess and survival skills, Sue invites Mick to travel back with her to New York to “continue the story”. Upon his arrival in the Big Apple, Dundee finds himself bemused by the local customs, but quickly wins over everyone he meets – the lone exception being Sue’s sarcastic and arrogant fiancé Richard (Mark Blum), who belittles and patronizes Mick at every opportunity. Of course, as is always the way of things in movies like this, Sue and Mick begin to fall for each other… Read more…
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