Archive
THE JUDGE – Thomas Newman
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The Judge is a family drama film directed by David Dobkin, who previously helmed such popular movies as Wedding Crashers and Fred Claus, and starring Robert Downey Jr. as Hank Palmer, a hotshot defense attorney living the high life in the big city, who returns to his sleepy Indiana hometown following the death of his mother. However, further problems await Hank when his estranged and distant father Joseph (Robert Duvall) – the town’s long-serving judge – is unexpectedly arrested, suspected of murder. Suddenly forced to become his own father’s lawyer, Hank sets out to discover the truth and, along the way, reconnects with his fractured family, while rekindling his relationship with an old flame. The film has a stellar supporting cast including Vera Farmiga, Billy Bob Thornton, and Vincent d’Onofrio, and has an original score by Thomas Newman, who excels at writing music for this type of film. Read more…
SAVING MR. BANKS – Thomas Newman
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The much-loved Disney feature Mary Poppins celebrates its 50th anniversary in 2014. It’s hard to believe that it’s been that long since the world first learned the word supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, or were first able to hear the worst Cockney accent in cinematic history courtesy of Dick Van Dyke, but it’s true, and the legacy and popularity of the film remains as strong today as it was in 1964. The new film Saving Mr. Banks, directed by John Lee Hancock, tells two parallel stories. Firstly, it charts how the film Mary Poppins was made, with the irascible English spinster P.L. Travers (Emma Thompson) traveling from her home in London to Los Angeles, where she is wooed mercilessly by no lesser figure that Walt Disney himself (Tom Hanks), in an attempt to secure the rights to her book, which she is loathe to give up. Secondly, and possibly most importantly, it explores in flashback Travers’ childhood in rural Australia, and how her relationship with her loving, caring, but hopelessly drunk and irresponsible father (Colin Farrell) helped inspired her work, and her famous umbrella-wielding nanny. Read more…
SKYFALL – Thomas Newman
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Coming in to write the music for your first James Bond movie must be a massively daunting task. In composing the score for Skyfall, Thomas Newman – the multi-Oscar nominated composer of such seminal scores as American Beauty and The Shawshank Redemption – not only had to cope with 50 years of cinematic history after Ursula Andress first slinked out of the Caribbean sea in Dr. No in 1962, but legions of fans who treat the movie franchise as sacred property, and the legacy of the legendary music of John Barry and his heir-apparent, David Arnold. The ‘James Bond sound’ is so iconic and so well-established that it presents a composer as unique as Newman with a dilemma: does he abandon his own sound in an attempt to fit in with the overall sound of the series, risking giving up the very thing that makes him him, or does he compose music in his own inimitable way, establishment be damned, risking the wrath of those who would then surely accuse him of not being ‘Bond’ enough? It’s a challenging tightrope, and one which Newman had to skillfully navigate. 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…
THE ADJUSTMENT BUREAU – Thomas Newman
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Looking back over Thomas Newman’s career to date, it’s interesting to note how much his musical style has altered over the years. During the late 1980s and 1990s he was very much his father’s son; scores such as The Shawshank Redemption, Little Women, Oscar and Lucinda, Meet Joe Black and The Horse Whisperer showcased his lush, theme-driven, string-heavy music, and made him a popular favorite within the film music world. Then, in 1999, he wrote American Beauty, and from then on began his gradual transformation into a composer whose music relies on sound design, instrumental texture and unusual instrumental combinations than the straightforward orchestral through-composing that made many – including me – such an admirer. Since the turn of the millennium, for every Cinderella Man or Angels in America, there have been a half-dozen other “quirky” scores dominating his filmography: Erin Brockovich, White Oleander, In the Bedroom, Jarhead, Little Children, Revolutionary Road. These scores show flashes of the orchestral brilliance of which he is capable, but more often than not eschew the lyricism in favor of rhythm and texture, with very little thematic content to grab hold of. Unfortunately, The Adjustment Bureau is more of the same. Read more…
BROTHERS – Thomas Newman
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Brothers is the latest film from acclaimed director Jim Sheridan, whose previous efforts include My Left Foot and In the Name of the Father. A remake of film director Susanne Bier’s 2004 Danish film Brødre, it stars Jake Gyllenhaal and Tobey Maguire as brothers Sam and Tommy Cahill; Tommy is in jail for robbery, Sam is a United States marine serving in Afghanistan. When Sam’s helicopter is shot down in action, everyone presumes him to be dead, and Sam’s wife Grace (Natalie Portman) turns to the recently-released Tommy for comfort in grief. Gradually, Tommy and Grace form a new relationship… only for their lives to be shattered when a very-much alive Sam returns home, having survived the helicopter crash and spent months in the hands of Afghan militants. Read more…
REVOLUTIONARY ROAD – Thomas Newman
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
It’s been almost a decade since Thomas Newman wrote, and was Oscar nominated for, his score for American Beauty. In the intervening period, Newman’s work on that film has, arguably, become the most copied piece of music in recent history: the plinking and plonking and rhythmic quirkiness of that score has become cinematic (and televisual) musical shorthand for suburban life, and the things that go on behind the manicured lawns and the white picket fences. Thomas Newman has collaborated with American Beauty’s director, Sam Mendes, twice since then, on Road to Perdition in 2002 and Jarhead in 2005, but Revolutionary Road marks the first return to the setting which initially inspired both men. Like American Beauty, Revolutionary Road is a tale of suburban malaise and malcontent, hidden behind the sheen of a perfect marriage and the American dream. Based on the novel by Richard Yates and set in Connecticut in the 1950s, it stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet – on screen for the first time together since Titanic – as married couple Frank and April Wheeler. Frank is stuck in a dead-end job, and resorts to alcoholism to escape the mind-numbing drudgery of his life, while April dreams of moving to Paris to become an actress. Their neighbors see a perfect partnership living a perfect life, but in private their marriage is slowly dissolving into an endless cycle of bitter arguments and jealous recriminations, ultimately leading to a devastating conclusion. Read more…
TOWELHEAD – Thomas Newman
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Towelhead – also known as Nothing Is Private – is the theatrical directorial debut of Alan Ball, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of American Beauty, and is based on a novel by Alicia Erian. It’s another one of those stories of suburban dissatisfaction and the evil that lurks behind the face of normality in America, and tells the story of a young Arab American girl named Jasira (Summer Bishil) who is sent to live with her father in Houston, Texas during the first Gulf War. While struggling with her father’s controlling influence and the racism she encounters at school, Jasira begins to develop an unhealthy sexual fixation with a bigoted army reservist (Aaron Eckhart), who is more racist than anyone else. 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…
CINDERELLA MAN – Thomas Newman
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Cinderella Man is a wonderful example of everything that is great and everything that is so frustrating about Thomas Newman’s music. As he has proved in the past through scores such as The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile, Meet Joe Black and others, there are few finer composers than Newman when it comes to delivering a big emotional pay-off. The problem is that he does it so rarely that, with each new score, you are never sure whether the right buttons are going to be pressed the first time you slip the CD into the player. Tedious scores such as White Oleander, The Salton Sea and In the Bedroom showed plenty of innovation, but very little “enjoyment”, despite having the potential to sit atop his impressive filmography. Fortunately Cinderella Man falls in the camp of the former scores, although it does lack the thematic beauty and emotional impact of some of his better-known works. Read more…
LEMONY SNICKET’S A SERIES OF UNFORTUNATE EVENTS – Thomas Newman
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
In what can almost be seen as an extension of the playfulness he showed in writing Finding Nemo in 2003, Thomas Newman has written the score for Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, the first big-screen adaptation of the popular children’s stores by author Daniel Handler. Essentially a distillation of three of the Lemony Snicket books – The Bad Beginning”, “The Reptile Room”, and “The Wide Window” – director Brad Silberling’s film stars child actors Emily Browning and Liam Aiken as the Baudelaire children, made orphans in a mysterious fire and sent to live with their thespian uncle, Count Olaf (Jim Carrey). What results are – as the title suggests – a series of unfortunate events as Olaf hatches plot after plot to bump off the children and get his hands on their inheritance. With a supporting cast that includes Meryl Streep, Billy Connolly and Timothy Spall, Lemony Snicket looks set to rival Harry Potter in the coming years as the “literary franchise for children” – especially with another ten stories from which to choose future film storylines. Read more…
THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION – Thomas Newman
MOVIE MUSIC UK CLASSICS
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
As it is currently enjoying a limited cinematic re-release to celebrate its tenth anniversary, and has recently been released on a special 3-disc collectors DVD, I thought I would take the opportunity re-visit and re-review Thomas Newman’s score for The Shawshank Redemption. When I first saw this film back in March 1995, I thought it to be a worthy, enjoyable film, taking into account my comparative immaturity and lack of experience in things cinematic. Now, a decade later on, I consider it one of the best films I have ever seen; a warm, uplifting, moving tribute to the indomitable human spirit, the power of friendship, and the need for hopes and dreams. Read more…
ANGELS IN AMERICA – Thomas Newman
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The quality of original television music in recent years has improved immeasurably. Long gone are the days when all a TV-movie could hope for was a rising star or ageing has-been hiring a small orchestra or, worse still, mocking it all up on synths at home. Now, with recent excellent works like Brian Tyler’s Children of Dune, Laura Karpman’s Taken and Michael Kamen’s Band of Brothers, the upper echelons of television scoring is equaling – and occasionally surpassing – that of the cinema. One of these scores which surpasses almost everything written for the cinema is Thomas Newman’s Angels in America, by far one of the best scores written for any medium in 2003. Read more…
FINDING NEMO – Thomas Newman
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The last person you would expect to score a Disney family movie would be Thomas Newman; the last person you would expect to score a Pixar movie would be Thomas Newman, especially when the monopoly on these has hitherto been held by his cousin Randy. But, in an attempt to break away from the usual sound and go down a different road, Pixar and director Andrew Stanton asked Newman to score Finding Nemo, the excellent animation studio’s offering for summer 2003. The truly unexpected thing about the end result is twofold: firstly, it has provided Newman with a perfect opportunity to employ the services of a much larger orchestra, and to write broad themes and largely more upbeat music. The surprising thing is that, by and large, is also a little disappointing. Read more…
WHITE OLEANDER – Thomas Newman
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
I’m getting rather frustrated with Thomas Newman. How many times is he going to rehash the American Beauty sound before it becomes even more tired than it already is? In many ways, Thomas Newman is becoming the James Horner of the 2000s; a supremely talented composer whose work in the full orchestral arena is as good as anything being written today (The Shawshank Redemption, Little Women, Meet Joe Black). But, and at the risk of sounding cruel, he seems to be getting lazy, and is quite prepared to rehash his old works, whether it is at his director’s behest, or because of his own current obsession with sound design over melody. To paraphrase the Old Testament of the bible, American Beauty beget Erin Brockovich, beget Pay It Forward, beget In The Bedroom, and now beget White Oleander. Read more…
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