Archive
PATRIOT GAMES – James Horner
THROWBACK THIRTY
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Patriot Games was the second film to feature the character Jack Ryan, the CIA analyst and protagonist of a series of novels by Tom Clancy. He first appeared on screen in 1990 in The Hunt for Red October, played by Alec Baldwin, and returns in this second installment played by Harrison Ford. The film is directed by Philip Noyce and is, in my opinion, one of the best political action-thrillers of the 1990s. The story begins with Ryan on vacation in London with his family, where he inadvertently foils a plot to assassinate a member of the British royal family by an Irish paramilitary group, the ULA, a radical offshoot of the IRA Irish Republican Army. With the ringleader dead and the other terrorists in custody, Ryan is given an honorary knighthood by the Queen, and returns home a hero – but things become much more serious when Sean Miller, the brother of the killed ULA leader, is broken out of prison, and vows to exact revenge on Ryan. The film co-stars Anne Archer, Patrick Bergin, James Earl Jones, Richard Harris, Samuel L. Jackson, and a young Sean Bean, and is a terrific tale that offers an overview of Irish republican politics in the 1980s and 90s, a high level examination of ‘the troubles,’ combined with some excellent action and suspense. Read more…
FAR AND AWAY – John Williams
THROWBACK THIRTY
GREATEST SCORES OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Far and Away is a romanticized film about the American immigrant experience, specifically those who came from Ireland seeking their fortune in the new world in the 1890s, while the country was still recovering from the great potato famine several decades previously. The film stars Tom Cruise as Joseph Donnelly, a poor farmer from rural Ireland who meets Shannon Christie (Nicole Kidman), the privileged daughter of his father’s landlord, and they bond over their shared plans to emigrate to America. The film then follows the travails of the couple as they travel from Ireland to Boston, fall in with a local gang boss, and get involved in everything from bare knuckle boxing to prostitution simply to survive; the ultimate aim is for them to travel from Boston to Oklahoma to take part in a so-called ‘land race,’ the winner of which is given a plot of land and a shot at the American dream. The film co-starred Thomas Gibson, Robert Prosky, Colm Meaney, and Cyril Cusack alongside Cruise and Kidman, and was written by Bob Dolman and directed by Ron Howard – the same duo who made Willow in 1988. Read more…
UNLAWFUL ENTRY – James Horner
THROWBACK THIRTY
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Unlawful Entry was one of a spate of home invasion movies that hit theaters in the early 1990s. Directed by Jonathan Kaplan from a screenplay by Lewis Colick and Ken Friedman, the film starred Kurt Russell and Madeleine Stowe as Michael and Karen Carr, a happy couple living in an upscale part of Los Angeles. One night an intruder enters their home and attacks Karen before escaping; one of the police officers who responds to their 911 call is Pete Davis (Ray Liotta), who is friendly and helpful and goes out of his way to install a good security system in the house. However, what initially appears to be a kind gesture quickly turns sinister when Pete develops an unhealthy fixation on Karen, and begins to stalk her. The film, which co-starred Roger E. Mosley and Ken Lerner, was a commercial success, and was especially praised for Ray Liotta’s compelling and terrifying performance as the unhinged Pete. Read more…
HELLRAISER III: HELL ON EARTH – Randy Miller
THROWBACK THIRTY
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
One of the most popular and successful horror franchises of the 1980s and 1990s was Hellraiser, based on Clive Barker’s groundbreaking but somewhat controversial 1986 novella The Hellbound Heart. The first film based on the story was released in 1987 and introduced the iconic Pinhead character to the pantheon of horror movie monsters: an inter-dimensional ‘cenobite’ traveler who ensnares unwary souls with his cryptic puzzle box, and then sentences them to a lifetime of torture that blurs the lines between pain and pleasure. A sequel, Hellbound: Hellraiser II, was released in 1988, which expanded on the mythos of the cenobites, and was mostly well received by audiences. This second sequel, Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth, marked the end of the series of ‘good’ Hellraiser movies – from this point on, through seven further interminable entries, the franchise became worse and worse, to the point where Hellraiser fans essentially consider this to be the conclusion of the story. Read more…
ALIEN 3 – Elliot Goldenthal
THROWBACK THIRTY
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
When I first started writing about film music, in the summer of 1997, I tried to write a review of Alien 3. I had seen the film previously, and liked it a great deal, and I remember being especially impressed with the music in the finale, so I went out and bought Elliot Goldenthal’s soundtrack CD. This was my first experience of his music outside of film context, and my film music knowledge at that point barely extended beyond the big orchestral scores of John Williams and James Horner, and the sweeping romance of John Barry. Hearing Alien 3 for the first time was… well, it was almost indescribable. I had no idea what I was listening to. It felt like angry, vicious, random noise, and I absolutely hated it. I hadn’t yet begun to explore the darker and more atonal side of film music, I had no knowledge of Stravinsky or Penderecki, or of twentieth century avant-garde music in general. In short, I had no clue what Elliot Goldenthal was doing. I didn’t have the vocabulary to understand it. Thankfully, thirty years down the line, I now have had vastly more exposure to and tolerance of this type of aggressive music, and I can now appreciate it for the masterpiece it is. Read more…
CITY OF JOY – Ennio Morricone
THROWBACK THIRTY
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The career of British director Roland Joffé is one of the oddest ones in recent cinema; after cutting his teeth making gritty UK TV dramas he gained international critical acclaim and Oscar recognition in 1984 for his film The Killing Fields, about the brutal Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia in the 1970s, and followed that with what is probably his most famous film, The Mission, in 1986. However, after making several consecutive flops in the late 1980s and 1990s, including things like Fat Man and Little Boy, The Scarlet Letter, and Goodbye Lover, he was eventually reduced to making low-budget ‘torture porn’ horror movies like Captivity, and now hasn’t made a major movie in more than 15 years. Possibly the last good movie Joffé made was this one: City of Joy, from 1992. It stars Patrick Swayze as an American doctor who travels to India in search of ‘spiritual enlightenment’ after a career crisis, and finds himself becoming deeply involved with helping people who live in the slums of Calcutta. The film co-stars Pauline Collins and Om Puri, and was a minor critical success, but is largely forgotten today. Read more…
ARTICLE 99 – Danny Elfman
THROWBACK THIRTY
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
With all the political furore in the United States today about drug companies, health insurance companies, access to universal healthcare, and other related issues, it’s sobering to realize that this was already part of the national conversation some thirty years ago, and that little has changed in the intervening decades. Article 99 is a film which looks at those same issues – it’s about how corrupt officials try to deny vital healthcare services to US army veterans, and how a group of compassionate doctors at a veteran’s hospital break the rules in order to provide care to their patients by circumventing ‘Article 99,’ a bureaucratic cost-cutting administrative loophole that prevents veterans from receiving the benefits they deserve by stating that a vet is eligible for treatment only for injuries incurred in actual service. The film stars Ray Liotta, Kiefer Sutherland, Forest Whitaker, and Lea Thompson, as the doctors willing to risk their own careers to help others; the film was directed by Howard Deutsch from a screenplay written by Ron Cutler, and has a score by Danny Elfman. Read more…
YEAR OF THE COMET – Hummie Mann
THROWBACK THIRTY
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
One of the more little-known ‘mainstream’ films of 1992 is Year of the Comet, directed by Peter Yates and written by William Goldman, who was inspired to write it because of a desire to combine two of his personal loves: red wine and traveling. His script first hit Hollywood in 1978, and originally Goldman wanted Robert Redford and Glenda Jackson to star as the leads in what he envisioned as a ‘romantic adventure comedy thriller’ in the vein of Charade, wherein the protagonists embark on a chase from London to the Scottish Highlands to the French Riviera, in search of the most valuable bottle of wine in history. The title of the project relates to the year the McGuffin wine was bottled, 1811, which was known for the Great Comet of 1811, and also as one of the best years in history for European viticulture. The film sat un-made for almost 15 years, until eventually Goldman was able to leverage his success off the back of writing The Princess Bride and Misery and put it into production; Timothy Daly and Penelope Ann Miller were eventually cast as the leading pair, but despite some handsome production values and lovely location shooting, the film was a box office disaster, a critical flop, and almost immediately sank into obscurity. Read more…
HOWARDS END – Richard Robbins
THROWBACK THIRTY
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
In the 1980s and early 1990s the producing-directing team of James Ivory and Ismail Merchant made a series of films based on classic late Victorian-era British novels, including several by the great E. M. Forster, whose examinations of the hypocrisy of the British class system made him one of the most acclaimed novelists of his generation. Howards End was the third Forster adaptation by Merchant-Ivory Productions, after A Room With a View in 1985, and Maurice in 1987, and it’s generally considered to be one of the best films they ever made, and one of the best films of the 1990s. It’s a film about society, class, warring families, and life in Edwardian London, with the titular country house serving as the prominent location around which all the drama unfolds. The film stars Emma Thompson, Helena Bonham-Carter, Anthony Hopkins, and Vanessa Redgrave, and was an enormous critical success, eventually going on to be nominated for nine Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and with Thompson winning Best Actress. Read more…
THUNDERHEART – James Horner
THROWBACK THIRTY
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Thunderheart is a serious, interesting murder-mystery thriller, directed by Michael Apted from an original screenplay by John Fusco. The film stars Val Kilmer as FBI agent Ray Levoi, who is sent to a Native American reservation in South Dakota to lead the investigation into the murder of a tribal council member; Levoi is of Sioux heritage, but has no connection to his tribe and his ancestry, and is reluctant to go. However, once he arrives on the reservation, he becomes increasingly convinced that a cover-up is happening, involving local authorities, an apparently dangerous militia group, and even members of the US government. The film co-stars Sam Shepard, Graham Greene, and Fred Ward, and was a modest box office hit, while also receiving critical acclaim for its tone, pacing, performances, and sympathetic portrayal of contemporary issues in Native American communities. Read more…
BASIC INSTINCT – Jerry Goldsmith
THROWBACK THIRTY
GREATEST SCORES OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Basic Instinct was one of the most commercially successful but socially controversial films of 1992. A murder-mystery thriller with strong sexual content, the film was written by Joe Eszterhas and directed by Paul Verhoeven. Michael Douglas starred as San Francisco police detective Nick Curran, who becomes involved in an intense sexual relationship with Catherine Tramell (Sharon Stone), a mysterious and confident novelist, despite the fact that she is the prime suspect in the murder of her wealthy rock star boyfriend, who was stabbed to death with an ice pick while in flagrante. The film, which co-starred George Dzundza and Jeanne Tripplehorn, was controversial for several reasons – for its depiction of the ‘heroic detective’ as an amoral cocaine addict, for its brutal violence (including the opening murder and a subsequent rape sequence), and especially for its explicit sexual content, which included the now notorious scene where Sharon Stone flashes her vagina at police officers during an interrogation. Of course there had been successful mainstream erotic thrillers before – Dressed to Kill, Body Heat, Nine ½ Weeks, Fatal Attraction, and Jagged Edge, which Eszterhas also wrote – but Basic Instinct caught a wave of popularity and social zeitgeist, becoming one of the biggest grossing films of the year, and catapulting Sharon Stone to stardom. Read more…
RUBY – John Scott
THROWBACK THIRTY
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
November 22, 1993, marked the thirtieth anniversary of the assassination of US President John F. Kennedy, and in the years leading up to that memorial several films and TV shows were made looking at the details surrounding the event. The JFK assassination had fascinated the American public for decades, and the stories and conspiracy theories surrounding it had become stock-in-trade for filmmakers and authors. The most high profile film made during that period was JFK, written and directed by Oliver Stone and released in late 1991, but the spring of 1992 saw another film about the event – Ruby, directed by John Mackenzie. It takes a look at the life of one of the other important figures of the event: Texas nightclub owner Jack Ruby, who shot and killed JFK’s assassin Lee Harvey Oswald in the basement garage of a Dallas city police station two days after JFK’s death. The film starred Danny Aiello as Ruby, and has a supporting cast that included Sherilyn Fenn, Arliss Howard, David Duchovny, and Tobin Bell. Read more…
WIND – Basil Poledouris
THROWBACK THIRTY
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
In the years immediately prior to his death in 2006, composer Basil Poledouris essentially retired from scoring and moved from the Los Angeles area to Vashon Island, off the coast of Seattle, Washington, where he indulged in his second greatest passion after music: sailing. Many composers are well known for their non-film music endeavors. Alan Silvestri owns a vineyard and makes his own wine, for example, and James Horner famously (and tragically) loved flying vintage planes. Once in a while the two passions are able to intersect, and for Poledouris that happened with the only score he wrote in 1992 – Wind. The film is a romantic adventure set in the world of America’s Cup yachting, which stars Matthew Modine and Jennifer Grey, and was directed by Carroll Ballard. The film is mostly forgotten today, but film music fans would be remiss if they forgot Poledouris’s score for it, because it allowed him to fully embrace the emotional rush that sailing provided for him, and inspired him to write one of his most personal scores. Read more…
WHERE ANGELS FEAR TO TREAD – Rachel Portman
THROWBACK THIRTY
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Where Angels Fear to Tread was one of several cinematic adaptations of novels by the British writer E. M. Forster in the 1980s and early 1990s, the others being A Passage to India, A Room With a View, and Howard’s End. Like all of Forster’s work it is a scathing examination of the British class system, its rigid mores and morals, and how those formal rules butt up against the passions bubbling underneath the proverbial stiff upper lips. This film adaptation is directed by Charles Sturridge and stars Helen Mirren as Lilia, a recent widow who travels from London to Tuscany in 1905 with her young companion Caroline (Helena Bonham-Carter). Shockingly, Lilia falls in love with a handsome and roguish Italian named Gino (Giovanni Guidelli), marries him, and falls pregnant, much to the dismay of her conservative and status-obsessed siblings (Rupert Graves and Judy Davis) back in England. As the two halves of the family fight over Lilia’s perceived unsuitable relationship, especially as it relates to the future of her unborn child, the disagreements quickly turn to tragedy for all involved. The title comes from the famous line in Alexander Pope’s 1711 poem ‘An Essay on Criticism’: for fools rush in where angels fear to tread. Read more…
DIÊN BIÊN PHÚ – Georges Delerue
THROWBACK THIRTY
GREATEST SCORES OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The city of Diên Biên Phú is located in the north-west of Vietnam, and was the site of the decisive battle of the First Indochina War in 1954. The conflict climaxed with 55 days of intense combat in which the French colonial army fought against local Vietnamese forces for the fate of the region. It was a terrible and bloody battle, with thousands killed as a result of anti-aircraft batteries, tank warfare, and ground assaults; the eventual result was a humiliating loss for the French, and victory for the Chinese and Russian-backed Viet Minh communist revolutionaries. In the immediate aftermath of the battle the Geneva Accords were signed, ending the war; France withdrew all its forces from its regional colonies in French Indochina, and the independent countries of North Vietnam and South Vietnam were created, although that would not be the end of the conflict, as less than a year later in 1955 the two sides then began battling each other for control of the entire country. The resulting Second Indochina War – known in the United States as the Vietnam War – would then rage on for twenty more years. Read more…
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