Archive
PEARL – Tyler Bates and Timothy Williams
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Earlier in 2022 a mid-budget horror movie called X, directed by Ti West, became something of a cult sleeper hit. The story was set in the 1970s and follows a group of actors who drive to rural Texas to make a Deep Throat-style adult film, and end up meeting a terrible fate at the hands of the elderly couple whose home they use for filming. The movie had a cast of reasonably major actors – Jenna Ortega, Martin Henderson, Brittany Snow, Kid Cudi – but the breakout star was undoubtedly Mia Goth, who got rave reviews for playing both not only the aspiring pornographic actress Maxine Minx, but also Pearl, the elderly woman whose outwardly frail demeanor hides a truly horrific core. This new movie is a prequel to X, and was shot simultaneously with the first film; it again stars Goth, this time as the younger version of Pearl, and looks at her early life, and the circumstances which led to her… problems. Read more…
DEADPOOL 2 – Tyler Bates
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Considering that super hero movies in both the main Marvel and DC universes have become enormously serious affairs in recent years, it’s a breath of fresh air to have something like Deadpool 2 come along. A wholly irreverent, self-aware, and unashamedly profane affair, director David Leitch’s film is a sequel to the unexpectedly popular 2016 original. Ryan Reynolds returns in the lead role as the reluctant hero, a mutant in the X-Men timeline with the ability to heal himself from literally any wound or illness; in this film, he becomes embroiled in an unexpectedly complicated plot involving a time-travelling cyborg named Cable (Josh Brolin) who has travelled from the future to assassinate an anguished, overweight teenage mutant orphan with the ability to shoot fire from his hands (Julian Dennison from Hunt for the Wilderpeople). It touches on themes of family, revenge, and even child abuse, but the main selling point is the character of Deadpool himself, who is entirely aware of his ridiculous super hero circumstances, and who offers scathing commentary and snarky pop-culture references on his own adventures while dispatching the bad guys. It’s gleefully gory, and massively overblown, but has a surprisingly heartwarming and touching emotional core too, with the latter element involving Deadpool’s ex-stripper girlfriend (Morena Baccarin) and the members of the X-Force team that Deadpool assembles; I really enjoyed it. Read more…
GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOL. 2 – Tyler Bates
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The latest entry into the Marvel Cinematic Universe is Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, in which writer/director James Gunn blends epic space action and special effects with broad comedy and a whole host of unresolved daddy issues. In the aftermath of the events of the first film, the Guardians – Star Lord Peter Quinn (Chris Pratt), Gamora (Zoe Saldana), Drax (Dave Bautista), Rocket (Bradley Cooper), and the newly-sprouted Baby Groot (Vin Diesel) – are now working as heroes for hire, saving planets for a price. Unfortunately for the Guardians, the aftermath of their most recent job results in them running from the haughty and arrogant High Priestess of the Sovereigns (Elizabeth Debicki), space pirate Yondu Udonta (Michael Rooker), and Gamora’s vengeful sister Nebula (Karen Gillan), all of whom have different reasons for wanting to find the Guardians. Unexpectedly, the Guardians receive help from an omnipotent and powerful creature named Ego (Kurt Russell), who claims to be Quinn’s father… Read more…
GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY – Tyler Bates
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
I have waited for 15 years, ever since I heard his first major score for the 1999 film Rated X, to type the following sentence: finally, after all these years, here is a Tyler Bates score I enjoy quite a lot. I have made no secret of the fact that I have found the vast majority of Bates’s work over the past decade pretty underwhelming. Ignoring the controversy surrounding his work on 300, scores like The Day the Earth Stood Still, Watchmen, and Conan the Barbarian had the conceptual and thematic potential to inspire truly terrific music, but ended up being disappointments of the highest order. Guardians of the Galaxy, thankfully, is a significant step forward. While still lagging behind the upper echelons of the film scoring world, and despite still suffering from a curious lack of individual personality, it is nevertheless the best score of Bates’s career to date by a country mile, making use of a big orchestra, a big choir, electronics, and some rock and 1980s pop elements, all brought together under the banner of a rousing central theme. Read more…
THE DARKEST HOUR – Tyler Bates
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
As a general rule, and if I can help it, I don’t engage in hyperbole on Movie Music UK. A recurring cliché is that predominantly web-based reviewers are prone to proclaim every new thing “Best Something Ever” or “Worst Something Ever”, with no real sense of the history of whatever they are reviewing, and it’s a difficult stigma to overcome. Having said that, and with those points in mind, you will understand what it means why I say that Tyler Bates’ score for The Darkest Hour is one of the worst film scores I have ever heard. The last time I wrote something along these lines was when I reviewed Geoff Zanelli’s awful effort for the film Gamer in 2009. In my review of it I posted a picture of a polar bear with a migraine to illustrate how it made me feel; as such, here is a similarly illustrative visual representation of how I felt after listening to The Darkest Hour: Read more…
A SYMPHONY OF HOPE: THE HAITI PROJECT – Christopher Lennertz et al.
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
On January 12, 2010, the city of Port-au-Prince in Haiti was effectively flattened when it was struck by a magnitude 7.0 earthquake. Within a matter of seconds over 50,000 people had been killed, and over a million people left homeless. Diseases such as cholera blighted the survivors and thwarted relief efforts, and since then the humanitarian crisis in the country has reached staggering proportions, with over 250,000 residences destroyed and basic services and infrastructure left in ruins. Reacting to the global call for help, film composer Christopher Lennertz was inspired to act. Calling upon his fellow composers and other members of the Los Angeles film music community of musicians and engineers, Lennertz teamed up with the charity Hands Together to create A Symphony of Hope: The Haiti Project, a musical fundraising project intended to help the people of Haiti. Read more…
CONAN THE BARBARIAN – Tyler Bates
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Film music aficionados generally consider the score for the original 1982 version of Conan the Barbarian, written by the late great Basil Poledouris, to be one of the finest scores ever written. While remaking the film itself is, from my point of view, neither here nor there as I thought the original movie was greatly flawed, stepping into Poledouris’s musical shoes was always going to be a daunting task, no matter who the composer is. It turns out that the composer is Tyler Bates, returning to the historical action epic genre that first brought him to prominence – or should that be notoriety? – with 300 back in 2006.
The film, which is based on the sword-and-sorcery pulp stories of Robert E. Howard, is directed by Marcus Nispel and stars Hawaiian actor Jason Momoa in the classic Arnold Schwarzenegger role. The straightforward story follows the adventures of Conan, a vengeful warrior who marauds across the landscape of medieval Hyboria searching for those that murdered his father and slaughtered his village when he was a small boy. Read more…
A Symphony of Hope: The Haiti Project
Last Saturday, March 26th, I had the honor attending the recording sessions for “A Symphony of Hope: The Haiti Project” at the Eastwood Scoring Stage at Warner Brothers Studios in Burbank, CA. The brainchild of composer Christopher Lennertz, the Symphony is musical fundraising project designed to help the people of Haiti in their desperate time of need.
A year after the terrible earthquake which destroyed the lives of thousands of Haitians, it was clear to Lennertz that the need for assistance was greater than ever. In response Lennertz came up with the idea of the “Symphony of Hope”, and invited 25 leading film composers to collaborate with him on a project to benefit the Haiti Earthquake Relief fund. Read more…
HALLOWEEN II – Tyler Bates
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Cult director Rob Zombie’s ultra-violent re-imagining of the classic Halloween legend continues with Halloween II. Picking up immediately from where the last film left off, the film stars Scout Taylor-Compton as Laurie Strode, who has been taken to hospital to recover from the wounds inflicted on her by her psychotic, murderous brother Michael Myers (Tyler Mane). However, Laurie’s recuperation is short lived when the supposedly dead Michael returns, very much alive, intent on reuniting with his sister, even if it means murdering everyone in the hospital who stands in his way.
Despite an idiosyncratic cast that includes Malcolm McDowell, Brad Dourif and the director’s wife Sheri Moon-Zombie, Halloween II was called a “brutal, bloody, badly executed mess“, and was a comparative box office failure. The same adjectives could apply to Tyler Bates’ score. Read more…
WATCHMEN – Tyler Bates
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Watchmen is, by all accounts, one of the most important comic books – or graphic novels – ever written, a critical watershed in the history of the art, and one which set the standard by which all future efforts in the genre were judged. Written by Alan Moore in 1986 with illustrations by Dave Gibbons, it marked one of the first times that the comic book genre had tackled the world of the ‘super hero’ with adult themes and sophisticated contemporary political overtones. Moore’s story is set in a world where the United States is on the verge of nuclear war, vigilantism has been outlawed, and the traditional costumed superheroes are in retirement or working for the government. When one of these government sponsored superheroes is murdered, five other super heroes – Nite Owl, Doctor Manhattan, Ozymandias, the mysterious Rorschach, and the sexy latex-clad Silk Spectre – come out of retirement and team up to solve the mystery. Read more…
THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL – Tyler Bates
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The original movie of The Day the Earth Stood Still, released in 1951 and directed by Robert Wise, remains to this day a seminal, well-respected science fiction watershed, one of the first times that a movie in the previously much-maligned genre has actually had something important to say. The original film starred Michael Rennie as Klaatu, a visitor from another world who comes to Earth in the company of his giant robot, GORT, to warn that mankind’s increasingly violent nature will lead to the planet’s destruction if it doesn’t change. Also a major part of the original film was Bernard Herrmann’s classic eerie score, most notable for its groundbreaking use of a theremin. Read more…
DOOMSDAY – Tyler Bates
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Doomsday is a very peculiar, genre-bending British action movie – part Mad Max, part Night of the Living Dead, part Escape from New York – directed by Neil Marshall, who previously made the hugely entertaining Dog Soldiers and The Descent. The film is set in a post-apocalyptic Britain, some years after Scotland has been quarantined due to the onset of a deadly virus. When the virus emerges in London, the corrupt political leaders send Major Eden Sinclair (Rhona Mitra) to Scotland to find a cure, only to find that the country has become a lawless wasteland overrun by vicious punk rock marauders and armor-clad medieval warriors. The film also stars Bob Hoskins and Malcolm McDowall, and I have to admit that I thoroughly enjoyed it on a mindless, purely visceral level.
Read more…
HALLOWEEN – Tyler Bates
Original Review by Clark Douglas
And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who would attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. – Samuel L. Jackson, “Pulp Fiction”
Oh, how I loathed this movie. “Halloween” is one of the worst remakes you will see this year, or any year. It takes a fascinating premise and removes it of all it’s fascination. It takes memorable characters and makes them boring. It takes subtlety and turns it into overbearing obviousness. It takes what was previously unspoken and spells it out. It takes a movie that was creative and breathtaking and makes it dull and uninvolving. In addition to all of this, it is just plain mean and ugly. Read more…
300 – Tyler Bates
Original Review by Clark Douglas
You know, I’ve been rather critical lately of the way movies are advertised. “Bridge to Terabithia” and “Stranger than Fiction” are pretty notable examples. The first was billed as a “Narnia”-like fantasy, the second as a goofy concept comedy. If you’ve seen either of those films, you know just how ridiculous that is. But I must give credit to “300” for delivering pretty much exactly what it advertises: Half-naked men in boots and red capes shouting a lot and killing each other on various copper-toned computer-generated sets.
The film is based quite faithfully on the graphic novel by Frank Miller (“Sin City”), who based his story quite loosely on the famous historical tale of the 300 Spartans (I’m too lazy to re-tell it here, but it’s a lot like “The Alamo”). This story was originally put to film in the 1960’s under the title of “The 300 Spartans”, and indeed, it was Miller’s love for that film that inspired him to create this interpretation of the story. Read more…
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