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12/31/05 - Aeon Flux: (Graeme Revell) --All New Review-- "When
a studio
denies screenings for critics on a project as highly advertised as Aeon
Flux, you know
that something is wrong. A few notable exceptions have popped up over the years
(Psycho
being the best known), but for the most part, studios have little interest in
treating critics
to screenings of films that they know are downright awful. And while Aeon
Flux may
never be found in those "world's worst films" categories, it been thoroughly
slapped around by
those critics who went ahead and viewed it. One critic had the outstanding response
of saying
that the film is "as enjoyable as acid reflux." Based on the animated MTV series,
the film's
story is set 400 years in the future and tells us
that the remaining 5 million or so people who have survived a terrible disease are
confined to
one city, and that city is controlled by one powerful family. Inevitably, of
course, people
want outside of the walls of the city, and a supertechno assassin is dispatched by
these
rebels to kill off the people holding their curiosity in check...." ** Read the
entire review.
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12/28/05 - The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3-D: (Robert
Rodriguez/Graeme Revell/John Debney) --All New Review-- "Director Robert
Rodriguez has
an important decision to make about his career. Is he going to continue producing
gripping,
mature pictures such as El Mariachi and Sin City? Or is he going to
let his
apparent fetish for video game-inspired kiddie adventures with wannabe rock star
pre-teens
destroy his career? These Spy Kids types of films really are becoming a
borderline form
of fetish for Rodriguez, and his methodology of producing them often results in an
awkward
situation regarding the music for the pictures. To label it plainly: Rodriguez is
an
equal-opportunity employer when it comes to his scores. It is easy to accept the
premise that
Rodriguez prefers to write the primary themes for his films but does not have the
time or
expertise to flesh them out to the levels
necessary for the finished product. There's nothing wrong with getting some
assistance for the
score-writing duties..." ** Read the entire
review.
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12/24/05 - Brokeback Mountain: (Gustavo Santaolalla) --All New
Review--
"First published as a short story in The New Yorker in 1997, E. Annie Proulx's
heartbreaking
tale has been adapted with much acclaim by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana for Ang
Lee's full,
feature length film, Brokeback Mountain. The true mastery of the film in
critics'
viewpoint has been Lee's ability to tell the story with the kind of intimate focus
on personal
tragedy that keeps Brokeback Mountain from becoming a melodramatic farce or
a
stereotypical "gay cowboy" representation. Two male ranch hands unexpectedly
discover their
affection for each other as teens and immediately deny that their haphazard
intercourse ever
happened. As they marry and carry on with their lives over several years, they go
on "fishing
trips" that yield no fish, and the inevitable sadness of their predicament
manifests itself
when the wife of one of
them finally confronts the men after witnessing them kiss. By the end, it's hard to
know if
everything we're seeing exists in flashback or as part of an imagined future..."
*** Read the entire
review.
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12/22/05 - The Greatest Game Ever Played: (Brian Tyler) --All New
Review-- "Not everyone thinks of a round of golf as the greatest game ever
played,
including George Carlin, who famously called for all the American golf courses (and
cemeteries, of course) to be churned up and used for affordable, low cost housing.
The
participants of the also famous 1913 U.S. Open golf championship would hardly
agree, for it is
that sole event that occupies the entire story of Bill Paxton's The Greatest
Game Ever
Played. There couldn't be a further departure for Paxton from his last (and
first) film,
Frailty, with The Greatest Game Ever Played serving a very familiar
process of
presenting a feel-good sports story with a touch of history, romance, and, of
course, the
obligatory underdog plot. True to historical record, Francis Ouimet was an
underpriviledged
American amateur with a 10-year-old caddy who defeated renown British player Harry
Vardon in
the U.S. Open in 1913. Vardon is a likable character, having grown up in similar
circumstances, and the only villain of the story is a newspaper owner..." *** Read
the entire review.
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12/19/05 - Stealth: (BT) --All New Review-- "Why bother?
Really, the
quality of director's Rob Cohen films must be contributing, in some
minor form or another, to the gradual dumbing down of America. From XXX to
The Fast
and the Furious, and now with the ultra-dumb Stealth, there seems no
purpose to
these video game films other than to a) develop video games from them, and b) make
lots of
stuff blow up. Spectacularly unrealistic and frightfully illogical, W.D. Richter's
script for
Stealth actually tries to touch on an ethical debate contemplated in films
since
2001. What happens if the ultra powerful and sleek new flying drone of the
military is
magically struck by lightning and given an intelligence of its own? And what then
if it starts
downloading songs from the Internet and destroying innocent targets? Only the guys
who get off
on a flyboy buzz will find anything redeeming in Stealth, and amid its
scenes of
exploding and crumbling skyscrapers or utterly ridiculous dialogue..." ** Read the
entire review.
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12/16/05 - Proof: (Stephen Warbeck) --All New Review-- "While
it is very
tempting to compare Proof, based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning play by David
Auburn, to
Ron Howard's A Beautiful Mind from four years ago, the two films differ in
that A
Beautiful Mind was about a crazy mathematician whereas Proof is about
the daughter
of a crazy mathematician. Both films reflect the tortured tales of how the madness
of the
mathematician affects the family around him, and both handle dementia in an
extremely
intelligent fashion. Launched from its success on stage, Proof received some
worthy
critical responses on film, although many have said that some of the theatrical
flare has been
lost in the film version. Director John Madden has experienced success before, and
it was his
teaming with Gwyneth Paltrow and composer Stephen Warbeck that assisted his success
with
Shakespeare in Love, including some controversial Academy Awards. The
comfortable
relationship between director and composer has led to a score for
Proof..." *** Read the entire review.
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12/13/05 - The Chumscrubber: (James Horner) --All New Review--
"Black
comedies about the pitfalls of American suburban life for the teenage crowd have
experienced a renaissance in the last ten years, aided by the immensely popular
mainstream hit,
American Beauty. No film festival would
be complete with several entries in this genre (convenient, of course, because of
the low budgets
required to make them), and a hyped favorite
at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival was The Chumscrubber. A film lauded by
debutant
director Arie Posen and screenwriter Zac Stanford,
The Chumscrubber is a look at life in Hillside, the shallow and medicated
suburb of
average Americana (in this genre of film, at least)
in which parents don't care about their kids, the kids are hopelessly ingrained in
drugs, and a
character who defeats nasties with his
detached head in a post-armageddon world of a video game both inspires the teens
and the title of
this film. The irony is that if you've never
wandered about life in the drugged daze that these teens are experiencing, you'd
never be able to
relate..." ** Read the entire
review.
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12/11/05 - Jarhead: (Thomas Newman) --All New Review-- "It's
been several
years since the initial Hollywood films about the first Gulf War began putting the
Los Angeles
twist on America's endeavor in that time and place,
though 2005's Jarhead comes from perhaps the most notable of circumstances
thus far.
Directed by American Beauty's Sam Mendes, Jarhead is based on the
best-selling
2003 memoir of the same name by Anthony Swofford, who served a frustrating tour in
the first
Gulf War. While some groups may be inclined to lump this film in with the second
Gulf War (and
indeed, some of the problems and emotions that existed in 1991 still prevail in
some pockets
of the military in Iraq the second time around), the movie makes clear the
difference between
the short invasion that was 1991 and the prolonged occupation that is 2003 and
beyond. The
focus of Jarhead is an intensely personal one, and tells of the narrator's
experiences
as a 20-year-old sniper who spends his young adulthood preparing for war and is
then obsolete
by the time he actually arrives on the battlefield...." *** Read the entire
review.
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12/8/05 - The Brothers Grimm: (Dario Marianelli) --All New
Review--
"Whenever you approach a Terry Gilliam film, whether you're a film reviewer, a
soundtrack
reviewer, or an everyday moviegoer, you have to expect yourself to be transported
into a
macabre world of fantasy where terrible things happen simply because they're funny
and
unexpected. There has been a significant time since Gilliam's last project, and
while The
Brothers Grimm showed much promise in its long evolution, the film will be
placed like
many of his other efforts on the back burner of cult status. Since working with
Michael Kamen
on Brazil and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, Gilliam has rarely
put forth
much attention to the quality of the scores for his films, nor have those films
really needed
spectacular musical accompaniment. But the big screen interpretation of the fable
for The
Brothers Grimm proved to be an exception. To describe the plot of this tale
would do too
much injustice to the film..." ***** Read the entire
review.
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12/6/05 - The Fog: (Graeme Revell) --All New Review-- "When
did it become
cool and/or fiscally viable to remake John Carpenter's already suspect horror
movies of the
1970's and 1980's? One that certainly didn't need a remake was The Fog, a
1980 film
from Carpenter that depicts a small coastal town haunted by ghosts of a shipwreck
that take
their revenge by embodying themselves in a killer fog. In the somewhat faithful
2005 remake,
that deadly condensation manages to cause spontaneous fires, attacks by killer
seaweed, and
the always popular demise of a character via uncontrolled garbage disposal. There
is no amount
of ridicule that can adequately describe just how hideous this remake is; without
the
stylistic ingenuity of Carpenter's direction, the new version of The Fog
fails despite
a significantly higher budget. Even Carpenter's involvement as a producer could not
steer the
film past its critical doom and box office floundering. This had to be one of the
projects in
which you knew the dismal outcome of the picture..." ** Read the entire review.
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12/4/05 - Bee Season: (Peter Nashel) --All New Review-- "The
greatest
irony about the film adaptation of Bee Season is that most of the people who
watch the
trailers for the film and are unfamiliar with Myla Goldberg's 2000 best-selling
novel on which
it is based will have no idea what they're getting into when they watch it.
Seemingly a story
about how a family copes with its internal demons while its daughter becomes a
spelling bee
champion, Bee Season only uses these concrete story elements to tell a
larger tale
about religion. The film involves the Jewish concept of the Chosen People, capable
of reaching
the ear of God through letters via the ancient mystical practices of Kabbalah.
Subplots in the
film involve acts that are done in the name of Tikkun Olam (a Hebrew phrase that
means "to
repair the world") and spiritual journeys at a Hare Krishna temple. It is a dreary
tale of
self-exploration, almost in a documentary style, and even its scenes at the
spelling bees,
with hundreds of young hopefuls in attendance, are portrayed with a dull
lack of enthusiasm..." ** Read the entire
review.
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12/1/05 - Oliver Twist: (Rachel Portman) --All New Review--
"Charles Dicken's first full novel
was published in 1838, and as such, Oliver Twist is among the author's
better known stories about early
19th-century London. It has been put onto the big screen several times, including
most notably Sir David Lean's
classic 1948 version and the Academy Award winning musical adaptation of the stage
hit Oliver! in 1968. There
are subthemes that not only connect the 2005 version by Roman Polanski to his
previous film, The Pianist, but
also to the director's own childhood. Polanski's intent in remaking Oliver
Twist once again was to place an
emphasis on the humor and eccentricities of the larger-than-life characters rather
than get caught up in the doom and
gloom of the destitute side of life in London at time. The usual score collaborator
for Polanski, Wojciech Kilar, has
taken a leave of absence from film music, which is unfortunate, given that Kilar's
often dark sensibilities would seem
to suit the Dickens story quite well...." **** Read the entire
review.
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