White Bird
Kensuke’s Kingdom
Twisters
The Union
Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F
The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare
Tv round-up
The Tattooist of Auschwitz
Off the beaten track, March 2024
Shogun
After sitting on the shelf for a couple of years, Marc Forster’s White Bird has finally been released in the US, to pretty disastrous financial returns. A sequel to 2017’s surprise hit Wonder, it picks up the story of a seriously disfigured young man, now attempting to make his way in a new school, as his grandmother visits him to recount her tales of life in Paris during the Nazi occupation.
Before turning to the topic at hand, I wanted to pay a little tribute to the MovieScore Media label. I remember reviewing their very first release, 18 years ago – when I was worried that they were a digital-only label, which I didn’t approve of at the time. (Now I’d be very happy if I never had to buy a CD again.) But that’s beside the point – throughout that time, Mikael Carlsson’s label has, again and again, focused on putting out music for films around the world that don’t necessarily have a high profile – and where the composers are not necessarily household names – but is good music.
I don’t know if you can remember this, but apparently a couple of years ago a film was released which did not star Glen Powell. I know it’s hard to believe but Google it if you must – I swear it’s true. Of all the recent Hollywood nostalgic trips back to films of the 1980s and 90s, Twisters is one of the bigger surprises, because I didn’t realise that people actually had any real nostalgia for the first one. Still, I guess they must and audiences have been lapping up this latest instalment in the “rival groups of people chase tornadoes with unclear motivation” genre. Mark Mancina – and I’ll whisper this quietly because I know it’s generally loved – wrote the score for the first film and I could never quite understand the enthusiasm for it, but he’s not the flavour of the month these days and Benjamin Wallfisch is on hand instead. I have to admit that I’ve not loved his music nearly as much since he moved from the smaller-scale dramas with which he made his name into Hollywood blockbusters, but there’s no doubting his chops as a composer and while I’ve not really got the sense of his personal voice coming through these big popcorn scores yet, he’s very capable of providing entertainment value and that’s what he’s done for Twisters.
I must admit, I spent so much of my time watching The Union concerned that Halle Berry’s hair covering at least one of her eyes at most times would make her life as a secret agent considerably more difficult than it really needed to be, that I may have missed all the good parts of the film, because I don’t really remember there being any – other than finding Rupert Gregson-Williams’s score to be a pleasant enough surprise that I would give the album a go. It’s a breezy, all-action affair which doesn’t perhaps break much new ground but its blend of John Powell-ish Bourne-style action music with a hint of David Arnold’s Bond sound makes for a satisfying listen.
Three decades after the pretty awful third instalment of the series, Eddie Murphy returned to his most famous role for a fourth one – and while it got a mixed reception, I enjoyed it. Films described as “action comedy” rarely do the comedy particularly well, but this film prompted me to go back to the original Beverly Hills Cop which is one of the best of the genre and while clearly Axel F isn’t as good as that one (or its first sequel), it’s entertaining and great to see Murphy on good form. Harold Faltermeyer’s main theme for the first film is one of the most iconic keyboard themes any film’s ever had and Lorne Balfe (who also worked with Faltermeyer material on Top Gun: Maverick) not surprisingly nods his head to it in his score for this new instalment, opening the album with a straight 2024 reworking of the whole theme and dotting elements from it in throughout.
I can’t quite believe it’s been twenty years since the great Jerry Goldsmith left us. His music has been part of my life for most of my life – still today, rarely a day goes by that I don’t listen to at least some of it. We all have different reasons for liking film music […]
When I first started making the move from my casual love of the music of films I loved while I was growing up into a more obsessive passion for film music and wanted to explore its golden age, there were only really two composers whose music from the golden age was particularly widely-available on CD […]
Loosely based on a true story, Guy Ritchie’s The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare tells the story of a secret WWII mission – commissioned by Winston Churchill – to take out an Italian ship docked on a small island off the west African coast and thereby cut off a key supply line to German u-boats in […]
We Were the Lucky Ones tells the story of the Kurc family during the second world war. Until it began they lived in the Polish city of Radom, but following Hitler’s invasion some went into hiding, some were taken to concentration camps and others flew to distant corners of the world. The score is jointly […]
While Heather Morris’s novelisation of the memoirs of Holocaust survivor Lale Sokolov has not been without its controversy (the Auschwitz Memorial Research Centre has criticised it for some factual inaccuracy), it is an extraordinary love story set against the backdrop of evil and I have found the tv adaptation to be harrowing and powerful. I […]
I’ve only done about three useful things in my life – I would like to do more but having no talent for anything is a bit of a barrier. Still, if I can do one useful thing through this website then it’s to highlight great music that you might not otherwise find out about, and […]
Film music isn’t a genre of music – it’s effectively all genres. For a while it was very largely dominated by romantic symphonic music, then jazz came into it, then other 20th century musical forms, and eventually we’ve ended up in a place where it can be anything. Likewise, there are so many ways of […]
With its striking visuals inspired by Studio Ghibli, Planet of Lana is a platforming video game featuring a girl and her cat which achieved positive notices on its release in 2023. Notable to readers of this website is its stirring music composed by Takeshi Furukawa, one of my favourite scores of the year. It starts […]
Seven years after writing one of his most extraordinary scores, for Patton, Jerry Goldsmith took on the challenge of scoring a biopic of another of the great WWII generals, Douglas MacArthur. He saw it as an interesting challenge, how to revisit a superficially similar thing but do it in a different way. And while in […]
An entertaining film about repression and prejudice, Gary Ross’s Pleasantville stars Tobey Maguire and Reese Witherspoon as a pair of siblings who find themselves transported inside a 50s tv show. As she in particular encourages the residents of the town to lose their inhibitions and start being themselves, the characters and locations gradually start shifting […]
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