Last Friday, Spike Jonze's adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are hit theaters, carrying in its wake the expected critical reaction. My local reviewer found the film profoundly boring, a claim I can't counter as I haven't seen the movie, but one line in his review did provoke me to a response:
"A word about the creatures. Constructed by the Jim Henson workshop with their faces digitally augmented in post production, these towering, shaggy, overstuffed monsters perfectly capture the look of Sendak’s timeless illustrations. That’s why this film has one of the coolest trailers around." [emphasis added]
Have you seen the trailer? If not, or if it has been a few months, take a gander before continuing on:
Reading that line, I was amazed that he actually believed that creatures themselves made the trailer. They were certainly a part of the equation, and I'll admit to a thrill of recognition this summer when I first saw the preview before Harry Potter. The creatures are Sendak's drawings come to life. But the reviewer seems to forget that trailers are primarily visuals and music. The trailer for Where the Wild Things works because the trailer was cut to a song that perfectly matched the film's intent.
Most trailers are cut to portions of the temp track, a rough outline of previously composed music the director gives to the composer as a guide for the type of music he'd like to hear in the final mix. And most directors know little instrumental music other than film music, which is why James Horner's Aliens or Wojciech Kilar's Bram Stoker's Dracula keep getting used over and over. But occasionally the people who create trailers take the time to find a perfect marriage of sound and image, resulting in a powerful trailer.
Think back to earlier this year with the Watchmen trailer. The trailer opens with two cues from Philip Glass's Koyaanisqatsi, "Prophecies" and then "Pruit Igoe." This is movie music, sure, but it moves at the same pace as the images on screen. Then, in a stroke of beauty, the music segues into Muse's "Take a Bow," a song that Matthew Bellamy claims is based on his listening to Glass's soundtracks. But beyond the musical coordination, the song's lyrics include the lines:
"And our freedom's consuming itself, What we've become is contrary to what we want Take a bow.
Death, you bring death and destruction to all that you touch."
These lines summarize much of Watchmen in a few short words. In other words, the trailer is a perfect match to the movie and works profoundly on multiple levels
Returning to Where the Wild Things Are, the trailer opens with footsteps, birds, and hints of the wild things themselves, allowing the impact of seeing those creatures to fully register. But then, the song "Wake Up" by Arcade Fire enters halfway through the song with these lyrics:
"If the children don't grow up, our bodies get bigger but our hearts get torn up. We're just a million little gods causin' rain storms turnin' every good thing to rust."
Here is a song about growing up and closing off your heart to wonder and love and emotion accompanying a trailer for an adaptation of a book that celebrated how the imagination of children allows them to deal with complex emotions. And when the wild rumpusing begins, the trailer circles back to the beginning of the song, a wordless vocal jam that moves in tempo with the images. Sure the creatures startle and amaze us, but the music grabs our heartstrings and plays them perfectly so we respond intellectually and emotionally to the trailer. That's why some trailers last and why some draw us into the theaters to watch films.
Last night I gave a talk on Virgil Thomson's film scores for Pare Lorentz's Depression-era documentaries The Plow that Broke the Plains and The River. If you have never seen the films, they are powerful statements on how mankind has recklessly harmed the environment and the effects the nation was reaping at the time from agricultural over-cultivation (just think of the Dust Bowl) and deforestation (the regular flooding along the Mississippi and her tributaries). Thomson's scores work to crawl under your skin and help you feel the impact of the searing images on screen, and I firmly believe the films would not be half as successful as they are without the music. Though there is narration, these are essentially silent films and the music tells you what to feel long before the narrator in most cases.
But as beautifully constructed as the films are, as I was researching them for my presentation I was struck by their genesis more than their outcome. Both of these films were financed by the government. They are New Deal propaganda pure and simple. When Rexford Tugwell took the reins of the Resettlement Administration, he recognized that many were going to view its job of telling people where to live and how as socialistic (a view that did ultimately force him out of that job). Hoping to cut off criticism, he established an office of information for the RA and began churning out an amazing number of images that define the way we see the Great Depression. In the Photography Project, top-notch artists documented the Depression's human impact - resulting in the most iconic image, Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother. In the Special Skills Division, Sidney Robertson (who later married Henry Cowell) collected folk songs in California, music that was the basis for Woody Guthrie's career. And in the Film Project The Plow that Broke the Plains and The River transformed the way the RA and the Tennessee Valley Authority were viewed by the public. All these artistic products were paid for by the government, were produced during Roosevelt's bid for a second term, and told Americans why the New Deal was necessary.
We often moan about the ways politicians spin ideas and manipulate images from Bush's "Mission Accomplished" banner to Obama's greek columned acceptance speech in Denver to the infamous death panels. But to see these films with newly recorded soundtracks was to realize that today's politicans are inept at harnessing the media to manipulate the public. No wonder Congress in Roosevelt's day scuttled his attempt to have a joint session viewing of The Plow that Broke the Plains.
On Monday, I began furiously prepping my film music class for Tuesday evening. We've reached the 1980s in the class and I was sorting through various scores and movies to determine what I wanted to play for the class. Since the late 1970s and early 1980s saw the fruition of the synthesized score, I wanted to play them an example, but figured most had heard the use of synthesizer in action films, and I was already showing two science-fiction movies so needed some contract, otherwise I would have played bits of Vangelis's excellent score for Blade Runner. Suddenly, Maurice Jarre's intriguing score for Witness came to mind and so I pulled it off the shelf and began writing about it.
I covered Maurice Jarre two weeks ago when we were in the 1960s and we discussed his magnificent score for Lawrence of Arabia. I gave a bit of his background (his training was in percussion, which points to why his scores are so rhythmically based), flashed a picture, and moved on. I decided I needed to flash a picture with his birth date again, so I googled him to make sure I had it correct. And there, buried a few links down, was Maurice Jarre's obituary. I teach contemporary music; composers die and I dutifully mark in their death dates in my notes, slides, and handouts. But I had never had a composer die between two mentions in my class two weeks apart.
Even that oddity wasn't what really struck me. Instead, I was stunned that I hadn't heard anything. Nothing. Here was the composer of Lawrence, Doctor Zhivago, Fatal Attraction, Witness, and Mad Max III, yet few in the American press or blogosphere took note. So, here's a bit of Jarre, his overture for Lawrence of Arabia, his greatest accomplishment:
Surprisingly, Jarre was not the first choice for the score. Director David Lean wanted Malcolm Arnold, who scored Lean’s Bridge on the River Kwai, then tried for William Walton, then Benjamin Britten, then Richard Rogers (of Rogers and Hammerstein), and finally Aram Khatchaturian. But Jarre brought an admirable restraint to the film. Yes, he used a full symphony orchestra, but also an electronic instrument – the ondes martenot, a plucked string instrument from the region – the cithara, and an Arabian hand drum – darbuka. He then used his timbres to produce two sounds: English tunes that represent Lawrence and the West and Arabian tunes to represent the land and Lawrence in Arabia. A forward-looking score for its time.
In my film music class last night, we were discussing how music can work to tell us new or deeper things about the characters we see on screen. One of my examples was John Barry's score for Goldfinger, a score often dismissed as "suited to the slick, hard-edge, dehumanized nature of those films."
I find the score a fascinating one because Barry conflates Bond's theme with that of Goldfinger's, in essence showing that both of them are cold, calculating, and deal in death. In other words, the music makes a more complicated figure out of Bond than we usual think.
This notion of using the Bond theme to dig at untold dimensions in the character began with Barry, but I find David Arnold keeping the tradition alive in his scores for the new Bond movies. I just reviewed Quantum of Solace and found new ways in which the Bond character is developed through the music. Hope you enjoy reading it.
After a wait of nearly 20 years, a new Indiana Jones movie hit theaters this summer. And while fans of the film had to wait almost two decades for a new chapter in the story, film music fans had to wait nearly three for a comprehensive collection of the film's signature music.
Released last month, Indiana Jones: The Soundtracks Collection is a milestone set as it features the most complete recording of the music from Temple of Doom (one of the quirkiest and most successful of the scores) and newly remastered sound for all four scores. While not the amazing success of the Star Wars or Lord of the Rings collections, the set is certainly worth the $40 it currently lists for on Amazon.com. You can read my complete review of the Indiana Jones set for more details.
You may have noticed that for the past month under our "currently watching" tab we've had the HBO miniseries John Adams listed. We haven't actually been watching it that long (it is only seven episodes), I've just forgotten to change it out for the past few weeks.
Turns out that it was serendipitous that I did not because my most recent score review was for the soundtrack release of music from that production.
Joy and I were both riveted by the miniseries - it is the kind of movie that you wish all Americans would see just to learn a bit of their history. The production design was at pains to capture the feel of Colonial America. The music? Not so much. It is fairly standard issue scoring, not too imaginative. You can read my specific critiques in the full review if you're interested.
Back in 2003, I reviewed Danny Elfman's score and the movie Hulkpositively. I remembered when my review came out that I felt distinctly in the minority in my opinion on the film and the score. It took a few hearings for me to fully hear what Elfman was going for, but once I did I was completely on board with his vision.
With that in mind, I gave Craig Armstrong's "The Incredible Hulk" a few hearings just to make sure I was hearing it correctly (which is why my review is so late after the film's opening). Unlike five years ago, my opinion did not improve. Too often the score falls into standard action cliches from the past 10 years - pounding synth work, vaguely ethnic percussion, and a pedal point for it all to rest upon. Still, as you will read, there is a bright side to the score, especially in its distribution. Hope you enjoy.
We're back after a long hiatus. There are plenty of stories to tell, and they will be told, but a quick post to get you back in the groove of stopping by here on your daily rotation.
I just finished a review of the The City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra and Choir's recording of music from Tim Burton's films. I was a natural to do this review as I've long admired (and reviewed) Elfman's scores for Burton's films, but this release was made to capitalize on the acclaim for Burton's version of Sweeney Todd and so opens with three cuts from the musical and has nothing from the best Elfman score for a Burton film, Big Fish.
Still, although I usually do not appreciate symphonic orchestras taking on film music as a way to make a little extra money, this release works. Just ignore the hopelessly convoluted title and check it out.
Night before last, Joy and I stayed up late, enjoying the last few days of our winter break before classes wash over us next week. We watched a movie recommended to me by a student last year in my Romantic music class who felt it would appeal to my sensibilities in numerous ways.
He was right.
The movie is an epic from 1982 by Werner Herzog called Fitzcarraldo. The story follows a madman or a dreamer, depending on your point of view, who desperately wants to bring an opera house to the jungles of Peru and have Enrico Caruso and Sarah Bernhardt (even though the actress could not sing) open the house. To raise money for the project, he options land to harvest rubber. The only problem is that the land lies downriver beyond impassable rapids. Noticing another river runs close by, Fitzcarraldo determines to sail down the second river and then drag his steamship overland to the first river, bypassing the rapids.
The film is famous for its troubled production, not unlike Coppola's Apocalypse Now, another film about madmen in the jungle. Cast members quit and were hospitalized, half the production was shot twice, and Herzog decided to attempt Fitzcarraldo's plan, having his crew drag a 360-ton boat up a 40-degree incline and leading to a mutinous cast and crew. Perhaps as a result of Herzog's focus on making his vision come true, the film is meandering, a bit overlong, and everything after the boat crosses land fills like an anti-climax. But there are images throughout the movie that are breathtaking and searing.
The sequence that most haunts me days later is when Fitzcarraldo, abandoned by all but three of his crew members and hunted by natives who have killed every other expedition down the river, climbs to the top of the boat and begins playing Caruso records. The steamship, plowing through the water, is quickly surrounded by hand-dug canoes as the natives listen in surprise and awe, stroking the ship as though it were an apparition. It is a striking scene, and one echoed later as we the audience watch in surprise and awe as the steamship is pulled over land while Caruso sings from the top, a ghostly voice haunting the production.
The scene impressed me for many reasons, but perhaps most for its use of opera. I have long been fascinated by the way modern films incorporate opera into their structure. Opera is such an art of artifice and is so overly emotional that multiple meanings can be grafted onto it, especially by a public that does not understand the meaning of the words. However, I have found that in the past thirty years, opera has come to symbolize evil more than anything else in film, and especially wealthy, arrogant, intellectual evil. Perhaps most famously that connection was made with Hannibal Lector in the series of films beginning with Silence of the Lambs. In that character, the purest, most chilling evil, dispassionate about every activity including death, was given music that was exactly the opposite. As he committed horrible acts, beautiful music flowed on, enveloping the viewer and charging their reaction further, heightening their response.
Opera is strange in that way - so many ideas can be grafted onto it that it serves multiple purposes in film. However, this notion of opera equating with evil has truly permeated film beyond any other connection. From its beginning, the television recounting of Superman's origins Smallville has traded in convention comic book and movie cliches. It does so sometimes to its advantage and sometimes to its hilarious disadvantage, but because of this trend, I find it useful in viewing what musical and visual tropes have become de facto in our shared language. Since Lex Luther was not evil at the show's outset, an evil Luther was provided in his father, Lionel, and every time Clark or Lex entered Lionel's office (his lair, if you will), opera was playing. Lionel's evil essence vibrated in the very air around the main characters. Since Lionel is wealthy, upper class, and cruel, the cliche dictates that opera must be his musical marker.
In this scene, Lionel is contemplating suicide, but even in a fractured state of mind, opera surrounds and identifies him:
What strikes me as most interesting about these uses of opera as sign of evil is that lyrics are hardly ever important. Lionel is listening to "Je crois entendre encore" from Bizet's The Pearl Fishers, a beautiful song about longing for a lost lover and the divine rapture those dreams give. He is not pinning under the stars for a beautiful woman, he is fixated on ending his pain and suffering.
This disconnect between the words of an aria and the onscreen image has been carried to an extreme by the recent dip into irony that operatic uses for evil have taken. I first remember noticing this type of use in The Untouchables, where Al Capone orders Sean Connery's character Jim Malone to be killed. The hit takes place while Capone is at the opera, enjoying I Pagliacci:
This scene is wonderful because Capone is crying, empathizing with Pagliacci who, in his aria "Vesti la giubba," is pouring out his pain at having to make people laugh while he is crying on the inside. As Capone's minion delivers the news of Malone's death, Capone does the opposite of Pagliacci, laughing through his tears of sadness to arrive at an indescribable elation.
However, most directors use opera in fights in this way:
In the background, "La donna è mobile" is playing while the Punisher and his assailant battle. "La donna è mobile" is about the fickleness of women and why men shouldn't trust them. So unless the director was going for understated homo-erotic content, an idea I sincerely doubt, he just wanted bouncy opera to ironically counterpoint his brutal fight scene. But even given the benefit of the doubt, the music does not fit, the irony falls flat.
Sometimes, however, using the sound of opera without any concern for the words results in powerful moments. Consider this scene from The Shawshank Redemption:
Andy is playing "Sull'aria" (also known as the Letter Duet) from Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro. In the duet, Countess Almaviva and her maid Susanna are plotting to trick the Count and so are writing a letter dictating where the Count will meet Susanna who will actually be Almaviva in disguise. What does all this upper vs. lower class deception have to do with men in prison? Nothing. But the music is some of Mozart's most beautiful and is truly transporting, a feeling perfectly captured in this scene.
Perhaps the best use of opera in film is when the feelings of the characters in the film are translated, shared, and magnified by the feelings expressed in the opera. Consider this scene from Life is Beautiful:
Here, Guido is desperately in love with and attempting to woo his future wife Dora. His feeling toward his love are perfectly expressed by Nicklausse's words to Giulietta in the "Barcarolle" from Contes d'Hoffmann: Lovely night, oh night of love, smile upon our joys! Night much sweeter than the day, oh beautiful night of love! The aria then reappears towards the end of the film, providing added resonance for the tragedy that unfolds. Music in this film is used to shape the character's intentions, provide links between earlier moments in the film, and underscore emotion. It is one of the best examples of the use of opera in film.
I could go on, obviously, as opera continues to be used in myriad ways in film, both well and poorly. Perhaps these examples only speak to the power of music, that so many differing ideas can be layered into it as it expresses and communicates with each one of us individually.
I must confess that with this review and the last one, I've reviewed back to back two of my favorite film scorers working today. And, unfortunately, in both cases they did not live up to expectations. Danny Elfman's new score for The Kingdom is perhaps the deepest cut of all because I was looking forward to his return to adult action-adventure movies after a few years of scoring children's films. But alas, he has descended into noodling. Interesting noodling, but noodling nonetheless. You can read all about it here.
While waiting a few hours for my plane in Detroit, I managed to finish my latest review and get it posted. Ang Lee's Lust, Caution (Sie Ji) is already generating controversy for its explicit sex scenes and its designation as originating in Taiwan, China, a sticky political situation to be sure. In my book, the more interesting controversy is how similar Alexandre Desplat's score for the movie sounds to his excellent The Painted Veil from last year. A bit less caution and a bit more daring on Desplat's part would have made this a more satisfying score.
After the light and fluffy No Reservations I posted last week, I must have felt the need for some dark apocalypse brought on by giant mutant insects on a far away planet. That's right, I've posted my first official review of a video game score for Epic's Gears of War. With all the hype over Halo 3 in the past few weeks, it seemed the right time to delve into this newly emerging genre that has already produced composers like Michael Giacchino of Ratatouille fame. So, enjoy!
After a long hiatus from reviewing film scores, I'm back with a review of this summer's nod to female, adult movie-goers, No Reservations. While the movie did poorly at the box office, the soundtrack isn't that bad. It has several excellent recordings of standard Italian arias and pop standards and is an enjoyable listen. Too bad the same can't be said of Philip Glass's score. In any case, if you're interested, you'll find the review here.
Time to finish up my quick discussion of the scores for my birthday film festival. Feel free to agree, disagree, or wonder what in the world I'm thinking.
The Producers - I need to start with a quick caveat: I have not seen the musical version or the movie of the musical, though I admit to a perverse glee in considering that a movie was made of a musical made of a movie about the making of a musical. My head just hurts thinking about it.
John Morris is not a widely-recognized name in film scoring. He was a favorite of Mel Brooks's and wrote the scores for most of the writer/director's movies. He also wrote the score for Dirty Dancing, though raise your hand if you can hum any tune from that movie except for "The Time of My Life." Overall, this low profile fits what I heard in The Producers. The music is unobtrusive and mainly pastiche. It gives you exactly what you would expect, exactly when you would expect it, and manages not to get in the way of the words or visuals. In fact, Mel Brooks helped write the film's most memorable music, the opening number of "Springtime for Hitler." All in all, the film's music reinforced the commonly-held prejudice that comedy scores lack musical sophistication because the overall sound design is more important in getting laughs.
Vertigo - Herrmann is a master. His scores for Hitchcock films are among his most daring and successful. Vertigo stands alongside Psycho as his greatest achievement.
What more can you say?
Next, please.
There is plenty to say, and plenty have said it, a fact you probably gleaned from my earlier comment that I heard two papers on the music this year alone. Alex Ross has written one of my favorite discussions of the film and the music, and you should definitely read it. But even without following the link, you have to admit that Vertigo is one of the great works of the 20th century. I'm planning on adding a day in the spring to my Music History Survey class on film music and we'll probably look at Vertigo. To give you an idea of how good a score it is, think of the opening credits. Saul Bass designed swirling, twisting spirals that are so good at communicating vertigo that Joy had to look away because her head was already hurting that night. Behind those images, Herrmann's main title music endless circles through third relationships, hinting at a tonal center, but never giving us one. Those hints of tonality pull at our musical perception in the same way the spinning images do our visual and together give us a complete picture. They tell us that all is not as it seems and we will be pulled off our center by the movie.
Herrmann's music works this way through most of the movie. There are long, long stretches with no dialogue, but the music tells us what is going on inside the actor's heads. It creates an atmosphere as clearly as Chinatown, but is exactly the opposite. Where Goldsmith uses the barest minimum of materials to define Chinatown's corruption, Herrmann overloads the film with Post-Romantic lushness to create madness and obsession. It is truly a brilliant score.
The Rules of the Game - Music is quite possibly the weakest element of this sterling film and may be why it continues to rank below Citizen Kane on all-time-best lists. Kane boasts Herrmann's first film score and the music adds immeasurably to the film. The Rules of the Game boasts costumes by Coco Chanel, but lacks cohesive original music. Instead, Renoir used fragments from many different composers, most notably Saint-Saëns. The music works to some degree in establishing the characters' pedigree, but does not help the narrative or reveal anything about the characters beyond the surface. A musically disappointing end to a marvelous week in film and music.
You might have noticed last week that I never mentioned the scores to the films we watched. You might have even thought to yourself that it was strange how I never mentioned the scores to the films we watched. After Tuesday's movie, I decided that I needed a full post just to discuss the music.
The Seven Samurai - When the title cards flash up at The Seven Samurai's opening, strains that could have come from a Hollywood production issue forth. The dissonance between the images of feudal Japan and music of Western European derivation is harsh, but expected given Japan's musical history in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Western music gained a foothold in Japan during the Meiji period's rapid modernization. It began when military wind band music was imported and adopted alongside Western military tactics and arms. These instruments were followed quickly by string and keyboard instruments until, by the middle of the 20th century, most Japanese children were trained on Western instruments instead of traditional Japanese ones. Even beyond childhood training, composers in particular gravitated towards Western compositional idioms in the 1950s as a backlash against the ultra-nationalist sentiment that pervaded the early Showa era during WWII. Many agreed with Toru Takemitsu (perhaps Japan's greatest composer of the mid-20th century who later wrote the score for Kurosawa's film Ran) who claimed to regret his Japanese heritage and allowed himself “to gaze only into the mirror of Western music and Western art.”
As a result, the music for The Seven Samurai is unremarkable. It serves its purpose, but the only times it really adds in a new way to the film are the moments it breaks into traditional Japanese instruments. These instruments are brought into play to represent the farmers, the lowest social class of the film and the constant object of scorn and because of this association, they gain an air of being a lower order of instruments. But their sound is distinct and powerful to Western audiences in generating time and place. Film music is an interesting phenomenon to me in that it doesn't have to be from a time or place to evoke that time or place; just consider the fallacy of a late 19th century orchestra playing for a Shakespearean drama. But for a foreign film to work for Americans, it almost needs that layer of verisimilitude.
Chinatown - Jerry Goldsmith's score for Chinatown certainly fits into the category of music for a time and place but not of that time or place. Although he used numerous popular tunes from the 1930s, most of Goldsmith's underscore was written for an ensemble of four pianos, four harps, percussion, strings, and solo trumpet. Not exactly an ensemble you would have found in 1930s LA., nor in any noir film from any era. But the sparse constructions that Goldsmith favors perfectly match the film's style and the percussive nature of the instruments echo the film's percussive dialogue and editing.
Goldsmith was known for taking chances on his scores; he wrote Planet of the Apes using the 12-tone language for goodness sakes. With Chinatown he practically avoided melody and harmony, making single lines that are almost pointillistic, like flecks of color, that weave in and out of one another. The result is unsettling during the film, not allowing you to relax into the narrative flow because you know there are things going on beyond what you are seeing. This score was much more effective than I expected, and rivals Vertigo for the best written of the week. Constantly surprising, I can't imagine the film succeeding on the same level without it.
I have a new review up for public consumption - Ratatouille by Michael Giacchino. The film opens this Friday, and if early reviews and the music are any indication, it is truly a family film that all will enjoy. A movie that appeals equally to children and grown-ups alike is a rare enough creature, but throw in the film's artistic achievement and you have one of my most anticipated movies of the summer.
Giacchino is probably best known as the composer of Aliasand Lost, two shows whose music is key in their identity, and The Incredibles, whose music both situated that film in the lineage of action/superhero films while helping it transcend that category. He's done some interesting stuff with Ratatouille, so check it out.
There's a new review up for your reading pleasure: Strange Weirdos: Music from and Inspired by the Film Knocked Up. I rarely review a completely song-driven score since such efforts are usually tangentially related to the films they accompany. I'm sure you can think of myriad examples where the music on those albums never appears in the film itself. But with Strange Weirdos, Wainwright has crafted a musical analog to the film's atmosphere. It is gently mocking, bitingly sentimental, and a welcome rebuttal to "Music Inspired By" scores.
It's that time of the month again, time for another film score review. Currently posted for your reading pleasure is Basil Poledouris's Red Dawn, newly restored and expanded from its original 1984 release.
For those of you not in the know, Red Dawn is a vision of America invaded and overtaken by the Soviet Union. The only people left to stand up to the evil commies are those 80s heartthrobs Patrick Swayze, Charlie Sheen, Lea Thompson, Jennifer Grey, and Powers Boothe.
The music is by the master of 80s testosterone movie music, Basil Poledouris, a Kansas City native best known for scoring Conan the Barbarian, thereby musically introducing us to the governator.
All in all, an interesting discussion and one I'd have to think about more deeply than is possible in my sleeplessness addled brain today, but I was most struck by the age of the film scores proposed as great by all the commentators. As is often the case, music from the past twenty years gets no respect.
Think about the AFI's list from a few years ago. Certainly the list proves that comedy scores are routinely ignored and has other problems like putting Vertigo and The Adventures of Robin Hood outside the top five, but notice that the most recent film score is from 1986.
Is this neglect a feature of our historical imagination? Most will argue that great art needs to stand the test of time to be considered great art, but why is twenty years the proper amount of time? Why do we seem chronically unable to recognize great art within our own time period?
Some of you know, but many of you don't, that I moonlight reviewing film scores. It all started back in 2002. I was finished with my masters degree, mired in my doctorate, and desperately needed to remember that I actually liked music.
I've always enjoyed listening to, discussing, and even dissecting music in movies, so I sent out an e-mail to a website I enjoyed reading, submitted a sample review, a two weeks later was a full-fledged critic.
Since then, I've averaged one or two reviews a month, both of recent releases and classic scores. When I post a new review over at Soundtrack.net, I'll link it here if you're interested.
My most recent review is of Rolfe Kent's score to Reign Over Me. I've previously reviewed his scores to Sideways and The Wedding Crashers, both examples of a score equal to its movie in terms of artistic accomplishment. In this case, however, the music is far better than the movie. Hope you enjoy.
