Film and TV scores
michael kamen’s score to licence to kill is very reminiscent of his score for die hard. it has a very 80s sound to it, with the familiar james bond motifs grafted onto it. it makes sense; the two films are only a year apart.
the results aren’t too bad, though i didn’t particularly care for his die hard music, or kamen’s style in general. however, he does ok in the bond mode.
Wouldn’t you know? as soon as I bring up my film score classification difficulties, I am presented with yet another challenge. Fight Club. Both the film and the soundtrack by The Dust Brothers are, I do say, fantastic. but I am torn between keeping the score with my other filmtracks or moving it closer to its musical brethren. In either case, the fact remains that this is electronic music done right. It’s got great mood, nice beats, interesting sounds, is slow, is soft, is hard and is driving fast when it needs to be. Recommended.
Speaking of the Brothers Dust, where have they been lately? Fight club was released in 1999 and I haven’t seen or heard anything from them since. I know they’ve been doin’ the producer/mixer thing for a while, and i’m sure that Beck keeps them busy. But seriously, their independent work is so so good that it’s disappointing to see them working on other people’s projects and not their own. Though, the Nickel Bag remix of Hey Man Nice Shot… that’s kickin.
If I didn’t already know differently, I would never have guessed that the soundtrack to K-pax was from a movie. indeed, it plays more like a backroom-in-the-club chill-laced downtempo record than a film score.
This is the only record by Edward Shearmur that I have, so I don’t know whether this is out of the ordinary for him, but I must say that I thoroughly enjoyed it and I may have to check out his other works.
This revelation, however, adds the quandary of how to categorize it: it’s from a movie, thus I’ve had the genre tag in iTunes set to "score," my catch all for movie music. But looking over at discogs’ page for it, I found it listed under "ambient," "dub" and "modern classical" which are all appropriate.
So I’m considering changing it something more genre specific.
(I have a similar issue with The Mothman Prophecies, the score to which is closer to ambient minimalism than a traditional film music.)
in baseball that’s great. on the tunequest, not so much.
two danny elfman scores from 1996 made their way through my ears to my brain this week: mission: impossible and mars attacks! and while i enjoyed both films more than the general public seemed to, i had a mixed response to their scores.
this week marked the first in the 4 years i’ve owned those scores that i gave them any serious attention. if that seems like a familiar pattern around here, it’s because it is. about one-third of the Great Music Dump™ of 2001-2002 consists of film scores that i would get, give a cursory listen, then file away with the assumption that i’d be back to revisit them.
well, it didn’t quite work out that way.
like classical music, film scores take a lot of effort to get to know and fully appreciate. with the rapidity that i was adding new music to my collection at the time, there simply wasn’t enough opportunity to give each score the attention it deserved.
which brings me to the strange reversal of expectations for those two scores. giving both a serious consideration, i find it funny that mission: impossible is a fairly serious film of action, adventure and intrigue, yet its soundtrack is clever and lively and downright fun to listen to (especially elfman’s robust rendition of the M:I theme), while mars attacks! is a ridiculous and playful send-up of old sci-fi flicks, but its score is downright boring. i wasn’t even half-way through it before i was inclined to purge it from my collection, which was done.
so to recap: mission: impossible. yay. mars attacks! nay.
great film. great soundtrack (particularly the overture).
The score to the first Men in Black motion picture features the usual trademark quirkiness one would expect from composer Danny Elfman. This soundtrack is good, with stellar opening and closing title suites as well as good thematic material and interesting action cues. The score also noteworthy in that it’s one of the earliest examples that I can think of that mixes electronic percussion with a full-scale orchestra.
James Horner is a hack.
That’s my opinion. Some people think he’s a good or even great composer. I don’t. I happen think he has precisely 1.5 Good scores to his credit, namely Star Trek 2 and 3. Those two score, I also happen to think, are among the finest score of the late 20th century, with an asterisk. (the asterisk being that the highlights of each are highly derivative of Prokofiev).
I mention it because I listened to Horner’s score for the 2001 film Enemy at the Gates today and was once again frustrated by the music. Despite my accusation above, Horner can be a talented composer, I just think he’s fond of shortcuts that lower the quality of the final product. For example, this Enemy at the Gates score opens with the type of epic 15+ minute suite The River Crossing to Stalingrad that I am quite fond of. It effectively incorporates an all-male chorus and evokes the same Slavic character that I enjoy in Dvorak’s and Tchaikovsky’s work. Additionally, there are some really nice melodic passages throughout the score.
But…
And this is a deal-breaker, horner re-guritates the same "Menace" Motif that he originally wrote for StarTrek 2 (1982) and already recycled at least once for Aliens (1986). And this motif is everywhere in the score, ruining what might have been compelling music.
It’s not the motif’s fault really. It’s actually a simple and effective couple of bars of music. But in my mind, it is far too overused and too closely related to Khan for it to work anywhere else. So I may hang on the opening suite, but the rest of this score will be departing my library.