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| • | Newest Major Reviews: | . | • | This Week's Most Popular Reviews: | • | Best-Selling Albums: | ||
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1. Nim's Island 2. The Life Before Her Eyes 3. Horton Hears a Who! 4. Leatherheads 5. The Spiderwick Chronicles | . | . |
1. Moulin Rouge 2. Gladiator 3. POTC: Curse of the Black Pearl 4. Star Wars: A New Hope 5. Edward Scissorhands |
6. Pearl Harbor 7. Schindler's List 8. Titanic 9. Braveheart 10. Home Alone | . | . |
1. Varèse Sarabande 25th 2. The Last of the Mohicans 3. Legends of the Fall 4. Schindler's List 5. LOTR: Return of the King (Set) |
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Filmtracks Recommends:
Buy it... if you are confused, if you like being confused by the nature of life, and especially if you like music that is incongruous and confused. Avoid it... if you like musical notes to match each other in harmony and would rather whistle while you work rather than contemplate the deep inner workings of a frustrated score. Filmtracks Editorial Review:
What Burwell accomplishes for the film is exactly what that story requires: a dissonant, sometimes unorganized, occasionally messy, and always disjointed score. Of the three "themes," the one for the primary character is intentionally written in a bizarre series of meandering notes, disregarding harmonious keys at every turn. It's intentionally difficult to tolerate, and to appreciate it is almost as trying. In addition to the intent of the bizarre, the life of the screenwriter is also pathetic, so Burwell's more melodic passages (or, I should say, less inhibited by random bangs, rumbling notes of no order, and synth effects) are those that mimic the moves of a nerdy child. Only in the final cue, "The Unexpressed Expressed," does Burwell soothe the listener with a remotely coherent progression of theme, but by that point, you've been bombarded by so much confusing noise, that your head is spinning in a daze. The score is book-ended by even more ridiculously demented Fatboy Slim remixes of Burwell's score, including the seventeenth track, which is the single worst piece of film music to have been produced in years. The album oddly finishes with the far too happy "Happy Together" song by The Turtles... it's a complete 180 degree turn from the score, and is perhaps the only redeeming track. Overall, this is confusion at both its best and worst. *
Insert includes pictures from the recording and mixing sessions, along with the following note from Carter Burwell:
Musical equivalents evolved to help with this. The inharmonic overtones of struck metal and the plaintive sound of english horn suggested the random walk of mutation and the endless losses of natural selection, while also playing the confusion and sadness of the characters. Cyclical structures in the score mimic the meaningless engine of life and death, sad on the personal level but so awfully necessary for life itself, while also playing the spinning wheels of the creators of the story. Is there anything entertaining about looking into the mind of a creator? Wasn't postmodernism supposed to save us from considering the creator at all by seeing creation only in the eye of the beholder? Isn't it hopelessly modern for writers to write about the act of writing? And why do I have to write my own liner notes? I didn't want the music to state what the film is "about", since this ambiguity is one of the film's attractions, but to write these notes I have to pretend that I do in fact know what it's about. Unknowable, primordial soup of doubt? Meaningless engine of life and death? Would I have made any of these ridiculous claims if I didn't have to write these notes? And what's with all these rhetorical questions? Who do I think I am, Socrates? If he was so great, why didn't he make it to the final cut of the film? In the end, I guess that's the moral of the story, of evolution. That's why you read this. I made the cut." | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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