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Around the World in 80 Days: (Trevor Jones) Chalk up
yet another remake in the "why bother" column. Jules Verne's adventure novel
is about late 19th century inventor Phileas Fogg and his companion
Passepartout, who, to win a bet with the top of the Royal Academy,
circumnavigate the globe in 80 days by using trains, boats, balloons, and
elephants. The story of
Around the World in 80 Days was adapted onto
the big screen in a 1956 classic that performed very well at that year's
Academy Awards, and yet, in an effort to disgrace that film's legacy, Disney
has decided in 2004 to remake the story into a slapstick comedy starring
aging kung-fu master Jackie Chan. Aside from the basic problem regarding the
mere existence of this film, the nonstop slapstick punches and clumsy moves
by the 50-year-old Chan contributed to laughing audiences and disgruntled
critics. Cameo appearances by John Cleese, Kathy Bates, Rob Schneider, Jim
Broadbent, and Arnold Schwarzenegger (in his final role before politics
lured him from Hollywood) steal the show from a relative unknown (Steve
Coogan) in the role of Fogg. By mutating Verne's story into a kung-fu style
slapstick comedy, Disney has completely altered the focus of the film, thus
changing the approach that composer Trevor Jones would have to take with the
score for the new
Around the World in 80 Days. Teaching world music
at the university level and often recording with the London Symphony
Orchestra, Jones was nothing less than a brilliant choice for the composing
duties of this film, regardless of its merits. The sustained quality of
Jones' action writing has been continuing to improve as his career matures,
and he always has the capability of producing simple, but memorable themes
for his scores. Had this version of
Around the World in 80 Days been
as intelligent and as long as the original 1956 film (3 hours), then Jones
could have been presented with the most diverse and interesting scoring
assignment of his career.
While his music for the new, Frank Coraci-directed version
is nothing less than ambitious and enthusiastic, Jones' contribution to the
film seems stuck in the rut of perpetual slapstick action. Rather than
producing an adventure of monolithic proportions, which seemed to be the
intent with his
League of Extraordinary Gentlemen score last year,
Jones has swung the doors open to the realm of high-flying children's music.
Perhaps more than any other composer in the modern era, Jones has proven to
be a chameleon when forming a workable style within a score, and
Around
the World in 80 Days is a strong example of Jones adapting the sounds
heard in previous Disney children's adventures and reproducing them at his
customary, bloated levels of orchestration. The title theme for the film is
a variation on Harry Gregson-Williams' swashbuckling tune for last year's
Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas, and the rhythmic, harmonious action
cues follow many leads from James Newton Howard's work for animated films by
the same studio. The enormous magnitude of the noise produced by the LSO,
combined with the often break-neck tempos, may even remind the listener of
the wild action cues from James Horner's
The Rocketeer. The first
half of the score is filled nearly wall to wall with this loud,
straight-forward action material, and had Jones continued with only that
direct, brass-blaring style, the score could easily have been a
headache-inducing nightmare by the end. Luckily for both him and us, the
story takes us on a journey around the world through different cultures,
allowing Jones to stretch his legs in the areas of world music at which he
maintains such a rich knowledge. The action music is by no means
substandard, but it does exhaust your ears with its consistent noise and
lack of one of those super-dominant themes that Jones is known for
conjuring. If you bypass the more generic action cues in the first 20
minutes of the score on album, you'll find some much more impressive action
development with a full choir near the end.
As the story picks up another main character in Paris (in
the fourth score cue), Jones lays on the accordion as the first real break
from the action, switching from polka to waltz rhythms that are simple in
character, but a relief nonetheless. An elegant, sweeping variation on the
rhythm carries into "1st Class Waltz," but Jones finally starts to cook with
the female Turkish soprano voice that opens "Prince Hapi Escape." As the
story progresses into the Far East, the following two cues offer the score's
highlights; slower renditions of themes performed by a Chinese violin and
flute, with lush accompaniment from the full ensemble, easily outshine the
rest of the album. For brief moments in these two cues, you can almost
forget the ridiculous nature of the film and appreciate Jones' more serious
melodies. The "Lost in America" cue has the most playful (and enjoyable)
action cues that are, understandably, saturated with the musical cliches of
the Wild West. A honky tonk piano yields to a swinging clarinet theme in
early high jazz style and, inevitably, the snappy percussion and rhythms of
the cowboy lifestyle. The final two cues introduce the choral element into
the mix, with Jones allowing both the instrumental and vocal ensembles to
increase in velocity and intensity as the wager is won. A ripping snare
propels us to the finale, and Jones leaves us with the customary,
pulse-pounding choral crescendo that you've come to expect from big-budget
Disney adventures. On the album, three songs are placed before about 48
minutes of score. The title song is both decent and compatible with the
score, incorporating a children's choir into a nice melody. David A.
Stewart's voice, though, resembles Jeremy Irons' singing voice a tad
too closely, and seems a little too scruffy for such a peasant song. The
"River of Dreams" song, starting like a bad rehash of Ace of Base from the
mid-1990's, as well as the "It's a Small World" interpretation, range from
irritating to outrageously out of place. Hearing the Baha Men crucify a
Disney classic (the story didn't even go through the Caribbean, did it?) is
an especially disturbing piece of commercialistic garbage from the studio.
Overall, there are highly commendable parts of Trevor Jones' score for this
remake, but you must survive the relentless happy comedy/action writing in
the first half of its length to get to the treasure cues of the latter
half.
****
| Bias Check: | For Trevor Jones reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating
is 4 (in 14 reviews)
and the average viewer rating is 3.72
(in 21,469 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
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