Filmtracks: Cellular (John Ottman)


Ottman

Cellular: (John Ottman) If you're the type of person who hates cell phones, then perhaps this film's not for you. The screenwriter of Phone Booth, Larry Cohen, must have decided that he had conquered the market on phone booth terror, so he turned to every possible method of terrifying a person with the familiar concept of a failing cell phone. In essence, a tenuous and random cell phone connection between a woman being held hostage in her own home and an average Joe on the streets sends the young man on a race against time and his cell phone battery to help this woman and her family. Despite the numerous plot holes that always arise when you stretch a topic like this one to such great limits, the film does survive on its performances and twists in plot. Though suffering only mild slaps from critics, the film still didn't hold well enough with audiences to keep it in the theatres very long. Director David R. Ellis had been a fan of composer John Ottman's work for The Usual Suspects and X-Men 2, and thus successfully pursued Ottman for the scoring duties on Cellular. The plot of intrigue and terror seems right up the alley for John Ottman, who seems ever-willing to traverse the range of blockbusters to duds and have fun with anything he has time to get his hands on. Once again, it's a project for which he can often switch between major and minor keys in obvious portrayals of good and evil. Even moreso than in his early years, though, Ottman has become obsessed with the idea of recording sound effects associated with the films he composers for and incorporating some variation of their sound into a rhythm or distinct instrumentation twist that elevates his music beyond the usual trash that exists for B-rated suspense and drama flicks. With Cellular, he continues this trend, almost to levels unnecessary intelligence for this kind of film, but even if you can't enjoy such scores on their thematic and rhythmic integrity, they serve as an interesting study in smaller-budget ingenuity in instrumentation. Whether you can enjoy Cellular or not will depend on your interest in these unusual tactics.


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Ottman does seem to take shameless pride in his attention to unique sounds, and he should. If a purely average (if not substandard) score such as Point of Origin (released on album last year) can be made into a delightfully wicked listening experience simply because of the incorporation of typewriter sounds, then why can't Cellular be equally as enticing with its distorted cell phone tones and police sirens? The score opens over the studio logo with the phone tones, distorted and overlayed with woodwinds so that they're not as obvious as they probably needed to be (they could easily be missed by a casual listener). The police sirens do catch your attention to a greater extent when their brass renditions are present, although they too seemed underplayed. At some point, with a score like Cellular that is average in every other regard, you almost wish that Ottman would hit us with even more blatant elements of musical intrigue. He's proven that it's difficult to even outsmart himself, no matter the project... so let's have more of it! As for Cellular, Ottman uses one somewhat mundane theme for both the hero and the hostage, with appropriate mutations for their separate performances for the two very different characters. The hero's thematic representations border on coolness, from the hip stealing of a Porsche to the "Going Shopping" and "Making a Connection" cues --both of which enjoying some life from electric guitars and rocking rhythms. The hostage's version of the theme exists in both "Abduction" and "The Bait" (the latter of which has slurred brass a la Jerry Goldsmith's The Shadow), and has the sentimentality you hear from Ottman's morbidly sad electronic choir style of writing. Neither is preferable on album, really, and Ottman is careful to make sure that these differing styles never overlap to any degree. In presence, the primary theme is often performed in full only by woodwinds, strings, and piano in subtle fashion, allowing a powerful and commanding brass motif (highlighted by a strong grouping of French horns) during moments of suspense as the most memorable aspect of Cellular. Overall, Ottman's creative nature continues to float what would otherwise be a rather uninteresting project. ***

Bias Check:

For John Ottman reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.29 (in 28 reviews)
and the average viewer rating is 3.06 (in 15,541 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.