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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 | . | . |
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Filmtracks Recommends:
Buy it... only if you have witnessed the film and have appreciated the music, and/or you are an absolute die-hard fan of the more mundane underscores from The X-Files. Avoid it... if you value any resemblance of intelligent design, creative spark, or thoughtful inventiveness in your low-budget scores. Filmtracks Editorial Review:
On a basic level, Snow was trying to make a score that did several things: service the suspense, bring coolness to the teenage crowd, and save some money in doing so. The first goal is satisfied to the degree that any very basic score can appeal to the primordial emotions of the listener, no matter how poorly developed it is. The second goal is never achieved, with the employment of an electric guitar and a few strutting rhythms in the latter half of the score falling well short of any sex appeal. And as for saving money for the production, Snow may have done just that. But the score is so cheaply rendered that it begs for classification in the B-rated genre. Everything about Snow's music here sounds cheap, from the thematic ideas through the horror slashes and stabs at cool anthem presented in "Evil Chairs." The title theme is embodied by echoing, dissonant synthetic orchestra hits, bouncing between left and right channels while the title theme very slowly extends itself in the background using keyboarded whole notes (Cast Away-style). While a sense of resolution eventually concludes the theme when the synthetic, echoing hits match the harmony of the keyboard in the final notes, the rendering of the theme (even with treble-region tingling effects) is too sparse to enjoy. The action sequences in Disturbing Behavior are a far less dense version of Brad Fiedel's Terminator music, with a palette of sounds so limited that the inclusion of them all at once exposes a failed attempt to bring effectiveness to the cue through volume. A few moments of thematic development in a traditional sense are explored in "Dead Neck/Rowboat" and during "Safe Ferry/Finale," but even these are overwhelmed by the bleak atmosphere constantly maintained by Snow's droning bass-region electronics. Tired synth loops and drum pads never mature past their own repetitious performances, and the lack of any truly enjoyable harmony in the score can't even point it in the direction of the new age genre. The most interesting aspect of the album is the inclusion of John Beal's trailer music for the film, which is still rather cheaply rendered on synthesizer, but at least has a dynamic range of sound that seems like a godsend after 40 minutes of Snow's mundane, non-descript meanderings. *
* Composed, Conducted, and Produced by John Beal
The insert includes a short bio of Snow's career, as well as the following comments from director David Nutter about Snow's score:
My own career began in music with dreams of doing what Mark does to perfection. At least now I can say that, after working with Mark Snow, that dream has come true at last." | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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