Buy it... only if you're prepared for substandard sound quality and are familiar with the five beautiful minutes of Flatliners that highlight the product.

Avoid it... if you're only a casual collector of James Newton Howard's scores and five minutes of choral magnificence in muted sound isn't worth the search.

Howard

Flatliners/Falling Down: (James Newton Howard) One of the more sought after private CD releases of the mid-1990's was this combo album released in 1997 with two of James Newton Howard's scores for well-known films. The mass appeal for this pseudo-bootleg surrounded the release of the highly varied and occasionally beautiful score for Flatliners, a Joel Schumacher film with an all-star production crew and cast that depicted a group of medical students who decided they would challenge the power of God by suspending themselves in near-death experiences to see what happens at the doors of the other side. Supposedly, the experience is reported to one of peaceful bliss, but these cocky students at University of Chicago manage to turn the affair into a series of gloomy and suspenseful maneuvers in resuscitation, all set in a Gothic and shadowy environment that causes the film to walk a fine line between adventure and horror. Howard plays the score along the lines of a religious horror film, alternating between glorious choral statements of beauty and terrifying barrages of orchestral and electronic mayhem. The moments of beauty gravitate towards the remarkable "Redemption" cue, a documented highlight in Howard's entire career and a calling card among his early assignments. This four-plus minute cue is harmonious in a grandiose religious fashion, offering the film's salvation in a magical thematic statement arguably unparalleled in the composer's lengthy career since. On the other hand, Flatliners on the whole is better defined by its considerably disturbing horror elements, with cues like "Flying - First Expedition" featuring a downright unpleasant combination of atonal choral chanting and heavy percussion that mirrors Danny Elfman's concurrent Nightbreed score in many ways. Howard does return to the simple beauty of "Redemption" in a few places, but in the same fashion as in A Devil's Advocate, with single notes of magnificent harmony bursting out of otherwise distraught action. In "Diary of a Surgeon," Howard creates a sound remarkably similar to what Trevor Jones would write for Hideaway a few years later, with a electric guitar rhythm propelling an adult chorus, though here in Flatliners, the guitars eventually wail harshly (among other irritating sound effects). Poor sound quality (with a distracting level of hiss) plagues the entire presentation on this album.

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Several years later, Falling Down would offer another gloomy picture, but in a completely different setting. Under the pressure of the stresses of modern day life in Los Angeles, an average business man does for traffic jam motorists what the movie Network did for broadcast news viewers. The no-name man, played by Michael Douglas, snaps mentally, going on a careless rampage across the metropolitan area, during which he just happens to acquire a large bag of weapons and wanders through dangerous circumstances with remarkably good fortune. His path towards self-destruction is heroically presented by Joel Schumacher once again, with the doomed, soulsick man trashing symbols of modern life, wasting both a telephone booth and a fast food restaurant with automatic weapons, as well as destroying a construction site with a rocket launcher. For this project, James Newton Howard takes a far more subtle role than in Flatliners. Howard would be nominated for an Oscar for this kind of gritty, somewhat underplayed action music in the concurrent The Fugitive, and like that better known score, Falling Down suffers from a certain anonymity that works well in the picture, but not on the album. One of the more creative tracks is "South Central," with a noir trumpet solo, a weary music box, and the distant, hip rhythms of a city's center in the background. Even when Howard allows the rage of the man to inspire his music, as in "Miracle Mile," the score is confined to almost jungle-like rhythms, often with tingling electronic accompaniment. No strong theme or motif exists in Falling Down, with one of the most unique identifiers of the score being a wavering electric guitar that slurs between notes as the man's mental breakdown continues. The actual title theme is hinted at by strings in "West L.A." and perhaps Howard was attempting to use only the shadow of a theme to represent the man's previous sanity slipping away. Overall, Falling Down lacks the vengeful grit of the film itself, and translates into a largely boring score on album. Its sound quality, however, is much better than that of Flatliners on the product. In the end, the duo of Flatliners and Falling Down really points to the "Redemption" cue of the first score as the sole strong highlight of this combo album. Only Howard completists would enjoy it from start to finish.   Amazon.com Price Hunt: CD or Download

Flatliners: ***
Falling Down: **
Overall Album: ***

Bias Check:

For James Newton Howard reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.31 (in 53 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 3.16 (in 58,041 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.