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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 a die-hard James Horner collector and seek a surprisingly competent bootlegged compilation of the composer's mostly non-released works. Avoid it... if you expect to use the album for anything other than an educational experience, for many of the cues are intolerable and there is no flow the wildly varying selections. Filmtracks Editorial Review:
The seventeen minute suite from 48 Hours is by far the weakest link, with Horner's intolerable synthetic jazz from 1982 sharing the more unfortunate traits of his later Red Heat score. Poor sound quality in these five cues further irritates the ears. 1981's The Pursuit of D.B. Cooper is pure silliness for banjos, fiddles, mouth organs, and slide guitars in a ridiculously paced country dance rhythm... definitely a cue to pull out on your roommates after midnight. Horner's version of The Journey of Natty Gann features a beautiful orchestral title theme with pieces to be developed later in The Land Before Time, and its short duration on this compilation is a highlight. One of the more recent selections without a commercial release is 1993's House of Cards, written along the same lines as Horner's plethora of children's scores. Its soft string theme shares similarities with The Man Without a Face. The 1983 replacement score for Something Wicked this Way Comes is as whimsically close to Harry Potter music that Horner has perhaps ever come, and the opening title cue is a strong alternative to the score's full bootleg. The Tales from the Crypt cue is a cute piece for plucked strings and synth along the lines of some of Mark Snow's more humorous music for the X-Files series. The entirely synthetic music for My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys in 1991 is surprisingly similar to the pop ventures by Hans Zimmer at roughly the same time. Akin in parts to the best cues in Field of Dreams, the light keyboarding, synth chimes, and a romantic theme make for easy listening in both cues. Horner's music for the Italian, 1990 Lawrence Kasdan film I Love You to Death again has a touch of Nino Rota, but with a few of the expansive chord progressions of Legends of the Fall. Its delightfully Mediterranean-flavored theme is betrayed by both muffled sound quality in this pressing and, strangely, the calypso rhythm at its conclusion, which leads steel drums, saxophone, and accordion on a wild ride that doesn't seem to belong in any single world culture. The rather mundane 1993 score for Jack the Bear is charming in its sensitive theme, but non-descript when compared to Horner's other ideas for similar films at the time. This cues suffers from sound effects over its length, though Jack the Bear would eventually receive an official Intrada release many years later. Horner composed the impressive Uncommon Valor in between his two Star Trek scores, and the influence can easily be heard. Pieces of Krull and Aliens are also evident in its stylistically characteristic military rhythms. At some point, you've heard so many variations on Horner's rising four-note motif from his early 80's scores that it's a wonder he managed to squeeze its usage all the way through The Rocketeer in 1991. When you put all these tracks together, you obviously have a CD that doesn't have any consistent flow whatsoever. It's the kind of product with which you can pull your favorite cues onto another compilation and simply retain this CD as source. It's easy to see how the album was created, especially with most of the "End Title" cues likely pulled directly from VHS tapes. But at a time when Horner compilations were flooding the market right after the success of Titanic, this one is by far the most relevant to the composer's most die-hard collectors. ***
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