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Composed, Co-Conducted, and Produced by:
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Marco Beltrami
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Co-Conducted by:
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Pete Anthony
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Additional Music by:
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Buck Sanders
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Release Date:
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October 2nd, 2001
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Availability:
Regular U.S. release.
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Filmtracks Editorial Review:
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| | Beltrami | |
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Joy Ride: (Marco Beltrami) Just in time for Halloween, a horror flick is
released about a teenage summer vacation excursion gone awry. Is it just me, or
is there something wrong with the timing there? Either the production of the
film was delayed (by the will of Allah and Osama bin Laden?) or someone working
one night in the studio realized --all of a sudden-- that Joy Ride was
going to be a terrible film and figured that nobody would notice or care about
the apparent error. Likely, it was the latter. I used to wonder why films like
this get made. As I child, I thought that bad films like this were produced only
so that bad music could accompany it. In the case of Joy Ride, that may
very well have been the case. The cliche tale involves a college freshman, his
dorky brother, and his dorky girlfriend, who decide to harass a trucker known
only by his CB handle. As fate would have it, of course, the trucker gets mad,
and decides to break a couple of minor traffic safety laws while gaining his
crazed revenge. What great joy! But let's set aside the fact that this is a
dumbed down teenage version of the classic film, The Duel, and remember
that the film was also an unfortunate career entry for a composer... and in
particular, a composer who seems to not care that the vast majority (if not all)
of the films on his resume are terrible stinkers.
Marco Beltrami either needed the money or is immune to the infectiously poor
quality of the films he works on. Making a living out of scoring poor horror
flicks is one thing. But never even trying to do anything original with the
score is another. As much as I dislike the mass of Christopher Young's music for
B-grade horror films, he at least attempts (on many occasions) to do something
original with his orchestration or themes. Beltrami, with the exception of the
finale major key rendition of the Scream theme in the third installment
of that series, has yet do anything that could not have been predicted by the
listener. His music is just as cliche and boring as the films he scores. It is
almost as though the talent is there, but the incentive or will isn't. The score
for Joy Ride is a unequivocal waste of time. There is no thematic
development, and no motif that repeats for a period of time longer than one cue.
There is no consistency, no harmony, and no reason to even analyze it. The score
is not unlistenable --it isn't the kind of unbearable noise that electronic
ensembles can create these days-- but is simply nothing more than a series of
meandering orchestral hits and minor key chords. If you go from C major to E
sharp enough times, yes, people will get the idea that something creepy is
supposed to be happening on the screen. Choppy strings, brass blasts, and
pounding timpani make this low budget score even more cliched than it could have
been, given the fact that it was recorded with an orchestra at all.
Beltrami does a few things with the score (and album) that make the product
practically laughable. His use of choppy strings, as mentioned above, is a
meager immitation of Bernard Herrmann's classic style of string use, as made
classic by Psycho. I don't know if Beltrami was doing this on purpose,
but in any case, it can only make the listener go "oh, jeez" and try to avoid
imagining Herrmann spinning in his grave. The twelfth track is an apparently
awkward steal of the Mongolian music from Goldsmith's The Shadow. The
final track on the album, complete with nonsensical dialogue and cute
synthesizer effects, is a neat method of poking at the listener with a sharp
object after subjecting him or her to a full half hour of mind-numbing music. I
can't say if my extreme disdain for this score (which is no secret to you by
now, I guess) is because I'm tired of these kind of movies and their equally
dumb scores, or the fact that Beltrami has shown signs of talent in the past and
is wasting his time with assignments such as Joy Ride. I can't imagine
any reason whatsoever to recommend this album to you. It is the most boring,
underplayed, and unoriginal score of the year, and it is an amazement to me that
it even made it onto an album (though I suppose the new musicians' union
agreement in Los Angeles had something to with it). It's a waste of time all
around. Support intelligent movies; don't buy this album. *
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Viewer Ratings and Comments:
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• 1. Communication (1:28)
• 2. Ice Man Cometh (2:22)
• 3. Ridin' Shotgun (2:58)
• 4. Ring-a-ling (3:28)
• 5. Naked Lunch (2:00)
• 6. ...it wasn't comely (2:54)
• 7. Children of the Corn (4:23)
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• 8. Charlotte's Web (2:08)
• 9. Sitchiation (1:17)
• 10. Shake Yr Tail Feather (1:15)
• 11. Route 666 (1:50)
• 12. Mole Asses (3:20)
• 13. Refreshify (0:56)
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Insert offers no extra information about
the film or score, except for a list of the performers of the Hollywood Studio
Orchestra.
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