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Filmtracks Recommends:
Buy it... if you seek the last truly strong tones of heartfelt personal exploration and broad strokes of Americana in Basil Poledouris' celebrated career. Avoid it... if you've never been a fan of Poledouris' habit of mixing electronics at the forefront of an orchestral ensemble, for this score offers a healthy role to the composer's usual synthetic rhythms and an electric guitar. Filmtracks Editorial Review:
Comparisons to Randy Newman's music for The Natural or James Horner's Field of Dreams, both heavily praised, are tempting, but while For Love of the Game is a film with baseball as its narrative inspiration, the score is really about one man's recollections about his life. It's an upbeat, gracious, and easy-going score with a blend of contemporary rhythms and orchestral fortitude. Poledouris' knack for brilliantly balancing the organic and synthetic for a character score is legendary, and he's on his game here. One primary theme occupies the entire score, heroic and monumental in the climax of "Last Pitch" while sensitive and tingling in the flashbacks of "Relationship Montage." The extremely affable "Main Theme" suite covers both of these bases, and in the solo woodwind renditions of the theme, Poledouris' music sounds remarkably similar in its slight stature to Kimberly the following year. The slight country and rock rhythms, complete with percussion suitable for an elevator speaker, are necessarily accessible though somewhat generic and bland. The score's outward comedy moments pull hard at the country strings, and "Tuttle Knockdown" and "Gus Hits" are definitely three minutes that needed to be subtracted from the score's album. The electric guitars in these cues are unacceptably obnoxious despite the intended abrasive personality; far better are the performances of the instrument when it accompanies the full orchestral ensemble. An acoustic guitar serves as the grounding element of the score's personality, strumming along with the upper-range synthetic effects and producing the same family-friendly, comfortable atmosphere as Free Willy. The piano is also used to the same end in "Jane's Home" and "The Decision," both of which are as endearing as they are smooth. The latter cue features an impressive full ensemble variation on the theme, with piano adding elegant counterpoint. The mix of the solo instruments with the ensemble is impressively clear, and the electronics are, as typical in Poledouris' scores, resounding in their use of the full sonic spectrum. The final cue on album, "Last Pitch," is worthy of some discussion on its own, for its style defies the restrained environment of the remainder of the score. The cue's final three minutes add an adult chorus to the mix of orchestra, electric and acoustic guitars, and synthetic rhythms. The resulting repetitions of the title theme, along with some generally pleasing chord progressions of massive scope in between, would be suitable for an adventure film of far wider implications. The momentous proportions of this cue are a surprising conclusion to an otherwise humble score, creating an outstanding listening experience on album but perhaps overplaying its hand in the film. In terms of sports film music, For Love of the Game does not achieve the same amount of inspirational spirit that Jerry Goldsmith was able to conjure for other stories, though nothing in either Hoosiers or Rudy tries to generate the power of "Last Pitch." The triumphant explosion of melody in that cue is a highlight of Poledouris' entire career, despite its somewhat awkward, bombastic stance. The score as a whole relies upon the fifteen or so minutes of truly gorgeous orchestral contributions to survive. But survive it does, and that melodic half of the score will be a necessarily inclusion for any Poledouris collector. At the time of the film's release, a fifteen-minute promotional album of Poledouris' score was floated in response to a commercial song-only album that featured only one small suite of the very best music from the score. This album fetched hundreds of dollars in blazing online bidding, and these buyers must have felt silly when Varèse Sarabande eventually offered 33 minutes of the score on an album later in the year. Ironically, it's one of the rare circumstances in which a short Varèse album would have been better without the three minutes of irritating hard country tones in "Tuttle Knockdown" and "Gus Hits." For fans who were disappointed with Mickey Blue Eyes earlier in 1999 after a year of the composer's absence from the scoring stage, For Love of the Game was a pleasant surprise. In retrospect, it's the best part of a bittersweet goodbye to a favorite composer in his waning years. ****
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