Filmtracks Recommends:
Buy it... only if you can find the short album for a reasonable price so that you can pick out the passages of the ethnically beautiful love theme buried in the middle of the score. Avoid it... if you have no urge to hear arguably Goldsmith's worst inspirational sports material of his entire career, obnoxious tones for electric organ and a modern band that lead the charge on rip-offs of catchy tunes. Filmtracks Editorial Review:
Mr. Baseball: (Jerry Goldsmith) Unfortunate enough to open on the same day as The Mighty Ducks in October, 1992, Mr. Baseball capped off the real baseball season with yet another formula-based sports movie. Tom Selleck is convincing in his role as an aging slugger and first-baseman for the New York Yankees who womanizes, chew tobacco, and speaks before thinking but basically has a good heart (and is apparently steroids-free, thank goodness). Witnessing his decline, the New York Yankees trade him to a Japanese team, the Nagoya Dragons, and the rather unsophisticated brute is forced to not only fix a hole in his swing, but become accustomed to (and appreciative of) an entirely new culture and language. Along the way, he falls in love with an endorsement representative for the team (a beautiful young Japanese woman), finally accepts the advice of his manager, and ultimately helps the team advance to a playoff confrontation with its archrival. The film does have a certain amount of charm and genuine comedy, though amid merely average reviews, the project quickly became a late-night television diversion. Composer Jerry Goldsmith had a long and varied collaboration with director Fred Schepisi in the 1990's, yielding one of the composer's greatest scores, The Russia House. Also among the lot were comedy and jazz-influenced works like Six Degrees of Separation, I.Q., and Fierce Creatures, none of which spectacular scores (in fact, the funky I.Q. is probably the best of that lot). Unfortunately, Mr. Baseball ranks near the bottom of the list when it comes to consistent tolerability, simply because of Goldsmith's odd choice of style for the score that is informed by the culture clash on screen. The film has two distinct, alternating parts: the titles and scenes in which the setting is on the baseball diamond, and the character-building scenes of romance and culture adjustment. Goldsmith essentially created two different scores for those divergent situations, setting himself up for a combined soundtrack that suffers from its worse half being hugely fatal to the whole. The lack of mingling in instrumentation or structure in these two separate portions is a bit of an odd misstep by Goldsmith, because despite the airy quality of the film's demeanor, a memorable score (for the right reasons) could have resulted with a little more overlap. The better half of Goldsmith's effort for Mr. Baseball merits some significant discussion because it is one of the composer's rare ventures into cultural romance in the later stages of his career. The budding romance and cues of loneliness for the star player are scored with a love theme that exceeds many of Goldsmith's other delightful melodies of the early 1990's in quality. As with other Fred Schepisi films, Goldsmith employs lazy jazz in the form of an electric bass and piano for some of this material, but fifteen minutes of purely innocent and engaging beauty occupy the score with a small orchestral ensemble led by a James Horner standard, the Japanese sakauhachi flute. Goldsmith's use of the instrument is far more restrained, however, allowing the Japanese cultural element to enter his orchestral work in subtle steps. Along with acoustic guitar and occasional broad strokes of counterpoint, lengthier cues like "Call Me Jack/A Wise Brain" move at the pace of a John Barry romance piece. Unfortunately for listeners, the mood of this evocative music is shattered in many places by the heinous choice of sounds Goldsmith creates for the baseball sequences. His begins with the six-note "charge" motif used in ballparks all around the world and writes a catchy interpretation of the "Baby Elephant Walk" at spirited rhythms that listeners would hear again in I.Q. the next year. The six-note baseball motif could have been very creatively interpreted throughout the score, even in the native flute passages, but it's the choice of instrumentation for the baseball rhythms that ruins this score. An electric pipe organ, electric guitar, modern percussion, clapping sounds, and other frightful samples, all existing in the extremely irritating context of the baseball motif and "Baby Elephant Walk" rhythm, are beyond most tolerance levels, and they cheapen this score considerably. The frustrating aspect of this tone is that it is so consistently wretched throughout the entire score, barely developing a narrative and almost never backed with the orchestral ensemble. Only in "Swing Away" does the orchestra and band strike a seemingly happy balance. Perhaps the problem with these cues is the rip-off of existing thematic constructs, or maybe it's simply the horrid electric organ. But Goldsmith rarely wrote music this insufferable in the latter stages of his career, and when also considering the equally treacherous Fairchild-performed song, "Shabondama Boogie," at the end of the very short album release, it's nearly impossible to recommend the product just for the woefully buried cues of romantic beauty hidden within. ** Track Listings:
Total Time: 32:42
All artwork and sound clips from Mr. Baseball are Copyright © 1992, Varèse Sarabande. The reviews and notes contained on the filmtracks.com site may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of Filmtracks Publications. Audio clips can be heard using RealPlayer but cannot be redistributed without the label's expressed written consent. Page created 6/25/98, updated 10/31/11. Review Version 4.1 - PHP (Filmtracks Publications). Copyright © 1998-2013, Christian Clemmensen. All rights reserved. |
