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| • | Newest Major Reviews: | . | • | This Week's Most Popular Reviews: | • | Best-Selling Albums: | ||
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1. WALL·E 2. Kung Fu Panda 3. The Happening 4. Indiana Jones: Kingdom of the Crystal Skull 5. Iron Man | . | . |
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... only if you have seen the film and understand the reasons behind the convoluted sound effects, recording quality, and song imitations. Avoid it... if you value your money, your sanity, and your belief in the integrity of film music. Filmtracks Editorial Review:
Punch-Drunk Love: (Jon Brion) In an attempt to take his career down the road to serious audience consideration, Adam Sandler stars a film by director Paul Thomas Anderson, who brought us Boogie Nights and Magnolia. It involves an inept salesman who gets caught up in a phone sex extortion scheme while attempting to woo the love of his live, and if that premise alone seems strange enough, then we'll just leave it there. While the film was generally regarded as a visually spectacular effort, Anderson's writing for the picture left much to be desired, and the film put off just as many critics as it confused audiences. Punch-Drunk Love is in a musical limbo area, not demanding a score of any one particular type of Hollywood norm, and what Anderson ended up requesting was an approach similar to that of Magnolia, for which Aimee Mann had written cultishly popular song material. In its progression, Punch-Drunk Love plays in an old musical formula, but it doesn't allow the music to take that line exactly. Composer Jon Brion, as advertised, evokes percussive elements from Lou Harrison, Jon Cage, Spike Jones, and Rosie the Riveter. If this sounds like unfamiliar ground for most film score collectors, then prepare for it to get even stranger. The film's dreamy, almost drug-induced atmosphere translates 100% into the score, with Brion producing a seemingly haphazard mismatch of several musical genres into one nearly psychotic package. A vintage Hawaiian style is revived in Punch-Drunk Love, but like the film, you can't determine if that 1960's/early 1970's style of lazy pop-kitsch is being mocked or expanded upon. So convoluted is this score --despite the obvious intention to adapt well known songs into a song/score mix-- that you sometimes can't figuring out what Brion was trying to do at all. The aspects of Punch-Drunk Love that follow a (song) musical format make sense, and the four or five songs in the film and on album do set a very distinct, whimsical atmosphere for the film. But Brion's original song, "Here We Go," as well as his underscore, is extremely confusing and, at times, unbearable to attempt to understand. If scores are supposed to make sense, then Punch-Drunk Love flunks the task outright. But given that love often doesn't make sense either, perhaps the point is well made. The original song is a shameless Beatles imitation, almost to such a level as being fascinating, but it is the score that will raise eyebrows. To follow the convoluted tale, Brion writes a piece of score from nearly every genre of film music. A few stay true to that vintage Hawaiian style. Others raise the Mediterranean spirit of love with a small Italian ensemble, while even other expressions of love use a traditional orchestra of a small size to attempt a love theme straight from the Golden Age of Hollywood. A stock horror cue is followed a few minutes later by an attempt to capture Bernard Herrmann's choppy strings at a moment of heated emotions. But the truly bizarre nature of Punch-Drunk Love is put on display in three of the first four cues, when orchestral and electronic elements are mutilated badly and on purpose. Sound effects and musical samples are mixed at unnatural rates, including the sounds of waves and seagulls distorted to ridiculous speeds in the second cue, with the quality of the sounds sometimes degenerating into random voices and the banging of garbage can lids. Making the situation worse is the intentional reduction of sound quality to varying levels in each cue (in an attempt, possibly, to make the score consistent with the era of the songs). Thus, you end up with mutilations of sound effects and orchestral tuning sounds that don't even sound consistent from cue to cue. When considering that Thomas Pasatieri orchestrated this effort, one can only conclude that this is the exact kind of experimental music that Thomas Newman would produce if doped up and confined to his studio for a month straight. Despite Brion's creative intentions, the result is entirely unlistenable, and the volume isn't even great enough as to make Punch-Drunk Love usable to irritate your neighbors with. All we needed was a Middle-Eastern female vocal to complete our confusion and irritation. *
The insert includes no extra information about the score or film. The albums come in a folding cardboard slipcase (instead of a jewel case) and the CD is very difficult to remove from the package. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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