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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 | . | . |
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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 can never turn away Horner's rambling piano rhythms and broad character themes for strings. Avoid it... if three or four tracks of ambitious, rhythmic orchestral theme cannot outweigh the generic atmosphere on the rest of the rare album. Filmtracks Editorial Review:
The musical representation for the boy in the film is elusive. Because the relationship between he and his parents and peers is muted at best, Horner responds with a similarly distant touch. The boy does have a theme, although that theme is tied more to his achievements in chess, and could probably be assigned to the game of chess itself rather than simply the boy's progression through the film. When the film puts the game front and center, Horner responds with a magical touch. Accompanied by layers of strings and tingling of metallic percussion, Horner's piano is the instrument chosen to represent the sophistication of the game. First in "Early Victories," Horner presents the flowing primary theme over a rambling piano rhythm that shines with exuberance and pride. Another highlight is "Josh and Vinnie," the most impressive cue on the album, in which the boy and Laurence Fishburne's hustler character play a rapid game in the park, culminating at a dizzying pace to an outstanding victory that Horner scores with his most ambitious material for the film. This piano-rhythm sequence slowly builds steam over two minutes until once again revealing the title theme with triumphant power. More intriguingly, this rhythm would be the one recognized by Horner fans and critics as the one introduced the year prior in Sneakers and eventually gracing the openings of Bicentennial Man and A Beautiful Mind. While the overuse of this very similar progression of chords has often been criticized, its appearance here (and in A Beautiful Mind) perfectly represents the lightning-fast strokes of logic at work. The score unfortunately allows the melodramatic string-based drama to prevail in the championship tournament cues at the end of the film, and while these are as enjoyable as any other broad Horner theme with resounding bass, the lack of Horner's precise and intoxicating piano layering is a shame. Having established the piano rhythms as the musical identity of the child's genius, Horner strangely abandons it to a large extent during the final competitions. Still, however, the score works wonders in many other scenes in the film; its magic is slightly diluted on album, with several lengthy tracks of pleasant, but uninteresting underscore yielding only occasionally to the highlighted cues above. Still, Searching for Bobby Fischer is one out-of-print Horner score that should merit some searching by any Horner collector.
Score as Heard on Album: *** Overall: ***
The insert notes include information about Horner and the film's director. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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