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Twisted: (Mark Isham) How do such unfortunate films
like the serial-killer thriller
Twisted pass through all of the
studio hoops and actually get made into a finished product for the big
screen? Without leaving you thinking that this review is simply a rant about
the film's poor merits, you have to know that composer Mark Isham is just
one part of a production that stands in one tidy, completely straight line
waiting to be shot at. To understand why the music is an utter and total
failure, you have to know why 99% of world-wide audiences considered the
film with the same lack of respect. It's rare that you actually have a film
in which every single element is so saturated with cliche that the film has
no redeeming, individual quality that stands apart. Usually, you have one
character, a piece of cinematography, or even a musical score that
transcends a step or two above the rest of the elements in a doomed film.
Not so with
Twisted. Top flight actors, including the steely, tawdry
Ashley Judd (whose character does, for you Juddaholics out there, conduct
herself in quite an active sex life in this film), are wasted; there are as
many cliches in their performances as there are times you see Judd drink
from a glass of cheap wine. The plot is a "whodunit" affair by screenwriter
Sarah Thorp in which the killer can be figured by any semi-conscious viewer
in the first 15 minutes. The cinematography uses every opportunity to leech
off of the beauty of San Francisco, with overly-predictable shots of Pacific
Bell Park (or whatever the heck they're calling it now) and the Golden Gate
Bridge that you'd swear belong in a
Star Trek film. The director of
the film, Philip Kaufman, definitely doesn't have the right stuff this time
around, with the execution of the film so lame that you have a thousand cops
all showing up at a crime scene at exactly a moment too late. And the score?
More of the same...
For a film as boring and predictable as
Twisted, the
only hope you have as a film score collector is the composer has at least
figured out the film's flaw as well, and has created something at a level
more interesting than the rest of the project. If you were to choose the
most cliched choice of composer for
Twisted --a cheap thriller about
corrupt cops set in a sophisticated city-- who would it be? Mark Isham, of
course. The veteran of jazz scores, and a man familiar with writing for that
lonely trumpet on a dark and wet city street, Isham could have composed this
one in his sleep. Given the quality of his output for
Twisted, maybe
he was asleep. It's the kind of totally non-descript, underplayed score that
could put its own musicians into light sleep during the recording sessions
if the room was just warm enough. In this case, those musicians belonged to
the Hollywood Studio Symphony, or at least part of it. Isham utilized a
moderate string section and four horns, along with his own keyboard and one
artist who, according to the packaging, was responsible for "many plucked
and struck instruments." Those 'struck instruments' could very well have
been studio chairs, discarded pipes, air conditioner intakes, and kitchen
utensils. The rapping and clanging of these sounds often pounds away in the
background over electronic whining sounds and occasional jumps from the
string section of the orchestra. The opening and closing cues attempt to
offer a paltry, uninteresting theme with contemporary guitar accompaniment
and a seemingly drugged brass solo. Despite Isham's efforts to insert some
sort of redeeming musical development in these parts, even these few minutes
fall into the trap of cliche. The final "You Are The One" cue (no, not a
Matrix reference) has two or three minutes that might nicely fill a
void on a compilation, but the rest of it is as non-descript and
uninteresting as it gets. Even at only 34 minutes, the album for
Twisted is painfully long, and offers music that is surely
unnecessary on album for nearly the entire listening public, including
die-hard score collectors.
*
| Bias Check: | For Mark Isham reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating
is 2.93 (in 15 reviews)
and the average viewer rating is 3.06
(in 6,616 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
|
The insert includes a list of performers, but no extra information about the score or film.
