Filmtracks Recommends:
Buy it... if you enjoy being bored out of your wits. Avoid it... if you prefer hearing your film scores in the upright position and awake state of being. Filmtracks Editorial Review:
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. * Track Listings:
Total Time: 34:22
All artwork and sound clips from Twisted are Copyright © 2004, 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 4/2/04, updated 4/3/04. Review Version 4.1 - PHP (Filmtracks Publications). Copyright © 2004-2005, Christian Clemmensen. All rights reserved. |
