Filmtracks Recommends:
Buy it... if you've ever wondered what a score would sound like if its musicians were either heavily inebriated or in a dazed stupor. Avoid it... if you prefer hearing film scores that inspire you just enough to remain in the upright position and an awakened state of being. Filmtracks Editorial Review:
Twisted: (Mark Isham) How do such unfortunate films like the 2004 serial-killer thriller Twisted pass through all of the studio hoops and actually get made into a finished product for the big screen? It's rare that you actually have a film in which every single element is so saturated with cliche that the overall product has no redeeming individual quality with which to define itself. 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 and tawdry Ashley Judd (whose character does, for you Juddaholics out there, conduct her character in quite an active sex life in this role), are utterly wasted; there are as many stereotypical pitfalls stumbled upon 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 identified by any semi-conscious adult viewer within in the first 15 minutes. The cinematography uses every opportunity to leech off of the mysterious beauty of San Francisco, with overly-predictable shots of Pacific Bell Park (or whatever idiotic corporate name forced upon it at the time) and the Golden Gate Bridge that you'd swear belonged in a "Star Trek" film. The director of Twisted, Philip Kaufman, definitely didn't have the right stuff this time around, with the execution so lame that you have a scene in which a thousand cops all show up at a crime scene exactly a moment too late. And what of the score? Any hope for intelligence from Mark Isham in this assignment? Unfortunately, Isham is just one part of a production that stands in one tidy, completely straight line waiting to be shot at, and the comprehensive failure of his music to help the movie transcend is simply one reason why the mass majority of worldwide audiences considered the film with a total lack of respect. For a movie as boring and predictable as Twisted, the only hope you have as a film score collector is that the composer has at least figured out the film's major flaws as well and has created something at a level more interesting than the rest of the project. Isham was at a disadvantage from the start, however, because he was a painfully predictable choice to score any cheap thriller about corrupt cops set in a sophisticated city. Isham has been to this dance many times before and since, and the results are usually the same. The veteran of jazz at the time, a man familiar with writing for that lonely trumpet on a dark and wet city street, Isham could have composed barely adequate tones for this one in his sleep. Given the quality of his output for Twisted, maybe he was asleep. It's the kind of completely non-descript, underplayed score that could put its own musicians into a dazed stupor 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 album's 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, because Isham's extensive sampled library of equivalently irritating noises, heard destroying the soundscape of several scores later in the decade (though most of them in horror and not mystery), was probably not in action by 2004. In Twisted, the rapping and clanging of these sounds often pounds away in the background over whining electronic tones and occasional jumpy strikes from the string section of the orchestra. The opening and closing cues attempt to offer a paltry, uninteresting theme with contemporary guitar accompaniment in the bass and a seemingly drugged brass solo that has to stop frequently to regain what little composure it has. A thinking man with a decent film music collection might get the idea that Isham was attempting to resurrect the ambience of David Shire's sparse urban thriller scores of the 1970's in these sequences, but given how shoddy the execution is, such teasing of the brain is not worth the time. Despite Isham's efforts to refine the expected, modern noir tone of this environment, he accomplishes nothing of distinction in the process of instead falling into the many traps of tired expectations. The final "You Are the One" cue (no, not a reference to The Matrix) has two or three minutes of slightly troubled but mostly tonal droning that might nicely fill a void on some compilation, but the rest of it is as pointless and uninteresting as it gets. Even at only 34 minutes, the album for Twisted is painfully long and offers music that is surely unnecessary apart from the movie 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 10/11/11. Review Version 4.1 - PHP (Filmtracks Publications). Copyright © 2004-2013, Christian Clemmensen. All rights reserved. |
