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Vibes: (James Horner) There are only two groups of
people in the world who would have any reason to even
want to
remember the 1988 movie
Vibes: Cyndi Lauper fans and James Horner
collectors. The film was, for some reason, backed by Ron Howard's
Imagine Entertainment production company, with a horrendous script from
two of the co-writers of Howard's
Splash who were attempting,
probably, to take advantage of the resurfacing popular interest in
parapsychology and the supernatural at the time (spearheaded by the
wildly successful
Ghostbusters). The premise of the film involves
two psychically gifted characters, one a hair-stylist played by Lauper
and the other a museum expert played by Jeff Goldlbum. They are conned
into seeking adventure in Ecuador, thinking that they'd be helping
someone find a lost child when indeed their psychic powers would be
needed on a perilous mission to find a mystic pyramid and unlock its
powers. Along the same idea as
Romancing the Stone, the two city
folk in a jungle environment manage to hook up by the end of the film, a
predictable but truly frightful event. For Lauper, the film represented
her big screen debut, and for director Ken Kwapis,
Vibes followed
his own debut with the Sesame Street film
Follow That Bird in
1985. Needless to say, the recipe was perfect for disaster. The summer
1988 release floundered and has long since been forgotten, with Lauper's
career stalling and Kwapis sent back to the dark corners of television
directing. The only notable aspect of the film that remains is the score
by then upstart composer James Horner. Already nominated for Academy
Awards for his work on
An American Tail and
Aliens, the
composer had completed work on the most lengthy and ambitious score of
his career,
Willow, an enduring orchestral classic, the same
year. The era of electronically defined music in Horner's career,
whether contemporary in tone or primitively ambient in intent, was
waning.
For Horner enthusiasts, 1988 marked the trailing years
of the composer's heavy reliance on synthesizers as the sole
instrumental spectrum on his lesser scores; many of his lower-budget
efforts in the years to come would feature at least some
moderately-sized orchestra or more authentic-sounding samples. Even
though it is based seemingly entirely in the electronic realm,
Vibes does have more individual character than Horner's more drab
synthetic efforts of the era, such as
The Name of the Rose. While
it was reported at the time that Horner employed a traditional string
and brass section for some of the more supernaturally scary cues, it's
difficult to hear their presence in the final work. What does stand out
from the synthetics are the use of a few select woodwinds, including a
pan flute and Japanese sakauhachi flute (largely solidified in Horner's
career that year). A significant array of percussive sounds, some
strikingly electronic and some rattling with a little more authenticity,
brings a vivid soundscape to the score during its jungle sequences.
These elements are all placed over a rhythmic and early loop-based
structure, often utilizing lengthy, repetitious, non-thematic
performances to carry a score heavy on ambience and short on character
theme or romance. That said, Horner's
Vibes does shine at its
best when his melodic material for the score is carried by the flutes.
Over the banjos, guitars, clapping sounds, whimsical high range
woodwinds, wood blocks, bird calls, mid-range drums, and a vast
collection of banging and tapping instruments, these flutes perform a
few hopelessly chipper themes. Unfortunately, their exotic fun is
restricted to the first half of the film, during which the characters
first arrive in the Andes ("Andes Arrival" and "The Journey Begins"),
and the score becomes much darker, atonal, and harshly electronic in the
other half. This sinister half culminates in "Silvia's Vision," with
heavy, off-key electronic droning accompanied by simple minor key
alternations by synthetic brass and strings, joined by the disturbing
sounds of dismembered voices, an unnerving sound remarkably unique to
this particular score for Horner.
Despite the score's selling points, Horner allows
Vibes to die miserably at its conclusion, with no resolution of
ideas in the "End Title" and a choice made not to score the film's
romantic moments at all. He seems to have gotten hung up on the
artistically rich atmosphere of the location, for in the final cue, as
he does throughout the entire work, Horner wanders from motif to motif,
rhythm to rhythm, leaving the only connecting thread in the form of the
score's inherently unique instrumentation. Overall,
Vibes remains
decades later as one of James Horner's more bizarre efforts, exhibiting
very few of the usual commonalities that typically connect his other
scores. Along those same lines,
Vibes is also a score that
devotees of the composer can use very effectively to combat arguments
about the composer's relative lack of originality. Nothing in the world
of digital age film scores sounds remotely like
Vibes (though
Thomas Newman might be the type to try someday), and Horner collectors
specifically will be startled by the stark differences between this and
the concurrently written
Willow. On album, the awkward and
disjointed score exists in short length, but it endures as one of the
most collectible CDs in the history of films scores. Standing as the
fourth entry in the Varèse Sarabande label's first set of CD Club
releases in 1990, the pressing of
Vibes was limited to an
astonishingly low 1,000 copies. That slim pressing number was even
surprising at the time, given that Horner had just stunned audiences
with
Glory and was sailing to the forefront of the industry. The
album sold out as expected and fetched prices as high as $400 on the
secondary market even after the proliferation of the score in bootleg
form (which features only the identical musical contents and, usually,
the same copied packaging as well). The standard Lauper pop song from
the film, "Hole in My Heart," understandably does not appear on the
product. Despite the score's two melodically enticing cues amounting to
over seven combined minutes, the entire work requires a mood of
significant funk to appreciate from start to finish, and for most
collectors it will reveal itself to be a curiosity rather than a
necessity.
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| Bias Check: | For James Horner reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating
is 3.13 (in 98 reviews)
and the average viewer rating is 3.25
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