> Continuing my rundown of a score a year that I haven’t heard in a good
> long while. Remember, this is all Riley’s fault!
> Last time - https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=133679
> -----------------
> This time - my 2000 entry - Thirteen Days
> Trevor Jones; orchestrated by Jones, Geoffrey Alexander & Julian
> Kershaw; conducted by Geoffrey Alexander
> Thirteen Days, a mostly accurate dramatization of the White House
> trying to resolve the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 starring Kevin Costner,
> emerged in theaters on Christmas Day before getting a wide release the
> following January. Two tickets were bought by me and my father, with the
> film having some personal relevance for him since he was born the day the
> confrontation was resolved. Yet that release strategy may still have been
> questionable since despite good reviews and probably selling more than
> just those two tickets the film didn’t make its budget back in theaters.
> It is perhaps owing to the film’s commercial underperformance that its
> score by Trevor Jones has slipped into obscurity. Nowadays, with Jones
> having been out of Hollywood for almost two decades, it’s easy to forget
> that he was once scoring notable projects with regularity; the two prior
> years had NBC’s Merlin miniseries, ABC’s Cleopatra
> miniseries, and Notting Hill, while From Hell came the year
> after. Jones later said that he still felt the assignment was a rare
> “prestige picture” gig for him, and perhaps that has something to do with
> the score standing as one of his finest works for the big screen, not to
> mention being by far the best score to ever come from a Roger
> Donaldson-directed film (Species, Dante’s Peak, The
> Recruit).
Don't forget Dinotopia in the miniseries category!
> The score expertly juggles patriotism and tension without spilling over
> into outright jingoism, Jones’ main melody occasionally soaring - the guy
> who could write those with the best of them - but otherwise serving to
> reinforce the solemnity and nobility of the story. A lot of the rest of
> the score seems to focus on urgency to keep people awake during a
> straightforward drama - martial snare and anvil clangs, occasional
> resurrections of the muscular urgency of his 90s action material (There
> Can Be No Deals going full Dark City for a bit), some
> propulsion from harp and piano and even subtle electronics. At times the
> album makes for an intriguing transition point between the action
> mannerisms of Cliffhanger and 2005’s Aegis, the latter the
> composer’s last significant score, yet it also in a few moments previews
> the mix of elegance and grandeur that would define the composer’s work on
> Dinotopia two years later.
> We don’t tend to get movies like this anymore, and as a result we don’t
> tend to get scores like this anymore. But thank goodness we did for a
> while. If you haven’t heard it yet, the album is available on the usual
> digital / streaming services.
> ****½ for my #6 score of the year 2000.
> Album -
> https://open.spotify.com/album/50LrAaa62OKjZa1q95ODes?si=pyG7Xr0ITDmNaubjjTMfIg
> Jones may be out of Hollywood, but Geoffrey Alexander and Julian Kershaw
> (contributors on most of Jones’ scores across 1993-2005) haven’t been.
> You’ve heard Alexander’s orchestrations on a number of scores by Patrick
> Doyle, George Fenton, and Dario Marianelli, and he’s conducted several
> notable scores by Steven Price too. And both gentlemen helped on last
> year’s score for The Little Mermaid.
My fondest memory of this score is having this on while frantically trying to finish writing this piece: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=87958 ...on election night 2020. Nothing like music for the Cuban Missile Crisis to really cement the urgency of everything lol.
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