: (David Holmes) With New York's most
powerful gangster now "getting in touch with his feelings," this sequel
to the highly popular
returns the same principle
cast under the direction of Harold Ramis for another go-around of
psychiatrist versus mob boss fun. The allure of the concept, while still
providing for a few laughs given Robert De Niro's tendency to turn the
mobster concept into a parody at any given moment, had faded
significantly since the original 1999 hit. Much of this lackluster
diminishment in laughs came because of the sequel script's unfortunate
attempts to insert serious drama involving Billy Crystal's character
into an environment suited better to straight parody of "The Sopranos"
and other pop culture representations of the mafia. The original film
featured a hip score with comedic Italian music references by composer
Howard Shore, released by Varèse Sarabande on a very rare (and
probably retracted) album. With Shore focusing his attention on the
immensity of
agreed to hired the up and coming
talent of David Holmes to produce the score for the sequel film. Holmes,
an Irish electronic musician, was a relative newcomer to the scoring
scene, though fans of his bass-heavy, funky electronica had long claimed
that his music resembled the style of retro soundtracks for nearly a
decade. His lively and diverse combination of rhythms, samples, and live
musicians sparked a cult-like following outside of the film music scene.
His entry into film scores came largely when he was hired by Steven
Soderbergh for two of his successful films,
Holmes' music for those films was greeting with praise
from both his traditional fans and film music enthusiasts, despite the
fact that they exist on an island completely separate from the basic
rules of traditional film scoring. His assignment to
Analyze That
marked the third major scoring job for Holmes. Whether you will enjoy
his music or not will depend completely on your opinion of this genre of
sound and Holmes' tendency to ignore the typical structures that you
hear from career film composers. In the context of a project like
Analyze That, Holmes' music is undoubtedly an adequate work, for
the film requires nothing of any seriously dramatic tone to further its
comedy. The score is very fluid and continuous in its style, and while
it lacks a recurring theme, it relies on its easily distinguishable
style of positive rhythm and electronic samplings to succeed in
producing a unique character. There is no orchestral ensemble hired for
accompaniment and no remarkable solo performance. The dominant rhythms
are built on a foundation of jazzy funk, and Holmes then inserts techno
and electronica synthesizer effects and motifs on that consistent base
of operation. Holmes is also able to frequently insert layers upon
layers of samples, and no better an example of this is heard than in the
opening track, in which a female voice saying "oh, yeah" is mixed at
appropriate beats and even the sound of a wristwatch alarm clock does
the same.
Analyze That doesn't have as much of the overtly
appealing funky personality (in tribute to the Las Vegas style of Lalo
Schifrin) as
Ocean's Eleven, but the same sense of urban
sophistication is present. The somewhat dense, accelerated sound is
refreshing in the context of this setting, and Holmes' busy loops and
processing of retro sounds into modern electronic instrumentation is
interesting, if not an easily flowing listening experience on
album.
The detractors of the album aren't many amongst the
die-hard fans of Holmes' rearrangement of familiar ingredients in his
earlier scores and especially on his own solo albums. The score does
suffer from a few basic flaws that will likely not affect the livelihood
of a rather shallow comedy like
Analyze That. It is music that
would work exceedingly well in a nightclub atmosphere, mixed into
freestyle cues that blatantly ignore synchronization points. In many
ways, each cue serves like source music (and some of it is truly
intended as such in the film's mix), though it's hard to match a cue
like "Car Showroom" with the actual environment you'd hear in such a
place. That sound is sufficient for the genre on album, but it doesn't
hold true to the basic rules of scoring for films; there is no punch
line accentuation, nor is there any single sharp cue change that would
indicate that something funny was said on screen (or perhaps even a
change of scene has happened). In these regards, the score functions as
only the most basic form of background entertainment, potentially
neglecting specific moments that need a musical twist in the film. The
only cue for which the mood may not match entirely is the Sushi Bar
scene, for which Holmes' used slight guitar plucking in an Asian sense
with a strangely loungey and almost-Latin rhythm. Additionally, the
score features no central theme, though the rhythm of the title sequence
does return in the Strip Club cue for good measure. Finally, the album
is relatively short and ends without so much as a basic repetition of
this lively rhythm, leaving the listener wondering why the music just
slowly dies off and stops. In any case, this score is an extension of
the Holmes style that listeners of his previous scores will be very
contented with, but traditional film music fans will find it very
repetitive, tedious, and lacking the basic characteristics of a film
score.
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