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| Poledouris |
Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles: (Basil Poledouris)
It's just so pathetic to see a perfectly good concept dragged through
the mud for absolutely no acceptable reason whatsoever. While the 1988
sequel to 1986's
Crocodile Dundee was at least understandable in
terms of revisiting a funny character for one last blast, Paramount
decided to haul Paul Hogan (who had claimed he would never do a third
film in this franchise) out for a wretchedly awful 2001 follow-up. With
the original two films seeming like they belonged to another generation,
perhaps there was enough nostalgia left in the tank to justify a really
good script for Hogan to wrestle with. But
Crocodile Dundee in Los
Angeles is downright horrible, failing to provide any compelling
connections to the previous film and trying far too hard to resurrect
laughs from previous situations in which Hogan was out of place. It was
difficult not to be acquainted with the cute legacy of the
Crocodile
Dundee franchise even that far removed from its origins, especially
with Hogan doing so many commercials for substandard vehicles (even in
his advancing years), so it should have come as no surprise that the
soundtrack for the third entry was not to be taken seriously. The first
two films in the series were provided catchy scores by Peter Best, and
though neither effort was particularly good, some critics complained
about not hearing his music in
Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles.
Composer Basil Poledouris' involvement with the film instead surely
began with his relationship with director Simon Wincer, with whom he had
collaborated on
Lonesome Dove (which some still consider one of
his best works). No doubt,
Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles
offered more than just a small paycheck for Poledouris, likely
attributable to a "sounds like fun" motivation as well. After all, how
many composers get the opportunity to score an entry in such a
previously intelligent and illustrious film franchise? Unfortunately,
this project arguably represented the end of the increasingly ill
composer's career. Poledouris' assignments of the previous three years
had all been of a smaller scale, avoiding the typical blockbuster
assignments that the veteran composer was best known for.
His health and his personal life in shambles,
Poledouris had relocated to Seattle and also established a state of the
art studio in Venice, Italy. Both moves ultimately came too late to turn
around his career before he lost his battle with cancer in 2006. While
he did manage to write and record for a couple of projects after 2001,
it's a shame that the ridiculous
Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles
is technically his final mainstream work. Aggravating that circumstance
was the fact that the new century had only yielded three Poledouris
scores to that point, with the pleasant
Kimberly and
uninteresting
Love and Treason scores failing to turn many heads.
This second entry in 2001 is a score that proved to irritate his fans
rather than reverse that downward trend. For the task of scoring of
Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles, Poledouris was given a sum of
money just large enough to incorporate fifteen or so minutes of combined
orchestral performances in Seattle, and the rest of the material was his
responsibility (along with his fellow producers from
Love and
Treason) to piece together back at his studios in Venice.
Ironically, the only redeeming parts of his score don't involve the
orchestra much at all; they are the performances by acoustic guitars at
the beginning and end of the work. The "Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles
- Main Title" and "Proposal/Wedding Day" sequences have the most
coherent musical attributes, with a simplistic theme that, with the help
of the orchestra's string section, actually produces a Poledouris-style
sound consistent with his other modern scores. The rest of the score is
handled with percussive and electronic samples that are nothing short of
tedious to hear for any great length of time, attempting to merge the
hip coolness of American rock tones with a twist of the jungle. That
jungle element, formally the Australian influence on the score, is
carried by acoustic guitar and is intentionally meant to conflict with
the rock portions representing America because of the needed culture
clash in the story. Unfortunately, this alternation, from the bizarre
rattling and plucking of the straight Australian sequences (which are
usually animal-related, not surprisingly) to the rhythmically
unpredictable electric guitars and their drums, causes a juxtaposition
that just doesn't work.
What is funny in the movie is difficult to tolerate on
album, and that can sometimes happen on score albums that accompany
slapstick films of lower intelligence.
Crocodile Dundee in Los
Angeles is not the worst case of a parody or slapstick score, but it
is still impossible to appreciate given its obvious limitations. The
constant switching of percussive tone in nearly every cue causes an
extremely fragmented personality for the entire work, especially by the
time the wailing electric guitars have overwhelmed the jungle atmosphere
that started to form a cohesive sound early on. At least the sound
quality from Blowtorch Flats in Venice is significantly better here than
it had been in the usually muffled
Love and Treason. The fact
that any mostly score-related album existed for this soundtrack was
surprising at the time. It represents a rare occasion when the main
attraction of the product is indeed the selection of songs rather than
the score material ("blasphemy!" you say? Well, no). The addictive "Down
Under" song by Men at Work is what 95% of all purchasers of this product
will be seeking, and it's the basic reason the album existed in stores
to begin with. Why it wasn't placed at the start is a mystery; its
personality fits Hogan so much better than the weak underscore. The
other songs are all decent, and one can only wonder why Silva didn't
jettison more of the score material by Poledouris to accommodate
additional songs that could have better financially boosted the label
(which was pushing the songs in its publicity tactics and nearly
ignoring the Poledouris majority on the album). That said, the two
aforementioned, bookending score cues could easily have been mixed into
a satisfying 6-minute suite of Poledouris' contribution to the film,
releasing the rest of the product for a potentially more lucratively
marketable collection of Australian flavored songs. As it stands, the
Poledouris collectors aren't going to be thrilled by this barely
listenable score, and people who buy the album for the four songs won't
be thrilled to have to sift through the twelve tracks of score in order
to get to what they want. All around, the album is a mismatch, and for
film music enthusiasts, one to avoid all together. To say all this about
the last of Poledouris' new commercial score albums in America before
his death is painful and frustrating, but it's hard, cold truth.
** @Amazon.com: CD or
Download
| Bias Check: |
For Basil Poledouris reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.54
(in 35 reviews)
and the average viewer rating is 3.29
(in 36,752 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
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The insert includes no extra information about the score or film.
