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| Zimmer |
The Holiday: (Hans Zimmer/Various)
Among the Christmas comedies and romances in 2006, there were
few successes. Director Nancy Meyers hoped to tap into the same female
audience base that brought box office fruits for
What Women Want
and
Something's Gotta Give with her home-swapping film
The
Holiday. In it, two professional women swap houses for two weeks at
an online site for such vacations, and in the process of living in those
homes, they meet their unlikely romantic counterparts. The problem for
Meyers, however, is that the seemingly simple plot takes several hours
on screen to resolve itself, and the acting choices are a bit bizarre to
begin with. Anybody who thought that Jack Black could pull off the same
transition that Adam Sandler accomplished in
Spanglish was
disappointed, and to see him paired in a serious role with Kate Winslet
is even worse. While the film fizzled for these (and a number of other)
reasons, there were some notable aspects of the project for film music
listeners to consider. First, Black's character in the story is a film
composer and makes a specific mentioning of Ennio Morricone in a scene.
Second, composer Hans Zimmer returns to the light romantic comedy genre
for which he produced endearing scores for the likes of the
aforementioned
Spanglish and Meyers'
Something's Gotta
Give. If you put those two factors together, and you know that
Zimmer adores Morricone's score for
Once Upon a Time in America,
then it gave him the opportunity to actually interpolate Morricone's
theme from the classic score into two key scenes in
The Holiday.
Since Zimmer's Oscar nomination for his work on James L. Brooks'
As
Good As It Gets nearly a decade ago, Zimmer has made a habit of
writing some of his most engaging music for this genre, sometimes taking
on most of the scoring duties himself. In the case of
The
Holiday, however, Zimmer leans on the assistance of six other
composers from his clone factory to help him in the process.
While this fresh batch of clones, most of whom are
relatively new names on the Zimmer scene, don't cause the score for
The Holiday to become as fragmented as you might expect, some
might claim to hear occasional identity problems with the work. The
ensemble consists of the usual Los Angeles string and woodwind sections
and a handful of soloists for flair on trumpet, piano, voice, and
guitar. Thematically, the score offers two easily identifiable themes,
neither of which groundbreaking, but presumably representing the two
leading ladies. Perhaps not surprisingly, the best cues on album are
"Maestro" and "Kiss Goodbye," both of which making vibrant use of
Morricone's theme from
Once Upon a Time in America and leading it
to some Heitor Pereira touch on guitar. Pereira's performances never
gain the momentum they had in
Spanglish, understandably, and with
the vocals in
The Holiday playing only a minor role, there's a
lack of outward flair in
The Holiday that makes it a rather
pedestrian score. Zimmer does counter with a charming sense of jazz,
embodied best by his tribute cue to the director, "For Nancy." For
Zimmer purists, only two cues (amounting to about seven minutes) were
written solely by Zimmer, including the snazzy opening and the light
rock-inclined "Definitely Unexpected." The remainder of the score is
mostly fluff on strings, piano, and guitar, rarely raising to a
substantial volume or pronouncing its themes with any exuberance. The
less anonymous cues are unfortunately the weaknesses of the album, with
the two source-like vocal cues in the middle, "Verso e Prosa" and "Meu
Passado," breaking the easy flow of the underscore. The final two cues
offer some fuller performances by the ensemble and a modern bass effect.
Fans of Zimmer's early works from the 80's will enjoy the matured
contemporary sound of "Cry." The juggling act of composers can be heard
in a few places on the album, with even the best and most subtle fades
sometimes betraying the transition from one composer's ideas to another.
But, on the whole,
The Holiday is a free-flowing, light-hearted,
and easy score with little substance and no worries, confirming that
much of Zimmer's most enjoyable music these days comes in non-synthetic
forms.
*** @Amazon.com: CD or
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| Bias Check: |
For Hans Zimmer reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 2.84
(in 121 reviews)
and the average viewer rating is 2.96
(in 298,172 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
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