Filmtracks Traffic Rank: #1,435
Written 5/2/01, Revised 2/7/09
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Buy it... only if you absolutely insist on maintaining a complete
collection of Basil Poledouris' music, because Love and Treason
has little life in its purely synthetic constructs.
Avoid it... if you demand any sense of vibrant or dynamic sound in
the drab and predictably shallow soundscape of this low-budget
television production.
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| Poledouris |
Love and Treason: (Basil Poledouris) This
television suspense thriller of 2001, which aired on CBS without much
fanfare, was produced by the same team that brought Flight of the
Intruder and The Hunt for Red October to the big screen.
Based loosely on the cover-up and exposure of military secrets, Love
and Treason is a revenge tale that pits an escaped convict against
the ex-wife who put him in prison (both were military officers).
Unfortunately, the film performed so poorly that it was never released
on video or DVD throughout the rest of the decade. Because of their
long-standing collaboration with composer Basil Poledouris, the
producers asked him to score the 100-minute movie. Discovering how
miniscule the budget for the score was, however, caused Poledouris to
laugh for a moment. With less than 5% of the amount that had been
allocated to The Hunt for Red October's score available for this
one, Poledouris, who enjoyed the film enough to want to be a part of it,
took a new approach to scoring it. For some time, Poledouris had been
collaborating with his friends and associates to create the "Blowtorch
Flats" studio in Venice, where the composer (along with others) could
use state of the art digital recording, mixing, and mastering
technologies to synthesize less expensive scores. If that intent sounded
familiar, then it was because such an enterprise was not entirely
different from the direction that the entire film scoring industry was
headed. With smaller budget films seeking more and more diversity in
their scores, Poledouris' "Blowtorch Flats" studio could have
represented the birth of another Media Ventures outfit of the budget
scoring business, though the composer's decline in health and consequent
death just a couple of years later didn't allow that studio to blossom
as he may have hoped. That said, with Love and Treason still came
the opportunity for Poledouris to test out the new studio equipment and
produce, essentially, a two-man score. If you thought that the
composer's music for Kimberly from the previous year represented
his style at its most minimal level, then you might be disappointed by
Love and Treason.
What Poledouris did with his array of synthesizers at
Blowtorch Flats is really no different from what the Media Ventures
composers had already accomplished for countless other productions. An
enormous number of orchestral sounds are transformed into digital
samples that could be manipulated and mixed together on keyboards
operated by one person, using ready-made loops and software to adjust
the combined result into a specific intensity necessary for nearly any
situation. While that concept was not new,
Love and Treason
functions as something of a trial run, and it was still light years away
from the more refined sound of the Media Ventures artists. The
soundscape of
Love and Treason has all the basic synthetic
cellos, drum pads, and straight electronic keyboarding that most
artificial scores feature. But one of the aspects that Poledouris
apparently wanted to test out with this project was space, and that's
the one problem that the studio still suffered from in this recording.
The sound quality of the finished mix is dull and flat, lacking the
vibrance that Hans Zimmer, Don Davis, and even the likes of Vangelis had
already managed to create. Some of that problem seems to reside in the
stereo mix as it weaves in and out of synchrony on album. With the
finished mastering playing without much life or style,
Love and
Treason exists as more of a practice run rather than an engaging and
entertaining standalone score. The best parts of the score are those in
which Poledouris goes back to his roots. The keyboarding heard in "Kate
Follows Rondell" needed to be expanded upon to allow Poledouris' native
piano skills to punch through with more regularity. Also among the
highlights are "Davis Meets Mobster," "It's Your Mother," and "Kate's
Blood/Air Speed," in which Poledouris and co-performer Todd Haberman
insert much needed consistency in rhythm to carry the suspense and
action sequences significantly better than the meandering synth cellos
can alone achieve. With these brief moments, combined with a farewell
sequence that almost breaks the lifelessness of a score devoid of theme,
Love and Treason offers about five to ten minutes of decent
material. But unlike other digitally conceived scores in the modern age,
Poledouris never created a synthetic sound that wasn't blatantly
electronic, and even his collectors may find little merit in this
restricted work.
** @Amazon.com: CD or
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Bias Check:
For Basil Poledouris reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.54
(in 35 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 3.3
(in 36,813 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
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