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| Goldsmith |
Matinee: (Jerry Goldsmith) Arguably one of director
Joe Dante most notable flops,
Matinee is a 1993 comedy that
accomplished several of his personal interests. It's a "coming of age"
picture for a group of pre-teen youth, it pokes fun at the B-rate horror
film industry of the 1950's and early 1960's, and it plays on the fears
of nuclear proliferation that were at their height in October 1962, the
time frame of movie's setting. While the group of young actors is more
than sufficient in their roles, it's John Goodman who steals the film as
showman Lawrence Woolsey, a character based upon the real-life horror
movie experimenter William Castle. Attempting to capitalize on nuclear
fears and bring the third dimension of film back to theatres, Woolsey
debuts a "movie within a movie" called "Mant" (featuring, as you would
expect, a creature that is half man, half ant) and includes drama with a
live "mant" inside the theatre itself at the showing. With nostalgia and
sentiment at heart, the comedy of the film is an extra bonus. With that
in mind, composer Jerry Goldsmith provides a score that is appropriately
light-hearted but not as strictly comedic as you might first imagine.
With the collaboration between Dante and Goldsmith spanning several
decades and including many successful titles, it's easy for
Matinee to slip through the cracks, though the score has managed
to remain a favorite amongst the composer's fans. An important
distinction to make in this soundtrack is between the music you hear in
"Mant" and that which Goldsmith wrote for the original character drama.
The old horror music applied as source is reused material from actual
films of the era and genre, and only in the context of a cue like
"Showtime" does Goldsmith play with some of that outwardly Bernard
Hermann-inspired knock-off style in his own material. While the "Mant"
music may, for some listeners, be the more memorable cue-by-cue material
in the soundtrack (the "Mant" film is, after all, quite funny), none of
that music exists within Goldsmith's contribution and is thus absent
from the album. Alone, Goldsmith's writing for
Matinee sounds
much like the lesser-inspired moments of
The 'Burbs from several
years earlier, pulling also from the procedures of composer's equivalent
contemporary dramas and comedies of 1992 and 1993.
In regards to the familiarity of nearly everything
heard in
Matinee, the score is far less entertaining in a comedy
or action sense than other Dante/Goldsmith pairings spanning from
Gremlins to
Looney Tunes: Back in Action (nine films total
by the composer's death). Goldsmith's themes follow the route of
sentimentality and nostalgia far more than comedy, with the first half
of the score containing little excitement beyond the consistency of the
composer's delightful, soft melodies for woodwinds. The themes Goldsmith
concocts for these films are very similar, with
Love Field,
Rudy, and
Angie all coming to mind, though in the case of
Matinee, his customary electronics typically setting the pace in
such circumstances are mostly absent. Relying instead on the slur of a
Henry Mancini-era jazz theme and occasional string theme borrowings
straight from the style of
Moon River as well,
Matinee is
an instrumentally conservative score. His identity for the kids is
typical lightweight fare for strings and woodwinds, though the ideas for
the theatre owner are far more intriguing. For Goodman's character,
Goldsmith inserts some sleazy jazz on piano, making for some greasy
moments at its start (complete with carnival pipes at one point) but
some outwardly elegant ones as the show goes on in later cues. An
attractive theme for suburbia takes a page from
The 'Burbs with
its chipper melody over pulsating brass and plucking bass strings. The
quantity of melodies for
Matinee is surprisingly deep, with the
final cue, "The Next Attraction," combining all of the thematic ideas
into one strong 8-minute cue (ending with a cute whistling sound effect
from Goldsmith's library), including an expansion of the faster,
rhythmic percussion-driven piano cues that finally provide a small taste
of that
Gremlins attitude. The latter half of
Matinee
provides a much more varied and interesting listening experience than
the first, thematically conservative half, including some
Basic
Instinct and
Forever Young shades in "This is It." If you
could throw the short blasts of B-rate horror music in "Showtime"
someplace in the vast end credits cue, you have all the music from
Matinee that you really need. The album is among those plentiful
Varèse Sarabande releases of Goldsmith's new music in the early
1990's that is too short for the most avid collectors but at least has
remained available at decent prices for decades. At the very least, it's
a reliable survey of the composer's comedic tendencies from the era.
*** @Amazon.com: CD or
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| Bias Check: |
For Jerry Goldsmith reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.28
(in 113 reviews)
and the average viewer rating is 3.3
(in 142,446 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
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