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| Zimmer |
Pacific Heights: (Hans Zimmer) With a "tenant from
hell" formula and an insane but effectively ingratiating villain,
Pacific Heights showed promise but fell victim of director John
Schlesinger's tactic of aiming for the kind of cheap thrills generic to
horror films of much lesser budgets. The 1990 production cast Michael
Keaton as the mysterious con artist who makes life a living hell for the
owners of a San Francisco home in hopes of forcing them into foreclosure
and picking up the residence for himself. He installs himself as a
tenant in their place without actually paying them, all the while
tormenting the other tenants and the owners upstairs. The young couple
that attempts to deal with him (Melanie Griffith and Matthew Modine)
eventually resorts to physical action and a little con action themselves
to strike back at Keaton's shady maneuvers. Stumbling over cliches and
stereotypes in almost each sequence,
Pacific Heights is the type
of film that best resides on late night cable, though Hans Zimmer's
score is one of the bright spots (along with Keaton in any role as
creep) that may make the entire thing worth watching. In the early
1990's, Zimmer was in the process of branching out into a multitude of
directions that yielded some of the composer's most diverse efforts. He
had a knack for overachieving in assignments that called for simple,
workmanlike music, often leading to scores with the depth of style and
personality not heard in many of his larger budget projects to come a
decade later. The composer had a habit, despite his refreshing
experimentation in the application of solo acoustic instruments to
synthetic orchestral samples, of adapting his prior themes and
instrumental techniques in his scores across this period. Rather rare in
Zimmer's career, during any time, have been the horror and suspense
genres, though, and
Pacific Heights therefore received music that
has basic mannerisms that will be familiar but execution and tone that
is relatively unique. A certain amount of generic slasher material was
required for scenes of outright horror (as well as some unpleasant,
dissonant droning that his keyboards easily provided), but outside of
these passages, Zimmer treats
Pacific Heights as though it were a
high class mystery straight from the film noir age. It's in the
attractively melodic half of
Pacific Heights that a collector of
the composer's music will find significant enjoyment.
The ensemble employed by Zimmer for
Pacific
Heights consists primarily of his usual array of synthesizers,
though the score benefits greatly from soloists on piano, saxophone,
bass, and trumpet (along with the soulful female voice typical to the
composer's scores back then), lending the obvious noir touch to the
atmosphere. These elements contribute most frequently to the first half
of the score, "Part I" and "Part II" on the album conveying the bulk of
the thematic development. In the final part, this snazzy instrumentation
is allowed to whip up ambitious rhythms to accompany the revenge
sequences on screen. A couple of motifs exist in
Pacific Heights,
muddied by some allusions to classical music that were also somewhat
common to Zimmer's work. The most interesting theme is a rhythmic idea
that uses a synthetic cimbalom effect that will, along with the
hyperactive string movements in these cues, oddly generate comparisons
to the much later
Sherlock Holmes. Blatantly electronic, almost
harsh brass samples are a minor detraction from these passages, but they
provide necessary muscle. The primary theme, however, is the classical
holdover that is translated from solo piano into surprisingly nimble
jazzy incarnations, especially in "Part II." This seven-minute cue is
largely devoid of the score's troubling dissonant material and is an
absolute must for Zimmer collectors (it appeared on one of Varèse
Sarabande's massive anniversary compilations). Under infectious piano
and sax performances of heightened intensity, Zimmer stretches out his
keyboarding to the highest ranges with intriguing flute-like tones atop
the ensemble. When the mournful voice joins the group, the recipe
becomes intoxicating. An even greater role for the sax, as in Jerry
Goldsmith's concurrent
The Russia House, especially with the
flourishes in performance style like the one at 5:34 in "Part II," could
have made this score a classic. Slight oriental character in the music
carries over from
Black Rain to represent the other, more abiding
tenants in
Pacific Heights, and there is little new to appreciate
in these cues. Zimmer has written some fantastic music of an exotic
nature in his career, but this doesn't benefit from that talent.
Instead, the noir jazz is where
Pacific Heights becomes
memorable, and a crisp recording quality allows for about twenty minutes
of very satisfying melodic exploration in the whole. It's unfortunate
that Zimmer has infrequently revisited a sense of style this thick in
his blockbuster years.
**** @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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