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| Isham |
Twisted: (Mark Isham) How do such unfortunate films
like the 2004 serial-killer thriller
Twisted pass through all of
the studio hoops and actually get made into a finished product for the
big screen? It's rare that you actually have a film in which every
single element is so saturated with cliche that the overall product has
no redeeming individual quality with which to define itself. Usually,
you have one character, a piece of cinematography, or even a musical
score that transcends a step or two above the rest of the elements in a
doomed film. Not so with
Twisted. Top flight actors, including
the steely and tawdry Ashley Judd (whose character does, for you
Juddaholics out there, conduct her character in quite an active sex life
in this role), are utterly wasted; there are as many stereotypical
pitfalls stumbled upon in their performances as there are times you see
Judd drink from a glass of cheap wine. The plot is a "whodunit" affair
by screenwriter Sarah Thorp in which the killer can be identified by any
semi-conscious adult viewer within in the first 15 minutes. The
cinematography uses every opportunity to leech off of the mysterious
beauty of San Francisco, with overly-predictable shots of Pacific Bell
Park (or whatever idiotic corporate name forced upon it at the time) and
the Golden Gate Bridge that you'd swear belonged in a "Star Trek" film.
The director of
Twisted, Philip Kaufman, definitely didn't have
the right stuff this time around, with the execution so lame that you
have a scene in which a thousand cops all show up at a crime scene
exactly a moment too late. And what of the score? Any hope for
intelligence from Mark Isham in this assignment? Unfortunately, Isham is
just one part of a production that stands in one tidy, completely
straight line waiting to be shot at, and the comprehensive failure of
his music to help the movie transcend is simply one reason why the mass
majority of worldwide audiences considered the film with a total lack of
respect. For a movie as boring and predictable as
Twisted, the
only hope you have as a film score collector is that the composer has at
least figured out the film's major flaws as well and has created
something at a level more interesting than the rest of the project.
Isham was at a disadvantage from the start, however, because he was a
painfully predictable choice to score any cheap thriller about corrupt
cops set in a sophisticated city.
Isham has been to this dance many times before and
since, and the results are usually the same. The veteran of jazz at the
time, a man familiar with writing for that lonely trumpet on a dark and
wet city street, Isham could have composed barely adequate tones for
this one in his sleep. Given the quality of his output for
Twisted, maybe he was asleep. It's the kind of completely
non-descript, underplayed score that could put its own musicians into a
dazed stupor during the recording sessions if the room was just warm
enough. In this case, those musicians belonged to the Hollywood Studio
Symphony, or at least part of it. Isham utilized a moderate string
section and four horns, along with his own keyboard and one artist who,
according to the album's packaging, was responsible for "many plucked
and struck instruments." Those struck instruments could very well have
been studio chairs, discarded pipes, air conditioner intakes, and
kitchen utensils, because Isham's extensive sampled library of
equivalently irritating noises, heard destroying the soundscape of
several scores later in the decade (though most of them in horror and
not mystery), was probably not in action by 2004. In
Twisted, the
rapping and clanging of these sounds often pounds away in the background
over whining electronic tones and occasional jumpy strikes from the
string section of the orchestra. The opening and closing cues attempt to
offer a paltry, uninteresting theme with contemporary guitar
accompaniment in the bass and a seemingly drugged brass solo that has to
stop frequently to regain what little composure it has. A thinking man
with a decent film music collection might get the idea that Isham was
attempting to resurrect the ambience of David Shire's sparse urban
thriller scores of the 1970's in these sequences, but given how shoddy
the execution is, such teasing of the brain is not worth the time.
Despite Isham's efforts to refine the expected, modern noir tone of this
environment, he accomplishes nothing of distinction in the process of
instead falling into the many traps of tired expectations. The final
"You Are the One" cue (no, not a reference to
The Matrix) has two
or three minutes of slightly troubled but mostly tonal droning that
might nicely fill a void on some compilation, but the rest of it is as
pointless and uninteresting as it gets. Even at only 34 minutes, the
album for
Twisted is painfully long and offers music that is
surely unnecessary apart from the movie for nearly the entire listening
public, including die-hard score collectors.
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| Bias Check: |
For Mark Isham reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 2.84
(in 26 reviews)
and the average viewer rating is 2.88
(in 9,975 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
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The insert includes a list of performers but no extra information
about the score or film.
