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| Debney |
Valentine's Day: (John Debney) The concept of a
large ensemble cast love story centered around a holiday isn't entirely
new to the movie industry, but director Garry Marshall took it to
extreme levels with his 2010 venture
Valentine's Day. With a
massive group of stars ranging from teenage heartthrobs to favorite
veterans, the story attempted to weave a complex tapestry of couples in
various states of distress and elation, giving audiences just a brief
glimpse into roughly twenty individuals while maintaining a warm,
feel-good romance environment sure to attract the ladies into theatres.
Unfortunately, while
Valentine's Day had a huge opening in
America, Marshall's efforts were greeted by negative reviews and the
film didn't prove to have legs. That hasn't stopped the director (and
writer of the story) from immediately announcing work on a sequel set
around new year's eve in late 2011. The fatal problem with
Valentine's Day was its attempt to emulate the popular and
successful 2004 film
Love Actually, which followed roughly the
same formula, but did so with a cast about half the size. By expanding
the story of
Valentine's Day to encompass so many cameo
performers, the story started stealing ideas from a range of other films
to fill its seemingly endless loops of character connections. The music
for the two productions also turned out to be quite similar, both
receiving chart-inhabiting song album compilations of music heard in the
film. The films also shared a remarkably similar need in terms of the
original underscore, the genre demanding pleasantly soothing light
orchestral, piano, and acoustic guitar approaches. Marshall (along with
his directing sister, Penny) has rotated through several compositional
masters of romance in the last twenty years, ranging from James Newton
Howard and Patrick Doyle to Rachel Portman. Collaborating with the
director for his two
The Princess Diaries films and
Raising
Helen, however, was film music chameleon John Debney, who tackled
Valentine's Day at roughly the same time as he let loose with
bad-ass electric guitars in
Iron Man 2. Debney is as safe a
choice for this kind of assignment as anyone, and his effortless
addressing of the topic is conveyed in the smooth personality of the
music. Unlike, Craig Armstrong's music for
Love Actually,
however, Debney's score for
Valentine's Day is largely
unmemorable despite its effectiveness.
Because of the substantial fragmentation of the plot of
Valentine's Day, Debney was at something of a disadvantage.
Armstrong was able to create unique identities for each of the couples
in
Love Actually (despite competing with the song placements)
because there were essentially only four major lines to follow in that
film. In
Valentine's Day, there is so much interwoven interaction
between incidental, poorly developed characters that Debney really had
no way to create and maintain consistent thematic or instrumental
distinction for anyone on screen. He does provide cues of unique
character at times, including a John Barry-style of melodramatics for
the older couple in "Edgar & Estelle" (which also sounds eerily similar
to Lee Holdridge's
Old Gringo), but the majority of the score is
frightfully anonymous. It never reaches to memorable heights as
Armstrong's
Love Actually does, instead content to play the field
conservatively with only one overarching theme to neatly wrap up the
giant circle. Heard in an instrumental crescendo in "Valentine's Day,"
this theme is adapted throughout the work and is the basis for the
Carina Round-performed song featured at the end of the score album.
There is a timeless quality to the song that gives it a silver screen
appeal, and appreciation has to be expressed for just how lovely the
song adaptation is. In many ways, it finally provides an outward
expression of emotion that the score only functionally touches upon.
That theme opens the album in "The Proposal/Trying to Tell Her," passed
from acoustic guitar to piano and clarinet. It later occupies a flute,
harp, and dreamy strings, never seemingly troubled outside of an
occasional yearning, hanging note at the end of a cue. The 36 minutes of
score material on the album rarely diverges from this tone, though
occasional pizzazz is offered with snazzy passages for light rock or
vintage Hammond organ-type funk. The score album from WaterTower (Warner
Brothers' new distribution arm for soundtracks) is arranged so that
almost 40 very short cues are condensed into 14 tracks, leaving silence
in between each cue within a track; while this is good for those who
want to pull out specific cues from within a track to enjoy, the
listening experience does stutter as a result. Some of the less than
30-second recordings probably should have been dropped to speed things
along. Still, this music is as consistently innocuous as it can get, and
it's difficult to reward Debney's efforts with a rating less than the
average three stars. That said, for a better variant of the same idea,
on screen and on album, seek
Love Actually instead.
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| Bias Check: |
For John Debney reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.33
(in 56 reviews)
and the average viewer rating is 3.09
(in 49,878 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.
