"Good" Music Part II
by Doug Adams
In As Good As It Gets, Jack Nicholson plays an anti-social, obsessive
compulsive guy who has stacks and stacks of records, tapes, and CDs in
the corner of his room, spends all day either hunched over his computer
or his piano, and eats a breakfasts of bacon, eggs, and sausage. Well,
at least I usually eat a healthier breakfast than that. The film is a "have
you ever noticed how funny it is that we..." style of acting showpiece,
which means that hard-sale music, as a rule, is going to be pretty inappropriate.
But, guess what, Hans Zimmer almost totally avoids that pitfall by sticking
to his Driving Miss Daisy, "The Critic" bag of pleasant
clarinet oddities; his main theme plays like some weird sort of klezmer
tango. Like Good Will Hunting a few weeks back, this isn't the kind
of score one can do too much of an analysis with. It's a quirky series
of tunes that's meant to highlight the quirky nature of life--though someday
I would like to figure out how small ensemble scores have come to be our
"quirky" ensemble of choice. I think Zimmer scores for string
quartet here, and I wonder if he'd ever use that for a dramatic score.
Regardless, the piece is notable inasmuch as we often forget that Zimmer,
Mr. Big Action Guy, is really quite adept at these smaller things. In fact,
I might venture to say that he's better at these. Admittedly, I'm biased
towards liking these quaint little scores over windmill-style heavy metal,
but I think Zimmer does a far better job of packing musical goodies into
these works. It sounds like he's enjoying himself. It's not a great or
challenging score, it's more like a pleasant little tune you'd hum as you
walk down the street observing life--which is exactly what it was supposed
to be.
Four Good Things About 1997
You know, I had a whole list of the high points of film music in 1997,
but since so many people are probably going to do that, I thought it would
be fun to just whittle it down to a few of the things I, personally, was
very happy to see in the field last year. So in no particular order...
Colorful Writing With Structure
Ok, I love the symphony orchestra as much as anyone has a right to,
but I was thrilled that 1997 showed us just how much could be done with
other instruments. Howard Shore was the leader here, with his wonderfully
colorful scores to Cop Land and Crash. Copland did use a
large string ensemble, but with the entire thing being electronically altered,
the inclusion of some odd harmonic sounds, signal-like trumpet solos, and
bagpipes it turned into a non- linear tapestry of moodiness. And it didn't
sacrifice one iota of dramatic or musical cohesion. The Game also
worked very well, but Shore's real stand out was Crash, a minimalistic,
hypnotizing mix of electric guitars swirls that proved one and for all
that the instrument can still be used in interesting ways (see below).
Thomas Newman always does incredibly well in this category; too bad he
was stuck with such dead-on-arrival films this year--still waiting on Oscar
and Lucinda. Carter Burwell applied the same kind of re-invented ensemble
music to a mainstream movie with Conspiracy Theory and came up with
one of the most enjoyable, off-beat scores this year. I'm not even sure
one could pin down all the influences in this work, it just seems to be
Burwell toying with a mix of shakers, saxes, low woodwinds, jazz, vaguely
middle Eastern harmonies, pop, synths, and searing guitars. Speaking of
which...
Intelligent guitar writing.
Between John Williams' Rosewood, Conspiracy Theory, all of Danny
Elfman's 1997 scores, and, of course, Crash, the guitar was a big
winner this year. But, what's best about it, is that each of the scores
listed above used guitars in completely different ways. Williams' Rosewood
used it as a slashing, violent color, Burwell used it as a trippy acid
rock brew, Elfman used it as Alberti- styled nostalgia in Men in Black
and Good Will Hunting, and as Tito-Puente- meets-Cab-Calloway-style
insanity in Flubber. Shore's Crash may still be the most
interesting usage out of all of these, but when was the last year that
electric guitar played anything put power anthems and down home pastiches?
He's Baaack... Jerry Goldsmith.
1997 represented a true return to form for Goldsmith. While fans of
his newer efforts like The Ghost and the Darkness and First Knight
were largely turned off by the serial, bitonal, Romantic amalgams he concocted
for L.A. Confidential and The Edge, in my eyes they represent
some of the best work he's done for years. It was the first time that his
1990's expressiveness and 1960's/1970's sense of innovation have completely
meshed. Note the way that the "Bloody Christmas" track in L.A.
Confidential, for all of its ragged, atonal, fury, is essentially a
swing chart with a groove. It seems so logical when the jazz flugelhorn
horn and trumpet solos come in, because we've already established that
"feel" through a single element of the violent music. Likewise,
the jazz solos toy with just enough dissonance to relate to the preestablished
darkness. I'll be very curious to see where 1998 takes Goldsmith.
World Music
World music in film music used to mean that someone was playing a shakuhachi
somewhere. This year it meant John Williams doing two scores for "black"
themed movies, a Latin percussion action score, and a Tibetian epic. It
meant Philip Glass doing the other Tibetian score in an entirely differed
way. It meant Mychael Danna's brilliant gamelan and American Indian flute
work in The Ice Storm, Medieval and Iranian instruments in his The
Sweet Hereafter, and Indian instruments and synths combined for his
Kama Sutra. And most importantly, it meant that the above scores--love
'em or hate 'em--didn't sound like twelve other things out the same weekend.
Of course, I'm skipping some of the more obvious stuff, like the mountains
of welcome re-released discs this year, but the point is, it was a good
year to be involved in all this. So let's all take a minute to sit back
and smile, content in the knowledge that they actually put all those records
in Jack Nicholson's room to lend him some needed humanity! I think...
Doug@filmscoremonthly.com
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