Film Score of the Week: Robin Hood--Prince of Thieves, by Michael Kamen (1991)

Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves is one of my favorite movies from childhood. As an adult, I recognize that it's at least partially terrible. The script is questionable at best, and the acting--across the board--deserves its own wing in the Terrible Hall of Fame. The movie is also way too long, and pretty much fails at tone. 

But! Robin Hood has two major things going for it that effectively disguise it as almost a good movie: some really great production and costume design, that straddles at a perfect crossroads between myth and history, and a score that's so great that it creates emotional resonance where story and acting failed to do so. 





The opening credits fly through most of the score's major themes in just over two minutes. There's the great "Hey, this is important stuff!" crescendo from about 0:20-0:38, the sweet action trumpets riff that kicks in at 0:52, and the romantic theme that uncomfortably reminds me of Bryan Adams, which weasels its way in briefly at the 1:10 mark. All three parts work for what the movie is selling. The action theme is Indiana Jones-like, the dramatic crescendo feels mythic, and the Bryan Adams bit is like proto-Titanic in all of the worst/best ways. Taken together, it's a score that succeeds at an A+ level in everything it tries to do. 

Before this, Michael Kamen was mostly known for orchestrating rock music pieces like Pink Floyd's The Wall, and scoring both the Lethal Weapon and Die Hard franchises, which actually had very effective scores for what they were trying to do. Later, he became perhaps best known (at least to some demos) as the conductor on Metallica's S&M (Symphony & Metallica) album. Kamen received an Oscar nomination for this film, but not for the score; it was for co-writing the interminable Bryan Adams song "(Everything I Do) I Do it for You." Four years later, Kamen received another Oscar nomination for co-writing another Bryan Adams film theme, this time for Don Juan DeMarco. So for those keeping track at home, Kamen received 2 Oscar nominations for Bryan Adams songs, but zero for his film scores. That sentence pretty much captures everything wrong with the Academy's music branch. 

Sadly Kamen died in 2003 at just 55 years old, but his work lives on. 

Film Score of the Week: Atonement, by Dario Marianelli (2007)

Despite the quality of even the best film scores, they're largely all part of the same musical phylum. Great film scores always function for their films, but I've only ever seen a few that really interacted with their films, and Atonement was the first time I noticed such a thing. 





For a film which is largely about the power of typed words, the artistic decision for the opening scene score to use the sounds of a typewriter as its percussion was a stroke of pure brilliance.

I also particularly love the way it's used in this scene:



As the pivotal moments of the plot are being set in stone, the sounds of typing drive home the idea that the characters are essentially writing their own futures in the moment, and Briony in particular is editing events in her head into the version that makes the most sense. (Side note: how weird is it to see Theon Greyjoy in there?)

Composer Dario Marianelli won a well-deserved Oscar for this score, and he's been nominated two other times, both for other collaborations with director Joe Wright, Pride & Prejudice (2005) and Anna Karenina (2012). Surprisingly he doesn't have many other especially notable credits to his name. Beyond his Joe Wright collaborations (the aforementioned ones and The Soloist), his only films to get wide releases are V for Vendetta (which I remember being quite good), and four films I haven't seen: The Brave One, Eat Pray Love, The Boxtrolls, and 2011's Jane Eyre adaptation. Hopefully soon he'll find more directors that bring out his best. 

Film Score of the Week: Conan the Barbarian, by Basil Poledouris (1982)

Writing and reading about Game of Thrones all week, and hearing its epic score, reminded me of my other favorite score for a fantasy story, the original 1982 Conan the Barbarian. 

What I love about Conan the Barbarian is that it's an only semi-watchable B-Movie, but it carries itself like the Citizen Kane of loincloth flicks. The lead costars were tri-named prestige actors James Earl Jones and Max Von Sydow, the screenplay was by Oliver Stone, it was directed by John Milius, who was (seriously) considered to be part of the same "Movie Brat/Film School Generation" group as Spielberg/Coppola/Scorsese, and the score sounded like it belonged to a David Lean-style epic. 





The main theme goes through three basic parts: the thundering build-up (1:06-1:57, and again 2:41-2:58), the romantic theme (1:58-2:40), and the hero theme (2:59-3:40). All three parts are very good, but specifically the first 10-15 seconds of the hero theme are what makes the score transcendent. I honestly think it's one of the best pieces of heroic film music ever written, and it stands up to John Williams' best work. It's so layered, so gigantic in scope, and so seemingly weathered, like just getting to that sound was a struggle. There's a mythology to it that's almost godlike, like when fantasy characters say ridiculous things like "Songs shall be written of this deed." This would have to be what those songs sound like. Honestly, Marvel should have just purchased the rights to that score-segment and reused it for their Thor movies. There're only about 38 people on the planet that would have recognized it anyway. 

The score was by Basil Poledouris, a Greek-American composer also noted for the scores of Robocop (which is equally great), The Hunt for Red October, Starship Troopers, Red Dawn, The Blue Lagoon, and the Emmy-winning score of the TV mini-series Lonesome Dove. Poledouris never became the film-scoring force that it seems he should have. He mostly stuck to B-movies by overly masculine directors like John Milius, Paul Verhoeven, and John McTiernan, never really doing anything that could generously be called a prestige project. He never received an Oscar nomination, and died in 2006, at the age of 61. 

Poledouris also scored the Conan sequel, 1984's Conan the Destroyer. It's a horribly regarded movie, fully embracing its "B-ness" by employing the likes of Grace Jones and Wilt-fucking-Chamberlain as lead characters. Consequently, it's much more fun than its predecessor, almost 30 minutes shorter, and featuring far more ridiculous looking villains, including one that's basically a cross between a unicorn and an aborted yeti. So of course I love it. 

But it's hard not to hold a special place for the original, which really believed itself to be a Great piece of filmmaking. And it goes through stretches of nearly convincing the viewer of that, until you realize things like one of the score segments is called "The Orgy Chamber Attack on Thulsa Doom," and then you're right back to reality. 

Film Score of the Week: American Beauty, by Thomas Newman (1999)

Most of the truly great film scores still function as great pieces of music in their own right. One of the things I love about the score to 1999's Best Picture winner, American Beauty, is that it really doesn't. It's a score that seemingly has no centrality to it; like a continuous series of notes that all function together cohesively without actually forming the whole of a melody. Of course that isn't literally true. There is melody here. It just never draws attention to itself. 





The opening title music is among modern cinema's most instantly recognizable sounds. To anyone that's seen the film, five seconds should be enough to identify it. It's unmistakeable partially because it sounds like nothing else, and partially because it so perfectly brings to life the monotony of a life that has no life to it. And yet, I mean that as a compliment. Imagine being tasked to write a piece of music that's meant to evoke lifelessness while simultaneously being intriguing enough to fit the film's tagline of "…look closer." Sounds easy, right?

There are 19 tracks on the American Beauty score, and composer Thomas Newman infuses each one of them with both subtlety and intrigue, all serving their scenes in unique ways that still sound thematically like part of a whole. But the part everyone remembers is the gorgeous, sparse piano that accompanies the plastic bag dancing in the wind:





Music really doesn't get more minimalist than this. The main line is, I think, exactly four notes, followed by exactly seven notes, with each note created by one single key on the piano, played individually, spaced just far enough apart so that each note is almost like its own life. Its own plastic bag, dancing in the wind. For both a film, and a scene, about the hidden beauty of simplicity, a more perfect score is unfathomable. 

Composer Thomas Newman had been in the game for about fifteen years at this point (one of his first film scores was 1984's Revenge of the Nerds), but prior to this he was probably best known for scoring 1994's The Shawshank Redemption, which uses some of the same thematic notes during the great interlude where Brooks tries to make it on the outside. The Shawshank Redemption gave Newman his first Oscar nomination for Best Original Score, and American Beauty gave him his fourth. He's had 12 nominations to date, and lost every one of them. In 1994, he lost to The Lion King, which feels (kind of) justified, but American Beauty lost to The Red Violin, in what seems like a clear case of voters picking the score with the most music instead of the score with the best music. 

Thomas Newman comes from what could justifiably be called the greatest musical family of the twentieth century. His father, Alfred Newman, is the most decorated film composer ever, the winner of nine Oscars (most notably for 1956's The King and I) and loser of an additional 36 of them. His cousin is the great American singer/songwriter Randy Newman, who happens to have won two Oscars--and been nominated for 18 more--in what is practically a side career with film music. Additionally, Thomas has two siblings in the family business, David (one Oscar nomination) and Maria (no Oscar nominations, for shame), as well as two uncles, Emil (one Oscar nomination) and Lionel (11 nominations, one win). So for those keeping track, the Newman family has amassed 90 Oscar nominations and 12 wins. Not. Fucking. Shabby. 

Film Score of the Week: Cliffhanger, by Trevor Jones (1993)

What better way to celebrate the first day of March Madness--and several games that came down to the final possession--than with a movie called Cliffhanger? 

I've always had a (very) soft spot for Alpha Male-style action flicks, and that's largely because I grew up in the prime era for movies like this. Because Cliffhanger never spawned any sequels, it tends to be forgotten in comparison to many of its contemporaries, but it's actually one of the very best there is--a movie that combines a good high concept plot, phenomenal set pieces and stunts, a great villain (John Lithgow at his most sadistic), and a stunning score that has still stayed with me more than twenty years later. 





Because Cliffhanger had a much higher concept than even most high concepts, it needed a score that evoked not just the action and drama, but also the grandeur of the visuals. Because the location and landscapes play such a huge role in this movie (which is slightly unusual for the genre), the score to Cliffhanger is thematically closer to classic Hollywood epics than it is to the other Reagan-era action films, of which this is one of the last great gasps before CGI fully took over action films and changed them forever. 

The score was written by Trevor Jones, who's probably most well known for his score to The Last of the Mohicans the year before, and for which this uses many of the same elements. Overall, Jones has had an underwhelming career, but that could be due to the films he's worked on. His IMDb resume is mostly a depressing list of B & C movies with titles like Bad Influence, Chains of Gold, Blame it on the Bellboy, and Kiss of Death, none of which were probably likely to summon his peak creative inspiration. 

It's unclear why that became his career path. You'd think after the gorgeous score to Mohicans and then this in back to back years, offers for prestige films would have been flowing in. But if they did, Jones must have turned them down. Or maybe directors thought he's hard to work with. It's hard to say why some careers never reach their potential. 

But none of that diminishes what Jones did here, which is make a good little action movie feel as enormous and breathtaking as the Rocky Mountains that he was sonically capturing. 


(Side note: Check out the 7:55 mark of the embedded video for one of the all-time great acting WTF's, as the actor playing Frank seems to wildly misunderstand what emotion the scene was calling for, and looks upon the imminent death with what appears to be a cross between manic excitement and wild glee. It's like the director told him, "Okay, now give me 'Pedophile at crowded elementary school playground with no teachers in sight.'")

Film Score of the Week: Beetlejuice, by Danny Elfman (1988)

Few film score composers and directors have ever been more perfectly paired than Danny Elfman and Tim Burton, which is amazing luck, as Burton's first film happened to be the second film Elfman ever scored--Pee-wee's Big Adventure. Shortly after that, the duo went on an amazing three-film streak--Beetlejuice, Batman, and Edward Scissorhands--which their reputations have mostly rested on ever since. 

Personally, I'd say the first Batman (1989) is their best achievement as a pair--a movie with a pretty ho-hum script, but which looked and sounded better than any comic book movie before or since. But Beetlejuice is definitely the most fun either have ever had, a bonkers movie that taps into the most creative parts of their collective imaginations, with every weird idea they had just pouring out and finding voice in Michael Keaton's manic performance. Elfman's dark carnival-esque sounds are equaled by the perfect dark-carnival of Burton's design, and Michael Keaton makes for the perfect nightmare barker. 




Beetlejuice first came out when I was a kid, and I saw it around that time too. It made perfect sense to my seven-year old mind. Rewatching it as an adult, I'm amazed it exists. Can you imagine the pitch meeting where Burton tried to describe it to a studio-head? Or when they saw the first production and costume designs? Or first read the screenplay? Looking back, this and Edward Scissorhands feel like the only movies that really tapped into Burton's creative potential. 

Danny Elfman was also the lead singer/songwriter for '80s New-Wave band Oingo Boingo, but by the time his collaborations with Burton hit their stride in the late-'80s/early-'90s, he'd turned his full attentions to film composing, also churning out great scores to movies like Dick Tracy, To Die For, Mission Impossible, Spider-Man, Men in Black, and many more. He's been nominated for four Oscars, but hasn't won one yet. As a consolation prize, he wrote the theme to The Simpsons (also in 1988), which is probably a strong contender for Most Recognizable Television Theme ever. 

Film Score of the Week: Star Trek--The Motion Picture, by Jerry Goldsmith (1979)

In honor of Leonard Nimoy, Spock himself, all of us can live long and prosper with this great film music.





What I love about this score is that it captures everything the idea of the Star Trek franchise is supposed be: It's epic, but has this feeling of being continuous instead of climactic. Star Trek is, after all, a series about the journey, not the destination. 

And what Goldsmith doesn't get enough credit for here is that this score was directly competing against John Williams' Star Wars score, and really held it's own pretty well. People forget, Star Trek was only a three season show that got cancelled at the end of the '60s, and might not ever have been heard from again had it not been for Star Wars in 1977, and every other film studio immediately trying to duplicate that type of success. Hence the resurrection of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, released in 1979, which tried to play to that same audience and failed miserably (with people snarkily calling it "The Motionless Picture" for how goddamned boring it was). The score was the only element that met expectations. 

Jerry Goldsmith is definitely in contention for the title of "Greatest film composer that most people don't know by name." He's basically the poor man's John Williams, and I mean that in the same way you might call L.A. Confidential the poor man's Chinatown--both great, one definitely better. (And both of which Goldsmith wrote the score for!)

Basically, Goldsmith is supremely talented at writing semi-epic scores for semi-franchise movies, just never being quite as good at it as Williams (as though anyone ever could be). In addition to this one, he wrote memorable scores to Alien, The Omen, The Planet of the Apes, Gremlins, Air Force One, First Blood (Rambo), The Mummy, Basic Instinct, Poltergeist, Patton, and several others. Along the way, he collected 18 Oscar nominations, but only won once (Original Score for The Omen, 1976). He died in 2004, with 250 composer credits to his IMDb page. 

Leonard and Jerry-- Live Long and Prosper. 

Film Score of the Week: The Last Emperor, by Ryuichi Sakamoto & David Byrne (1987)

I've been thinking a lot about film scores lately since writing about this year's batch in my Oscar picks piece last week, and I feel like the great ones never quite get enough credit for how well they create and evoke the emotional epicenter of their films. Of course everyone knows the great John Williams scores, the themes to James Bond and The Godfather, the Psycho shower scene, and a handful of others. But there are so many wonderful film scores out there that fall completely off the radar for anyone that hasn't seen the film, so I thought it would be nice to start spotlighting some of them. Hence, a new recurring post: Film Score of the Week. 

We're starting with The Last Emperor because it's an all-time favorite of mine, and I recently acquired it on vinyl. Very few films have ever looked or felt as tragically beautiful as this 1987 Best Picture winner, which approximately no one has seen or thought about since 1989. That's too bad. It's definitely not one of the all-time great Best Picture winners, but it's not a sub-par one either, and it's a resplendent sensory explosion to watch and listen to. Japanese pop star Ryuichi Sakamoto composed one half of the score, and American pop star David Byrne (of Talking Heads) composed the other half. In what is a shocking surprise to myself and anyone that knows me, I like the Sakamoto half far better. 

The two sequences to really focus on are the first and third tracks. The main theme starts about 22 seconds into track one, and it's just startlingly beautiful. It conjures the discovery of a beautiful hidden world that the beginning of the film portrays, while also having an unmistakably tragic undertone that tells you the beauty won't last. With track 3, my favorite sequence starts at about 1:39, which retains the beauty of the opening theme, but focuses far more on the loss and yearning to regain it.

For semi-completeness' sake, here's the best sequence from the David Byrne half of the score. Musically, it's probably more complex and interesting than the Sakamoto half, but it's also far less emotional and elegant. Though in that regard, it serves the second half of the film well, which has less loss and elegance than the first half. 

An earlier version of this piece was written and posted on Facebook on February 27, 2015

The Great Scenes: The Last of the Mohicans and What Perfect Filmmaking Looks Like

This is the last nine minutes of the 1992 Michael Mann adaptation of The Last of the Mohicans, and it's as good an answer as any to the question of why I think film is the greatest art form. At 1:07 of this clip, the music starts, and at 1:24, the last word is spoken. The eight minutes after that is the most exciting, seductive, and breathtaking filmmaking you will ever see. 

Most (though definitely not all) good films have quality story, dialogue, and acting. Those are all important, but not the keys to great cinema. None of those are what sets cinema apart. After all, theater has each of those as well. What great cinema does is control the exact visual and sonic sensation you experience while still letting you experience it on your own terms. Three things combine to do that, and more than anything, they're what come together to create the art of filmmaking: editing, photography, and sound. Never have those three artistic elements been better used in unison than in these eight minutes.

The stunning score creates the tempo and the editing drives it. The location photography transports us to one of the most beautiful settings imaginable (taking place in upstate New York but filmed in North Carolina), but balances that setting with the savagery of the capacity for humans to inflict pain on one another. Everything Michael Mann and his team accomplish here is about absolute precision. The duration of the shots, the angles and distances of the camera, the use of filming death from above and leaps into the abyss from below, the subtle and occasional deployment of slow-motion, the way the driving nature of the music takes a break during the deaths around five and six minutes in before kicking back into full gear for the next action piece… It's all masterly composition in the most literal sense.

Every moment is an exercise in total control over what Mann wants us to see and hear, but what we think and feel comes from us. There's no exposition or explanation in anything that happens, it's all just pure action. It's the film version of shoot first, answer questions never. Mann has a gift of lingering in his direction where he tends to hold shots on characters in transitional moments for longer than other directors, and it allows the audience more of an opportunity to get in the heads of the characters. But these shots are usually devoid of dialogue, which ensures that the character's head is the only place we can go. Mann's films are almost never silent; music is far too important to him as a tool to dictate emotion, pacing, and mood. But his films are never overly talky, either. His characters are always given breathing room for the viewer to feel their situation without being talked to death about it.

Over the last 20 years, Daniel Day Lewis has become more of a star character actor, and retreated from really being a movie star. He disappears into his roles so much that we no longer know what he looks like in "normal" life. I don't know that this is ever what he looked like normally, even in 1992, but it is a wonderful anomaly in his career how much he allowed himself to be a visual star in this film, and how much Mann took advantage. Daniel Day Lewis isn't likely who people think about as a sexy, masculine, lead actor, but that's what he gives in this role. His screen presence is commanding, but not via the voice that he's used so well in his career. His physical presence just soaks up the screen.

Whenever I find myself questioned about why I believe filmmaking is the most potent art form (sometimes even questioned by myself), it's scenes like this that I go back to. Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of people collaborated to bring these eight minutes into existence, but we got the best out of each of them. It's that ability for the many parts and collaborators to create the greatest of all wholes that ensures filmmaking is the greatest of all arts.