Your favorite movie music?
by zagor 44 Replies latest social entertainment
-
-
Snoozy
Mine would be Phantom of the Opera...still gives me goosebunps...
Snoozy..
-
Crumpet
oooo sooo many to choose from. I adore the music to The Mission, The Beach and Kill Bill Vols 1 and 2, Picnic at Hanging Rock best. I have them on my mp3 player and listen to them constantly
-
Frannie Banannie
Dirty Dancing
Beverly Hills Cop
-
Who are you?
American Beauty
North by Northwest
-
MsMcDucket
Coven - One Tin Soldier http://youtube.com/watch?v=AM4ADoVc6TU
-
MsMcDucket
Poseidon Adventure - Maureen Mcgovern - There's got to be a morning after http://youtube.com/watch?v=bcLazPauA1c
-
lost_light06
Better off dead
-
lost_light06
High Fidelity
-
Terry
I'm so old I have been a movie music fanatic my life long with over 5,000 movie scores sitting on various shelves.
It is only in the last 15 years that filmmusic has descended to such depths that I've almost lost interest.
Yes, I'm afraid I'm one of those old goats who declaim, "They don't write 'em like they use to."
The Golden Age of filmmusic had something that has almost completely vanished from filmmusic. There was MELODY! There was the possibility of beauty in emotion too. This is intolerable today. The young shrink from emotion in melody as though it were a weakness of character to be (as they say) manipulated into FEELING something.
The great composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold gave us KING'S ROW and John Williams barely changed a note of it to give us STAR WARS main title theme. There is a debt to the old school that must be acknowledged.
My favorite composer lifelong has been John Barry who was not only responsible for the James Bond music until recently, he also gave us wonderfully evocative melody and drama in the Lion in Winter (I wrote the liner notes for the recording, by the way!), Out of Africa, Somewhere in Time, Dances with Wolves, Born Free. (All Academy Award winners.)
What contemporary film music is now is this. It is an extension of sound effects. Take the Matrix films as an example. Whistle me the theme to Matrix. Nah, you can't. It is pulsing tonalities and lots of percussive polyrhythms and no melody. It works with film just fine, but, there is no core of memorable human emotion.
Enough complaining from an old dog.
When I watch films that fill me with emotion and a sense of profundity they are films with incredible scores filled with themes memorable and haunting. Among them:
Spartacus, Lawrence of Arabia, King of Kings, for example have transcendant scores by Alex North, Maurice Jarre and Miklos Rosza respectively.
Someday the pop song will be removed from movie music and will, once again, be replaced by wonderful orchestral music. Until this cycle repeats itself I won't be buying any new soundtracks for quite a while.