The Screengrab

Bernard Herrmann was one of the most legendary film composers of all time.  One of his first major compositions was the score to The Devil and Daniel Webster, in which he showed both his innovative approach and his playfully subversive nature by by double-tracking a violin to play a jaw-droppingly complex rendition of "Pop Goes the Weasel", and then claiming the solo was the work of a teenaged violin prodigy he'd discovered.  He composed a number of memorable movie scores over the years, from the towering, epic sweep of Orson Welles' Citizen Kane (his very first project) to the moody, dark tension of Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (his very last).  But it is with Alfred Hitchcock's name that Herrmann's will be foreever linked.

Hitchcock knew he was playing with dynamite when he made Psycho.  The movie that buried noir and ushered in the age of the maniacal slasher was a risky venture for him on many levels:  with its shocking violence, infamous mid-film twist, and horror plot, it was a massive deviation from the big-budget hit mysteries that had made so much money for his studio bosses in the late 1950s.  Fearing disaster, Hitch -- who was nothing if not determined -- tried as much as possible to make the film on the cheap, and he wasn't afraid to capitalize on personal relationships to do so.  Some stories have it that he strong-armed Herrmann, who had turned in incredibly monumental work for him before on such movies as The Man Who Knew Too Much, North by Northwest, and Vertigo; but Herrmann wasn't one to be cowed so easily.  He agreed to work on the soundtrack for Psycho at less than his normal pay, but Herrmann -- a rarity amongst film composers insofar as he retained near-total creative control over the final product of his labors -- made it clear he was going to do things his way.  Most famously, he ignored Hitchcock's foremost prerogative when writing the score:  the director insisted that, for maximum shock value, there be total silence on the soundtrack during the murders, most especially the infamous shower scene.

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Sergio Leone had to be talked into making Once Upon a Time in the West.  He'd moved on; he wanted to make movies in America, and he'd already begun pre-production on a gangster epic he hoped would do to the golden age of crime pictures what he'd been doing to the golden age of westerns for a decade.  But a lot of producers had made a lot of money off of his so-called 'spaghetti westerns', and they wanted to make more.  So they dangled such a big paycheck in front of him that, in 1968, he agreed to go back to the well one more time.  He was going to finally fulfill his threat to totally dismantle the western and rebuild it from the ground up; and he wasn't going to do it without Ennio Morricone.

Though he scored a number of Leone's best films and came to be associated with the 'sound of spaghetti', Morricone is largely still known to American audiences as the author of the memorable main theme to The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.  And while that's a pretty strange piece of music in terms of traditional film scores, it doesn't even begin to give you an idea of what a truly wierd musician Morricone really is.  Capable at any given moment of unleashing nearly cacaphonous serial music, floods of distorted, ultra-loud guitars, haunting minimalist refrains, bizarre and atonal free-jazz sounds, shrieking electronic tones, or simple and elegant variations on traditional folk music.  Such wide and varied sounds are in ample evidence in the composer's vast catalogue; many of his best (and strangest) pieces of music were composed as soundtrack music for long-forgotten Italian movies, but put all together in one pot, a service performed by American avant-garde aficionado and punk vocalist Mike Patton on his indispensable Crime and Dissonance series, they represent one of the most restless imaginations of any contemporary musician.  With Ennio Morricone, you knew you'd be getting something of quality, but you might not have any idea whatsoever what it was going to be.  Such was the case with Once Upon a Time in the West.

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Appearing at a time when it seemed the big-screen musical was an outdated relic of the past, Broadway veteran Bob Fosse's clever and accomplished Cabaret caught all of Hollywood by surprise.  Sophisticated, playful, adult and remarkably well-made, Cabaret was in, but not of, the classical musical tradition; and while it had many pillars of strength -- outstanding lead performances, rock-solid source material, sure-handed direction, and a unique approach to storytelling -- it wouldn't have been the huge critical and commercial success it became without its dazzling array of songs.

John Kander and Fred Ebb's musical had come along relatively late in the day, and though it proved extremely popular, there were plenty of reasons to suspect that it might not be an immediate success as a motion picture.  Its homosexual subtext -- drawn directly from the autobiographical writings of Christopher Isherwood that inspired the play -- and its attempts to fold an energetic romantic comedy into a grim story about psychologically desperate people trying to find happiness during the rise of the Nazi party were controversial and were likely to draw criticism from all quarters if not handled with great care.  Facing these issues as well as time constraints, at least seven songs were cut from the Broadway play, leaving only a dozen to make the transition to the big screen.  New characters would be introduced, old ones would be cut, and the lead role of Sally Bowles was to be Americanized in order to accomodate the actress who would be playing her:  Kander and Ebb's favorite collaborator, Liza Minelli.  Fosse made the decision to play up, rather than down, the sense of doomed decadence that pervaded the Berlin social demimonde in those days, and to film in start, contrasting, and muted colors, giving what was a widescreen musical extravaganza a justifiable noir feel.  Any of these factors might have sunk the production, but in all, they seemed to perfectly capture the tone, experience and mood of its audience of the day, who helped make it a runaway success upon release.

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The great thing about movie writing is that there's so much to love.  Since film is the most intensely collaborative of media, a good move can be appreciated on any number of levels, and even a bad movie might have something to recommend it.  That's because a movie isn't one thing, it's dozens:  it's a screenplay, a collection of performances by actors, a moving picture, a trailer, a logo, a soundtrack, a trailer, and a dozen other artistic endeavors all assembled into a single production.  As you can tell from other Screengrab features like our "OST" soundtrack reviews and Paul Clark's trailer reviews, we love the process of looking at a film not only as a whole, but as the discrete elements that make up that whole.  Which is why we're very enthusiastic about "Poster Service", a new feature on the Guardian's film blog.

Enlisting the aid of Paul Rennie, the head of the graphic design department at St. Martins College, the "Poster Service" series takes a look at some famous (their first installment was Gone with the Wind) and not-so-famous (this week features Pink String and Sealing Wax, an Ealing comedy that was a hit in Britain but little-known elsewhere) in an attempt to discern, from a designer's perspective, why some movie posters work and some don't.  Referring to the Selznick classic, Rennie observes that "the title of Gone with the Wind immediately communicates an association with the genteel sophistication of the southern U.S.  Against a backdrop of the Civil War, the associations of [its] typography alluded to a more luxurious and sensual environment than that of the WASPish north.  It's just right for a particular kind of passion romance."  Of Pink String and Sealing Wax, he notes, "the Ealing film posters are remarkable on two points.  Firstly, and against all the odds, they are recognisable works of art by artists whose work extends beyond the usual concerns of graphic design, cinema and fine art.  Secondly, they embrace and give passion to the political dimension of satire and social-realism -- especially rare in cinema."

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In the past, we've discussed here in the OST feature how soundtracks often happily combine musicians and filmmakers at the height of their powers in a collision of sound and vision that justifies and enhances the existence of both soundtrack and film.  In some of these entries -- especially Nashville, Blade Runner, and Fight Club -- we've seen composers and directors perfectly suited for each other, starting great partnerships or merely cementing a similar vision that would inform their work for years to come.  Today, though, we're going to look at an excellent soundtrack that's atypical for both participants:  a film score done by a great composer working out of his element and a skilled director whose career would, follwing this film, go into a long, slow decline.

The Pink Panther series marked director Blake Edwards at the peak of his powers.  While he would never be considered a great director, he at least would develop, largely on the strength of the early installments of the series, as a competent and sure-handed director of comedies, and with the first of the series -- appropriately named The Pink Panther -- he was at his very best, giving the movie exactly the style, atmosphere and pace that it needed.  It's not  Citizen Kane by anyone's measure, but it's light-years away from the dross that he would later helm in movies like A Fine Mess, Skin Deep and Switch.  Henry Mancini, likewise, was a titan of film music, but it was largely through professionalism and dedication than brilliance or inspiration.  He had a reputation as a good, fast worker, capable of quick turnarounds of impressively hook-laden scores; while he may never have taken your breath away, he certainly fought you for its attention.  Mancini had an extensive background in jazz, but it was never his speciality; he was too tempted by the sounds of '50s pop and exotica to nail down anything like an authentic sound.  If anything, he tended to gravitate towards what was known then as "exotic", a sort of symphonic jazz-lite tinted with hints of what would later be called "world music" and heaping helpings of cheese.  He too would decline in power as the decades dragged on, but here, both of them hit their strides something fierce, resulting in a widely hailed comedy classic that produced one of the most memorable figures in cinema, and a soundtrack whose main theme is one of the most recognizable tunes in movie history.

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The Dark Knight  is currently smashing box office records with the same alacrity that the Joker makes a pencil disappear, and as with the first Christopher Nolan Batman movie, its soundtrack is provided by two veteran industry hands in the person of James Newton Howard and Hans Zimmer.  While it seems like this time around, their work was heavily influenced by the seething, screeching, atonal score that Jonny Greenwood wrote for There Will Be Blood, it's still highly reminiscent of the work they did for Batman Begins.

The two had their work cut out for them when they accepted the assignment from Warner Brothers to score the rebooting of the Batman franchise.  DC Comics' famed vigilante already had a number of memorable pieces of music associated with him:  from the jaunty, swinging theme song to the campy '60s TV show composed by jazz veteran Neal Hefti to the brooding, chaotic main theme written by Danny Elfman for the first Tim Burton Batman (which later became the theme music for the celebrated Batman animated series), and even Johann Strauss's operetta Die Fledermaus have been associated with the hero in the past.  Their goal when putting together a new score for Nolan's reboot of the franchise was to create something that conjured the proper tone of darkness and struggle without too obviously drawing on what had come before.  Howard, whose previous work has included The Prince of Tides and The Sixth Sense, took charge of the main theme and the loftier passages, while Zimmer, the German-born composer who created the eerie score for The Ring as well as the memorable soundtrack to Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line, worked on the incidental music and quieter, more sinister passages.  It was imperative that they create something that enhanced the brooding, bleak tone of Batman Begins while never threatening to overwhelm the action on screen or make the psychological development of the characters too obvious.

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Song parodies are tricky business.  Done well, they're delightful, working on their own terms musically, delivering on the joke, and rewarding the listener for spotting the various musical and comedic references.  Done poorly, they're about the lowest form of music there is.  One of the reasons that the ouevre of Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer works so well (and here we include This is Spinal Tap, which, although directed by Rob Reiner, was written by the three performers in much the same way that the later, Guest-directed films like Best in Show and A Mighty Wind would be) is that they have some degree of genuine affection for the medium they're skewering.  If Guest and company simply despised heavy metal, their parody would fall flat -- their unfamiliarity with or contempt for the music would result in unconvincing musical numbers, and their lack of feeling for the characters and the milieu would come across as patronizing rather than funny.  It's an undying tribute to how successful their parody truly was -- and how deeply it comes across as both affectionate and mocking -- that amongst actual heavy metal musicians, This is Spinal Tap is treated with the kind of reverence normally saved for people who play it completely straight.  The movie gets it just right, and real metal musicians know it.

One shouldn't minimize Reiner's contribution to the film -- he's a much more technically sure-handed director than Guest, and he did provide some of the funnier lyrics to the fictional group's songs -- but it's never hard to figure out, from the delightfully offhand, improvised quality of much of the dialogue to the fact that Guest, McKean and Shearer not only wrote all the music, but performed it themselves without the aid of the usual ringers, who's responsible for Spinal Tap's success.  In a bizarre testament to the power of successful comedy, the soundtrack to This is Spinal Tap  -- which, after all, is a movie about a comically incompetent heavy metal band -- became a huge success.  Many of those who bought the soundtrack album no doubt did so as a goof, merely to remember the mocking songs of this groundbreakingly awful British hard rock outfit with the constantly rotating drummers.  But many more bought it because, intended as a joke or no, these were damn good songs, written by damn good performers, who may have meant them to be insulting, but didn't do so from a position of ignorance.  How good were they?  So good that punk legend Mark E. Smith of the Fall lifted the riff from "Tonight I'm Gonna Rock You Tonight" in its entirety for his own "Athlete Cured".  So good that, when you take into account official releases and fan-created bootlegs, the fictional Spinal Tap has more records available than a lot of really good heavy metal bands that actually exist.  So good that the aforementioned "Tonight I'm Gonna Rock You Tonight" is something of a heavy metal classic despite its jokey genesis, and even appears in the video game Guitar Hero II alongside such genuinely legendary songs as "Freebird", "War Pigs" and "Billion Dollar Babies".  And so good that the soundtrack itself, almost unique among movies in the musical spoof genre, is strong enough to stand on its own detached from the movie:  if you have any affinity at all for the classic heavy metal sound, these are songs you're going to sing along to on your iPod even if you know, deep in your hard-rockin' heart, that they're really jokes at your expense.

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Although there's no reason that a bad movie can't feature a good soundtrack -- after all, there's plenty of good movies that feature rotten ones -- we've tended to focus, here in the OST feature, on movies that have both.  A soundtrack, after all, is meant as complementary; it's an enhancement to a good movie, not a substitute for one.  Still, every once in a while, a movie rolls around where the product on screen is pretty lousy, or at the very least forgettable, but which provides us with a soundtrack or score that will provide enjoyment years after anyone's forgotten what the movie was even about.  The relatively recent Hollywood trend of propagating otherwise mediocre would-be hit movies with pop songs -- often by bands under contract with the studio's parent company -- has been particularly helpful in this regard, as it can ensure that the filmmakers will be able to recoup at least some of the losses they took from no one going to see the movie from those same people deciding to take a flyer on the soundtrack, because at least it has that one good song on it by Sevendust or whoever.

Which is not to say that Spike Lee's movie on the wicked world of college basketball, He Got Game, is a terrible movie.  It's not even a terrible Spike Lee movie.  It's just not a great movie.  A skillful performance by Denzel Washington gets cancelled out by a pretty dismal one by real-life basketball star and non-actor Ray Allen; a skillful script about a subject of genuine interest is scuttled by one too many over-the-top scenes, and -- surprisingly, given Lee's love of basketball and the presence of genuine  NBA stars in the cast -- the sports action scenes generally fall somewhat flat.  However, the soundtrack definitely has emerged as a much more worthwhile endeavor than the movie.  Originally conceived by Spike and Public Enemy frontman Chuck D. as a straightforward soundtrack to the film, PE's He Got Game eventually emerged as an entire and distinct album by the revolutionary rap group -- and one which came at a time when many critics had written them off as a thing of the past. 

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When Entertainment Weekly chose Curtis Mayfield's stunning soundtrack to the 1972 blaxploitation classic Superfly as one of the top ten soundtracks of all time, they referred to it as "a textbook case of a soundtrack that artistically dwarfs the film that spawned it".  We're not sure we'd go as far as to say 'dwarfs' -- Gordon Parks' film is not without its merits (including some good performances, a real sense of moral tension and ambiguity, and some swell photography), especially when compared with other films of its sort.  But there's no denying that the combination of music and lyrics to be found on this release, on his own Curtom Records label, represent a high point in Curtis Mayfield's already-stellar career and will probably stand as an all-time great of 1970s funk and soul music long after the movie's artistic merits have been forgotten.  It's an album that belongs on any list of all-time great soundtracks, to be sure, but also on a list of the very best records of all time.

Intended as a combination soundtrack and score to the Gordon Parks film, Superfly also functions as a sort of concept album on its own.  The lyrics retell the story that takes place in the movie, in Mayfield's own words; in the hands of someone less talented, this would have been a disaster, coming across as either cheesy or pretentious.  But Mayfield's wise, sensitive storytelling gets it all just right, presenting a much more morally complex story than even the movie dares to tell and spelling out the essential tragedies of its characters in his smooth, insinuating soul tenor.  The music is likewise unbeatable:  a perfect transition from the smooth, hopeful soul of his earlier work (both alone and as a member of the Impressions) and the raw funk that would come to characterize black music later in the decade.  It's marked by lovely piano riffs, catchy horns, solid bass and drum work, and of course, Mayfield's unmistakable waka-waka guitar.  The movie (financed at least in part by Gordon Parks' dentist) wasn't expected to make much money, and neither was the soundtrack, but both proved to be runaway successes:  the soundtrack album produced two million-selling singles which not only gave Mayfield a huge post-Impressions payday, but assured his financial stability for the remainder of the decade as he was given more and more soundtrack work.  It's a rare soundtrack that can be appreciated solely on its own merits, distinct from the action of the film that inspired it; but much more than this, Curtis Mayfield's Superfly almost seems to be the score to an another, better movie altogether:  it stands alone and succeeds not only for what it is, but as something better than it was ever intended to be.

Due to the runaway popularity and vast influence of the Superfly soundtrack (it's probably the most heavily sampled album on 1980s and 1990s rap singles outside of the collected works of James Brown), it's been issued in a number of formats.  If you can, seek out the 1997 Rhino Records 25th anniversary collection, which features demo versions of the songs, additional selections from the underrated score, radio spots for the movie, and an excellent interview with Curtis Mayfield.

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Most critics expected, when the anarchic, devotedly vulgar Comedy Central cartoon hit the big screen, that it would be pretty funny and remarkably foul-mouthed.  They were right on both counts, but what few people expected is that it would also be unexpectedly profound (or, well, as profound as a movie featuring Satan and Saddam Hussein as feuding gay lovers could be), with a message about censorship that was more practical than self-righteous, and that its parodic sensibilities would be so remarkable spot-on.  In fact, given the direction that the series took -- becoming increasingly more dogmatic and quite a bit more obvious in its political point-making -- it's easy to see the 1999 film as the pinnacle of the South Park experience, where everyone involved really hit their stride.

This is especially true with the movie's exceptionally enjoyable soundtrack.  Rather than going for a more contemporary feel, creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, in conjunction with Hollywood music vet Marc Shaiman -- decided to go whole hog with a big-screen musical parody, tossing everything from Disneyesque ballads of longing to amped-up schoolyard jingles that play like something out of a Busby Berkeley musical to battle hymns juiced with triumphal orchestral swells to big-screen Oscar bait weepers made of 100% processed cheese.  The remarkable thing about them was how perfectly the parodies worked:  so well, in fact, that the obnoxious bigot's anthem "Blame Canada" actually got itself nominated for an Academy Award for Best Song, leaving the show's producers with the difficult question of how to stage a musical number featuring language that wasn't allowed to be heard on television.  (They came up with the elegant solution of having Robin Williams sing the live version of "Blame Canada" during the Oscar ceremony, and he's capable of draining the funny out of anything, so nobody complained.)  The songs on the soundtrack are pitch-perfect parodies; if you strip away the relentlessly filthy language and the subversive bits of the lyrics, there's almost nothing whatever to set them apart from the cheeseball Elton John melodies in a first-tier animated Disney "modern" classic.  It's the pouring on of tons of formal sincerity -- and then the total upending with gobs and gobs of adolescent toilet irony -- that makes the whole soundtrack work so remarkably well.

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What happened when the brilliant Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein and the great composer Sergei Prokofiev began working together to make a film based on the greatest triumph of the legendary warrior-saint Alexander Nevsky was more than a mere collaboration on a score by a director and a musician at the peak of their powers.  It was the creation of a total work of art, an integration of the most progressive mind in cinema and one of the most forward-looking men in concert music at the time into something that was meant to be more than a whole, but an entire unified work that transcended both of the elements that made it up.  And, thanks to the time and place it was made, it very nearly was never seen or heard by anyone.

When Eisenstein began work on what would be his most popular sound film, the entire Soviet Union was living in dread of an attack by Nazi Germany.  They were trusted by no one, and the longstanding emnity between the two countries was such that the director left no doubt who was represented by the movie's brutal Teutonic Christian warriors, who wore modified versions of the German Army's field helments and who were led by priests bearing swastikas on their holy garments.  The great Russian hero/saint Alexander Nevsky leads his savagely mistreated people in a glorious victory against the Teutonic would-be conquerers, set to a stirring, haunting, unforgettable symphonic score by Prokofiev.  Unfortunately, Josef Stalin didn't trust Eisenstein any more than he trusted anyone else, and he rushed an early print into production before Prokofiev had a chance to finish it.  The finished product featured not the full and rich orchestral version of the music, but a truncated cantata that, while worthwhile on its own, doesn't fully convey the glory and passion the two artists struggled to squeeze into the film.

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The collaboration between filmmaker Peter Greenaway and composer Michael Nyman has always been a productive one.  Nyman's playful formalism perfectly matches Greenaway's, and where they diverge -- with Greenaway's visually explosive artistic sensibilities balanced out by Nyman's simple, minimalist tendencies -- they are complementary rather than contradictory.  For many people, the peak of their collaboration came with the celebrated soundtrack to Greenaway's most successful film, The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover; and there's no denying that the relentless, operatic score to that film, with its nearly ten-minute main title sung with compelling gusto by a castrati, is a winner.  But for our money, the best example of Michael Nyman and Peter Greenaway putting their heads together was the soundtrack to 1988's clever, inventive formalist masterpiece, Drowning By Numbers.  It was the first full album where Nyman assembled the Michael Nyman Band -- a chamber orchestra put together specifically to perform film music, and it shows -- the performance is as tight as hell, and perfectly suited to the short form of the score.  At no point do Nyman's musical style and Greenaway's cinematic tendencies blend so perfectly together, and that's why this is a soundtrack worth owning on its own or in conjunction with the movie.

Driven by members of the prestigious Balanescu Quartet, and led by the outstanding saxophone player John Harle, the vibrant, energetic score had its genesis when Peter Greenaway suggested the use of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's "Sinfonia Concertante for Violin, Viola and Orchestra".  Using some of the Mozart piece's main figures as a jumping off point, Michael Nyman composed a score both evocative of the classics and wholly original.  The plot of Greenaway's bizarrely perfect little murder-comedy -- a trio of identically named women plot the murder by drowing of their respective husbands/boyfriends -- contains a number of his typically quirky but effective formalist touches (the numbers 1 through 100 appear on screen, in order, from the beginning of the movie to the end) and a fascination with game-playing.  These elements are reflected in the score, both in the playful tone and in the repetitive structure of the pieces.  In the film, the county coroner, Mudgett, is a compulsive game-player, and Nyman names his compositions for the bizarre little games he's always inventing -- and which ultimately lead to his downfall.  The music is a charming combination of romanticism and minimalism, and Nyman's piano-playing and conducting on everything from the string quartet to full-orchestra tracks is strong and enjoyable.

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Blade Runner has been described as a movie where everything comes together.  This might seem like an odd description for such a rambunction mess of a film, which was marred by so much studio interference and difficulties in editing that director Ridley Scott felt that the director's cut of the movie left something to be desired, but what's meant is that it was a movie that in many ways was the career peak for everyone involved.  Scott, a talented visionary but also an undisciplined egomaniac, never again made a film where he was so fully in command of his powers.  Screenwriter Hampton Fancher went on to do some interesting work, but nothing on this level.  Harrison Ford became a superstar, but one often defined by mediocrity and flatness; Sean Young's career would be sunk by rumors of her unpredictable emotional state; and Rutger Hauer would sabotage his own acting talents by appearing in anything that came with a paycheck -- but all three turned in fantastic performances.  Even the movie's rich population of character actors, all of whom did great work elsewhere, seemed to hit their peak in Blade Runner -- including Edward James Olmos, M. Emmett Walsh, William Sanderson, Brion James, and Joe Terkel.  Even Daryl Hannah isn't an embarrassment.  The cinematography is among Jordan Cronenweth's best; the set direction, costumes, and production design are all top-notch; and it would be far and away the best movie adapted from a Philip K. Dick novel -- not that the author would live to see any of the rotten ones to come.

Even the composer of the film's score did what many consider to be his best work in Blade Runner.  Vangelis (born Evangelos Papathanassiou) had built a career around his light New Age compositions that, if they weren't exactly triumphant, were at least slightly less boring than the music of most of his peers, but he scored a major success in 1981 with his stirring soundtrack work for Chariots of Fire.  On the strength of that album, director Ridley Scott personally selected him to write the score to Blade Runner, instructing him to capture the film's mixture of depressing urban dystopia and shimmering, artificial advertised reality.  Vangelis himself claimed he was attracted to the tortured character of ex-cop/blade runner Rick Deckard, and some of the thematic movements reflect this, shying away from the composer's usual use of high-toned, open chords to indicate triumph and transcendance, replaced with contracted, moody, jazzy movements and a sense of melancholy and despair.  Much like the movie, the album fools you:  the key notes, fills and musical cues are all a bit off, a bit subverted and turned around, leaving you uncertain how to feel, just as the script intends with characters like Deckard and Roy Batty.  Vangelis would go on to have a rich and rewarding career as a film composer, but he'd never do anything this good again.  Unfortunately, legal disputes with the record company -- as well as objections from the composer himself -- kept an 'official' soundtrack from being released for many years; the most widely available one featured the score being played by a thrown-together and inferior group of studio musicians.  The multi-disc set released decades later at least features the original music, but it's lacking a number of cues, bits of incidental music, and one of the best compositions on the record; let's hope that a "final cut" of the film music is imminent, just as we now have the definitive version of the film.

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The recent direction in which Radiohead has turned causes much split opinion, as might be expected from one of the biggest bands in the world.  Some feel that the more avant-garde turn their music has taken is a sign of growth, development, and change for the better, a step away from the simple but distinctive pop craftsmanship that marked their early days and towards an entirely new sensibility, more attuned to the voice of modern minimalist composers than to the pop or even indie-rock tradition.  Others think it's been a disaster, a pretentious and overwrought plunge into the alienatingly highbrow at the cost of the band's credibility, relatability and listenability.  Whatever one's opinion (and I'm certainly in the former camp), a lot of tears have been shed over the fate of the band's guitarist,  Jonny Greenwood.  Though he's been vocally supportive of Radiohead's direction and has adapted his playing admirably well to the demands of the more stripped-down, electronic-influenced work, many have wondered -- especially given the sound of lead singer Thom Yorke's solo work -- if he was fully behind the shift in tone.  But after the release of the stunning soundtrack to Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood, no one should worry, least of all Greenwood himself.  It's a masterful album, perfectly suited to the material onscreen, that shows how fully possessed he is by moody minimalism and dissonant, striking tones.

There were legitimate worries when  Greenwood was announced as the composer to the score to There Will Be Blood.  A number of people, myself included, questioned the prominent role assigned to Aimee Mann's music in Magnolia; boosters found it fitting, a natural extension of the movie's story.  Others found it extremely inclusive, smacking of the cart driving the horse.  It turns out they have nothing to worry about:  Greenwood's score in There Will Be Blood is as subtle and insinuating as Mann's songs in Magnolia were obvious and intrusive.  From the first squalling, snakeline chords the the last smothering cluster of strings, it's a tightly controlled, sinister, and utterly appropriate score, a musical realization of the struggles and excesses in Daniel Plainview's soul.  While the movie itself is epic, the score is minute and precise,  coming from a stripped-down version of a full orchestra and delivering a terrible sense of struggle from its very first notes.  At times, Greenwood almost seems to be fighting a horrible battle to make the dissonant blasts and squalling notes force meaning and emotion from the barren landscapes of the film's oil-town settings:  there is pain and effort in this music as real and as clear as Plainview's horribly willful efforts to drag himself out of a hole in the ground with a wooden leg.  Some notes sound relentlessly, again and again, with a  furious insistence worthy of Ligeti; other notes creep loosely around the edges of perception, bringing the entire thing an almost ambient quality like Brian Eno's instrumental efforts.  It's an astonishing piece of work on every level, instantly marking Greenwood as a force to be reckoned with as a film composer.  (Unfortunately, the presence of a slight three-minute quote from his own "Popcorn Superhet Receiver", an avant-garde piece influenced by the Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki, disqualified the widely praised score from Oscar contention.)

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In previous installments of "OST", we've discussed films where the score is extremely well-suited to the action on screen, where the music composed or compiled is almost perfectly matched with what's happening before your eyes.  Very rarely, though, does a soundtrack come along where the music seems almost intrinsic -- where the blend of visual and audible art is so seamless, so perfectly intertwined, that it's almost impossible to imagine one without the other.  One such soundtrack is that of Tom Tykwer's breakout cult hit, Run Lola Run; its driving, kinetic score helped propel the story action along to such a degree that it can be perfectly encapsulated in the public imagination with one brief snippet of the fetching Franka Potente careening through the urban streets at full tilt, with the thudding, hyper-speed techno her only accompaniment.  Indeed, it's a testament to the power of the score that it's become a sort of shorthand for the whole movie, lending itself to endless quotation and parody.

But the Run Lola Run soundtrack has a lot more going for it than mere cultural zeitgeist, and its perfect integration with the film itself is no accident.  For one thing, it benefits enormously from Tykwer having composed the majority of the score himself, in conjuction with partners Jonny Klimek and Reinhold Heil, both German session pros, producers and soundtrack veterans.  Musically, it's a nearly perfect piece of work, a flawlessly concussive distillation of German techno (and what better to accompany a film set in contemporary Berlin, a city that seems to run on techno?); the addition on the soundtrack album of a number of German techno bands -- most not well known, but with musical sensibilites that mesh exactly with the Tykwer-Klimek-Heil aesthetic -- only makes it better.  But even beyond that, there's a reason that most filmgoers carry around in their heads a conception of Run Lola Run that blends together music and art so perfectly.  Not only did Tom Tykver take his time (try saying that funf zeit schnell) when composing the score, seeing it from the very beginning not as an accessory to drape over the completed film, but he also did so using the same approach he used when filming the visuals:  an extremely tight, disciplined theoretical method which was so precisely and skillfully edited that it seems explosive, wild, even sloppy in the final product.  Not content to simply put together a score made up of professionally assayed Berlin techno, Tykver actually gave his compositions a theoretical basis that makes them work even better.  The main hooks (including the stuttering, percussive piano riff) from the movie's main themes, "Running:  One" and "Running:  Two", are actually citations of American avant-garde composer Charles Ives' ensemble piece, The Unanswered Question.  A highly disciplined formalist piece, Ives' work only gives the outward impression of wildness and abandon, and thus forms the perfect basis for Lola's soundtrack, which does exactly the same thing.

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The soundtrack portion of David Fincher's 1999 cult-favorite adapatation of the pseudo-subversive Chuck Palahniuk novel Fight Club receives its fair share of praise, and justifiably so.  It features great songs like Tom Waits' "Goin' Out West", terrific vocals courtesy Persian electronica songstress Azam Ali in Vas' "Svarga", a brilliant detournment of Andre Previn's main theme from Valley of the Dolls, and, of course, the stunning post-credits blast at the end of the Pixies' "Where is My Mind?".  Unfortunately, you won't find any of those songs on the movie's official soundtrack release; fortunately, what you will find there -- the movie's score, perfectly realized by the Dust Brothers, is even better. 

The Dust Brothers -- known to their moms as Mike Simpson and John King -- started out as Los Angeles-based DJs with a keen sampling sensibility and a knack for deftly combining the best qualities of hip-hop and rock.  It was this quality that followed them throughout their successful careers producing huge hits for everyone from Tone-Loc to Hanson to Young MC to the Rolling Stones, and nowhere was it better realized than on their innovative and memorable production of the second Beastie Boys album, Paul's Boutique.  But the Fight Club soundtrack -- their first full-length solo effort -- was a different animal altogether.  Sounding much more like their rivals (and onetime namesakes), the Chemical Brothers, it was much more saturated in techno and electronica than most of their previous work, and given that it was meant to set the mood for one of the blackest, bleakest comedies of the 1990s, they couldn't rely on the sunny, open feel they usually brought to the hits they produced for other artists.  Faced with the biggest challenge of their careers, the Dust Brothers came through like champions, putting together an insanely tense, claustrophobic record of unstoppable beats barely hemmed in by dark, sinister synthesizer buzzings and clangings, and schizophrenic ambient noises that perfectly suited the movie's nasty, crooked-grin postmodernism.  In many ways, it was literally the peak of their career -- they never put out another solo record, concentrating instead on production, and possibly admitting to themselves that nothing they'd ever do could possibly top the creeping death of the Fight Club score's innovative blend of dance, ambient, trip-hop and drum 'n' bass mayhem.

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More than any other decade of the 20th century, the 1970s get a bad rap.  Unfairly judged by the worst of its excess and constantly degraded by shorthand stereotypes, the seventies have come to mean cheesy, tacky, and pre-fab -- the very worst of American popular culture.  It's really hard to figure out why this should be so; both high and low culture were extremely well-served by the years from 1971 to 1980.  If people want to judge the whole era by "HONK IF YOU'RE HORNY" bumper stickers, avocado-green refrigerators, and the collected lyrics of Rupert Holmes, that's their own lookout -- the rest of us can enjoy one of the richest periods in all of American film, as well as the ascendant periods of funk and jazz fusion and the arrival on American shores of the high-energy cinematic candy known as chop-socky.

Those characteristics all came together on the soundtrack to Bruce Lee's first American-produced martial arts film, the legendary Enter the Dragon.  The movie itself, while lacking some of the more elegant formal qualities of other great films of the decade, features some classic setpieces and wall-to-wall dynamite in the action sequences.  Lee had never looked more invincible, and some of his demonstrations of his style of jeet kune do are still breathtaking 35 years after the movie's release.  When it came time to commission a soundtrack, producer Fred Weintraub brought in longtime pro Lalo Schifrin to do the job.  A classically trained Argentine who was already well-established as a highly skilled jazz pianist when he came to Hollywood in the late 1950s, he wrote some of the most memorably TV themes of the following decade before shifting to the big screen.  He'd just made a big splash in the business in 1971 by penning the theme music to his friend Clint Eastwood's megahit Dirty Harry, and Enter the Dragon was meant to be little more than an easy paycheck between projects.  For some reason, though, Schifrin chose to really pull out the stops on the Bruce Lee vehicle; working with an ad hoc mini-orchestra equally comprised of Warner Brothers studio pros and hot session jazz musicians, the soundtrack is a wonderful, energetic, thrilling, sometimes dirty but never trashy thrill-ride that combines classical cinematic sting with some incredible jazz and funk overtones that are prominent from the very first notes.  Schifrin peppers the score with pseudo-'traditional' Asian music cues, but their transparent bogosity never overwhelms the propulsive soundtrack to the point where they become cheesy; they're just loud little splashes of color on a vibrant canvas of sound.  

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It’s no surprise that the soundtrack to Stanley Kubrick’s highly controversial adaptation of Anthony Burgess’ sci-fi masterpiece A Clockwork Orange would prove to be almost as great a firestarter as the movie itself.  After all, music plays a huge – and hugely divisive – role in the movie:  music is all that the nihilistic, savage street thug Alex DeLarge truly loves; music is what makes one of his most vicious attacks so unbearable, as he brutally attacks an innocent while crooning the main theme from the classic musical Singin’ in the Rain; and music is what makes his brainwashing ‘treatment’ at the hands of the government so objectionable, as the Ludovico Technique not only robs him of his ability to do violence, but fills him with nausea when he hears the gorgeous strains of Beethoven’s 9th.

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Alex Cox's 1984 cult classic, Repo Man, is in every way the greatest punk rock movie ever made.  In its feel, its tone, its perfect blend of artsy surrealism and an obsession with junk culture, it precisely encapsulates everything great about American punk, and it's also one of the few movies (maybe the only movie made in the 20th century) to capture a specific punk scene-- in this case, the L.A. punk community of the early '80s -- without coming across as a limp, stereotypical joke.  Cox staffed his cast with legitimate punk rockers, and so it only made sense that he'd do the same thing with the soundtrack.  The resulting album, released on MCA Records in the same year as the film, is one of the greatest movie soundtracks of all time, and a perfect companion piece for the movie.

In fact, the soundtrack to Repo Man was, in its own way, more groundbreaking than the movie.  It was one of the first movie scores to consist mostly of pre-released material by established pop bands; nowadays, the process is commonplace, but in 1984, it was still something of a novelty.  Cox, who compiled the tracks for the album himself, was pitch-perfect in his selection of songs:  starting out with a monster epic by punk forefather Iggy Pop, the record goes on to treat us to choice tracks from many of the L.A. scene's best bands, including Black Flag, the Circle Jerks, Suicidal Tendencies, Burning Sensations, and the criminally underrated Plugz, whose blend of punk velocity and snarly Mexican-American attitude holds the whole record together.  Of course, as great as the soundtrack is, listening to it on its own can't compare to the sleazy thrill of enjoying it in the context of the movie.

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We critical types aren't supposed to say this, but, er. . . America doesn't always have the best taste. The movies, records and books that top the charts are very infrequently the best available. That's not to say that the public doesn't occasionally make the right call, though, and the soundtrack to the Coen Brothers' period comedy O Brother Where Art Thou? is one of the most glorious instances of the country taking something quirky and wonderful to its heart. In fact, the album was much more successful than the movie; the film was a minor indie success, but the soundtrack topped the Billboard Top 200 Albums chart for several weeks, produced a well-received country single, and won four Grammy awards, including Album of the Year.

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In my other life, when I'm not in a theater watching whatever art films manage to find their way down to San Antonio or in front of my TV watching obscure experimental films I scared up from Netflix, I am also a music critic. And there's one area where my two favorite forms of opinionated bloviating come together: in the OST, or "original soundtrack". Music has been a big part of the moviegoing experience since before there were talkies, and a good score or the right selection of a song on the soundtrack can make a film memorable just as certainly as an overbearing and obvious score or the use of a trite, predictable song can make a film irritating.  On occasion, we'll take a moment to review some of our favorite soundtracks or scores, starting off this week with Basil Poledouris' score from Conan the Barbarian.

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