It’s rare that a trailer really makes my ears perk up except in the case of trying to identify what score they’re stealing the music from.  But every now and then, there is a trailer that is a well done melding of music and image that is a piece of art in and of itself.  The first Inception trailers did that, as did the first Watchmen trailer (going all the way back to my first real post on this blog).  Well, as I was sitting in the theatre on Saturday anxiously awaiting my 10:50 AM (yes, I like the cheap matinees) screening of Inception to start, the trailer for David Fincher’s (he of Alien3, Fight Club, Se7en, and most recently The Curious Case of Benjamin Button fame) latest film came up – The Social Network.  The film is about the creating and founding of Facebook, mildly interesting, but the trailer…well watch it first and then let’s talk.

When I first saw it, it took me a bit to identify the song used, but after a minute I recognized Radiohead’s “Creep,” but in a, for lack of a better phrase, hauntingly beautiful choral arrangement.  And despite everything that I talked about in yesterday’s post about Inception, that song also stuck in my ear and I finally had to look it up.  It is done by a Belgian girls choir called (confusingly) the Scala & Kolacny Brothers.  But that’s not what I really want to talk about, I want to parse the trailer itself, because when a song is used well in a trailer, such as it is here, it pays to take about how it is used.  For me, it helps to identify why I had a particular reaction to the audiovisual content.

First, the song itself.  “Creep” was Radiohead’s breakout hit in 1993 (though first released the year before) that brought them to the attention of the alternative rock scene.  It features an interesting chord progression for the verses, G major – B major – C major – C minor, that –  for me – is one of the most interesting features of the song.  The arrangement itself is fairly standard, with a falsetto bridge by Thom Yorke being one of the few defining features, along with Jonny Greenwood’s guitar crushes leading into the chorus.  If you don’t know the song, just type it into YouTube and you’ll get numerous videos.

The choral arrangement featured in the trailer strips the rock instrumentation down to a lonely piano to provide a gently rocking, chordal accompaniment to the choir vocals (click here for a full video of their performance).  The overall effect is hard to put into words.  It helps to emphasize the lyrics, gives it a quasi-religious overtone, but also evokes the feel of piano artists like Ben Folds or Elton John or Billy Joel.  Also, acoustically, there is something about the nature of the range between the register of the choir voices and the piano and the differences of the timbre that gives it a space that also reinforces a quality of hearing a performance in a cathedral.  Further…there is an almost collegiate glee club quality to the fact that it is a simple choir and piano arrangement fitting with the film’s Harvard University setting.  In and of itself, it a beautiful arrangement and performance, but when it is melded with the images of the trailer, it takes on new levels of meaning.

But how is the song itself manipulated?  How are the lyrics used and interpreted?  Well, for the trailer, they begin the song with the second verse and proceed into the bridge, but then cut off at the end of the bridge to allow for some final dialogue and then end with the last line of the final chorus.  The lyrics as heard in the trailer (with famous radio edit of “very” instead of “fucking”) are:

I don’t care if it hurts

I want to have control

I want a perfect body

I want a perfect soul

 

I want you to notice

When I’m not around

You’re so very special

I wish I were special

 

But I’m a creep

I’m a weirdo

What the hell am I doing here

I don’t belong here

 

She’s running out the door

She’s running out

She run, run, run, run

Run

 

I don’t belong here.

I would hope that it is fairly evident from the editor’s careful lyric selection why this song was chosen, but I’ll go ahead and put in my thoughts.

The first two stanzas used are played against a montage of Facebook like screens: pictures, images of mouse cursors, status updates, etc.  Each scene of the montage is related in some way to the lyric itself.  For example “I want a perfect body” as we see an athlete after finishing a raise and a woman in a bathing suit climbing out of a pool, both examples of “a perfect body.”  Then for “I want a perfect soul” as we see a wedding photo and the picture of a just born infant (prominently featured the “soles” of his feet…a bit punny for my tastes).  The large implication of the two pictures is that of a wedding as a merging of two souls and that of a just born human soul.  The bigger picture of this verse being selected is a commentary on the whole idea of a “social network.”  The idea that all of our lives are so special that it warrants status updates and such informing friends and whoever what we are doing minute to minute (in my case, today announcing that I was getting an oil change…spread the news!).

The song is about longing for inclusion in a group, but eventual exclusion, “I don’t belong here,” because they’re a creep, a weirdo.  The somewhat voyeuristic first four lines of the second verse, someone longing for someone else’s life, body and soul, contrasted with their own sense of loneliness in their longing (in the second stanza) for someone, anyone, to notice when they are not there, is exactly the nature of Facebook, MySpace, and other social networking sites.  We want to be noticed, we feed off it.  Even blogging is a facet of this need for attention and validation of one’s life.

The last two lines of the verse, “You’re so very special / I wish I were special,” play as a digitized photo of actor Jesse Eisenberg as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg comes into focus.  Implying, possibly, that he created Facebook out of his own loneliness and fears, something that is somewhat hinted at in the scene that follows in the trailer as the song segues into the chorus.  He explains his wanting to do something so that he would be invited into one of Harvard’s exclusive clubs (this is a Harvard thing, like fraternities and sororities…but more Ivy League).

The balance of the trailer is a standard montage of scenes to give the audience a sense of the film’s plot, but are edited quite well to follow the pace of the song, especially as it moves into the soaring falsetto bridge (“She’s running out the door,” etc.).  The final “I don’t belong here,” is heard as the film’s title and logo, in a Facebook style, is seen.  A wonderful juxtaposition of meaning, a statement about exclusion against an image of modern society’s ultimate expression of inclusion.

A wonderfully made trailer that has made me interested to see the film itself.  Hopefully it won’t let me down like Watchmen did.

This is a hard post to write.  On the one hand, my head is still swirling with thoughts about Inception, but most are related to the film itself and its structure.  I’ve fully absorbed the music and I’ve seen the film, but I’m still trying to synthesize the two into a complete whole.  The film itself is layers upon layers upon layers…upon layers.  There is the heist movie cliché of the old thief doing this one last job to settle old debts/scores/whatever so that he can finally retire.  It’s a film about reality versus dreams, and the uncanny nature of reality and memory and dreams…and the unreliability of it all.  It’s both summer action and a mediation on life and love and regrets…and how they can haunt us even while we dream…especially when we dream.

SPOILER ALERT!!!!!  If you haven’t seen the film, you might want to wait to read on until you do.  Don’t worry, it’ll still be here waiting for you.

In many ways, what is referred to as “inception” in the film – the planting of a new idea into a mind in the hopes that the dreamer will accept it as their own – is like how Nolan constructs many of his films.  He shows you something right from the beginning, usually something key to the plot, if not THE key, but then leaves it.  Lets it worm into the viewer’s mind and allows them to try and figure it out.  He might return to it in flashes, but not always.  He might show it from some different angels, but not always.  But no matter how he does it, it’s there, just waiting to be explained.  The Batman films aren’t as explicit about it, but do it to some degree, but Insomnia, The Prestige, and now Inception all follows this model much more closely – Following and Memento do so also, but not as well, I think Nolan was still honing his craft.  In Insomnia, it was the image of blood seeping into cloth and for Prestige it was a forest full of top hats.  With Inception, it opens with Leonardo DiCaprio’s character Dom Cobb washing up on a beach, meeting with an old man and spinning a top (something that was also part of the film’s early, cryptic website).

I have the sense that in all three of the aforementioned films that musically the composers (David Julyan for the first two, now Hans Zimmer) have tried to achieve something similar.  The Julyan scores are a bit harder to get a handle one, especially Prestige…so I’ll leave those for later and lets focus on Hans’ latest and greatest.

The first cut on the album, “Half Remembered Dream” actually begins while the logos and are on the screen.  It’s the first time since Batman Begins that a Nolan film hasn’t opened in almost utter silence (and even Begins was only a “sound” of wings flapping).  As I mentioned in my first post, this cue introduces us to two of the main thematic ideas of the score.  The first is a four note motive that has a few different harmonic settings and weaves in and out of the score and the second is what I shall call “the trombones from hell” even though I know there are more than just trombones being played.  But…eh.

Let’s pull apart that opening track for a moment because it does something very interesting.  The four-note motive is basically a pair of ascending perfects fifth a half-step apart.  Most often heard as C-G-B-F#, which means that it ends exactly a tri-tone away from the first note.  In music theory terms, that F# is exactly equidistant away from both a higher and lower C and musically doesn’t really have a logical resolution.  If the F# had come from C, we would want it to resolve up to the G, but instead it’s coming from a B, so we could hear it as merely the fifth of B.  There are two conflicting tonalities built into the motive that are never resolved because the four notes simply fold back to the beginning like the never-ending staircase that is one of the visuals present in the film.  But there are variations, at times of great stress, occasionally the motive will change to C-B-B (an octave lower)-F#, heightening the tension and maybe emphasizing the B more, but no, it loops back around to C again.  It is also heard, the first version followed by the second and then back to the first.  So C-G-B-F#-C-B-B-F#-C-etc.

Both of these versions are present in the opening track and are also the versions most heard in the film, but there is another transposed version heard only once (at least that I’m sure of, explained later)…at the very beginning of the first cue over the first logo.  This version is the motive, but transposed down a fifth to begin on F:  F-C-E-B.  This is followed in the cue by the first appearance of the trombones from hell that will soon become the most iconic part of the score.  After that cacophony subsides though, we get the motive again, but now in the soon to be familiar C version and then followed by the second variant with the high B, though the final F# is not played (at least on the album, I’ll have to see the film again to confirm that is how it plays out, again see below for more).

Given that the trombones are most associated with the dream world itself, could this cue during the logos be our movement into the dream world of the film – one that we never come out of?  Unless the motive starting on F is heard again at the end of the closing credits…which is possible.  More research is required.  It’s actually plausible that Hans does play this game because towards the end of the credit the French song that I mentioned as being present in track ten of the album (“Waiting for a Train”) comes back.  This song, “Non, je ne regrette rien” (No, I regret nothing), is an important plot device in the film, and I would like to talk a little about it because it shows just how cagey a director Christopher Nolan is.

This song is best known in a 1960 recording by singer Edith Piaf.  This is notable on a few levels.  First, in the recent biopic about Piaf, La Vie en Rose, the song is used in the final sequence when Piaf is signing it for the first time as her death is also shown via parallel editing.  Now, as many other reviews have mentioned, Dom Cobb’s wife (who is dead when the film begins) is played by Marion Cotillard, who portrayed Edith Piaf in La Vie en Rose.  Layers upon layers.  Some may think that it is a cute inside reference, but given how the song as used in Inception as a cue that it’s time to get out and also for Dom is a reference to his dead wife – who still haunts his subconscious for reasons slowly explained in the film – I believe it’s more than an inside joke.  It was a cagey move on the part of Nolan about how dreams can work, how the outside world can intrude and infect them, as shown in the film when a character is dunked in water in a higher level and it starts flooding in the lower dream.  It could be that in reality that Dom’s wife looked nothing like Marion Cotillard, but because,  for him, that she is associated with the song, which is linked to Piaf’s death in La Vie en Rose, she has come to look like her in his dreamscape.  Layers upon layers upon layers.

The song itself is used as a cue for those inside the dreams to get ready to leave.  The person’s whose dream it is has headphones placed on them which are connected to an mp3 player with the song.  Then the song itself emerges into that dream, so it is in this capacity that it is heard throughout the film.  And in the end credits, if one stays long enough, it is heard towards the very end, right before a final statement of the four note motive…I think.  I wasn’t listening as intently this morning becuase I was just getting a sense of the film.

In the interest of full disclosure, I’ve actually put most of these thoughts together while typing this post.  The very act of writing has helped me to sort some of this out…and I have one more thought for you, loyal reader.

On the album, the first and last tracks end much the same way, with the sound being, in effect, choked off.  It’s actually not unlike an effect used in The Prestige, but that is for another time (are you watching closely?).  This sound could indicate a second level movement in the dream space.  If the first sound choke occurs right after the logos (which I can’t remember exactly) it could be our movement into the dream space of the film.  And as the sound occurs again at the very end before the credits, it is also our movement out.  So the film itself could be seen as a dream within a dream.  First is our movement into our dream space (represented by the modulation via trombones from hell of the four note motive) and then via the sound choke into the dream space of the film, which can be seen as Dom’s dream.  In this sense, then, the music of the credits, if the motive does indeed move back into the “home” F version after the last occurence of the Piaf song, moves us back into reality.

I guess all the people who left before the end of the credits are stuck forever in limbo. (See the movie to understand that)

I’ve spent most of this time on the finer technical details of music’s use in the film, ignoring the bigger picture ideas of how the music conveys the sense of the film.  I addressed that, in part, via my earlier posting, but it would help to reiterate that the music really does help to convey the sense of dreams.  From the “dreamy” guitar licks to the trombones from hell, everything is either amped up or slowed down to some sort of extreme, and the most pedestrian cue, “Mombasa,” occurs, ostensibly, in the real world of the film’s characters – though the levels of reality in the film are open to debate.

In conclusion, Zimmer’s score for Inception is a multi-dimensional work that, to an astute listener, is an integral part of the film, as is the Piaf song “Non, je ne regrette rien.”  They both assist in Nolan’s execution of the film which is a fitting conclusion to what can be seen as a trilogy of film meditating on the nature of reality and illusion: Insomnia, The Prestige, and Inception.  And these films also furthered themes present in Nolan’s first films, Following and Memento.  It is well-known that his next project with be the conclusion of his Batman trilogy and it will be interesting to see where the filmmaker and his team go from there.  Here’s hoping that Zimmer is along for the ride.

Wow.  Hans Zimmer has really outdone himself here.  Inception is a score that grabs your attention and rarely lets go.  Even the moments when it is a bit slower managed to keep my interest.  The overall tone of the score itself is classic Zimmer, though I can hear  some other influences in it.  Depsite all of this, the score is also very original and quite a trip from beginning to end.

The album itself is kind of weird in a few ways.  It begins with two fairly short tracks that feed into track three, which is where things really take off.  But these opening three tracks also sound like they’re one longer track and if you aren’t paying attention, you’ll probably not really notice until track three really kicks off and you just have to check the track name (“Dream is Collapsing” if you’re interested).  This is the track where the giant trombone/french horn/whatever-the-hell really kicks in.  This sound was featured in the film trailers even as early as last summer, which is part of what I think helped this score achive what it as.  According to interviews and such, Zimmer was working on this while Nolan was shooting (not unlike what they did for The Dark Knight).  This kind of lead time has helped him to really craft a unique sound for the score.

That being said, there are obivous things that will remind a listener of The Dark Knight, and the very atmospheric nature of many of the cues also remind me of David Julyan’s work on Insomnia and The Prestige…especially The Prestige.  But Zimmer takes that atmosphere and turns it into something much more.  It breathes and moves though remaining in a sort of stasis.  The guitar work, played by former Smiths member Johnny Marr, help the score find a groove that, especially in track 3, it rarely wants to shake.  As I mentioned to a friend, I predict that “Dream is Collapsing” is going to be heard in many, many film trailers in the coming years.

The two longer tracks on the album, “Old Souls” and “Waiting for a Train,” are also worthy of mention.  “Old Souls,” track 5, is almost pure atmosphere, featuring the piano theme (introduced straight away on the first track), over synth pads.  The track doesn’t really waver from this theme and only varies instrumentation and adds in some other sounds.  But despite this, Zimmer does such a good job of adding in new sounds to interest the ear that one doesn’t really notice that the track is nearly eight minutes long.

“Waiting for a Train” starts out much like “Old Souls,” the music existing in some sort of otherworldy ether, and while it also mediates on the same piano motive (this time starting out in guitar) it also explores some other material, and the distinctive trombone/french horn/whatever-the-hell call is not present in it’s natural state until the end (though the arguement could be made that some of the string swells are variations).  Though, I’d really like to know what the French song is doing in it about 3 minutes before the end.  Guess that is something the film can answer.

If there is a cue that I don’t truly care for, it’s “Mombasa.”  It’s a prototypical Zimmer action cue, and while it’s not terrible, it varies in many ways from the overall tone of the album that it kind of sticks out like [insert metaphor here]. 

Anyway, there is more I could say, but I want to see the film first before I attempt a more in-depth analysis.  Bottom line, though, this is my new frontrunner in the Oscar race.

As mentioned earlier, there have been two recent Star Trek score releases that feature expanded/complete scores.  For any fan of Trek and film music, it has indeed been a good year, a good few years in fact considering last year’s release of the complete Wrath of Khan score, and this year we have James Horner’s companion piece in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock and a deluxe/complete edition of Michael Giacchino’s score for last years Star Trek reboot.  I’ll offer here a few thoughts on each release, but I can tell you right now that both of these come with my highest recommendation.

Star Trek III: The Search for Spock – James Horner:  Many fans find this film troubling and hard to quantify.  It’s nowhere near as bad as Trek V, nor as slow-moving, “boring,” or esoteric as The Motion Picture (though I have always felt that MP has been misjudged and misunderstood), but at the same time The Search for Spock is nowhere near as good as the films that came before or after it, or Star Trek VI.  It is merely mediocre Trek.  For these and other reason, the score has always been judged similarly.  It builds on many of the themes and sounds that Horner established for the Trek universe in Wrath of Khan, but without many of the intense battle sequences found in that film, it lacks some of the excitement and punch of the previous score.  It has the same main theme and also features the bowed vibraphone sound that characterized Spock, and also features a new theme for the Klingon villains, and even though that theme shares similar qualities to Goldsmith’s klingon theme from Motion Picture, it is nowhere near the same level.  There is also a new theme for the Genesis planet that is at the heart of the plot of III, but truly the stand out track on this album is the nearly nine minute cue “Stealing the Enterprise.”  This cue ebbs and flows along with the action, shifting tone as the scenes changes from the Enterprise bridge to that of the pursuing Excelsior.  Also included in the set is a ten-minute cue of source music that was used in the bar scene when Dr. McCoy is trying to get a ship to take him to Genesis.  For this, as explained in the always wonderful Film Score Monthly liner notes (some twenty pages), Horner took three songs from the Paramount library and arranged them into bar muzak.  A little unnecessary, but Trek fans do tend to be completests.  Also in the set is a second disc featuring the original score album, which at times differs from what was used in the film and is found on the first disc.  It is an over-the-top, complete set that should find its way onto your score shelf.  What I really hope that this combined with last year’s Khan release indicates that FSM will be working to release all of the Trek scores in a complete/expanded edition, especially Star Trek VI and all of Goldsmith’s scores.

Star Trek: The Deluxe Edition – Michael Giacchino: Last year’s release of Giacchino’s Trek score by Varese Sarabande was at the same time a good release but also hard to get a handle on, and with this new release, I finally understand why I was a bit off-put by it: the music on the original release was too alike.  It featured all the major themes of the score, but there wasn’t enough diversity in tone, it was mainly action music and there was no push and pull to the disc.  This has all been corrected in this release.  Featuring two-discs of music from the film and presented in order, you’ll find all the tracks from the first album, including some additional music on those tracks, and all the music that was missing.  It not only gives a better feel for the score as a whole, it also further demonstrates something I commented on in my original review: not only was he purposely evoking the sound of the original series, but he was also pulling from the scores of Horner and Goldsmith (though more Horner in my opinion).  As I also pointed out in the earlier review, the track “That New Car Smell” is especially pulling from the Horner sound, as are many new tracks featured on this release.  To try and catalogue all of these and how Giacchino pulls from the earlier scores, would be quite an undertaking, but maybe someday when I have time I’ll take a stab at it.  But I’ll say this, Giacchino truly is a master of imitating period styles and synthesizing them into his own idiom.  In same ways, he reminds me of what Michael Kamen did in his Die Hard scores by interpolating a famous musical theme into the sonic fabric of the score.  For this release, we also see that Giacchino continues his tradition of humorous cue titles, which I know not everyone likes, but I find amusing and I believe fits not only his personality, but also that of much of his music.  If there is a complaint with this new set, it is two-fold, and they both have to do with packaging.  First, the booklet:  it features the obligatory write-up from the director J.J. Abrams that I assume was part of the original release (I got mine off iTunes so I wouldn’t know), and a new short piece from the founder of the original Star Trek fan magazine.  Both are well and good, but neither really delivers any real information on what went into the score itself.  And that is my big disappointment, in a twenty-some-odd page booklet, there are the two short “essays,” a personnel list for the orchestra, credits, track listing, and then pages and pages of pictures.  Seriously, we’re music fans, give us music content.  Oh well.  Secondly, the entire thing is contained not in a standard two disc case, but rather an oversized digipack that will not fit well on your standard DVD shelf.  See the picture below:

It’s a bit taller than the standard case and quite a bit longer so that it’ll most likely stick off the end of your shelf.  It’s like some of the annoying DVD packaging that has come out in recent years.  I don’t want bells and whistles in my package, I want content!  Anyway, despite the lack of truly informative content in the package and the annoying size and shape of the case, I still recommend this set to fans as it ill help to get a good feel for the scope of Giacchino’s score.

Well that’s about it for now, my laundry should almost be done so I better get to folding.  See you all a bit later this week.

So you’ve been asking yourself what you should go see this holiday weekend.  Well if the idiots outside my window who have been setting off firecrackers and other explosive devices for the last MONTH are any indication, then it’s probably a nice bar-b-que and a fireworks show.  But should your plans also take you to the neighborhood cineplex, then perhaps I could help guide you…aurally speaking at least.  For today, I shall review James Horner’s The Karate Kid score and James Newton Howard’s latest efforts to salvage a terrible film from M. Night Shyamalan, The Last Airbender.

It’s a little bit funny that these films have so much in common: both are big screen remakes/adaptations of previously existing material, both deal with the martial arts in some capacity, and both have composers with James as a first name.  But where The Karate Kid is an enjoyable and entirely watchable film featuring a stellar performance from a young actor, The Last Airbender is nigh unwatchable with a terrible script that even a cast made up of all-star child actors from days gone by couldn’t save.  Seriously, I felt bad for the actors trying to deliver some of their lines with a straight face, like I felt bad for the actors in the Star Wars prequels.  In fact, if there was an award for worst script to a summer tent pole film ever, I think The Last Airbender and Star Wars – Episode II: Attack of the Clones might actually tie.  Oh wait, I forgot the sand speech in Clones.  Okay Lucas, looks like you win again.

But enough about bad scripts, if there was an area where Airbender actually somewhat beats Karate Kid it is in the music department.  Though, I do find both scores enjoyable and both have been in heavy rotation on my iPod for the past few weeks.  So let’s go to the digital tape.

The Karate Kid – Horner’s score here is not much of a stretch for James.  The opening track on the album, “Leaving Detroit,” will evoke memories of classic Horner with its lone trumpet and piano based sound.  It’s wistful and sad, though without falling into depression and melancholy.  And for most of the score, Horner never really lets one forget that it is a Horner score, his fingerprints are all over it, though mostly in a good way.  His tone matches the film well, though there are a few odd moments.  The track “Backstreet Beating” sounds like it was stolen from an 1990s Hans Zimmer score with copious electronics (seriously, think Crimson Tide, but not as good), and the tournament montage track, “Tournament Time,” sounds at times like it was made from some leftovers of Zimmer/Newton Howard’s efforts for the Batman films – especially the first minute or so.  But where Horner does shine in this score is when he beautifully blends traditional Chinese instruments into his orchestral textures.  Tracks like “Journey to the Spiritual Mountain” and “From Master to Student to Master” show Horner in careful control of his orchestral timbres (they are also the two longest cuts on the album).  The last cue, “Final Contest,” is a great ending track and builds to the final moment where our valiant hero wins the tournament.  Listening to the track on its own, you would almost think that two large armies were about to square off, Horner plays it up the epic and it works.  Having seen both this film and the original with score by Bill Conti, I much prefer Horner’s efforts.  In the original I find Conti’s panpipes overwhelming and somewhat annoying.  And, I know it was 80s, okay, but how many bad 80s montage songs could you find in one film, seriously?  Luckily, for us, in the remake the director choice to forego montage songs and let Horner play the montages instrumentally.  And while I think plotwise the original was a bit more solid, this new remake is enjoyable on its own and features a great Horner score.  It’s hard to believe that this is a score from the same person that I was so incensed by back in December for what I still feel was some blatant cultural insensitivity in his Avatar score.  And speaking of the Avatar, but not blue people, but rather Aang, let us turn our critical eye to… 

The Last Airbender – Many people say that a large part of what makes the films of Alfred Hitchcock work so well is the music of Bernard Hermann, and while I haven’t seen enough Hitchcock films to say that with any certainty, I will concede this fact for now and use it as a basis for my critique that follows.  Like Hitchcock, Shyamalan has worked with largely with one composer throughout his film tenure.  For Shyamalan, it was only his first two films that were not scored by James Newton Howard.  But where some scholars think that Psycho would have only been a mediocre film without Hermann, I doubt that even Bernard could have saved The Last Airbender.  And while Newton Howard is not Hermann, he did craft a great score here and I think it was just about the only thing that kept me from walking out of the theatre in the first ten minutes…and I sat through Mortal Kombat: Annihilation (granted, I was a teenager at the time, but that’s not an excuse).  Now, as with Hitchcock, I have not seen many of Shyamalan’s film, and Last Airbender is the first time I had seen one of his films since I saw Signs in the theatre. But despite the film, Newton Howard has created an effective score here (though, he couldn’t help but hear some borrowing a bit from David Arnold in a few places, in my opinion).  I can’t be sure, but I think one of the ways he approached this score was to create a different orchestral theme for each of the four elements.  The last track on the album, “Flow Like Water,” feature what I think is, surprise surprise, the water theme.  It would take more viewings to confirm this, but since in the Avatar world the cultures are so linked with the elements that they can command, it would only seem like a logical way to approach the score.  And should they make the second and third films of the series, it would provide some ready material for them.  Now, since seeing the film, I have been acquainting myself with the original cartoon series.  The series is American made, but borrows heavily on the Japanese style of anime.  Its score feature copious amounts of traditional Asian instruments, helping to establish the culture of the world, and while Newton Howard uses some of the same instruments, his score is pervasively Western in its orientation.  Besides “Flow Like Water,” stand out tracks include the album opening “Airbender Suite” and “Journey to the Northern Water Tribe” (which also features that water theme).  I don’t know what else I can say, really, without trashing the film itself further.  Check out the score, though, it is one of the better ones this year so far.

Now speaking of the original cartoon, watch out next week for when FSFT5 takes on animated shows and their scores.

Finally, I’ve also been listening recently to Michael Giacchino’s Earth Days score.  This documentary came out last summer and was also shown on PBS.  The score is nothing truly special, but if you enjoy his work, especially many of his best moments on Lost, you should download it from iTunes.  Well that’s all for now.  Check in a bit later this weekend for my reivew of Star Trek: The Deluxe Edition and the expanded Star Trek III: The Search for Spock release from Film Score Monthly.