a movie mix to tide you over:

The Girl­pants April Mix, as you might have guessed, has been pushed back a month amidst the hubbub that goes with the lead-up to and even­tual events of the month of May. It should be ready soon, though, so keep an eye out. In the mean­time, I’ve cooked up a little some­thing else.

Every once in a while I’m con­vinced that my mp3 player’s ran­dom­izer is less a ran­dom­izer and more of a spas­ti­cally func­tional Maxwell’s Demon. Occa­sion­ally it just hits that per­fect segue (yes­terday I think it was Wilco into Super Furry Ani­mals) and my jaw drops a little and my steps hiccup. Recently it’s started playing tracks from film scores with wild abandon. Now, I’ve got 20gb of music on this thing and maybe 300mb of that is film scores, and yet I swear it plays at least 3 or 4 of these songs per hour of listening.

Film scores are the inter­sec­tion of my two main media pas­sions, so I have what I’d call a pro-am interest in them. Here are a few tracks that I’ll for­ever asso­ciate with their films:

Takeshi Kobayashi — All About Lily Chou-Chou — “Sight” (can’t buy! [except in ger­many])
A pretty, simple, piano-led piece from an extremely emo­tional and emo­tion­ally vio­lent depic­tion of teenage angst, this first track on the All About Lily Chou Chou sound­track is stir­ring and pensive–the sound of one last calm before the inevitable storm.

Alexandre Desplat — Birth — “Pre­lude” (buy)
Floating over the most per­fect imi­ta­tion of a Kubrick scene yet put to film, this opening piece from the incred­ibly ill-at-ease Birth could almost be the theme from a super­hero film. Starting with heraldic flutes and slowly drawing in a mas­sive string sec­tion, it grad­u­ally builds to a tri­umphant sun­burst of horns. You can almost see a young Clark Kent taking his first giant leap as they crescendo. But this is a film about a ten year old who wants to make love to Nicole Kidman, so what the fuck is going on here?

Damon Albarn and Michael Nyman — Rav­enous — “Colquhoun’s Story” (buy)
One of the strangest scores that I’ve ever come across, and for one of the strangest (and best) odd­ball films I know. Much of the album is made up of what sounds like a retarded third grade class playing Stephen Foster stan­dards, backed by a par­tic­u­larly angry Philip Glass. But don’t let that scare you off… this is pow­erful, strangely alluring music, and though it loses some­thing out of con­text it’s more than strong enough to stand on its own.

Hans Zimmer — The Thin Red Line — “Journey to the Line” (buy)
This is the very def­i­n­i­tion of a slow burn. Tracking Jesus Christ Himself’s long trek to the front lines of a Pacific the­ater island battle, this clock-ticking track is the per­fect com­panion to out­sider auteur Ter­rence Malick’s stun­ning nature pho­tog­raphy and the fore­boding in his actors’ faces. Incred­ibly mournful, epic, and com­pletely aware of the tragedy onscreen. The climax is brutal and the lis­tener expects it to come back at least one more time, but it passes all too briefly into a beau­tiful requiem.

Trevor Jones — The Last of the Mohi­cans — “Promon­tory” (buy)
This is the cen­ter­piece of a com­pletely schiz­o­phrenic score. Like Rav­enous, this work was pro­duced by two com­posers, but unlike that one, The Last of the Mohi­cans score is split neatly down the middle: the first half, all sweeping emo­tional land­scapes, was written by Trevor Jones, and the second, more reserved and new age-y, was by Randy Edelman. Both do fine work, but Jones’ music is what most will remember the film for. Sim­ilar to “Journey to the Line”, but much more straight­for­ward in its epic ambitions.

Yeong-wook Jo — Oldboy — “The Last Waltz” (buy)
Here come the wood­winds again. Ah, and there’re the strings. This is a waltz, nothing more and nothing less, but it’s beau­ti­fully con­ducted and played, and in con­text it’s a stun­ning cap on a truly epic score.

Philip Glass — Mishima — “Kyoko’s House (Stage Blood is Not Enough)” (buy)
Those familiar with Glass’ exten­sive work on film scores might be shocked to make out elec­tric guitar here, par­tic­u­larly that it’s used in a film about a mid-century Japanese author. Still, the com­po­si­tion and playing are classic Glass: all clipped phras­ings and rigid struc­ture, min­i­malism and rep­e­ti­tion, but more melodic and more emo­tional here than in most of his other work.

Amon Tobin — Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory — “The Light­house” (buy)
That’s right, the video game. Video games have scores too, you know. Or at least this one does. The only other one that I’ve found that comes close to having a re-listenable sound­track is Kata­mari Damacy, but that stuff’s kinda like aural PCP for game nerds. Anyway, Tobin does his usual post-DnB jazzy bass-heavy thing here and it’s fucking beau­tiful. Dark and mys­te­rious and basi­cally the per­fect accom­pa­ni­ment to crawling around in the dark with heatvi­sion and sniping bad guys.

Raul Seixas — City of God — “Meta­mor­fose Ambu­lante” (buy)
This one’s kind of cheating since it’s not tech­ni­cally part of a score. Still, City of God doesn’t have a stand-alone score per se, and since each piece of music in the film seems to echo a dif­ferent set of spa­tial or tem­poral coor­di­nates in Rio’s patch­work tapestry, it’s as good a can­di­date as any. It’s a soulful and smooth bit of funk-rock, all buzzing synths and chiming gui­tars and gospel backing singers, the movie’s swan song of the 70s.

(Yes, I did leave out what is prob­ably my all-time favorite OST: Blade Runner. Hon­estly, I couldn’t come up with a single track that encap­su­lated the bril­liance of what Van­gelis (Van­gelis!) did with that movie, but I do rec­om­mend spending a little time rooting around the inter­nets for the “Esper Edi­tion” 2CD ver­sion of the score, which col­lects every single bit of music from the film into an album that’s nearly as long and as nar­ra­tive [the script had, what, like 20 pages of dia­logue?] as the film itself. The commercially-released score is a ripoff and a re-recording.)