At one point, Ennio Morricone was attached to write an original soundtrack to Quentin Tarantino’s latest cinematic provocation. If this had gone through as planned (Morricone backed out due to a scheduling conflict), I’ve got to imagine that Basterds would still have sounded pretty much the same. There are two reasons for this.
First, Quentin Tarantino does not, as a rule, use original music in his films. Even in movies where there is a credited composer, such as Kill Bill 1 (the RZA) and Kill Bill 2 (Robert Rodriguez), the most prominently displayed cues are always preexisting music, respectively Hotei Tomoyasu’s Battle Without Honor or Humanity and a cue from Ennio Morricone’s score to Il Mercenario, which also turns up in the Basterds soundtrack.
The nice way of describing this is to say that Tarantino is a collage artist: he makes his films by combing through the scraps of other people’s creations, and he’s just as sensitive to sound fragments as he is to images. The not-so-nice way of describing it is to say that he’s a micromanaging sumbitch who cannot stand to let a composer have creative control over one of his movies.
Tasha Robinson, over at the Onion’s AV Club, has an excellent piece up comparing the book and film versions of Watchmen. In addition to the obligatory laundry list of fannish greivances, she points out a crucial difference between the two versions that Snyder had no control over: comics are a medium of visual narrative, while film is a medium of audiovisual narrative. Robinson is talking about the actors’ performances, and she does a good job explaining the effects of that. But she doesn’t mention the other big part of the film’s soundscape: music. And that’s kind of a shame, because the music department did something really interesting here. (Our own Mlawski saw this coming, as devout OTIketeers will no doubt recall…)
Spoilers ahead, for what it’s worth. Though I doubt anyone would read this without having seen the movie anyway.
In many cases, a movie’s soundtrack is just another piece of its marketing campaign. But occasionally, a song from a film actually becomes more popular than the film itself. Here are eight you can probably sing from memory (whether you want to admit it or not), from movies you’ve probably never heard of. Consider this a spoiler alert – if you read the name of a film and don’t want the plot described, just skip to the next one.
(NOTE: For a song to qualify, it has to have originally been released as part of a soundtrack. And I decided to stick to movies from the 60’s onward. Otherwise, this list might be all Gershwin and Porter.)
Let’s count ‘em down…
In this bonus episode of the Overthinking It Podcast, Jordan Stokes interviews Bear McCreary, composer of the Battlestar Galactica and Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicle TV series. Enjoy!
Download This Episode (AAC Format)
So, let’s talk about Howard Hawks’ The Thing From Another World, or rather THE THING, From Another World. (Thank you, Netflix!)
In many ways, it’s a stupid movie. It’s based on Who Goes There, a smart and deeply horrifying (at least to my 15-year-old self) novella by John W. Campbell, which you can read online for free, and probably illegally, here.
The basic concept (yes, spoilers ahead) is…
I just got through watching John Boorman’s 1981 film Excalibur (thank you Netflix). What a weird-ass movie. Not least because you get to see young Helen Mirren, Liam Neeson, Patrick Stewart (already bald), Gabriel Byrne, and Ciaran Hinds, most of whom were cast, according to IMDB, because Boorman wanted relative unknowns, so that people would focus on the movie instead of the actors. It probably worked well at the time, but it’s pretty hard for me to think anything other than “That’s academy-award-winner Helen Mirren wearing a sheet-metal bra! Patrick Stewart TOTALLY just hit that guy with an ax!” and so on. Video after the jump…
So let’s talk about the music. As you probably know, the score is by Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood (the musical equivalent of stunt casting) and it’s gotten a lot of press for that reason alone. But Greenwood has serious chops – this is one of the best scores I’ve heard in years. I’m sure it would have gotten an Oscar nomination, if the Academy hadn’t judged the score ineligible (apparently because Greenwood reused sections of a preexisting composition that he’d written for the BBC in 2004). A lot of my fellow film music nerds are pissed off about this, but I don’t particularly care… Greenwood doesn’t need the money, fame, or validation, and the score itself has received plenty of media attention already…
