Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides - Hans & Friends

Oh goody, a fourth Pirates of the Caribbean (POTC) movie. I'm not sure I'll ever bother finding out what is so strange about the tides in this one as the reviews have been largely crap and I was bored after half of the first one. No idea how or why I ended up seeing the two ear and eye bleeding sequels. Maybe I really have no willpower of my own.

The one thing that did improve after the first film (nominally by Klaus Badelt, but how come Badelt is never credited with "original POTC themes" in the later, Zimmer scores?) when Zimmer took over to deliver some occasionally jolly accompaniment. On Stranger Tides is more of the same, exactly what you'd expect; action music that sounds like Gladiator (really, Hans, something else, please?) and lots of Captain Jack's theme. Unfortunately, some of the whimsy of the theme is lost as it's ramped up too far, too often.

One significant redeeming feature is the inclusion of some gorgeous guitar cues performed by Rodrigo Y Gabriela (evidently Heitor Pereira is busy these days). The only downside is that they result in the album sounding like two scores mixed up; one intimate, Hispanic, the other trad Hans Zimmer. Still, it makes for a pleasing rest. The album is almost half remixes and other crap, best avoided. Fun enough and worth a punt if you like the previous POTC scores, but hardly essential.

Pieces of eight accepted at Amazon if you want to acquire it. Or they might exchange it for your parrot.*

*They won't, the lily livered bastards.

Rango - Hans Zimmer

Hans Zimmer and John Powell seem to be battling it out as to who can score the most CGI animated movies, although the former invariably gets help and the better invariably gets the better movies. The trailer for Rango looks half amusing and stars the voice of Johnny Depp as a chameleon in Mexico something something something. Naturally the music sounds like Pirates of the Caribbean rendered by someone impersonating Ennio Morricone in about 1965. Not that that's a particularly terrible thing, although the delightful Rango Suite does sound a bit too much like Depp's Pirates theme gone Mexican. Oh, and there's a none too subtle quote of Bernstein's Magnificent Seven rhythm in We Ride, Really!

Of the longer tracks, Bats is the standout; starting off as the unpromising 984,325th spoof of Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries gets, erm, ethnically cleansed with harmonica, banjos and such like. Mind you, the quote of Strauss's Blue Danube later in the track, in amongst some standard issue Zimmer action music is less inspired but the track has more variety in 4 minutes than the rest put together. Then again, the brief songs from Los Lobos and others are amusing and breakup the heaviness of some of Zimmer's underscore. Serious, Hans, you don't need to turn up the synth percussion track to 11 in every score you write.

Tracks are generally short and pithy, interspersed by short narration tracks. This counts as one of the five cardinal sins of film music albums (one day I might tell you the other four) but they are brief and humorous enough not to be too annoying. Still, sure someone will complain. It's all very jolly and enjoyable but doesn't exactly stick out. It's one of those scores that sounds exactly how you imagine (as per the above description). The main themes are pleasant enough but I can't see me humming them to the distraction of others.

Purchase this from Amazon.com with money.

Please Release Me (let me go) - Part 2

A few more scores that could do with a little more of them legitimately available on disc:


Starship Troopers - Basil Poledouris

I'm sure Basil Poledouris would be thrilled to see the continued interest in his music since his untimely death a few years ago; the re-recording of Conan is a measure of the esteem in which his music is held. Great though the re-recording is, it's something of a shame the composer wasn't around to wield the baton himself. It's passed into film music folklore than the original release of Starship Troopers almost sent Varese Sarabande broke due to the enormous re-use fees on the score which was (I believe) recorded by two different LA orchestras. Of course, collectors still bitched. Typical. With the far more sane re-use fee arrangements of recent years an expanded disc seems a far more realistic prospect, plus sci-fi scores always do well. Here's hoping.


The Disney scores of Alan Menken & Hans Zimmer

It's never going to happen, Disney are far too precious about their properties to let some small minority group have their way when they can re-re-re-re-release their classic soundtrack albums with yet another shit pop arrangement of the spin off pop song. However, longer versions of Beauty and the Beast, Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Lion King would be rather splendid. The latter two, in particular, are missing considerable amounts from their official CD releases. Zimmer's music for The Lion King got him an Oscar (not that it really counts for much; looking at you Gustavo Santaolalla) but Zimmer only gets a miserly handful of cuts on disc. With any lucky we'll get a re-re-re-release with 46 new versions of the Elton John songs too. On second thoughts...


A Bug's Life - Randy Newman

An unlikely entry, I'm sure you're thinking, but some of the most delightful cues were missed off the official album. One reason (a hunch) is that they were dropped because of the choir (notably Building the Bird and the finale, All is Well which are both marvellous) and Disney didn't want to pay extra for those tracks. In any event, it stands as Newman's finest score for Pixar to date, a terrific, intricate, thematically rich, pseudo-western which deserves to be heard in its entirity.

The Nightmare Before Christmas - Danny Elfman

Another unlikely candidate. The obscenely expensive Elfman/Burton boxed set (which I should hopefully be getting in February 2011) contains extra tracks but is sold out and hardly a realistic prospect for the average fan. The existing release is beautifully presented, but a few more underscore tracks to give balance to the above average number of songs would be most welcome. Might be fun to have a bonus disc of orchestra-only versions of the songs too (same applies to the Menken scores too). Here's hoping.

Scrooged - Danny Elfman

OK, OK, I've never seen the film (but have it on my DVD rental list) but the suite on Music for a Darkened Theatre is a delight and it's probably the most high profile thing by Elfman never properly released. Indeed, it's quite possibly the only studio score he's done that's never had a proper release.

Megamind - Hans Zimmer & Lorne Balfe

Hurrah, it's the quarterly mildly disappointing Dreamworks CGI film. Now in 3D! Actually, Megamind isn't at all bad, indeed most of their 2010 efforts have been decent, particularly the wonderful How to Train Your Dragon. OK, I didn't see Shrek 11 (or whatever it is) but presumably that was fair to middling like the other Shrek sequels. Megamind gets the Hans Zimmer and "insert name of random composer here" treatment; this time it's Lorne Balfe who appears to be a regular Zimmer "additional music by", but who has now "made it" and gets his name on the album cover, like reaching the pinnacle of some unambitious film composer initiation ceremony. However, it seems he has had some reasonable level of impact on Megamind  since it sounds notably un-Zimmer like a lot of the time.

One striking thing about Megamind is that it's not really all that heroic (at least if you benchmark anything vaguely superheroic against Superman). True, it's about the "villain" but even when one imagines it should be heroic (the action), this doesn't really happen and it's all rather charmingly plinky plunky, seemingly driven by the characters rather than the action sequences. It has more in common with a pleasingly above average family comedy score (think Randy Edelman on a good day). This is most in evidence for Hal's Theme, which is delightfully perky and memorable enough, if not brain achingly catchy. Ditto for the Roxanne Love Theme, which sounds like Michel Legrand. That and a dash of Bondian brass in Ollo makes one wish they had perhaps gone all out on the retro aspect, but alas that doesn't quite happen. This isn't quite The Incredible, but Michael Giacchino is in another league.

Again, one must assume that Zimmer's usual tropes were slightly subsumed by Balfe in the action since it doesn't sound like Con Air (did Zimmer even write that? Probably not, but he might as well have done) or Crimson Tide or Gladiator. Spots like Stars and Tights or Crab Nuggets are predictably upbeat and not exactly complex stuff, but aren't heavy with Remote Control percussion or that weird synth brass sound that makes a hefty live brass section sound like Hans has done keyboard karaoke and drizzled the artificial sound over the recording like an over zealous mayonnaise dispenser. Megamind isn't amazing, but it could have been so much more generic and it's nice that it isn't. The old fashioned mix of pop tunes are clearly for artistic reasons rather than money given their age (unless the kids really are listening to Glibert O'Sullivan and Minnie Riperton these days and I haven't noticed).


Acquire from Amazon.com.