The Screengrab : harry belafonte

OST: "Beetlejuice"

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 20:45:00 GMT

Danny Elfman's reputation as a film composer, to put it politely, is mixed. To put it not so politely, there are a lot of people who think he sucks. Though Elfman himself -- a multiple Oscar nominee, a millionaire many times over, and Mr. Bridget Fonda -- probably doesn't pay his detractors any mind, there is a growing consensus that the man who started out as the most unlikely person to achieve success as a composer of scores for blockbuster Hollywood films has turned into a contemptible hack whose name in the opening credits is a sure sign of sonic disappointment ahead. Of course, for everyone who feels that way, there's also those who fiercely defend his scores as memorable, inventive, and distinct; how many other film composers can you name who have gold records for collections of their motion picture scores? Elfman has two of them, and a legion of devoted fans. This kind of vehement disagreement is, in fact, familiar to Danny Elfman: during the 1980s heyday of his band Oingo Boingo, opinion was roughly split between those who found him an obnoxious noisemaker whose danceable, horn-laden compositions were an embarrasment to the punk circles in which he traveled, and those who found his music creative, infectious, and a welcome change of pace from the business-as-usual of L.A. hardcore.

But as Elfman's career as a film composer enters its third decade, those who defend him are growing fewer, and those who attack him are growing more. The time at which his name in the credits alone was enough to make fans line up at the box office for a ticket are long behind him, and it seems the more he embraced his fame as a Hollywood name worthy of dropping, the more he moved from his ludic, sonically inventive early work to a sense of darkness and bombast that never quite suited him to what can only be described as hackwork in films like A Civil Action, Proof of Life and Red Dragon. The sad thing is, it was not always thus: Elfman got his start composing music for the films of his friend, fan and frequent collaborator, the director Tim Burton -- and the early work they produced together really was special. Back then, Elfman geniunely sounded like someone who might seriously change the game when it came to film scores: his utterly postmodern approach of mixing the high and the low, and his keen sense of comic and dramatic timing, which he used to blow the doors off scenes with a judicious application of musical cues, seemed to be indicators of someone who was there to do more than just collect a paycheck.

The best of Danny Elfman's early collaborations with Tim Burton was the fantastic score to Pee Wee's Big Adventure. A more perfect marriage of score and film is hard to imaging, and the opening sequence of the beloved comedy -- with Pee Wee's activities growing more and more absurd as the main theme becomes louder and louder, finally hammering away at a perfect comic crescendo -- is unforgettable. Unfortunately, the commercial release is marred by many omissions, and by being paired on a double release with Elfman's passable but unspectacular soundtrack to the Rodney Dangerfield vehicle Back to School. So, for Elfman aficianados who want to show off what the man was capable of before he started sleepwalking through his career, Beetlejuice is the default pick. Not that it's much of a step down from Pee Wee's Big Adventure; they're both showcases for his blend of acumen and absurdity, his sure comic timing, his ability to use odd percussive patterns and polyrhythms to such a listener into the scene, and his deft mixing of cartoonish exaggeration with clever and appropriate instrumentation. The ghostly conjurations of the score proved that Elfman, despite later evidence to the contrary, was capable of sounding sinister without taking himself too seriously, and its magical mixture of catchy melodic elements and almost avant-garde experimental sounds makes it a collection of music worth listening to even outside of the context of the movie -- the true test of any great score. Beetlejuice is the pinnacle of Elfman's work with Tim Burton, for good and for ill: it never got any better, and it would all be downhill from there.

BEST TRACKS: The famous opening theme to Beetlejuice is a perfect example of what Danny Elfman is capable of when he's not just out to make a buck. Its clever folding of Harry Belafonte's "The Banana Boat Song" into what becomes a whirling, sinister piece of music is funny and unexpected, and the rest of the piece plays out with excellent and energetic stings over a rapid-fire death train of increasing tempos. "Travel Music", with its conjuration of 1950s-style on-the-road dynamics and its simple innocence twisted by its underlying nastiness, works very well, as does the hilarious muzak-from-beyond-the-grave of "The Flier/Lydia's Pep Talk". The eerie "Incantation", with its high-strung percussion that blasts out into an explosion of creepy vocal cues, haunted-house organ and propulsive horns, nicely rounds out the score.

Related Posts:

OST: Enter the Dragon

OST: Conan the Barbarian

DVD Digest for May 20, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 20 May 2008 14:00:00 GMT

This week: a crush of Blu-Rays from Paramount overwhelms the new crop of regular DVD releases, which is good news for you Blu-Ray fans, not so much for the rest of us. Time to trade up, I guess…

In the middle of the Format Wars of 2008, Paramount’s home video division made the decision to switch their loyalty to HD-DVD, thereby stopping all production on upcoming Blu-Ray releases and pulling current ones from the market. But now that HD-DVD has gone all Betamax on us, Paramount has decided to dump all of their previously-released Blu-Rays back into stores, along with some new releases. Check out this list of new Paramount Blu-Rays, in alphabetical order: Aeon Flux, Babel, Bee Movie, Black Snake Moan, Blades of Glory, Coming to America, Disturbia, Dreamgirls, Face/Off (Special Edition), Flags of Our Fathers, Four Brothers, Mission: Impossible III, Next, Shooter, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, Sleepy Hollow, Trading Places, The Untouchables, The Warriors, We Were Soldiers, and World Trade Center. I’m sure most of you can find at least a handful of titles in there that strike your fancy. And if not, you’ll just have to content yourself in the fact that Criterion Blu-Rays are only five months away.

Meanwhile, in non-Blu-Ray news, this week brings the release of the latest in George A. Romero’s Dead saga, Diary of the Dead (Weinstein), Nicolas Cage in National Treasure: Book of Secrets (Buena Vista, available in single-disc, double-disc, and Blu-Ray), the Happy Madison production Strange Wilderness (Paramount), and the anime epic Vexille (FUNimation Entertainment).

A handful of classics hit the market this week as well, my favorite being The Muppet Show Season 3 (Buena Vista), a season that included such memorable guests as Danny Kaye, Gilda Radner, Sylvester Stallone, Alice Cooper, Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, and Harry Belafonte. Also of note is James Stewart: The Western Collection (Universal), featuring new DVD editions of Destry Rides Again, Winchester ’73, Bend of the River, The Far Country, The Night Passage, and The Rare Breed. And MGM releases three comedies from their vaults- If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium, The Night They Raided Minsky’s, and What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?- no doubt to use their long-ass titles in an attempt to piggyback on the inevitable boffo box-office of this weekend’s similarly verbosely-titled Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

Finally, a handful of non-Paramount Blu-Rays hit stores this week: Anger Management and V for Vendetta. So that's cool, I guess.

The Rep Report (April 15--21)

Phil Nugent — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 15:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: The coolest noise in town this spring and summer may be at the Museum of Modern Art's "Jazz Score" series (April 17--September 15), which offers "a gallery installation, live concerts, and a panel discussion," as well as a series of features and shorts powered by original jazz soundtracks. Whether by design or just the luck of the draw, the selection makes it clear that the use of an original jazz score, whether composed by Duke Ellington (Anatomy of a Murder) or Elmer Bernstein (The Man with the Golden Arm), reveals a certain level of artistic aspiration, often coupled with a lust for the lower things in life. At the simplest level, music by Miles Davis or by John Lewis and the Modern Jazz Quartet can do wonders for a thriller such as Louis Malle's Elevator to the Gallows or Robert Wise's Odds Against Tomorrow, with Robert Ryan as a racist crook and Harry Belafonte as his unhappy partner in crime. At the other extreme, there's Arthur Penn's Mickey One, a fascinating, incoherent, art-damaged movie that seems to be trying to take its cues from Stan Getz's saxophone improvisations on the soundtrack--bad as the movie is, it's fun to watch just for the visions it gives you of the studio executive's heads melting when they first saw it--and such artifacts as Robert Frank's Pull My Daisy, with music by Ornette Coleman, and Shirley Clarke's off-Broadway verite films The Cool World and The Connection, reminders that the American independent film movement once seemed to be an offshoot of the Beats' world. There are also some international obscurities that sound better than intriguing, notable Dilemma, a 1962 film made in apartheid-era Johannesburg by the Danish director Henning Carlsen (Hunger), starring Zakes Mokae and with music by Max Roach.

LOS ANGELES: Tonight, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ "John Huston Lecture on Documentary Film" at the Linwood Dunn Theater will include screenings of the two great military documentaries that Huston made during World War II, The Battle of San Pietro and Let There Be Light. Although made with the cooperation of the U. S. military and officially intended as part of the war effort, San Pietro--which is both a strikingly clear and cogent account of a battle and a nonfiction war poem composed on film--met with some grumblings from the higher-ups, and Light, a harrowing visit to a medical ward full of soldiers suffering from the psychological effects of war, was actually kept from public view until the early 1980s. Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Susan King makes the point that Huston had to deal with much more interference than some of the people now making documentaries about the Iraq war, but many of those current filmmakers could still learn a lot from his work. She also reminds us that Huston had a ready answer for the jarheads who clucked that his movies seemed "anti-war': ""Whenever I make a film that's for war, you can take me out and shoot me." The screening will be introduced by Huston's son Tony and followed by a panel discussion including Dr. Charles Wolfe, Dr. Betsy McLane, and Richard E. Robbins, the producer-director of the Oscar-nominated doceumentary Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience.