April 24, 2007

  • The Slow FM Time

    This is that time of the year when score releases slow a little bit, ususally.  What has happened is that many of the labels that release older scores have been going full force so much so that it is hard to catch up.

    This past week was the 100th anniversary for Miklos Rozsa.  So there was a re-recording from Silva of The Private Lives of Sherlock Holmes and Varese Sarabande released a 3 disc set that of music by Rozsa that I have tried to track down this week.  Film Score Monthly has put out a couple of new releases of music from a couple of Lucy & Desi films on one disc, and a Clifton Parker and Maurice Jarre score on another.  These are remasterings of collectable Colpix LPs.

    We had a rental car with XM Radio in it this week, and I got to hear a little from Chris Young's score for Ghost Rider.  It sounded pretty darn good so I'll need to keep up with that some day while looking forward to the score release from Spiderman 3 which releases in a week.

    That's about it for today.

    Sunday was great because I finally sat through Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West (1968).  This is one heck of a long film, but what I realized is that it demands that you pay attention.  Early on a five minute sequence that has Jack Elam trying to keep a fly off his face is just the kind of thing that does more to set character, pace and that false sense of security that is missing from a lot of films these days.  I am so not a Western fan, but this film, and the previous Leone-Eastwood films, are just must see for any film fan.  Plus you get to hear Morricone's great score in its context.  What made me laugh was the way the music would play along in a sequence, then stop to let some action happen in the kind of "rest" rhythm of the music.  Just fascinating.