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DRAGONSLAYER – Alex North
MOVIE MUSIC UK CLASSICS
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Dragonslayer is a difficult score for someone like me to review, and this is why: it’s because I’m not a musicologist. You can’t review scores as intellectually challenging and musically complex as Dragonslayer in the usual way, because it’s not a standard score: despite being a fantasy film set in an ancient world of dragons, sorcerers, kings, and damsels in distress, the music is about as far removed from the genre conventions as one can imagine. I don’t have the musical vocabulary, or a deep enough knowledge of the compositional techniques Alex North employs in this score, to be able to do it justice, and any attempt by me to describe it in the usual emotional terms would be laughably futile. So let me begin with this: Dragonslayer is one of the most challenging, difficult, complicated, infuriating, disturbing, chaotic scores you are ever likely to hear. It’s also quite brilliant. Read more…
CLASH OF THE TITANS – Ramin Djawadi
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
In the interest of full disclosure, I admit that I went into Clash of the Titans expecting the worst. When the news broke that Scottish composer Craig Armstrong – who had been attached to the film almost since its inception – was being replaced by Ramin Djawadi, and that the film’s release date was being delayed several months so that the producers could cash in on the Avatar effect and add new 3-D special effects to an already effects-heavy film, my heart sank. However, after my first complete listen to the score, I found myself thinking “hey, it’s not that bad”. And then I stopped and thought again; have my standards dropped so low that ‘not that bad?’ is actually seen as a positive remark? Have Hollywood’s most expensive and elaborate productions become so bloated and self-serving that the music only has to not make the film demonstrably worse for it to be seen as a success? If this is where the major studios are pitching themselves these days, things truly are going from bad to worse. Read more…
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