Music that makes you giggle when you're not supposed to

D., get with the program, buddy!

With an ostentatious and painful lack of any really exciting adventure score since Williams decided to be "mature" and Goldsmith and Poledouris decided to be dead, this is simply the next best thing. Debney makes a fantastically fun amalgam of everything I (and a host of others) love about early Williams/Horner/Goldsmith/Poledouris adventure scores! It's rolicky, it's humongous and it's just oodles of fun.
In fact, it's not even trying to find its own voice; it's as much an hommage to the Grand Masters as anything I've ever come across, and is definitely up for most enjoyable score of the year as far as I'm concerned!

Bah humbug. Passion leaves me absolutely stonecold. A boring excercise in percussion that gets on my nerves after about ten minutes (which is fine because then the boring underscore sets in). I know Debney said he heard voices and saw lights and Gods came down from Olympus or where the hell ever to show him burning batons or whatever which inspired him to do this score in a religious fervour, but I swear he was just on the whacky baccy again!
Damn hippy!

I'm just so happy that in this day and age where experiments in atonal texture have inexplicably taken the place of anything recognizable like ,say, a melody (and I DON'T bloody mean 3 subrecognizable notes hidden somewhere before a pointless crescendo, never to be repeated, yet clung to as if if it were a bloody lifebuoy by those apologists who -undoubtedly under the influence of controled substances themselves- kling to their mad (or possible Godgiven) conviction they heard a THEME!), that ONE composer has jumped OFF this intellectual bandwagon and has just created something we had to go without for nigh to twenty bloody starving YEARS! And by now with foam and spittle dripping from my bloodshot eyes, I will continue to rave that this IS a program to get on board with, and a new direction for an art that seems to have lost its way in the last decades and slowly now is starting to come to terms with that old adage from that old Dutch painter Mondriaan who said "Art must be forgotten. Beauty must be realized."

Of course I still wouldn't wipe the shit of my cat's behind with the paintings he did, but whatever.
By thunder.

If any of the aforementioned would even coming as flagwavingly, soulsearingly, bassthumpingly close to a full twenty-one gun salute to a bygone era as Debney did, I'd be onboard with that.

But I ain't.

Now excuse me while I go listen to a generous helping of Krull and Quigley Down Under and cry in my port.

Wow, what a catfight.

Me, I just love Lair because it is a funny, shameless rip-off that does not want to be something else. I have far more problems with scores which sound like the old masters but try to persuade us of their originality. Lair is just nothing but Debney sceaming, "Look, I can do them all. I rule! I RULE!!!" with a big, fat grin in his face, and I would pad him on the shoulder and say, "Yeah, brother, you rule. You did it!", and we´d laugh our asses off.

Lair is a joke that you just don´t get, Demetris. Nothing wrong with that, and I understand absolutely where you´re coming from; I just think you take it too seriously.

Thanks, man. It is just pure fun to sit there, listen to it and yell, "Hey, that´s a Goldsmith track", "Hey, there´s Star Wars action", "hohoo, that was Horner´s danger motif", "wow, he even did Rosza..." and so on. Just fun. I would love to know if the guys who ordered Debney to do the score even KNOW about what he did. The backstory of this score would be very interesting to know.

You know why i am giggling? 'Cause it seems to me that the only ones that are taking the score as a "fun little joke" and telling me to lighten up is you; unlike the makers / Debney himself who actually take this pretty serious in fact, even more than i do.

http://www.gametrailers.com/player/18615.html

I wonder what your response to someone who would be using the same arguments as you but to defend "300" as a fun little game of look at me i good Goldenthal-isms would be;

Well on your first point, i beg to differ a bit; my own experiences so far have showed me that - most of the times, things aren't as pleasantly naive or well-spirited as they might appear to people outside the business

On your 2nd paragraph, you're absolutely right; i agree with that What's there's there and it's a matter of personal choice for anyone based on their taste whether to enjoy the hell out of it or not and also that i too doubt scores like that will frequently come our way, in the near future.

The main difference is of course that Goldenthal's work, no matter how much or little you may appreciate it (which, again, is a matter of taste) is -with all due respect- nowhere near as iconic as the Great Classic Action Scores more or less referenced in Lair. And that's what makes that one fun (and funny).

The references are so abundantly clear that it would even make a non-filmscore nut sit up and smile and think of Star Trek III, Conan, Indiana Jones and Rambo. And that's the difference: the joke (or hommage, or reference for want of a more neutral term) works because it's so unsubtle.

It's more or less the same reason why the James Bond theme or The Good, The Bad & The Ugly whistle reference/joke in a myriad of films work (even though these are of course way better known than the examples in Lair, but the principle is comparable): people do recognize it and are able to put a frame of reference against it, immediately hitting the right emotional buttons.
In the case of Lair these buttons may be less obvious to the casual listener, but to us score lovers it's one huge party of recognition, making me smile for the first time in a looooooong time of score listening.

Yup. I think Ralph pretty much nailed it.

Tomandandy's big, heroic ending to the The Hills Have Eyes remake made me laugh out loud! It's just so pompous, such a breaking in style of the rest... it's ridiculous

Antineutrino, have you heard Il Grande Silenzio? I think the problem with some of these well known Italian westerns scores is that they've been used for a huge amount of parodies, which makes it hard to appreciate as something serious.

You're weird.