YOUR ALL TIME FAVOURITE FILM SCORE ALBUMS!!!

I remember Major Tom and that's it. ( as you'll know, nothing to do with David Bowie )

Do you have the rare and very valuable Revenge of The Jedi figure? ( I don't )

I really liked those 'The Story of...' albums. So much so that I was known to transcribe the dialogue into a sort of screenplay for me and my friends to act out. We did record the first one onto cassette...at least we started to. But no one had as much enthusiasm for it as I did.

I rarely bought music on cassette.

I also can't remember which figure(s) it was? Only a handful were released before the geek-wars that made the producers back down from Jedi's getting all righteously vengeful.

(And no, I never owned a Revenge Of The Jedi card/action figure. Guess they were only ever distributed in the USA before being retracted. Not that I would have given tuppence: I've never been a "mint in box" kinda collector, so I would have ripped the action figure off whatever it said on front).

#16: THE FOURTH MAN (1983) by Loek Dikker, on Varese Sarabande LP ('84).

After seeing this album sitting on record shelves for several years, I blind bought it around '86 never having seen the picture.

I immediately connected with the darkly seductive orchestral score for THE 4TH MAN and it's been a fave for decades.

When I finally watched THE 4TH MAN on DVD around 2001, I didn't like the film all.

This, I think, makes for an interesting topic because 1) how many favorite soundtracks do we own from movies we enjoy/appreciate? ... and contrast this with 2) how many favorite soundtracks do we own from movies we dislike?

Does anybody have favorite soundtracks within their Top 50 which are from flicks (s)he strongly dislikes?
How many faves do we have from cinema which we have never seen?

...also...

How many of us can seperate our love of a film's music from our love of the film? Can one fully appreciate a soundtrack album if one dislikes the source it comes from?

Speaking for myself, I continue to appreciate Loek Dikker's intense and intoxicating music score even though I feel Paul Verhoeven's work on THE 4TH MAN is rather repugnant. Despite its 'art' house subject about an alcoholic author who experiences religious-themed hallucinations, THE 4TH MAN shirks no opportunity to lay on the gore and blood letting (as if its target audience is the grindhouse demographic).

Dikker's soundtrack album, though, should be better known. It's one of those short Varese LPs than has not (yet) been reissued into CD.

I think Varese should re-do this title as one of their CD Club offerings. If you are at all familiar with the heady & Dionysian concert music of Karol Szymanowski, then this should give you an idea of what Dikker's score is like (and can achieve).

THE FOURTH MAN is an excellent film (absolutely gorgeous photography, btw), although I can't remember much of the score off the top of my head. I met Dikker two years ago, during a film music conference in Trondheim, Norway. He did talk a bit about his work on that Verhoeven film during a lecture he did (which was rather boring, to be honest).

What about choices #17 through 50?

No, he spoke English with a heavy Dutch accent.

I'm not sure what he's doing these days, if anything.

I don't think I would have called The Final Conflict a bad movie but it certainly isn't great, on the plus side, besides the sublime score, it does have a great and convincing lead in Sam Neill and the cinematography is great too.

Of the others in my list I think we all know there are many detractors from Conan and even more from Krull but I like them both despite the cheese.

Not for nothing did many critics of the time dub Star Trek 'The Motionless Picture', personally I think the film is underrated and thank the gods for the slow pace which allowed JG to craft one of the true masterpieces of film scoring.

Legrand's score is too good for The Thomas Crown Affair. I think the Peirce Brosnan remake is better.

#2 The Dancer Upstairs (Alberto Iglesias)

Sometime in 2003, I met up with a fellow film score fan in Sydney. Alex was his name. At the time all I could talk about was how many motifs Shore's LOTR scores had. (Sigh, oh to be young again.) He wasn't so interested in that, and despite my trying to show him he was wrong (because that's what you do when you share interests with someone -- you find something to disagree about!), he did plant a seed that day that ended up trumping Shore's trilogy in my estimation.

Alex was a Yared fan, but more a fan of his European scores prior to Minghella pulling him into the heights of Hollywood. But he had a new favourite composer who had overtaken Yared -- in his opinion, doing the Yared thing better than Yared. Alberto Iglesias. And his best work was The Dancer Upstairs, in Alex's opinion.

Now I knew that film. I'd seen it. A thriller about a hunt for a terrorist in a Latin American country, it was John Malkovitch's first film as director, and the first time I really became aware of Javier Bardem (in a beautiful performance, long before he was asked to trot out variations on Chigurh). But Iglesias's score hadn't really leapt out at me. I remembered the Nina Simone song that opens and closes the film. I preferred Iglesias's score for Talk to Her at the time, one of those film score albums that worked quite well as a crossover album away from the film.

But the seed was planted. I never saw Alex again, but I sought it out, paid good money, bought it on faith, and started listening. Dark, chamber orchestral ruminations with something of a jazz flavour to it. It didn't start out as a favourite. But it grew on me. Two years later, my second and third films were temp'd with it, and on the third no composer could get close enough to Iglesias's sound to displace it. (Which ended up costing me quite a bit of money.)

I'll give a brief overview of the score. What strikes me most about it is the sad melodic beauty lost amidst the threat, and the beauty of the threat. This really is a score with an exquisite sense of unease to it. The accordion pasito of the opening that gives away to stark strings, and returns with the journey to the mountains. The piano-and-cor-anglais duets of 'Conversations' and 'Theatre'. That seeringly sad theme, heard in the three 'Dancer Upstairs' tracks. The strange and subtle tension of 'Calle Diderot', with its meandering piano, and the very unsubtle chill and violence of 'Chinese Embassy'. I love every moment of this bleak, faded romance. It captures the themes of romanticism turned sour and ubiquitous corruption better than any other score could have.

Bravo Iglesias, you've done good work otherwise, but this is your masterpiece. And I believe I'm pretty much the only person who actually likes this one (of the 10 people who've heard it).

I think about these things. Number 3 coming in October.

Actually I've not heard that one, but his Almodovar scores generally are the most entertaining. I think with DANCER UPSTAIRS I have never quite separated the music from the narrative it represents. Each enriches the other.

TALK TO HER is the most pleasant of the albums overall. SEX AND LUCIA would also be worth checking out if you haven't heard it. Sweet, but also with some nice ambient stuff.

I hide nothing (although thankfully I don't have to, given that board disappeared). Who among us never held a view they're now embarrassed by? All part of growing up. It wasn't long before that I said that I found Hitchcock boring and didnt have much time for black and white films. Sigh. (Oh to be young again.)

Starting to feel a lot better. I'll probably do # 17 tomorrow.

wriGHT ...oh the joys of a fucked up infected head