The Appellate & The Appeasement

This week I saw Trial and Error which was an amiable (if aimless) little courtroom comedy from the director of My Cousin Vinny, Jonathan Lynn. The score was by Phil Marshall, who I'm not really familiar with. It's another entry into the original-pop-song-with-no-words school of scoring that Randy Edelman used for My Cousin Vinny and Danny Elfman used before that in Midnight Run. I wonder why this form of scoring is so popular for comedies. I think it's probably the same mentality that tells us comedies can't win Oscars— i.e. they're supposedly simple entertainment for the masses. Therefore, pop songs (often geared towards Middle America) are what the masses want, right? Well, this is a valid practice I suppose, though it brings about all the problems inherent in scoring things with what are essentially songs. Plus, I still think that it tends to feel a little safe and sitcomy.

So what are the other approaches to comedy scoring? Well, there's the old "score it straight" school of thought. This has been an incredibly successful approach, and it's probably due to the fact that it really isn't making any attempt to be comedy scoring at all. It's really just plain film scoring—setting some kind of music to a story. It works because it puts the audience in the mind set of real people, or what the cinema puts in front of us to equate them. Somehow it's funnier to watch bizarre things happen to real human beings than to cartoony ones. Of course, the cartoon scores of Carl Stalling and the underrated Scott Bradley work great, but they are basically dealing in absurdist realities. No one ever laughs at Tom and Jerry getting blown up because we actually like to watch animals explode. It's funny as a consciously constructed surreal version. This is why Mickey Mousing can work in these scores and not feel cheap. We're so intensely aware that we're watching a constructed medium that we want it to sound hyper-real and fabricated at the same time—it's part of the fun.

There also seems to be some smaller subgroups within the play-it-real mind set. One of my favorite comedy scores is Danny Elfman's Pee-Wee's Big Adventure. Though we often hear about the ingenuity of scoring in the Rota/Italian style, Elfman is basically doing a very standard straight take on drama. The real cleverness of this score is that he's scoring it "straight" from the point of view of someone with some sort of mental problem. Thanks to the score, we're really watching the movie through Pee-Wee's eyes (no Paul Reubens jokes here, please). The drama is played according to how someone who overreacts to everything would behave. And since we get to watch the whole film through this skewed logic, we perceive everything through the same deranged rationalism that Pee-Wee lives his life according to.

Lost World Fall Out

I'd really like to get John Williams' more vocal supporters on my side, because then I could be sure that if anyone ever said anything negative about me they would be instantly pulverized. Needless to say, many people did not agree with my review of The Lost World last week. A few did, but not many. I thought it was pretty funny that I was accused of Williams bashing because I've always been such a fan of his work. Anyway, regarding The Lost World score, someone did point out something interesting to me. I had complained that the dinosaur music lacked anything to really give it focus, that it all sounded too random. Well, as in the first film, there actually is a four note motif which represents the dinosaurs. This will teach me to attend theaters with better sound, I guess. Those of you with the CD can find this motif (C# D# E C# up an octave) in a number of tracks. While I much prefer the dino motif from the first film (A# B G C#), the fact that there's a little more meat in Lost World's score does raise my opinion of it. But, just a little.

I also got to thinking about Lost World's attempt to score the mood of the film rather than any specific goings on. I think this is also Williams' goal in his score to Sleepers. The score to this film doesn't get attached to any specific story elements, it's just making the oppression a tangible substance rather than an implied one. There's really nothing at all wrong with this approach and it probably could have worked in Lost World had it been a little more synchronous in musical terms. Sleepers has a lot more musical material for Williams to play with, and it's better material.

The horn and the flute become the characteristic solo instruments in Sleepers and the kind of harmonies used are very interesting. For instance, if you know a little bit about tonal harmony you know that what makes a chord major or minor is the third note of the scale. If a chord has a major third in it, it's a major chord. Same for minor; the minor third determines its "minor-ness." Major and minor chords usually have pretty specific dramatic implications. It's not as simple as "minor is sad" and "major is happy", but there are certain inescapable associations. (This is why it's hilarious when Elfman uses that huge major chord as the hippie cries, "They came in peace!" in Mars Attacks! It's over-the-top mindless happiness and bliss. And then the martians kill him.) What Williams does with many of these horn and flute solos is take the third out of the chords so instead they're stacks of fourths and fifths, which are far more ambiguous in emotional terms. (It's a version of what's known as quartal or quintal harmonies.) It's really a very clever way to mix sentimentality and oppression, because the individual melodic intervals dictate the mood rather than inherent harmonies. This is also why atonal scoring can be so effective, because you're going note by note in emotional terms rather than having to fall into some larger-scale harmonic progression. This harmonic style also leaves Williams a huge out when he finally goes to major chords, because our ears really can feel the shift in timbres and moods.

Sleepers is also a lot more effective in rhythmic terms because even when he uses rock drumset patterns, Williams keeps his time signatures so odd (9/4 and 11/8 show up) that we never fall into a strictly linear style which plows through the drama a la Lost World. If you're interested in hearing John Williams do very clever percussion scoring, find Images somehow. Percussion is very often the focal point of cues in Images, but it's used in a very melodic and coloristic way rather than the drum machine style that Lost World favored. It reminds me a bit of George Crumb.

But Sleepers is a lot easier to find, so definitely give this a listen. It's not Williams' best. There's probably too much score and voice over in the film, and it ends up deadening its dramatic immediacy, but it's still pretty good. Rosewood is even better and I'll have some comments on that once the video comes out.

Any thoughts anyone? DAdams1127@aol.com