It Ties The Room Together.

Zoe: Hey Justin, how’s it going?

Justin: The white death has descended upon me.

Zoe: Umm I take it, it snowed?

Justin: That is what I said.

Zoe: I guess, in a very morbid, roundabout way…

Justin: Snow is pretty as long as you don’t have to be out in it. Driving home from work yesterday and then cleaning off my car today was not my idea of fun.

Zoe: And this is why you should move somewhere warmer like San Francisco. In the winter it’s pretty mild, decently warm and sometimes sunny, but the nights are beautiful.

Justin: Yeah yeah, rub it in. So what are we going to talk about today?

Zoe: Well I was thinking we could talk about television and movie scores/soundtracks/theme songs.

Justin: Excellent idea! This comes at a great time. I have been recently listening to the new soundtrack for Tron: Legacy. The whole score was written by Daft Punk which makes a lot of sense when you think about it. If you are familiar with their work such as “One More Time” and “Harder, Faster, Better, Stronger” (yes, they did it way before Kanye) you can understand why they were picked to write the score for this movie. They have a very digital sound to them and that goes along great with what Tron: Legacy is about. I am very excited for it to open this Friday. What soundtracks have you been listening to lately?

Zoe: I’ve been playing a few lately from start to finish.  The first is the soundtrack to Black Snake Moan and the second is Cadillac Records.  They’re both mainly straight-up blues and I’ve been into that lately (on the non-soundtrack side, Matt and I have been seriously digging The Black Keys, who sound like they should be the Allman Brothers’… brothers…)  On the score side of things, I don’t usually just listen to them all the way through, or listen to them that often, really, but we just got Sherlock Holmes and that’s been great to get to know.

Justin: For someone who isn’t that big into scores you at least have remarkable taste in composers. Hans Zimmer is great and probably my second favorite movie composer. He also did movies like Pirates of the Caribbean, The Dark Knight and one of my personal favorite scores, Hannibal. As you know I was in band from 5th grade all the way through high school and even played a couple years in Miami’s Marching Band. So, when it comes to instrumental scores I love them. My all-time favorite composer is John Williams (Harry Potter, Indiana Jones, Star Wars). This is mostly because I was a French Horn player and he wrote some awesome pieces for the horn. I also like Danny Elfman (Nightmare Before Christmas) and Howard Shore (Lord of the Rings).

Zoe: I know how much you love your scores.  But sometimes all I can think of is Jason Segel’s character in Forgetting Sarah Marshall his lame job scoring a TV show a la “CSI.”  In a scene that would call for foreboding music, he starts playing typical random atonal (thanks for the right phrase, Matt) notes like, “Bam.  That’s all it needs.”  I think scores are really interesting, but I usually listen to music for longer stretches while I’m reading or writing or working, and soundtracks can be hypnotizing, and so not that conducive to my work.  I know lots of people who are the other way around–that way makes tons more sense to me, but what you need to work is what you need to work, right?

Justin: Right, I am in the second category there. The lyrics distract me when I am trying to read or do something, but that doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy a good soundtrack when I am driving in the car jamming out. One of my favorite and it pains me to say this, is the Twilight soundtrack. In fact all of the movie soundtracks have been pretty good, however, the first is by far the best. You can say all you want about the Twilight series but it actually did produce something good. It had a mixture of Muse, Paramore, Mutemath and so many other decent band. The actor Robert Pattinson even contributed to it. The bands I believe were some that the author, Stephenie Meyer, listened to when writing the books. Which is pretty cool because the story and this music were paired together. It is interesting when writers do that.

Zoe: That’s one of the reasons I love The Big Chill’s soundtrack.  It takes place in the ‘80s, but it’s about people reminiscing (partly) about their college heyday, so the soundtrack lineup is killer.  The movie has a bunch of excellent songs not on the soundtrack, too.  (And if you’ve never seen it, you definitely should: Glenn Close, Kevin Kline, Jeff Goldblum, William Hurt, Meg Tilly.)  Maybe I’m just a sucker for reminiscing and nostalgia, because now that I think about it, the rest of my favorite soundtracks take place in other eras, and most of them are musicals: Hairspray, Across the Universe, Cold Mountain (uh, not a musical, but my favorite Natalie Portman performance), Dreamgirls, Moulin Rouge, 10 Things I Hate About You (shut up, it’s from 1999, that’s more than 10 years ago), Gladiator and Prince of Persia.

Justin: Cold Mountain is an excellent movie and a wonderful soundtrack and 10 Things I Hate About You is also great. The one thing I like about some soundtracks is your ability to find new artists that you like. Soundtracks like the first Spiderman movie and to be honest a lot of superhero movies have lead me to some new bands. Garden State and a lot of other indie type movies are also great for this as well. They don’t have the budget to pay some of the bigger bands to play on them, so they get a little unknown band who at times are absolutely fantastic.

Zoe: I love innovation, yeah.  I really enjoyed Juno and Scott Pilgrim vs the World’s soundtracks for exactly that reason.  The whole time, I kept thinking, Wow, what great songs, and they’re new to me.  Okay, well, Beck in Scott Pilgrim wasn’t new as a voice, but the songs were new.  Can I switch over to TV scores/soundtracks for a moment here?

Justin: Sure, you are probably better in this department than me anyway. Nice mention of Juno and Scott Pilgrim by the way. Two excellent soundtracks.

Zoe: Well, a lot of TV shows have great theme songs (“Veronica Mars,” “The Big Bang Theory,” “Bones”), but I just want to point out that tons of shows have used music, or “live bands” within the show to great effect.  Point in case: “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” had its own club that often had real bands, and so did “The O.C.”–not the greatest example of a quality TV show, but it did make several bands really popular.  Plus, “The West Wing” episode “Noel,” one of the saddest/best episodes in my opinion, had Yo-Yo Ma and he’s just… extraordinary, and without him playing, that episode might not have been so affecting.

Justin: Yo Yo Ma playing Bach’s Suite in G Major is breathtaking. It was also featured in the movie Master and Commander. Then again it is piece that is used fairly often for some reason. It is a beautiful piece but both Bach and Yo Yo Ma have other songs out there, time to find a new one to use.

Zoe: I bet you had to look that one up.

Justin: What did I have to look up?

Zoe: The piece Yo-Yo Ma played on “The West Wing.”  I thought you probably couldn’t just remember that off the top of your head, not when I brought it up.

Justin: I did in fact figure it was the Bach piece considering it is one of the most used. Although I did have to look up to remember which episode it was played in and you are correct the piece adds so much to the tone of that episode. That is one of the reasons I love music so much. A well-placed song can really drive a point home and the opposite can also happen. If you just randomly stick a song in somewhere that doesn’t match the tone or atmosphere, it can really detour the movie.

Zoe: I’m trying to think of a great example of a totally obnoxious soundtrack, in terms of disrupting the movie’s flow or taking away from the film, versus not liking the song choices.  But I don’t think I can think of one.  Sometimes the sound isn’t equalized well and swallows the dialogue, but that’s another problem altogether.  Justin, can you think of any horrendous soundtracks?  Distracting ones?

Justin: You know, I know that I have heard them and I know they exist but I for the life of me can’t think of any off the top of my head. This could be because if the music is really bad I try to block it out.

Zoe: I know there have been moments where the songs intrude, but none comes to mind either.  I do want to mention that I love a film or TV show that pulls off having little/no soundtrack/score to it at all, when the movie or show relies on its own dialogue and its cinematographer to carry the emotional weight.  Closer is a good example–there’s only one song, “The Blower’s Daughter” by Damien Rice–in the entire movie, noticeably; but that could be because it was a play originally.  Also the series “Deadwood” didn’t use a soundtrack and that’s one of my favorite quality series; music would have annoyed me, now that I’m thinking about it.

Justin: I think another great movie that does this is The Birds (thanks Zoe for the reminder). In fact if I remember correctly Hitchcock was one of those masters of cinema that didn’t have to rely on a soundtrack in many of his movies. The atmosphere that he creates came from the actors and the well placed shots. The end of The Birds just wouldn’t have been the same if there had been some score playing over it. Music is the last thing you want as you are trying to sneak out of a house surrounded by hundreds of sleeping birds. But he also used sounds to his advantage, such as in the Psycho shower scene. Everyone is very familiar with the string hits that added so much to that well known scene.

Zoe: I think you really hit on the whole purpose of sound/lack of sound: to help create atmosphere.  Production design and things like lighting and whether the actors are shot close-up or wide lens, etc., contribute to creating the atmosphere, but I think sound ties it all together, like Lebowski’s rug.  There’s evil guy themes, swelling triumphant themes, sneaking themes, danger-is-coming themes, crashing music to surprise you, heart-pumping music for chase scenes, and hopefully great (non-intrusive) romantic music.  They’re all just as symbolic as actors’ expressions and the style the director uses, don’t you think?

Justin: Exactly and nice use of The Big Lebowski by the way. Anyway, it has been a great writing this for the blog for the last few months and we hope to continue on for many more.

Zoe: With the holidays coming up and life being a little hectic around this time of year, Justin and I have decided to take a little hiatus until after the first of the year.

Justin: During this time we hope to refill our energy tanks and watch some great movies to talk about when we get back.

Zoe: Right! This week we will finish strong with a couple of solo posts before signing off for the year.

Justin: We hope that you will join us next year for even more Idle Banter & Escapades.