Sunday, November 9, 2008
Thursday, October 16, 2008
...And Now For Something Completely Different....
Yeah, for the sake prolific-ness and to avoid major gaps in posting I've decided to post my reasoning to a certain ScoreKeeper at Ain't It Cool News why he should give in to the goodness that is the soundtrack to The Dark Knight. Maybe you guys will find it amusing in turn.
Caution: It's longwinded.
You will like The Dark Knight Soundtrack because.... of several factors.
One, we must consider the theatrical essence of the score that allows it to rise above the classic strings to sadness/brass to brawl scoring. Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard, in their infinite compositional wisdom, matched Christopher Nolan's stark, Hobbesian vision of Gotham with the surprising and poignant punch layers of orchestration that audibly remind us that Gotham is a living, breathing city that has many levels of social deviance and unique rhetoric. Many fans want to harken back to Danny Elfman's original scores on Tim Burton's Batman as the seminal aural conversion of comic aesthetics to film. In many ways it was, but it was strictly tailored to Burton's cartoonish, and uber-goth vision of Bruce Wayne's city. The Elfman score resides, note-perfect, in a place reserved for the bombastic tropes of a composer who is damn good at that kind of thing. A place where grand, ethereal composition streamlined with the richly polished mis-en-scene that the director provided. Granted, Burton is a dark mind that brought us a dark Gotham, but not a darkness that acknowledged black as the absence of color. Consequently, Burton saw black as a color as vibrant and complimentary as the white, red, green, and purple that served to distinguish it. And in this ballet of color, Elfman accordingly scored the film as a frosting to the visual overtness that is the 1989 Batman. I've always said that key lighting and Elfman go hand in hand- and this remains true. But in the absence of sharp blacks and sharp whites there is a gray that is not explored thematically or musically. Cue: James Newton Howard and Hans Zimmer.
In Christopher Nolan's Batman, there is a lack of saturated color. There is mostly textual gray. This gray is the areas needing plunged for answers and insight. This is where Nolan received most of his praise, breaking with the surreal, and lensing the opaque, humanistic qualities of Batman's universe. The city streets sounded like city streets in Batman Begins. The pugulist assaults against Gotham's good citizens resonated not only with the sounds of cracking bones, but with the nuances of wounded psyches. This approach thirsted for a score that illuminated these idiosyncracies.
Zimmer and Howard provided a score that ambled through the trash of Gotham's streets, and not the skylines from which the view is much less defined. Their score on Batman Begins echoed Nolan's insistence on penetration at the floor level; at the deeply conflicted sociology of city inhabitants level. It is here that the brass and woodwind only kick in sparingly at the few moments in which our main characters see momentary glimpses of certainty in an uncertain world. Batman Begins was as much about the struggle of one pained soul trying to evaluate the nature of his existence as it was about laying the transparent foundations of his legacy as the iconoclastic Batman figure. Deep, lingering strings were needed to convey the tension and the quagmire of the very human mind of a very fictional character. The battle cries of the horns were needed as the harbingers of destruction; tangibly and existentially. Zimmer and Howard had us flounder with the drama their music created between the words, keeping us, the viewer, closer to the chest than the characters, but as unaware of the latent pitfalls as any of these on-screen characters could be. Cue: The Dark Knight
The Dark Knight brought with it an adversary as deeply wounded as Bruce Wayne. And this adversary's pain had the uncanny function of mobilizing the "id" dwelling within the Gotham collective. The Joker's bright and jagged face paint seems to have been a purposeful shield, or cloth, covering the gray, chortling viscera contained underneath. It is this "grey matter" that Howard and Zimmer were already in tune with with the previous film. And their orchestral foundations for Nolan's universe found a new playground in this foe. A playground with all the rattling of chain swing sets and popping of metal under the weight of children descending down tinny slides. There are the expected sounds in a playground- the surface sounds- that everyone quickly imagines. People imagine the cacaphony of yelps, giggles, the swish of frenetic action. Certainly, these are expected and immersive sounds, but they are only a component of the audible chaos. Zimmer and Howard understood this and decidedly "rattled the cage", as so to say. The composers brought The Dark Knight a stringy muscle prone to spasm and contraction under the weight of the character's actions; or, sometimes, inaction.
"Why So Serious" and "Like a Dog Chasing Cars" brought an audible suspension of manic tension. The one note hammer ons that jangled the spine of these tracks convey the vision of a piece of trash being blown down Gotham's side streets, collecting more and more refuse and momentum. The planetary physics apply here, as a rogue space matter gains more velocity with the "Aggressive Expansion" of mass. This trash is the Joker, obviously. Whereas the composition "Why So Serious" set the tone with nervous stutters and calamitous percussion, "Like a Dog Chasing Cars" smooths this propulsion into a siren of danger and runaway ambition.
Juxtapose these pieces with the refrained and cautious tracks, "I'm Not a Hero" and "A Dark Knight" and you have the optimal and dramatic collision course between two minds battling for soul of the city. Bruce Wayne's track are artfully scaled back and plodding in comparison to "Why So Serious" and "Like a Dog Chasing Cars", as to show the divergence of purpose between the hero and the villain... and the same end game. However, "I'm Not a Hero" and "A Dark Knight" thematically are more sullen, and prone to apprehension. The crying strings and murmuring brass aren't exploitive and allow the listener to extrapolate the most core themes from Bruce Wayne's covetously-kept, internal strife. Zimmer and Howard have the decency to provide character-specific scoring that acts as a guidepost to the consequences unfolding, and not a direct interpretation of such things. Here again, I should note, these composers have succeeded in streamlining their approach to Nolan's gritty, deep tragedy. Like any great tragedy, the chorus does not merely fill in the grey, but moreso it makes us re-examine these contradictions while the story moves dilligently onward.
Harvey Dent is an indisposable element to this story and has been treated thus. Zimmer and Howard use their most optimistic compositions in regards to his rise and fall. It is because a track like "Harvey Two Face" is so optimistic and lifting- with wide swathes of strings and sustained french horns- that his inevitable corruption is so poignant. The score in relationship to Harvey Dent's progression is the most obvious, but it has to be because that is what the character, undilluted, stands for. He was to be the only true civil servant, and was stripped of his virtues by the most craven of forces. Zimmer and Howard's choices for Harvey's character almost stand as their greatest prestidigitation on this soundtrack. The sleight of hand they pull when implementing such a commercial orchestration is one that can only be pulled off by the masters of musical composition for film. I know not to question its presence, because, in the end, it's the only audible jigsaw that can act as a cornerstone in an environment of crumbling morality. And isn't that what Harvey Dent was promised to be... once.
---------------------
My name is Damon Peoples and I go by "Damonster" when logged in to AICN. I hope this, at the least, adds some perspective to your opinions on the soundtrack. Keep up the good work, Scorekeeper.
Caution: It's longwinded.
You will like The Dark Knight Soundtrack because.... of several factors.
One, we must consider the theatrical essence of the score that allows it to rise above the classic strings to sadness/brass to brawl scoring. Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard, in their infinite compositional wisdom, matched Christopher Nolan's stark, Hobbesian vision of Gotham with the surprising and poignant punch layers of orchestration that audibly remind us that Gotham is a living, breathing city that has many levels of social deviance and unique rhetoric. Many fans want to harken back to Danny Elfman's original scores on Tim Burton's Batman as the seminal aural conversion of comic aesthetics to film. In many ways it was, but it was strictly tailored to Burton's cartoonish, and uber-goth vision of Bruce Wayne's city. The Elfman score resides, note-perfect, in a place reserved for the bombastic tropes of a composer who is damn good at that kind of thing. A place where grand, ethereal composition streamlined with the richly polished mis-en-scene that the director provided. Granted, Burton is a dark mind that brought us a dark Gotham, but not a darkness that acknowledged black as the absence of color. Consequently, Burton saw black as a color as vibrant and complimentary as the white, red, green, and purple that served to distinguish it. And in this ballet of color, Elfman accordingly scored the film as a frosting to the visual overtness that is the 1989 Batman. I've always said that key lighting and Elfman go hand in hand- and this remains true. But in the absence of sharp blacks and sharp whites there is a gray that is not explored thematically or musically. Cue: James Newton Howard and Hans Zimmer.
In Christopher Nolan's Batman, there is a lack of saturated color. There is mostly textual gray. This gray is the areas needing plunged for answers and insight. This is where Nolan received most of his praise, breaking with the surreal, and lensing the opaque, humanistic qualities of Batman's universe. The city streets sounded like city streets in Batman Begins. The pugulist assaults against Gotham's good citizens resonated not only with the sounds of cracking bones, but with the nuances of wounded psyches. This approach thirsted for a score that illuminated these idiosyncracies.
Zimmer and Howard provided a score that ambled through the trash of Gotham's streets, and not the skylines from which the view is much less defined. Their score on Batman Begins echoed Nolan's insistence on penetration at the floor level; at the deeply conflicted sociology of city inhabitants level. It is here that the brass and woodwind only kick in sparingly at the few moments in which our main characters see momentary glimpses of certainty in an uncertain world. Batman Begins was as much about the struggle of one pained soul trying to evaluate the nature of his existence as it was about laying the transparent foundations of his legacy as the iconoclastic Batman figure. Deep, lingering strings were needed to convey the tension and the quagmire of the very human mind of a very fictional character. The battle cries of the horns were needed as the harbingers of destruction; tangibly and existentially. Zimmer and Howard had us flounder with the drama their music created between the words, keeping us, the viewer, closer to the chest than the characters, but as unaware of the latent pitfalls as any of these on-screen characters could be. Cue: The Dark Knight
The Dark Knight brought with it an adversary as deeply wounded as Bruce Wayne. And this adversary's pain had the uncanny function of mobilizing the "id" dwelling within the Gotham collective. The Joker's bright and jagged face paint seems to have been a purposeful shield, or cloth, covering the gray, chortling viscera contained underneath. It is this "grey matter" that Howard and Zimmer were already in tune with with the previous film. And their orchestral foundations for Nolan's universe found a new playground in this foe. A playground with all the rattling of chain swing sets and popping of metal under the weight of children descending down tinny slides. There are the expected sounds in a playground- the surface sounds- that everyone quickly imagines. People imagine the cacaphony of yelps, giggles, the swish of frenetic action. Certainly, these are expected and immersive sounds, but they are only a component of the audible chaos. Zimmer and Howard understood this and decidedly "rattled the cage", as so to say. The composers brought The Dark Knight a stringy muscle prone to spasm and contraction under the weight of the character's actions; or, sometimes, inaction.
"Why So Serious" and "Like a Dog Chasing Cars" brought an audible suspension of manic tension. The one note hammer ons that jangled the spine of these tracks convey the vision of a piece of trash being blown down Gotham's side streets, collecting more and more refuse and momentum. The planetary physics apply here, as a rogue space matter gains more velocity with the "Aggressive Expansion" of mass. This trash is the Joker, obviously. Whereas the composition "Why So Serious" set the tone with nervous stutters and calamitous percussion, "Like a Dog Chasing Cars" smooths this propulsion into a siren of danger and runaway ambition.
Juxtapose these pieces with the refrained and cautious tracks, "I'm Not a Hero" and "A Dark Knight" and you have the optimal and dramatic collision course between two minds battling for soul of the city. Bruce Wayne's track are artfully scaled back and plodding in comparison to "Why So Serious" and "Like a Dog Chasing Cars", as to show the divergence of purpose between the hero and the villain... and the same end game. However, "I'm Not a Hero" and "A Dark Knight" thematically are more sullen, and prone to apprehension. The crying strings and murmuring brass aren't exploitive and allow the listener to extrapolate the most core themes from Bruce Wayne's covetously-kept, internal strife. Zimmer and Howard have the decency to provide character-specific scoring that acts as a guidepost to the consequences unfolding, and not a direct interpretation of such things. Here again, I should note, these composers have succeeded in streamlining their approach to Nolan's gritty, deep tragedy. Like any great tragedy, the chorus does not merely fill in the grey, but moreso it makes us re-examine these contradictions while the story moves dilligently onward.
Harvey Dent is an indisposable element to this story and has been treated thus. Zimmer and Howard use their most optimistic compositions in regards to his rise and fall. It is because a track like "Harvey Two Face" is so optimistic and lifting- with wide swathes of strings and sustained french horns- that his inevitable corruption is so poignant. The score in relationship to Harvey Dent's progression is the most obvious, but it has to be because that is what the character, undilluted, stands for. He was to be the only true civil servant, and was stripped of his virtues by the most craven of forces. Zimmer and Howard's choices for Harvey's character almost stand as their greatest prestidigitation on this soundtrack. The sleight of hand they pull when implementing such a commercial orchestration is one that can only be pulled off by the masters of musical composition for film. I know not to question its presence, because, in the end, it's the only audible jigsaw that can act as a cornerstone in an environment of crumbling morality. And isn't that what Harvey Dent was promised to be... once.
---------------------
My name is Damon Peoples and I go by "Damonster" when logged in to AICN. I hope this, at the least, adds some perspective to your opinions on the soundtrack. Keep up the good work, Scorekeeper.
Thursday, October 2, 2008
National Celebrate Alli Balli Day!!!!!!!!!!!!
Happy 24th Birthday to Alli from 3 corporate aliens!
Soooo, if you see this girl on the streets, tell her Happy Birthday for, like, weeks!
Soooo, if you see this girl on the streets, tell her Happy Birthday for, like, weeks!
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
Yay! Porn!
Amazing music festival ad...
XXX Diesel is going to be an awesome international live music show. You should check out the official site... http://www.diesel.com/xxx/. Pedro Winter, uffie, M.I.A., woop, woop!
Vintage robot porn...
XXX Diesel is going to be an awesome international live music show. You should check out the official site... http://www.diesel.com/xxx/. Pedro Winter, uffie, M.I.A., woop, woop!
Vintage robot porn...
An arbitrary moment dedicated to Licking
Juliette Lewis's band, Juliette and the Licks aren't half bad and I thought I'd share a video if you haven't heard them yet. She's sexy in a crazy Tonto type of way. And she's got a crazy growl.
Note: Juliette Lewis has provided vocals for a handful of Prodigy songs. Neato!
Note: Juliette Lewis has provided vocals for a handful of Prodigy songs. Neato!
I don't know how I let this commercial slip by....
Daft Punk...denim...Juliette Lewis. How did this contractual obligation come about? Still, it amuses me. I guess those are three bad ass elements. Too bad it was a GAP commercial. I'd bet the Creative Artist Agency was behind this.
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
Ghostbusters 3!!!!!!!!!!!!!!..... and not the video game!
Early confirmations of steps moving forward in the production of a new entry into the Ghostbusters series has been vocalized. Harold Ramis has submitted his screenplay (I believe co-written by Dan Akroyd) to vested parties. Word is Judd Apatow would produce with the the original director, Ivan Reitman, manning the cannons. Harold Ramis stated that Venkman would return in all his glory, even though Bill Murray has been not so accommodating in the past. However, he agreed to lend his voice to the forthcoming videogame! More than I can say for Sigourney Weaver, who thought it was blasphemous to be a part of a videogame mock-up. I guess she though Alien 4 was a serious Golden Globe contender.
The plot, from what Dan Akroyd described years ago for a third GB, deals with the team of guileless paranormal investigators going through a gate to Hell. Once in Hell they realize that they are just back in NYC again. Except.... everything that NYC grates on people with has been manifested to ridiculous proportions. Gridlock, hazardous cabbies, mystery meat venders, etc.,etc.
Now, keep in mind that that was years ago that he stated this. And they (Ramis and Akroyd) wrote a script specifically for the new videogame. And that this new story seems to be a tad different. Supposedly, the aged Ghostbusters might be training new recruits for the third outing. With Apatow on board, it could be assumed that anyone from Paul Rudd to Seth Rogen to Will Ferrell could be taking on the business of learning the trade. Who knows, but it sure is exciting for a guy who still has the Ghostbusters Firehouse in firm lock-up.
Wonder what some of your thoughts might be? I know I'm fucking excited they are going to have the original team return (yes, Ernie Hudson). Fuck Sigourney Weaver though. Actually, no, I'd like her to come back too. She's only essential for nostalgic sake.
"No Dana. There is only Zuel!"
"Viggo, the master of evil, trying to battle my boys; that's not legal!"
Look out for The Donald, SNL ladies, Superman, and....Downtown Julie Brown?
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