Sluncho's Top 10: Film Scores

1. Koyaanisqatsi (1982, Philip Glass)

This is a pretty biased choice, I'll admit. Koyaanisqatsi is my favourite film of all time, so of course I'm going to be kind of the music, but at the same time, from an objective standpoint I think I can say it's hard to top a good Philip Glass score (see: Truman Show, The Thin Blue Line) and of his film works this is the one I find myself listening to the most. In the context of the film, the music serves as a sort of special kind of dialogue, filling the entirely silent film with a broad range of emotions, giving voices to the people whose mouths flap but say no words. The synchronization of the film's action to the music is actually probably why I enjoy the film so much. It makes the sheer beauty of the visual and auditory experience even more powerful. Loaded with Glass' usual repetitious arpeggios, fierce tempo changes and haunting chants, this easily would stand on its own as just a Philip Glass album (Glassworks, a chamber music piece from the same year, is almost a Koyaanisqatsi-lite to the point where it even shares entirely identical cues played on different instruments). Hell, really, aside from being my personal favourite film score, I'd be quite tempted to flat out say the recording itself (particularly the brilliant new reissue with the music cut into the exact segments it is used in the film) is the greatest album I have ever heard and I honestly doubt I will ever hear much better.

Particular moment of brilliance: "The Grid", a twenty-one minute scene set to one continuous piece of music. I cannot help but cry every time I see this, not out of any sort of sorrow, but in sheer amazement at the strange beauty of the world we live in and how this piece captures it.

2. Ghost in the Shell (1995, Kenji Kawai)

Mamoru Oshii is a director I have a real love/hate relationship with. I dug Only You because it was a pretty goofy comedy with painfully 80s music montages and some surprisingly solid writing, Beautiful Dreamer was damn smart but a fucking pain to watch, his little self-indulgent projects like Talking Head and The Amazing Lives of the Fast Food Grifters (which is essentially a cinematic inside joke whose punchline is 20 years too late) stand on the borderline of genius and pretension, and for some reason I could never bring myself to like Ghost in the Shell. Critics love it, it's his most mainstream film (hell, I am quite sure a great deal of the flick's audience doesn't know who Oshii is or how fucking strange the rest of his flicks are) but something about it never clicked with me.

Post-apocalyptic Japanese cinema is really a huge acquired taste. On the low end we've got things like Fist of the North Star (imagine Mad Max, but with acid trip visuals) that are good, dumb fun for people who aren't familiar with Japan's cultural fixation with post-nuclear decay and the "rise from the ashes" mentality that brought them from decimation in World War II to some kind of ultramodern technogiant in the modern era, but then you get flicks like GitS that take out all the fun of the harsh future by replacing wandering messianic heroes in vast deserts with a cold, mechanical world where robots masquerading as people are everywhere and humanity is more a figurative concept than a literal one. This sort of stuff used to bore me to tears, so I never really gave the flick much of a chance. But then I started to watch more and more Oshii, I decided I might as well attempt to re-evaluate it, and I discovered I was really missing out on a huge gem. If there was any one thing that hooked me, though, it was the score. 

These kind of films, strange considering their super futuristic visuals and concepts, tend to have a very raw, tribal sound to the music. Kenji Kawai's score to the film consists almost entirely of very similar chants. Long, drawn out drones just a wee bit faster paced than Gregorian, that are typical of the sound of Japanese Noh theatre. It's deeply spiritual in both lyrics and tone, but somehow it doesn't clash with the "world of tomorrow" visual sense. If anything, it serves as an eerie contrast. The extremes of the past vs. the future. The perfect music for one's quest to find their humanity in a mechanical world. Aside from the vocals, the mood is further set by clanking bells, hard-hitting but rare bursts of drums and sparse shamisen and zither work.

Particular moment of brilliance: "M01 Chant I - Making of a Cyborg", the film's opening credits song. The finest example of the music's stark contrast to the film's plot and visuals. Also, though this is no doubt utterly lost on non-Japanese speakers, this song also serves as a brilliant piece of  foreshadowing for the film's ending.

3. Boss Nigger (1975, Leon Moore)

Mr. Moore's only known theatrical credit, Boss Nigger is a surprising triumph of a film made even better by his phenomenal music. What easily could have been just another cheesy "fuck whitey" blaxploitation flick actually ended up being a bittersweet western with a strong anti-racism message that's not heavy-handed enough to get in the way of the gunfights and tough talk. Moore's music manages to capture period charm (right down to the obligatory saloon piano) without being too cliche and gets anachronistic without being absurd by giving Boss and his partner Amos these heroic, string-heavy funk themes that shame most other black cinema of the era. It's not just cheesy wah-wah and slap bass, there's some genuine beauty and skill to the arrangements of these tracks. Of course, it would be idiotic to select this film for a best of list without mentioning....

Particular moment of brilliance:...the absolutely unforgettable opening title theme. I have nothing else to write here, just listen for yourself.

4. Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (1977, John Williams)

Say what you will about him nowadays, there is no denying that there once was a time that George Lucas was a visionary film maker who left an indelible mark on science fiction with his imaginative visuals and fresh writing (blatant Eastern mythologizing aside, a lot of Lucas' concepts were pretty unique at the time). A New Hope was my favourite movie growing up. It has good guys you can root for, a charismatic bastard of a villain, great special effects and one of the finest sequel set-up endings ever. But if there's one thing about it I will never forget, it will be the music. The main theme from Star Wars is an internationally recognized, much praised and commonly hummed classic that will likely retain social relevance longer than the film itself. John Williams has an excellent track record (Fiddler on the Roof in particular being brilliant and very deserving of its Oscar win) and the works he composed for the Star Wars films pretty much perfectly capture the spirit of what a good Hollywood score should be.

Science fiction film scores are a tricky thing to succeed at. The early era of the genre is pockmarked with far too many attempts at trying to be "futuristic" (y'know, I love the theremin as much as the next bloke, but it gets old) and modern sci-fi scores are all CRASH BANG BOOM noise that senselessly punctuate already over the top explosions (really, sci-fi and action have knotted together into an awful ball in the recent past, so I guess this is to be expected). Some composers manage to eek out a niche for providing a unique take on typical sci-fi fare (I will never get tired of whoring out Shigeaki Saegusa), but Williams manages to play the middle and do very typical big orchestral film scores for his futuristic works, but he crafts excellent melodies with big heroic brass and stomping marches and perfect ambient interludes. These are scores that could work for any film with the right implementation. He compliments the visuals without making pieces that are mutually exclusive to them, and can set up the right mood in an action scene without having the music get in the way of what's going on visually (which is something very few Hollywood composers can do well).

Particular moment of brilliance: Isn't it obvious?

5. No Country for Old Men (2007, Carter Burwell)

This is a strange choice, but bear with me, people. As anyone who has seen this film knows, there's almost no music in the film at all. Only sixteen of the film's one-hundred and twenty-two minutes has music, most of which plays during the end credits. The lack of music helps to create a different kind of score, though, one of natural sound. Aside from speech, ambient sounds and gunfire, there is nothing. It adds a dark realism to this already tense film. Any film can get you to jump with a sudden orchestral blast, but for silence to be ended by a blast from a shotgun and the sound of a body coldly hitting the floor will give you a much more genuine scare. The unpleasant violence of the film would be trivialized if it was scored the way most thrillers are, this is a film with no real hero or villain, so if typical music would be unbecoming of it, then it is for the best for the action to play out in silence. In fact, the few times music does play in the film are some of its calmest moments.

The first time I saw the film, I actually could not recall having heard anything other than the end credits music, and left the theatre feeling uneasy and tense. Comparatively, not long after I saw the dreadful remake of the already so-so J-horror "classic" One Missed Call, which uses an obnoxiously IN YOUR FACE BOOGIDDY-BOOGIDDY score to amplify its weak scares and left the theatre not even close to shaken up, but I was also able to laugh out loud at the film with all this cacophonous noise going on. The key to evoking true terror is subtlety, and even though No Country isn't a horror film by definition, packs more genuine jump moments than most actual "scary" movies do.

Particular moment of brilliance: Originally I was going to give this nod to the excellent end credits, but instead I figured it would be best instead to showcase some of the film's "natural" score instead. It loses a bit of its kick due to YouTube's dreadful quality, but if you saw it in a theatre, every little noise would hit you like a freight train .

6. Akira (1988, Tsutomu Oohashi)

One of the few living geniuses of music, Tsutomu Oohashi (best known under the alias Yamashiro Shoji) is a brilliant composer and scientist who blends high and low technology to create some of the most powerful music ever recorded. He and his music collective, Geinoh Yamashirogumi (a hundreds-strong group of doctors, students, businessmen and average folk), have scored films, performed concerts all over the world and recorded a little over a dozen albums since 1974. Using personally modified synthesizers and a broad range of ethnic instruments, they combine prog rock, classical and many varities of Asian spiritual music to create a sound unlike anything else you will ever hear. Their utterly brilliant 1986 album, Ecophony Rinne, caught the attention of director Katsuhiro Otomo, who requested they compose a similar score for his upcoming film.

Much like Kenji Kawai's brilliant work on Ghost in the Shell, Oohashi contrasts Otomo's bizarre vision of future Tokyo with Buddhist prayer chants, clattering Indonesian percussion and a recurring (and nigh deafening) slam of  some drum so painfully low that I cannot identify it. Heavily built on recurring motifs and setting the action to sound, there is a blend of fierce fighting music (the mostly vocal "Battle Against Clown" appears in almost every action scene) with melancholy ambient pieces (the utterly gorgeous "Illusion" lightly fades in and out at several points in the film, with its flutes scoring many a flashback and hallucination) and phenomenal opening and closing bookends (the film begins and ends with the same chant). Interlinked via vocal cues and running percussive themes, the movie has distinct song cycles and associates some pieces with specific characters (antagonist Tetsuo's appearances are often set to the piece bearing his name, "Mutation" sets the mood for his evolution to something either above or below humanity).

Particular moment of brilliance: "Kaneda". Set to an utterly gorgeous motorcycle chase in the dead of night, the song sets the tone for the rest of the film, managing to compliment the ferocity of the visuals while still packing an otherwordly beauty all its own.

7. Predator (1987, Alan Silvestri)

A man with an incredibly varied career, Silvestri is a terribly underrated composer. While he has worked on his fair share of horrendous films, he has also scored some incredibly popular and memorable films and the music always compliments the picture. With Predator, Silvestri's score is the foundation for which the rest of the film is laid. While far from what most people would look at as a masterpiece, Predator is for my money the greatest action film ever made and one of the finest American motion pictures of both the 1980s and all time. It is a simple, effective film where all the different parts come together to form one uniform piece. Every element of it is perfect. The cast have the right amount of hammy ridiculousness and true emotion in their performances, the dialogue is incredibly sparse but utterly unforgettable (just about everything said in the film is quotable), the visual work is a great blend of practical effects and convincingly rendered computer graphics (the Predator's heat vision in particular doesn't feel nearly as fake as it should) and the music doesn't fall behind or usurp the pace and tone of the film. If even only a single one of these things were missing, the film would fall apart.

Particular moment of brilliance: The early parts of the team's jungle trek. With distant, rolling drums to build up tension and massive blasts of horns and string squeals to make you jump, this scene demonstrates that (like the film itself) Silvestri is capable of jumping back and forth between subtlety and ridiculousness without ever coming off as trying too hard. The frantic tempo and volume changes as our heroes charge recklessly forward are effectively contrasted by the stark silence (mechanical hums aside) when we see the action from the Predator's point of view. (No clip available, sadly, you can thank FOX for that.)

8. The Proposition (2005, Nick Cave and Warren Ellis)

We've had two post-apocalypse cyberpunk films with odd soundtracks thus far, so why not two contemporary westerns with odd soundtracks? Nick Cave is one of my absolute favourite musicians of all time, and when I found out he was writing AND scoring a film, I had to see it. The Proposition is a stark, brutal portrait of 1800s Australia, violent and unpleasant with dialogue as vicious as its visuals. The music is a mix of of incredibly reverb-heavy and dark strings with these inexplicable vocal songs dropped in now and again that I don't quite understand the point of but love nonetheless. Describing the onscreen action in strange hushed tones over this eerie backing, the vocal pieces are very different but not at odds with the more cinematic pieces in the film. Ellis' violin work provides one of the best examples of music fitting visuals in motion picture history, as even listening to the music on its own will inevitably have you remembering the harsh, insect-ridden deserts of the film, even long after seeing the film.

Particular moment of brilliance: "The Rider Song", easily the most musical of the vocal tracks. A folksy, melancholy tune about the protagonist with wonderfully simple lyrics delivered with profound emotion by Cave in one of his most subtle vocal performances ever.

9. Ghostbusters (1984, Elmer Bernstein)

Whether you're a fan or not, there's no denying that Ghostbusters was one of the most important films of the 80s. A triumph of humour, horror and special effects, it spawned a lengthy and uneven franchise with a so-so sequel, two television series, a pile of dire videogames (save for this year's brilliant Ghostbusters: The Video Game) and an upcoming sequel/relaunch. The sins of the franchise aside, the film still holds up to this day and I cannot imagine the day were it will no longer be seen as brilliant. The late, great Elmer Bernstein's 50 year career is loaded with classics (An American Werewolf in London, To Kill a Mockingbird, My Left Foot) and his versatility is on display better in Ghostbusters than anything else.

Bernstein nails both comedic beats and big scares perfectly, massive orchestral stings and the drones and hums of the Ondes Martenot punctuating the paranormal scenes with jangly piano and mellow woodwinds providing a backdrop for the film's near-endless stream of quotable banter.  While Ray Parker Jr's brilliant theme song will forever be the music most commonly associated with the film, the score itself is equally unforgettable and thanks to Terminal Reality, used exclusively in their excellent videogame adaptation, allowing another generation to appreciate the dramatic strength of this music. Comedy scores rarely ever go above and beyond the call of duty like this.

Particular moment of brilliance: Just watch this.

10. Paris, Texas (1984, Ry Cooder)

Wim Wenders' terribly underrated desert wandering drama wouldn't be complete without its hauntingly perfect score. Ry Cooder, as most music enthusiasts know, is an utterly brilliant slide guitarist, and this score here is quite easily his finest hour. Based around an instrumental interpretation of Blind Willie Johnson's "Dark Was The Night, Cold Was The Ground", the treble and fret noise compliment the long, quiet shots of Harry Dean Stanton stumbling through Texas better than any other music I can imagine.

Slide guitar has this amazing dark, ominous quality to it. The distinct metallic hum of the slide gives the oft sparse instrumentation even more of a kick. 

Particular moment of brilliance: The introduction. A perfect representation of the film's aesthetics. I'm hard pressed to find more films that start off with a scene this striking.