September 21st, 2009, 1 Comment »
Check out the awesome cake my nephew Paul enjoyed for his fourth birthday party (click for buccaneer bigness):
It comes complete with licorice cannons and Malteser cannonballs. Paul’s party was pirate-themed, coincidentally coinciding (can one say that?) with International Talk Like a Pirate Day. I wonder, is Paul destined, therefore, to a have a lifetime of pirate parties?
June 4th, 2007, 7 Comments »
Speaking of Pirates of the Caribbean, can you hum the main theme of the score? I can sort of vaguely remember it, but not with any kind of precision.
That got me thinking about film scores, and how many melodies from film scores I could, say, accurately whistle or hum. Here’s the list, off the top of my head:
Jaws
Star Wars
Raiders of the Lost Ark
The Great Escape
Back to the Future
Superman
The Mission
It’s no surprise that most of those are John Williams scores, the composer on whom most film aesthetes like to heap abuse.
This raises a related point–should film scores be hummable at all? My rule of thumb is that if I notice the score (unless I’m actively listening for it), it’s too prominent, or the movie is too dull. Maybe film composition has evolved beyond Williams’s memorable themes, and the medium is better for it?
Which scores can you hum? No counting soundtracks that you own–that’s cheating.
Speaking of film evolution, compare the plot of the three Pirates movies to the three original Star Wars movies. I feel like there’s more double-crosses, twists, reversals, action sequences, subplots and so forth in one Pirates movie than in all three of Lucas’s films. And what happened to a little exposition in the first act to refresh our memories from the last movie? It took me half an hour to remember where the hell Jack Sparrow had gone.