"It's my theme music. Every good hero should have some."

So, the other day, I finished a review of Michael Abels's score for Nightbooks. Pretty enjoyable, even if you had to dig for the thematic content that you'd imagine to be part and parcel of the fantasy-horror genre. (Though, in fairness, it took me a few listens to uncover the themes in Abels's Get Out.)

Now, as I've mentioned before, I’ve made so many CD purchases that I have sort of a pile of titles that it takes me a while to work through. Hell, I've still got titles I haven't listened to that I bought months ago. While doing a project at work, I decided to pop in Marco Beltrami's Hellboy: the Deluxe Edition*. The original 44-minute program on its own is my favorite score from the composer but the Deluxe Edition. Holy shit. Now I haven’t seen the movie in the 17 years since its original release, but let me tell you about this score: there are themes for Hellboy, Liz, Abe, the villains, Prof. Broom, as well as a destiny motive. With the various ways of these themes interplaying with each other and in so many different variations, there were melodic surprises around every corner of this score. I’ll be the first to admit that Beltrami is a hit-and-miss composer, but my God, this is a hit. This is what I wanted from Nightbooks.

These days, it’s like movie makers and studio heads and even some composers are just ashamed to have bold, thematic film music in the movies anymore. The other day, I watched the 1991 thriller Body Parts featuring a score from Loek Dikker, perhaps most well-known (at least, to film music fans) as the composer of Paul Verhoeven's The Fourth Man. Just imagine a movie these days with a peculiar score like that or, even further, the one Wojciech Kilar wrote for Bram Stoker’s Dracula the following year? I’m not saying every genre movie these days should be scored like these two, but at least 65-70% to be fair, okay?

I’m reminded of the time I went to see Bill and Ted Face the Music last year at the drive-in. Mark Isham’s score didn’t really ruin the movie, but it didn’t really do anything to enhance it, either. On the drive home, I pulled up David Newman’s score for Bogus Journey on YouTube and let me tell you, the use of themes really made a difference, especially the goofily determined motif for the evil robot doubles. It speaks to how invaluable Newman was to the first two movies.

This is why I should be so determined to make it in the movie business: so that future generations will know what good film scores sound like via the scores from my movies. Otherwise, every score will probably end up sounding like Martin Todsharow’s Snake Eyes or Ludwig Goransson’s Tenet? Does that sound like a world worth living in?

* - Not long after my copy of the Hellboy: DE arrived, I saw a comment on the previous post mentioning it. To the person who offered it, I'm sorry. I've been at this blog-writing thing for 17 years and the total number of legit, non-spammy comments I've received in that time has been - at best - twice that number. Sometimes, you never know.