Soundtrack Review: It's Wayne's World

Lincoln Center screens Tim Burton and Danny Elfman's Batman.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Batman (Michael Keaton, l) confronts the Joker (Jack Nicholson, right) atop
Gotham City Cathedral at the climax of Batman. 
Image for promotional purposes only © 1989 Warner Bros.

In 1989, the Hollywood superhero film was born with Tim Burton's Batman, a dark, Gothic and deadly serious adaptation of the classic DC hero. And with it came the score by Danny Elfman, the self-trained composer and former frontman of the Los Angeles art-collective-turned-new-wave band Oingo Boingo. Mr. Elfman is the subject of a six-concert retrospective at this summer's Lincoln Center Festival, focusing on his many collaborations on Mr. Burton's films.

Robbery, Shootout, Revelation

Turning up the Heat with Elliot Goldenthal's soundtrack.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Robert De Niro as robber Neil McCauley in a still the Michael Mann film Heat.
Image © 1995 Regency Entertainment-Warner Bros.

I don't write much about film music on this blog. Sure, movies and so-called classical or art music have been joined at the hip since the heady Hollywood days of Franz Waxman and Erich Wolfgang Korngold. But in today's column I'd like to talk about composer Elliot Goldenthal, and the extraordinary soundtrack for Michael Mann's 1995 heist movie Heat.

Heat is more than just a cops-and-robbers story: it is an epic three-hour Los Angeles saga with an all-star cast (the leads are Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, along with a "laundry list" of skilled actors, many of them in tiny supporting parts) Shot entirely on location and taking place mostly at night (although De Niro's "crew" of robbers stages their two most spectacular thefts in daylight) it immerses you in the lives of both the crooks and the cops, exploring their characters with a depth that goes far beyond the usual formulas of the genre.

But what I really want to talk about is the music.

Raindrops in Outer Space

Chopin's Prelude in D features in Ridley Scott's Prometheus.

Renaissance android: David (Michael Fassbender) enjoys Chopin in Prometheus.
Image from Prometheus directed by Ridley Scott © 2012 20th Century Fox/Scott Free/Dune Entertainment.

Yesterday was the Fourth of July, and I took a much-needed break from the heat and hustle to see Prometheus, Ridley Scott's new science fiction opus, a prequel to the British filmmaker's first smash hit, Alien.

Alien is one of my favorite horror films of all time, a chill-inducing re-take on the sci-fi classic The Thing from Another World. It is basically a creature flick with an eight-foot-tall bio-mechanical monster stalking and killing crewmen aboard an atmospheric, dark space-ship. Prometheus is more cerebral, an H.P. Lovecraft-inspired quest for the origins of life on Earth that--you guessed it--leads to crew members being horribly killed in all sorts of inventive ways.

Among the flickering lights, black goo, alien technology and tentacles that one expects from this franchise, there was a small musical pleasure: Chopin's Prelude in D minor, the Raindrop. The pianist is Philip Howard.

Koyaanisqatsi in 5 Minutes

This is your brain.

Photo from Wikimedia Commons.

This is your brain on drugs.

Well, not really.

Tooling around on the Inter-tubes today, I found a version of Godfrey Reggio's 1978 film Koyaanisqatsi, sped up 1,552% by visual artist Wyatt Hodgson. Mr. Hodgson's version uses a different score ("The Holy Egoism of Genius" from The Seduction of Claude Debussy by The Art of Noise) and has been compressed to run for just five minutes. The song's been cut a little short too.

If you're not familiar with Koyaanisqatsi, it is a meditation on the imbalances of modern life. It is assembled footage, dating from just before its 1982 release to documentary footage and stock imagery dating all the way back to a NASA film from 1962.

Although it is only 86 minutes long, time speeds, slows and bends in upon itself as the images fly by. The images range widely: staring pedestrians shot on the street, cars and televisions being assembled, and the most famous, iconic shots: clouds racing across mirror-front skyscrapers.

Enjoy.

Balance Out of Life from Wyatt Hodgson on Vimeo.

And here's Godfrey Reggio's original on YouTube.