After watching Kubrick's The Shining for the first time last night, I was precisely thinking of writing something on the music.
As most of you surely know (I certianly was the only one not having seen teh movie yet), it was a mix of Bartok and I don't remember who and Wendy Carlos-- I must add I thought the first bars were very reminiscent of Rimsky-Korsakov's Russian Easter piece (I need to check the actual English title).
I wonder what you think of it; I really disliked that "score" a whole lot. It was constantly intense, always edge-of-the-seat, which made it uncomfortable but not in the desired way; there were also two moments where the music climaxed as if something portentous, horrible, surprising, scary or whatever occurred, when there really was nothing.
In other words, it sounded like a poor patchwork job, with repeating bits of constantly tense and climactic music, which undermined it all.
It was still a great movie; Nicholson was extraordinary, adding an apparent infinity of nuances and shifts in mood to the slightest sentence; Duvall was an equally great cast, as the fragile, doesn't-stand-the-slightest-chance wife. I kept wishing Kubrick had let a composer score the movie correctly-- whether Goldsmith, Bernstein, Jarre, Schifrin, ...
Tonight, I watched Dagon,, which was a pretty good film indeed. Music-wise, I didn't notice much that would make we wish for a CD release, but it does not mean it was particularly bad. The cue during the flashback was interesting, and I liked the rather dreamy end music.
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