Score: A Film Music Documentary (2016)

	Also Known As: -
	Year of first release: 2016
	Director: Matt Schrader
	Actors: -
	Country: USA
	Genre: Documentary
	Conditions of visioning: 09.01.2018, City Kino
Synopsis: On the importance of the score in movies.
Review: This Documentary, funded by Kickstarter, constitutes a most welcome overview on the topic. I am always on the look-out for movies with a good or original soundtrack, and as I wrote in that article, in the vast majority of movies the soundtrack is not worth mentioning and in the worst cases it disturbs the viewing experience, often by underlining too much the action. But in some rare cases the score is noteworthy, and this is what this Documentary highlights. And it does a good job at it, showing interviews of the most relevant people: score composers of course, but also the directors that commission those composers, movie producers, a film historian and even a psychologist to explain to us how image and sound interact in our brain. The structure of the Documentary is also well-done although classic, interleaving interviews about how to make a good score with a chronological timeline of soundtrack History, highlights on the best composers and some more technical sections (like how all the sounds are mixed together). I was glad that the Documentary reminded me what a huge artist John Williams is. I am too often thinking about his un-remarkable work on the latest Star Wars movies (like Star Wars: The Force Awakens) re-using old recipes and themes, his last great work on he saga being to me the theme Duel of Fates in Episode I - The Phantom Menace. One should never forget what he did on E.T., Indiana Jones, Jurassic Park, Superman or Jaws of course, examples that gave me the shivers when I heard them again in the Documentary. It is interesting that the 80's were dubbed the John Williams era while we are now in the Hans Zimmer era, another great contributor to the art with movies like Batman Begins, Pirates of the Caribbean, Gladiator ... What I can criticize from the Documentary is the omission of the work of some composers I judge of importance. the existence of director-composers like John Carpenter (seen in action at the NIFFF2016) is not mentioned at all, nor is the band Daft Punk for their revolutionary work on Tron: Legacy although we see the poster of that movie in the background during the section about soundtracks composed by a new breed of artists. More important omissions are the one of Alan Silvestri (Back to the Future, Forrest Gump) and the unforgivable one of Basil Poledouris, my personal favorite, responsible for one of the undoubtedly best film scores ever (Conan the Barbarian) and some other no less remarkable (like Starship Troopers). Was he deliberately forgotten because he exercised in the shadow of Williams and that would have been redundant in the Documentary, or because Genre movies were purposefully avoided (same reason for Carpenter). In any case that costs one rating point to that otherwise very good Documentary.
Rating: 7 /10