Lee Kyle wrote:3) I like the soundtrack. Maybe it's aimed at people like me, who have no musical training whatsoever and therefore can't pick up musical subtleties. But I think the music adds a lot to the overall story. (Random comment: I think the Twilight soundtrack is much deeper and well-thought than the book/movie series itself. When I listen to the Twilight soundtrack on its own, I actually come away feeling the series has meaning.)
You don't really need any "musical training" to like or dislike something. It's a bit like wine; "real experts" can swoon over a really old bottle of something rare where some of us less sophisticated types will just taste a vaguely interesting vinaigre. Those same experts will probably have to be carted off to the hospital if they're ever forced to down a bottle of my favourite Riesling.
That said, while I've come to appreciate LMI's soundtrack a lot more than I used to (or maybe have simply become "desensitised" to it), it's basically the same two or three themes repeated throughout the movie without any substantial variation and, with rare exceptions, without regard for the scene it pretends to enhance. There
are some reasonably effective enhancements, such as the building tension as Owen watches the couple through his telescope, and the quasi-angelic choral thing as Abby arrives. The rest of it, as best I can remember at the moment, was just structurally very simple and tediously repetitive.
Contrast that with LTROI's soundtrack. The introductory theme might be a bit "heavy" for American ears (it was for mine, too), but the rest of it tended to go with a fairly light touch. Check out the soft and darkly moody background music in the moments leading up to Oskar's offering Eli his Rubik's cube - and the tentative "holding your breath" moment as she hesitates to accept it. Check out the relatively quiet theme playing as Oskar flees his father's house and runs into the night to hitch a ride back home - it's full of uneasy undertones. Check out the clear, simple, lighthearted theme that plays in various places as Oskar is either with or is thinking about his girlfriend.
Check out the scenes where something nasty is happening. The predominant instrument in those scenes is a water flute. Very dissonant
I don't think the people responsible for LMI's soundtrack coordinated with the people who laid out the scenes, and I'll maintain forever that it was mostly just too damn SCREECHY. The only parts of it I really did enjoy were the tunes that I remember from those times, such as "Do you really want to hurt me?" I was about twelve years older than Owen in 1983, and so your mileage may vary on this particular point - if it had been music from ten years earlier, I'd have been more profoundly affected.
Lee Kyle wrote:8) I find myself wishing I understood horror movies better. I watched them over and over again as a child (Halloween, Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street, etc - how many times did I see Michael stick that girl to the wall?). But I seldom watch them anymore, and it makes me wonder if there are assumptions or understandings on the director's part that I am simply missing. Does the maker of a horror movie assume the viewer will interpret certain things in certain ways, simply because that's how things work in horror movies? Alas, I do not know.
I once said, as an oblique complaint because of some troubles (iirc) I was having getting some fanfic past moderation, that horror is a delicate thing. Too little, and it may actually come out unintentionally comedic; too much, and it's either overbearing or gratuitously gory. It's rather like trying to go Christmas shopping for somebody you don't know.
We're all afraid of things. If we're not, we're not actually sane, but we're all afraid of
different things. Some of us fear wide, open spaces, others fear the dark, others fear spiders, and the list goes on and on. Many of us share many of these fears, and so a movie set mostly in darkness and thrusting isolation, loneliness and persecution to the fore is likely to affect large numbers of us.
What I've been running into with the horror genre I've consumed voraciously over the decades is twofold: any more, it tends to be formulaic or derivative crap, and the things that used to scare the living bejabbers out of me when I was a kid these days can sometimes just make me chuckle in mild amusement. Hitchcocks "The Birds", which I saw at the drive-in while I was still in elementary school, had me having nightmares for a very long time, and while I'll maintain it's a very well crafted movie, and still very effective, it's gotten to be impossible for me to "suspend disbelief" enough to get lost in it. This, in spite of the fact that I
can still get lost in movies I've seen before.
You should note that the face of horror has changed over the decades. There's a great deal in common between much of what was popular in the '80's and what was popular in the '50's, but there are also very important differences. As an example, much of what I remember from the 50's was basically of an "us versus them" mentality, where much of what I remember from the late '70's on through the middle '80's tended to have a much more personal flavour.
What happens to audiences over large numbers also happens to us individually. Things change, and we usually change (somewhat) with them.
Besides - I can only watch so many movies about young women running away from Menacing Bad Guys in the night before my eyes start going funny and it starts getting to be time to turn on some
real horror, such as the Nightly News, or maybe a sitcom.
