Filmtracks Traffic Rank: #1,898
Written 4/28/10
Invert Colors
Buy it... if you seek a 180-degree turn from horror master
Christopher Young, despite this score's rather anonymous extension of
light drama techniques employed across the industry.
Avoid it... if you expect any part of this otherwise innocuous
score, outside of one bonus track concluding the album, to really step
forward and engage you.
 |
| Young |
Love Happens: (Christopher Young) The 2009 romantic
drama Love Happens would have been a completely anonymous entry
in its genre, even despite a lawsuit from screenwriters claiming its
story was stolen, if not for a case of product placement so
overwhelmingly sickening that it took an already poor film and made it
laughable. The title of this film may as well have been "Qwest Happens,"
its story shot in Seattle and taking advantage of every reference to the
regional telecom company possible. There wasn't much else in first time
director Brandon Camp's production worth mentioning. Jennifer Aniston's
star power caused the safe date movie to please studio executives with
moderate profits, but little about Love Happens appealed to
critics or audiences. Its plot tries to take the issue of immense
personal loss and give it a glossy coat of paint to push the romantic
elements. Aniston's usual affable character falls for Aaron Eckhart's
decent guy, the latter a self-help book author successfully pushing his
product while ironically incapable of dealing with the death of his own
wife. The script's alternation between cheesy genre cliches and stabs at
addressing the serious undertones of Eckhart's demons diminished the
effectiveness of both and turned Love Happens into a tedious bore
for most. Taking a much deserved break from his passion for scoring dark
dramas and horror films was composer Christopher Young, whose career has
occasionally included light dramas but rarely one so stereotypically
packaged as Love Happens. The year of 2009 was a time of
outstanding achievement for Young, whose output included both the
magnificent horror opus Drag Me to Hell and the impressive drama
Creation, among other work ranging from decent to overachieving.
By comparison to these other assignments, Love Happens yields a
breath of fresh air from Young, though while it is good to hear the
composer continue to prove his talents outside of his creepy comfort
zone, there's only so much reinvention of the music for romantic drama
and comedy genre that can be done for a film like this. As such, while
certainly different from the composer's norm for the late 2000's and,
more importantly, effective for its context, Love Happens isn't a
particularly memorable score. It's the kind of music that is
interchangeable with that of several other composers' approach to the
same general topic, so don't expect to hear a plethora of trademarks
from Young's career.
The style of Young's music for
Love Happens is
best described as an extension of Hans Zimmer and Heitor Pereira's
recent acoustic guitar and string-based urban dramas with a touch of
Thomas Newman sensibilities thrown into the equation. The former is
perhaps no surprise given that Young contributed music to the Zimmer and
company rush-job
Something's Gotta Give in 2003. The latter
comparison manifests itself in the form of a marimba, which is the only
real instrumental color in
Love Happens to augment the string
section, pianos, acoustic guitar, and contemporary percussion.
Individual cues do branch out with electronic enhancements, but for the
most part, Young has kept the situation as innocuous as possible. A
charming melody of easy harmonics and anonymous character is established
early and emphasized several times before coming to a natural climax in
the concluding cue. Few moments of torment await you in the presentation
of this score on album, faint shades of more recognizable Young
dissonance from synthesizers punctuating a troubling passage in "Mind
Noise." Otherwise, the score alternates between pleasant piano solos,
nebulous string backing, and the kind of quietly plucked guitar
performances you might hear in an intimate urban restaurant setting.
Occasional pizzazz is welcome, though perhaps too predictable, from the
light woodblock tapping effects to Hammond organ and electric bass
contributions. The tone of these performances is repetitive and generic
enough in structure to demand fade outs in a few cues. One such cue is
the score's highlight; placed at the end of the "bonus tracks" section
of the album, "Fast Toward the Eye (of Lorelei)" adds airy female vocal
effects and accelerated string and electric bass movement to the score's
thematic material to finally assert a more ambitious personality. The
album seems to compensate for its arguably over-extended 67-minute
length by presenting about twenty minutes of material in this addendum.
While it is understandable to emphasize the flow and warmth of the
narrative in the previous tracks, these bonus cues do contain the
majority of the score's extroverted music and may have helped maintain
listener interest had they been shuffled into the rest of the product.
On the whole, however, this score meets all of your expectations without
really having a chance to exceed them. Only the final track on the album
merits inclusion on a compilation of the genre's most engaging music.
The rest of the score is commonplace, though it is, at the very least,
refreshing to hear from the pen of the horror master.
*** @Amazon.com: CD or
Download
Bias Check:
For Christopher Young reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.48
(in 27 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 3.17
(in 10,920 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
|
