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entertaining u newspaper: your weekly guide to entertainment
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Opera on the Stage and Screen
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by erin thursby scopes1925@msn.com
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This Christmas, we got the CD’s of the soundtracks of both Pirates of the Caribbean movies. I’ve been listening to them in my car as I drive about town, and I have to say they’re worth buying, if you’re a casual listener. The score, from both movies are catchy for orchestral work, and there’s a reason for that. Fans of soundtracks will catch riffs that sound so familiar that it’s comforting. The first CD especially seems to be an blend of all that goes into an action movie score, something that many critics buzzed them for. Myself, I don’t necessarily see that as a bad thing. As derivative as the pieces sometimes seem to be, they’re at least accessible to the public. People that were never interested in purely instrumental work are picking up the two soundtracks and loving it.
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I’d say that the soundtrack from the second film was the better of the two. The composers seemed to be composing for the characters they had gotten to know in the first film (Captain Jack Sparrow in particular) and seemed to be more focused about producing a more “piratey” sound. They also kept the signature bits from the first movie that will have surely stuck in your mind. All in all, more effort seems to have been put forth in the second score, and it shows.
The score of The Curse of the Black Pearl was not without controversy. Originally it was the vet composer Alan Silvestri (The Mummy, Back to the Future) that was slated to compose the score, but he was soon fired due to producer back-room politicking in favor of Klaus Badelt and the Media Ventures team. Although Badelt is labeled as the composer on the first CD, it was really a team of about 8 composers who put the music together. The time they had to put the score together was so short and music was so derivative that some critics accused the team of swiping movements (with minor changes) from the other scores in the Media Ventures library, specifically from Hans Zimmer, who produced the album and took over the job of composing for the second Pirates CD.
My biggest complaint on Dead Man’s Chest was the truly awful techno mix at the end of the CD. A few sword sounds, a line or two from the movie and a mangling of a track from the first CD (that wasn’t my favorite to begin with) really, really disappointed me. I seriously could have mixed a better track myself on my computer. Throwing in some of those strings in a very strong way would have been interesting for that track, as would a smattering of that haunting “Yo Ho, Yo Ho, a Pirate’s Life For Me” sung by a young Miss Swann in the beginning of the first film. The track, as it was, made me sad, because I had such high expectations.
It’s the strings from the movies that are most recognized, but you’ll come to appreciate some of the more haunting, bombastic and playful pieces that employ the orchestral bag ’o tricks in both CD’s.
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