I don’t really think about movie music too much but I like the music from Pirates of the Caribbean and Gladiator. In fact, the score for PotC reminds me in places of the Gladiator soundtrack. I guess it’s the horns. Oh, and I like the music from the Lord of the Rings movies, of course, especially the chanting bits. Although I do find the hobbit theme a little twee. I’m a little embarrassed to admit it, but I always secretly like it when O Fortuna gets used in a trailer, even if it’s for some dumb action movie. Yes, I know it’s a horribly overused piece.
As for dislikes, I remember not liking the music for Troy, it just seemed derivative. I rented it and watched it on a 19" tv and it’s not a great movie to put it mildly, so that probably had an effect too.
I have many soundtracks I like. Some of the movies are very different though, so it’s like comparing apples and oranges. In no particular order:
Chariots of Fire
The Wind and the Lion
Lawrence of Arabia
The LOTR trilogy of movies
A Man For All Seasons
and, strangely enough, the music from both Conan movies.
John William’s scores are always popular, and deservedly so. The soundtrack for “E.T.” is excellent, not to mention “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” “Indiana Jones,” “Star Wars,” and “Jurassic Park.”
I think Bernard Herrman is considered by many to be the best composer for the movies. He did everything from “Citizen Kane” to “Psycho” to “Taxi Driver.”
The zither score for “The Third Man” is a personal favorite. The score for “The Land Before Time” is actually pretty good too – I heard a track from it once out of context of the movie and was surprised how good it was.
Badelt (POTC) and Zimmer (Gladiator) work together and Zimmer produced POTC.
As for me, I’m basically a Thomas Newman fangirl, though I don’t own the score for Jarhead. I also like Rachel Portman (Chocolat, Legend of Bagger Vance), James Horner (though his recycling can drive me crazy at times), Mark Isham, Carter Burwell, Jerry Goldsmith stops
Let me do worst moments in scores since I just mentioned James Horner’s recycling madness and want to vent a bit.
There’s this track, I don’t know where the first version is (Searching for Bobby Fischer maybe?) but it’s used with robotic noises for the opening titles of Bicentinnial Man and used with Charlotte Church? vocals for the opening titles of A Beautiful Mind. I laughed and people looked at me, “What’s so funny about opening titles?” they wondered. Sigh.
Another, er, great Bicentinnial Man moment is this scene sometime around a wedding. James Horner also scored a little know movie called Braveheart which has a very recognizable theme. Horner uses the first half of that theme with a different ending in Bicentinnial Man. The movie was bad enough, but suddenly my mind was filled with this image of Mel Gibson and all his men running over the scene. Fun times!
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I’ve got a friend who passionately loves this cue from Dragonheart and tears up or cries everytime she hears it. Guess which bit gets used all the time in trailers?
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I once read that the score for the 1933 version of King Kong was the first movie in which music was composed to exactly fit, at some points at least, the movement on the screen. If you watch the movie as the village chief begins descending several steps towards the film crew you will notice it. Today this is a common practise, but apparently it wasn’t then.
The *Repo Man * soundtrack rules. Black Flag’s “TV Party,” Burning Sensations doing “Pablo Picasso,” a Spanish version of “Secret Agent Man,” and of course Iggy Pop handling the title theme - what more could one ask for?
The long out-of-print *Atomic Cafe * soundtrack also is excellent.
It’s really kind of amazing how much the score can effect how you perceive a movie. In a film class in college we once watched a cheap-o DVD version of a silent movie (“Metropolis” I think?) that had a soundtrack that was obviously just a bunch of public domain classical music tracks laid down one after the other with no relation whatsoever to what was going on in the movie. But even then, the feel of the music had a great effect on how you felt about what was going on on the screen. There was a rather scary part in the movie where a girl is being abducted (?), and the music at the time was Mendelssohn’s Italian Symphony. So instead of seeming creepy and sad and scary, it was adventurous and rousing and scary. I’m sure a different track of music would have given a completely different feeling, without necessarily lessening the impact of the movie.
Peter Gabriel’s “Passion” (for The Last Temptation of Christ) is a big favorite of mine. I listened to it for years before I ever saw the movie.
I rarely notice the score while I’m watching the movie, which usually means the composer is doing his/her job. The one time I remember a score really annoying me, almost to the extent of putting me off the movie, is Michael Kamen’s for the first X-Men.
Especially the vocalizations by one of my favorite human beings, Diamanda Galas.
There have been some great film scores over time–Korngold’s* The Adventures of Robin Hood; *Copland’s *Of Mice and Men; Herrman’s The Day the Earth Stood Still *and Psycho; Bernstein’s *The Man with the Golden Arm; *Mancini’s *Pink Panther; *Morricone’s Spaghetti Westerns; Corigliano’s *Altered States *and The Red Violin . . . man, too many to keep going.
Here are the soundtracks/scores I have bought recordings of:
Beetlejuice (a friend who’s in the CSO said, “sounds very Russian”)
*In the Heat of the Night
The Rapture
The Stuntman
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg
Natural Born Killers *(awful movie; great soundtrack)
*Purple Rain
Pulp Fiction
*
I have the soundtracks from Donnie Darko, Master and Commander, Trainspotting, and Hamlet [2000], Eyes Wide Shut, Lost in Translation, Blade Runner, and Brokeback Mountain. All different and all very good.
They really need to redo the Ladyhawke soundtrack, though, as people here have mentioned before. The synthesizers–by Toto!!-- just don’t work in what is supposed to be a 13th century story.
I can’t believe nobody has mentioned the Reservoir Dogs soundtrack. Stuck In The Middle With You is the defining song in the film. Little Green Bag is pretty good as well.