Film Music

Overnight out here in the Chicagoland area it rained cats and dogs and, we're pretty sure, a few cows and at least i camel.  It rained, according to Lionel Richie, all night long.

Thankfully, the Metra commuter train organization rewarded the folks here at MojoFiction with an extra hr and a half railroad train ride. A nice train-riding bonus to be certain. Just, had we known this, we would accept stayed home. But we didn't know until the Clybourn stop (the concluding stop before downtown), when the usher informed us that the train signals were out and we would have to await for transmission switches and then look further for all the other trains in the whole city to go ahead of usa. At i point they started importing trains from other major cities but so they could go in front of us, besides.

With nothing to do while we waited but reassert our dominance over Angry Birds: Star Wars, we instead grabbed our caput phones, jacked in the MP3 player, and thumbed through our playlists.

We attempt not to play our music too loud into our headphones, mostly considering nosotros value our ears.  Just we likewise don't desire to annoy the other riders. Perchance if we were pumping out some Beyoncé or Fun, or whatever the kids like these days, it would be okay. Just when the guy next to you is cranking the volume upwardly on the soundtrack to Avatar, that'south annoying.

We're that guy.

Non with the Avatar soundtrack, though. That was simply an example…

The thing is, MojoFiction has always loved motion-picture show music and we're not afraid to acknowledge it. …In a blog. …Under a pen name.

Music won't make a film, simply information technology can make it better. And it can certainly break it. The original Tron? The musical score sounds similar a toddler barbarous on ane of those keyboards you tin buy at Toys R Usa and accidentally recorded the sound. The movie isn't spectacular anyway, simply the music kills anything that was good. Michael Mann's The Final of the Mohicans? Stellar score. Enhances the motion picture in every way.

Side notation: Why did The Social Network win best score in 2011? Interesting music and we like it, but after a twelvemonth-long secret investigation nosotros discovered that it won simply to annoy united states of america.  Actually, information technology turns out that it works well for the pic and that's a major factor. That said, the How to Railroad train Your Dragon score was like some other character in that movie it should have won the Oscar, that's all we're saying.

But these things are subjective. What isn't, though, is how pic music done right can move u.s. without taking the spotlight. Actually, while yous were bawling your optics out at the end of Titanic (you lot were, don't lie), were y'all thinking about the music? Probably non. Then Celine Dion started singing and y'all knew it was time to get. Simply after you exited the theatre and had time to think almost it, you started thinking about that music, like you heard it but didn't hear information technology, but you knew if you heard it once more it could bring dorsum that emotional connectedness you had with the characters and their story. So you went out and grabbed the CD and immediately burned it to your MP3 player, but didn't tell anyone you did considering, secretly, you actually like that Celine Dion song.

Film music in an interesting creature considering, listened to past itself, out of context, it's not e'er great. It might even sound disruptive. But when you've seen the moving picture, and particularly when yous enjoyed the picture show, the music can often become something beautiful. All of a sudden, people who you lot only briefly noted at the stop credits become vivid composers that you offset to look for when a new film comes out: Rachel Portman, Patrick Doyle, John Powell … we're just scratching the surface hither.

Movie scores help you maintain a connectedness to a meaningful experience. Nosotros at MojoFiction nevertheless love the soundtrack to Field of Dreams and Schindler's List. Who (depending on your age) doesn't know the theme from E.T. later on only a few notes? Or the opening to The Lion Male monarch? Or Hans Zimmer's musical weirdness for the Christopher Nolan Batman movies? We think it goes across America's love affair with movies themselves and moves into emotional territory. Human beings crave emotional experiences, something that's hard to discover on Twitter or a smartphone text message. When you leave the theatre, the very place y'all visited to have an experience, you oftentimes don't want to let go of that emotional ride. And music marries to movies perfectly. Music can evoke darkness and light, dear and detest, movement and stillness. Popular songs on the radio remind you of high schoolhouse and higher and first dates and hymeneals dances. Music in films reminds you of the journeys in life that we all take.

(Except Transformers: Nighttime of the Moon, which simply reminds MojoFiction of a really bad movie called Transformers: Dark of the Moon.)

So we saturday in that location on our long train ride with our headphones on and our music playing and allowed ourselves to be swept away to far off lands where the music swells, warmly wrapping effectually usa as we re-live an unexpected midnight kiss in a downpour of rain. We won't tell yous what movie that's from. It's our clandestine.

But these are the things that happen when you lot sit on the train for an extra 60 minutes and a half.