Gutbrain Records

Saturday, 05 July 2008

I'm with jwz on this. Haven't we suffered enough? And while I realize that remakes of movies are inevitable — I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the second movie made in Hollywood was a remake of the first — can't they at least come up with new titles, even if they can't come up with new movies?

It drives me crazy that "Dawn of the Dead is one of my favorite movies" or "I watched The Texas Chainsaw Massacre yesterday" is no longer a clear statement. Couldn't this Keanu Reeves vehicle be called Starman-Terminator-Matrix-like Timekiller?

Anyway, this remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still looks pretty bad and if the music in the preview is any indication of what will be in the movie, it's a huge step backward from Bernard Herrmann's brilliant score for the original.

Had Herrmann written that music for the concert stage instead of for the cinema screen, he would be considered much more "important" than he ever has been. Such is the distinction between "classical" or "concert" music and music written for movies (or TV or radio or whatever) and it's one of my pet peeves. The first time I heard the music of Jón Leifs, my reaction was that Akira Ifukube had already covered this ground pretty well.