MOVIE MUSIC MAGIC

I’m off on a three-day getaway to the coast with my family, so I’ll be checking in periodically but unlikely to post anything new until after Tuesday. But I can’t think about the ocean without drifting off into the dreamscape of Bill Forsyth’s Local Hero. Forsyth would have been my choice for filmmaker I most miss on the cultural landscape if I’d ever managed time enough to answer the questions on my own damn quiz. The spectrally beautiful Scottish environs he conjures for this 1983 classic—one of the absolute peaks of a lousy decade for the movies—are as much of the mind as of geography, and they've haunted me ever since I saw the movie theatrically 25 years ago. That's why Mark Knopfler’s ethereal score is so touching and expansively gorgeous—it gets into the same spaces that the images from Forsyth’s magical comedy do. This is one of the great merging of music and movie imagery I can think of. So I offer you this beautiful performance of the movie’s main theme, from a 1997 Montserrat concert, as a buoyant gesture of weekend peace, harmony and productivity.



And in a bald-faced attempt to generate some conversation over the weekend, I’m wondering what you’d say were some other great marriages between movie music and imagery. I’ll offer up a couple of others off the top of my head—how about Franz Waxman and Sunset Boulevard?



Or Pino Donaggio and Dressed to Kill?



Michael Giacchino’s scores for The Incredibles and Speed Racer are brilliant compliments to their brilliant films. For some reason Joe Hisaishi’s music for Sonatine just popped into my head. And what about Angelo Badalamenti’s collaborations with David Lynch?



Or Ennio Morricone with Sergio Leone (and seemingly hundreds of others)? And of all Bernard Herrmann’s indelible work, right now I’m thinking of the spectacular orchestral conclusion of Hangover Square and those ominous basso clarinets that signal the rising of the dead in Jason and the Argonauts.



What ones come to your mind?