Miscellaneous
I received a whole bunch of CDs yesterday and I'm still going through them.
I have to admit that I've never really gotten into Jerry Fielding. I have nothing against his music (and I think his score to The Wild Bunch is extremely effective), I just never really got around to listening to a lot of it. I bought The Enforcer because, as a big fan of 70s urban thriller scores (my Urban Danger compilation serves as a testament to that), I have been collecting the Aleph releases of the Dirty Harry scores. I happened to think that it was a pretty smooth move on the part of Lalo Schifrin to use his connection at Malpaso to release this score on his label as well, which I like to support because of all the amazing music that it brought to me.
Fielding's score is in the same funky vein as Schifrin's music for Dirty Harry and Magnum Force, but while parts of it are a little harsher, the theme that he came up with for Inspector Moore (Tyne Daly) is really good. This continues the trend of Dirty Harry scores surprising me when I get to listen to them on their own... Magnum Force was a revelation.
There are two more Dirty Harry films, Sudden Impact and The Dead Pool, both of which I expect to see released by Aleph at some point. I am eagerly awaiting them, but now I am wondering what I am to do with the artwork for Urban Danger with Clint Eastwood prominently on the cover if I do a separate Dirty Harry mix (which would be a lot of fun). This also might be one of the few cases where all of the spines for a particular movie series matches; after I filed the (disappointing) Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix CD, I couldn't help but notice with some frustration that all of them on the shelf have different spine designs... and most of them are on the same label!!!
I also really enjoyed Henry Mancini's Wait Until Dark, which never had an official release before FSM put it out. I'm actually kind of thankful for that, because one can hear in the score what the Wait Until Dark album Mancini would have recorded might have sounded like. He would have adapted mostly the lounge type stuff, which would have made a nice album, but part of what I like about this CD is how it keeps you off-balance by constantly allowing discordant phrases and suspenseful moments to creep into some of these pieces. It gives the whole affair a general sense of paranoia, which is clearly what he was going for.
BILL:
Ginny, first of all, I'm not your answering service. Second of all, somebody named Greg or Craig sent you an owl just a little while ago.
GINNY:
Now which one was it, Greg or Craig?
BILL:
I don't know, I can't keep up with all of your boyfriends.
While I've been re-reading the books to ramp up for the release of Deathly Hallows, I have also been avoiding the fandom like the plague ever since I got berated on hogwarts_grads for having suggested that I think that "Good Snape"/"Bad Snape" was too simplistic a way of looking at such a complex character by somebody who stated that they firmly believed Snape was good and nothing anybody says, even J.K. Rowling, could change her mind. I spent most of my life avoiding fandom, now I see what a good idea I had so long ago...