And here's why, at least for this moment in time, as a weekend assignment assessment:
Paul Thomas Anderson nailed it in his Adam Sandler flick with a horribly misleading and therefore distracting title so I don't want to mention the name of it. The music was always perfect, usually understated until you needed it and then it could be full-on metronomic-vibe quality to push the feeling of the scene so there was a way to appreciate the acting and storyline more because of it.
His second excellence of usage was to accent quirk via music tone/shift (dark pop culture) that left BZ feeling it was a French film and to me, the end of a Doris Day movie where they finally kiss (and the strings kick in with that sticky sweet 50s sound).
That lead to a discussion on why Jerry Lewis is so perennially popular in France. The French guffaw over physical humor, the French New Wave guys studied Peckenpaugh, Wilder, Philip Marlow, the 50s Hollywood version of the American Dream. That's how Godard could come up with "Weekend" (a messy but highly entertaining piece of work with a definite point of view and could only be in that format) and Truffaut did his thing, without giving in. The Italians Fellini and Antonioni, seem to be fans of American cinema, with her spectacles of epics, monumental mythology sustained bludgeoning of messages the media/gov't/illuminati powers want us to believe, driving the market place, against the will of the rogues, who turn around and write best sellers about the charade.
The 2nd example of good music usage is the beginning of Manhattan, Woody Allen's early benchmark of creepitude where he's foreshadowing a pechant for young women. http://sentence.yourdictionary.com/penchant
Hey listen I don't even want to have this conversation, I'm from Philadelphia! - Diane Keaton
It's Jazz and then an over-the-top symphonic bombastic build over fire works and some reference to the city and sex and just as it's about to get extra-annoying, it switches out and the scene settles in a front room of some NYC bar.
"I was never in the trenches, I was caught right in the middle, it was a very touch decision."
As with any declaration (good music makes a better film/story) the opposite must also be true in some way.
Case in point: witnessed a film set in 1215 that otherwise could compel intrigue went overwrought for too long & then there's the 'too big' --composers don't know how to build a build, something that isn't just background noise, a wallpaper bed with no soul (the easy fix down and dirty cheap trick of the trade that usually works in a pinch which is why lazy people employ it so often).
Reality tricks of the trade and tips from the tightrope, a class I hope to teach one day when I still have to work (because I chose film and television as my career and therefore got screwed when it came to financial planning in any traditional manner) and can lecture at a local college (when I am eligible for AARP) and go on grand adventures that I can still pull off, oversee and guide along, creatively, but without having to give the 24-7 style commitment commensurate with relative-to-normal shit pay, as in the only industry where your pay goes down consistently the more experience you get as the ability to destroy you is much easier in the creative realm than it is in any task-performance-metric-measurable career (say engineering like my mom's NE side of the family or doctoring medicine/inventing like dad's Bronxville side with accolades and madness hand-in-hand but still, easier to quantify success and click off points of fail. In my realm, it's all about ego, attitude and expertise. If your expertise messes with an ego or an attitude, it doesn't matter any more (unless your boss values you or your position more than some snap reactive decision to flip people like you flip houses because they threaten you). Note you better learn and personify: learn when to keep your mouth completely shut and go off and just give in to the fools, but they were really awful from the get-go, in retrospect, it would be hard not to feel set-up in every case. The one where the cast member was given carte blanche, well that happens too, but it's not always possible to see it coming (or know the signs) because it is just so wrong, and everyone agrees except the people who matter (when it comes to controlling your existence -- and that would be the people who can fire you for no real reason at all and that in any other industry would end up in front of the labor board, except organized crime) -- those people matter and they often put the target on your head without you even knowing it.
Music drives the emotional tone of the scene, sets the pace, gives an identifier (to location and action).
And when it's bad, it's awful, for the most part.
To be continued. But this would be lecture 2 or 3. Lecture 1 overview, inspiration, history, lay of the land. 2: Picture and Sound. 3: The Actor/Presence. 4. Writing -- structuring the story (so many choices but which one is the way of the story for this particular piece); what makes a good story stop down bring in your fav clip and analysis under 4 minutes -- 2 week interstitial or group presentations;
4-5 continuance of technical pieces as they achieve vision; 6: pitching stories; 7: reviewing/writing/crafting -- meet idea people, guest lectures, 3-4 weeks. Lecturers for 1st 1/3-1/2 of class, then Q&A then workshops on that topic with followup session around class 11.
End 4 classes: 3 projects in development.
Next semester developing ideas/finding role that is right for your strengths and talents
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