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December 14, 2008

The Right Stuff

By Cinema and Music

I’ve just got home from watch­ing The Day the Earth Stood Still at the Empire in Island Bay. It has sev­er­al short­com­ings (which I’ll cov­er off in the review later this week), one of which is the lack of decent theme music.

Sure, it has a score (writ­ten by Tyler Bates) but that score is like so many these days: a series of chords strung togeth­er to height­en imme­di­ate emo­tion – com­pletely unmem­or­able once they’ve passed through your head. I even stayed through to the end of the cred­its to see/hear if any­thing more inter­est­ing was going to hap­pen. It didn’t.

Compare with the film I watched last night (in hi-def via the Apple TV Store): Philip Kaufman’s The Right Stuff. Bill Conti’s score is legendary, an Oscar-winning fan­fare that nev­er fails to get the heart pump­ing. And, because I obvi­ously don’t have enough to do, and I want to try the Yahoo Music Player plu­gin, here’s the Cincinnati Pops ver­sion of Music from The Right Stuff” (right click to down­load in m4amp3 format or click the play but­ton to open the Yahoo Player).

[audio:https://funeralsandsnakes.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/14-music-from-_the-right-stuff_.mp3]

Right click to Download Music from The Right Stuff

Update: I’ve gone back to the Anarchy Media Player plu­gin for back­wards (and hope­fully for­wards) com­pat­ib­il­ity reasons.

Update2: And the upgrade to WP2.7 breaks the Anarchy Player. Sigh. I don’t want to waste too much time on this. Any ideas for a work­ing altern­at­ive solution?