Escape Artist's Top 10 Movie Soundtracks: Part 2

Here are the final five entries of Escape Artist's favourite film soundtracks of all time. Find Part 1 here.

Marie Antoinette - Brian Reitzell (2006)



Sofia Coppola's third film was unfairly and condescendingly dismissed on its release, with critics and Cannes audiences accusing it of misrepresenting history and being little more than a lightweight music video that fetishised the opulence of France's Ancien Regime. The criticism was total bollocks, and a classic example of judging a film based on projected criteria. Marie Antoinette is an aesthetic confection, true, and it's intentionally anachronistic. But it reaches deeper by exploring the confusion and naive flutterings of a teenage girl plunged into a high-pressure royal marriage, destined to become France's eternal Queen Bitch figure. As such, Coppola plays it like a teen drama, mixing the aesthetics of late 18th century French aristocracy with the high-top sneakers and New Romanticism of John Hughes' Shermer high schoolers.

The film's soundtrack is an appropriately time-hopping affair, where the Baroque of Vivaldi, Scarlatti and Couperin meets the pop baroque of Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Cure and Bow Wow Wow. It's a heady cocktail that mixes cold and smooth, the period harpsichord pieces making an elegant bedfellow to the sheen of those 80s beats. The soundtrack even mixes the two on a single track with a special version of 'Hong Kong Garden' that begins with a lush arrangement of strings before kicking into Siouxsie Sioux's art-punk attack. Add in a sprinkling of lilting contemporary post-rock and you've got the recipe for a confusing but oddly perfect soundtrack to a much-misrepresented film.

A bizarrely abridged version of the Marie Antoinette OST on Spotify, here.

El Cid - Miklos Rozsa (1961)



Of all the great soundtracks on this list, Miklos Roszla's score for El Cid is the one that renders my critical faculties utterly obsolete. Within ten seconds of the score's gorgeous strings taking flight, I am at its mercy. El Cid might have been the most formative movie of my early childhood. For better or for worse, it taught me that doing the right thing always supersedes doing the sensible thing. It taught me that the baddies always win at the beginning, but the goodies always win in the end. It taught me that love can be both perfect and broken, and that good love should probably involve the girl fleeing in despair to a nunnery at some point. It taught me all these things in a language I could understand: knights in shining armour and fluttering pennants and Charlton Heston being awesome. For a young boy of a naturally nervous disposition living at boarding school, its uncompromising sense of old-fashioned honour was somehow a comfort and a manual. For me personally, Roszla's score condensed all of that into a few minutes of soaring orchestration. So a shamelessly personal choice. Check out the above video, which contains the film's opening credits and its most recurrent musical refrain. I hope you like it, but I don't really mind if you don't. It belongs to an anxious little boy who needed it once.

The full El Cid OST on Spotify, here.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford - Nick Cave & Warren Ellis (2007)



Nick Cave and his Bad Seeds/Grinderman cohort Warren Ellis are busy men. When not working on their frontline musical projects, they've developed quite a healthy cottage industry composing soundtracks for a number of excellent recent films, not to mention a couple of stage plays and the audio version of Cave's second novel The Death of Bunny Munroe. Ellis and Cave's 2007 soundtrack for Andrew Dominik's stunning western The Assassination of Jesse James... could be their finest collaboration to date. While it feels like their previous work on The Proposition laid the groundwork for Assassination's keening interplay of strings and piano, Cave and Ellis here replace that score's warped brutality with an atmosphere that's altogether more existential. The duo's orchestration has a tentative quality that perfectly mirrors the bewitching, morally complex world that the movie creates.

The full Assassination of Jesse James... OST on Spotify, here.

Days of Heaven - Ennio Morricone (1978)



The full soundtracks for Terrence Malick's first two films, Badlands and Days of Heaven, are sadly pretty tricky to track down nowadays. It's a real shame because both are superb. While Carl Orff's short composition 'Gassenhauer' perfectly encapsulates the childish, deadly fairytale of the Malick's feature debut, Ennio Morricone's compositions for Days of Heaven might be the more substantial of the two.

Morricone brilliantly works around the central theme of Camille Saint-Saens' 'Aquarium' from his suite 'Carnival of the Animals', which plays over the film's enigmatic opening credits. His compositions take enough from Saint-Saens' suite to bring across its otherworldly mystery, while adding a little extra humanity to soundtrack the leisure and labours of the film's men and women working the fields of the Texas Panhandle. Little flashes of playfulness break up all the heavy themes, the zippy acoustic 12-string guitar piece that soundtracks Bill, Abby and Linda's train journey foremost among them. In a long career full of incredible film scores, Morricone's arrangements for Days of Heaven stand as some of his very best.

Shaft - Isaac Hayes (1971)



As an absolute novice when it comes to blaxploitation movies, the most immediate appeal of the genre for me has always been the music. Isaac Hayes' soundtrack to the big daddy of blaxploitation films might be the obvious touchstone, but it's pretty irresistible. For an instant hit of funk-inflected grandeur, the film's main theme is a stone-cold killer, slow-burning through hi-hat drum fills and wah-wah guitars before flowering into that vocal that we've all known, loved and done bad impressions of for years.

Beyond the hit single, the album is filled with instrumentals that show off Hayes' composition skills and the rock-solid musicianship of Stax house band The Bar-Kays, with whom Hayes recorded the rhythm tracks in a single day. The tempo shifts from brash, muscular numbers that hint at Hayes' pioneering early disco style ('Be Yourself') to caramel-smooth jazz-soul ('Early Sunday Morning'). While Curtis Mayfield's Super Fly soundtrack might well be superior when heard in isolation for its socially conscious lyricism and more traditional pop song structure, but as a pure soundtrack, Shaft wins every time. Shut yo' mouth!

The Shaft OST (minus 19-minute epic 'Do Your Thing') on Spotify, here.

Review: The Tree of Life

Trying to write something meaningful about a Terrence Malick film is getting into serious dancing-about-architecture territory. For a director who clearly puts so little stock in words, a written review seems like a woefully inadequate medium for commentary. But as I am unable and unwilling to start performing reviews through interpretive dance, plain old words will have to do.

Throughout his meandering 40-year career in film, during which time he has only directed five full-length films, Malick has been gradually stripping his work of narrative and character development. Although his films have always exhibited a dreamy quality that prioritises visual communication above all, debut Badlands and its follow-up Days of Heaven maintain strong elements of plot, the latter even coming off as positively Shakespearean, in a floaty sort of way. But his 1998 "war" movie The Thin Red Line and 2005's The New World saw Malick's more abstract themes - a vague but insistent yearning for the spirit of the natural world foremost among them - come to the fore.

The Tree of Life feels like the culmination of this steady drift away from storytelling and towards a sort of visual poetry. At once intensely personal and unabashedly grand, the film sets the day-to-day life of a small-town Texan family against the vast, unknowable scope of the universe, its creation, and the nature of everything that exists within it. Simple.

This split between intimate scenes of family life and portrayals of our planet's fiery birth might seem incongruous. Malick moves in mysterious ways, the twining limbs of his tree providing a link between the smallest events and the very largest. His widescreen vision of the universe is certainly arresting in a visual sense. Tectonic plates sizzle and grind against one another; oceans are born and in turn incubate the multicellular organisms that spiral along the sea bed. Stars burn, forests bloom and dinosaurs roam.

We're introduced to this eon-spanning maelstrom before we ever set eyes on a human character. Nevertheless, it's Mr and Mrs O'Brien of Waco, Texas and their three sons that put it all into perspective. Their life together in a quiet 1950s suburb (depicted so specifically that it is likely drawn from Malick's own memories) is at once idyllic and riven by conflict. The father (Brad Pitt) is the square-jawed embodiment of the do-it-for-yourself American ideal of Darwinian strength. A day's work for a day's pay; relying only on the sweat off your brow. He tries to pass his world view on to his sons, who he subjects to a strict regimen of traditional discipline, physical competition and rough affection.

The mother (Jessica Chastain) is the lamb to her husband's lion, a creature of seemingly unending compassion, childlike and empathetic. While Mr O'Brien mutters stern reprimands at the children across the dinner table, Mrs O'Brien is playing with them in the garden and waking them up with ice cubes down the backs of their pyjamas. If they seem symbolic rather than real, that's because they are - this 50s childhood is all channelled through the memory of their eldest son Jack in later life (Sean Penn), still torn by the incompatibility of his father's "way of nature" and his mother's "way of grace".

As such, Jack plays a major part in the film's family scenes, and Malick's direction beautifully fleshes out all those hazily remembered details of childhood through simple, striking moments, from gangs of children playing in the streets in the twilight just before dinner to Jack obsessing over every detail of his father's face and hands as he plays the local church organ. Jack's experience of growing up also provides a microscopic test bed for all the giant ideas floating around, as he flits to and fro between his parents, tries to reconcile the growing anger he's harbouring, and even deals with guilt and confusion after rifling through his neighbour's underwear drawer. These tiny domestic dramas mix Oedipal frustration with visions of unblemished love, with Jack and his brothers trying to find their way through the middle.

The film makes its own views clear through the judicious application of the Book of Job, the thrust of which rests on man challenging God on why the good suffer along with the wicked. The answer, the film seems to say, is to embrace a way of life that transcends the slings and arrows of fate; to see grief and joy as inseparably joined in the titanic, shared experience of life. While Mr O'Brien's vision of self-reliance gradually crumbles into a ruin of disappointment and failure, his wife's way of life proves resilient through surrender, culminating in the yielding of her most precious treasure to the Everything: the life of her own child.

The film's ending has proven its most divisive moment. The final scenes, which show characters walking down a celestial beachfront, have been criticised as an empty piece of aesthetic doodling, tantamount to the meaningless beauty of a perfume ad. While the comparison is understandable at the visual level, the scene really makes sense as a proper conclusion to the messages of a shared experience, of transcending the whims of grief and fear. These scenes are The Tree of Life's pearly gates, only instead of white marble they're made of all the versions of ourselves and all the things we've seen and done, together in one place.

It's a profoundly spiritual vision, but not in any sense that will pander to fundamentalists. Although many of the film's messages are conveyed through Christian allegory, they could resonate with any number of philosophical, religious or scientific viewpoints. In fact, Malick's larger depictions of the world's biological development seem rigorously scientific, at least to this layman.

The film's performances are roundly excellent; Pitt and Chastain are magnetic as the opposing forces at the centre of the universe, and the children are played with the naturalism that's so vital if the audience is to buy into their physical and emotional awakening. Even so, the performances are barely worth commenting on, so ingrained are they in the film's imagery and themes.

The Tree of Life resonated with me in a way that seems specific to Malick's films; there simply isn't space here to fully plumb its depths. But that doesn't mean I would recommend it to anyone. If you're looking for a great Sean Penn/Brad Pitt movie, don't bother. If you're looking for an immersive story, stay away. If you tend to think art films are pretentious and boring, you'd probably be better off loading into a giant slingshot and firing yourself into the heart of the sun. But if you're interested a beautifully conceived collage of life, one that shows but doesn't preach, that shares but doesn't explain, that mourns and celebrates all at once, The Tree of Life might make a lifelong fan out of you.

Interest Score: Butterflies/10

Satisfaction Score: A baby's toes/10

Top 5 films worth another look

Hollywood marketing is akin to being propositioned by a 300-ft hooker - terrifying, magnificent and utterly overwhelming. For those plugged in to the monolithic hype network that fizzes around the interweb and adorns our billboards with gurning celebrities and obnoxious animated gerbils (now in 3D!!), the stream of information moves at such a pace that it's hard to slow down and take stock. After all, it's hard to concentrate when James Cameron's grabbing you by the ear-holes and screaming, "AVATAR! IT'S A GAME CHANGER! NOTHING WILL EVER BE THE SAME AGAIN! NOT EVEN YOUR SHOES! AVATAR!!!"

So here are five movies definitely worth spending a couple of hours with, no matter what you've heard. Some of them were met with lukewarm reviews on release but are worth reassessing; others were simply swept away in the undertow. All I know is that once in a while, it's therapeutic to look back rather than forward for once.

1. REDBELT (2008) - Dir. David Mamet

As a playwright first and foremost, David Mamet has had a patchy history as a writer and director of movies. But he delivered something special last year with Redbelt, a studied look at the world of mixed martial arts and the tension between living a life of physical and mental discipline and entering televised tournament bouts for cold, hard cash. The fight scenes are kinetic and authentic, but it's the underlying philosophical struggle that gives the punches real weight.

2. SUBWAY (1985) - Dir. Luc Besson

For my money, Luc Besson's best film. It's just that no one agrees with me, so apparently my money is worth less than a slap in the chops. Cooler than Leon and smarter than The Fifth Element, Subway is Besson's purest contribution to the cinema du look movement. Christophe Lambert puts in a career-best performance (that's not saying much, admittedly) as Fred, a thief with an utterly obsessive personality, who takes refuge from pursuers in the Paris Metro, which is home to a menagerie of subterranean denizens. This film is hopelessly romantic, painfully idealistic and thrillingly youthful. But, based on past experience, you'll probably disagree with me. You hateful bastards.

3. DAYS OF HEAVEN (1978) - Dir. Terence Malick

Well, you can't make a list of misunderstood movies without at least one Malick film, can you? He's also my favourite director and I swear to God I will fight you if you say any different. Days of Heaven is the dreamiest film in a career of dreamy films. Its lack of a focused storyline meant no money and little recognition (apart from a richly-deserved Oscar for Nestor Almendros' awe-inspiring cinematography), but this movie was always going to be too good to make any money. Malick's tale of transient rural labourers in the early 20th century is a masterclass in what movies can do that books can't. Eschewing reams of dialogue and exposition frees the film to tell its story and convey its mood using performance and cinematography. The end result is a poem which doesn't have to resort to anything so clumsy as words. The best kind of poem.

4. ONLY YESTERDAY (1991) - Dir. Isao Takahata

While Hayao Miyazaki continues to (justifiably) garner acclaim with his escapist, fantasy-themed parables, Studio Ghibli's other co-head has created some of the studio's most powerful work too. Takahata's films are more grounded in reality than Miyazaki's and tend to be less visually flashy, but there's always an undercurrent of raw emotion pushing them forward. Only Yesterday follows a directionless 27 year-old as she considers her future and looks back on her childhood. The film serenely exploits the human impulse to recall the purity our youth and mourn how the world has warped us. Only it's nowhere near as much of a bummer as that sounds.




5. SERENITY (2005) - Dir. Joss Whedon

Firefly is pretty high on the list of awesome shows that got cut short before their prime, and it took a feature film continutation to fill that Mal Reynolds-shaped hole in fans' dreary lives. Clearly there wasn't enough of us, however, as the film failed to make back its budget. All I know is that I couldn't convince my girlfriend, or anyone else, to see it with me. I may have just stumbled upon the realisation that Serenity failed commercially because of the crushing social isolation of its fans. Sorry, Joss!

What I can't figure out is why no-one else was interested in seeing it. Serenity is a supremely entertaining sci-fi blockbuster which combines thrilling action scenes with compelling characters and a healthy dose of the funnies. Perhaps it was the perception that you had to have watched Firefly to follow it (which is incorrect; Serenity's story is completely self-contained). In any case it's certainly worth seeing if you missed it; in a just world, this film would have gone on to become a summer tentpole franchise. Particularly gushing superlatives must be thrust at Nathan Fillion's Mal Reynolds, arguably science fiction's best leading man since Han Solo.