Sunday, August 08, 2004

It's the best, and DOZENS agree with me!

Only in the bizarro-world of film music fandom could you have a message board thread like this one, wherein Jerry Goldsmith's score to King Solomon's Mines, a movie that is remembered by no one except for film music fans, and then only because it's got a Jerry Goldsmith score, is placed alongside John Williams's near-classic score to Raiders of the Lost Ark. The effect is not unlike if a thread raged on some classical music board somewhere, comparing, say, the symphonies of Berwald to those of Brahms.

And for sheer "God, I can't look away!" lunacy from the film music world, there's the guy who wrote this piece about Goldsmith, and the various threads in which he pontificates on the FSM boards (like here -- in which Our Hero reposts his entire front-page article to the message board because a few words he'd meant to be italicized weren't -- and here, in which persons digging deeply enough will find a familiar name mixing it up -- I just chalk it up to something in the water that day -- and there are many more). This guy blends his idolatry of Jerry Goldsmith with his idolatry of Ayn Rand, with all of the humility that lovers of the latter are so often known for.

(In fairness, Dan -- the Objectivist Goldsmithian linked above -- does a pretty interesting job of describing Goldsmith's general approach to scoring. Where he flies completely off the rails is in his insistence that Goldsmith's approach is the only valid approach to film scoring, and that therefore all other film composers are inferior.)

On the off chance that there are any lovers of classical music out there who avoid film music because the fans are so, well, weird, all I can say is, Don't blame the music. It's not the music's fault. Really.

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