Something for Thursday

Here's a bit of wonderfully beautiful film music writing, from the movie Medicine Man, by Jerry Goldsmith. This is one of those movies to which Goldsmith gave a pretty good score despite the fact that the movie is complete crap. (The flick has Sean Connery and Lorraine Bracco as two biologists in the Amazon, trying to track down a lead on a potential cure for cancer before those pesky myopic Brazilians bulldoze the entire forest. Connery can't quite figure out for the life of him what he's actually looking for, even though the movie has telegraphed it to the viewers so strongly that we're sitting there, shouting at the screen, "It's the ****, dummy!". (I redacted it in case you want to watch the movie, which I don't recommend.)

Anyway, there is one wonderful scene in the movie: a sequence where the characters climb into a set of Rube Goldberg-esque chair things suspended a hundred feet above the ground and pull themselves on ropes from one tree to the next. This cue, called simply "The Trees", underscores that scene, which is mainly good because the characters stop talking. It starts out nicely enough, but the gorgeous melody blooms forth at about the one minute mark. The track ends with some boilerplate suspense stuff once the beautiful scene has ended, but the middle four minutes are pure film music magic.

Here's "The Trees". (Don't bother watching the video, it's just a picture.)