And life continues to continue. The last 48 hours have been intensely bizzare - I have a fiction problem is all you're getting - so you'll mostly just get trivia instead.

This morning, I'm listening to Youth Without Youth. Ach, that film. Count off the points: Francis Ford Coppola, Tim Roth, existentialism, golden-colour-scheme and stunning music. How could I not want to see it? And I spent two years looking forward to it, and finally got it on DVD. We watched it at Christmas. It's still the butt of family jokes. It's about a dying lingustic professor who is hit by a lightningbolt, and starts getting younger - in the mean time, he's chased by Nazis who want his secrets, gains super-powers, along with a metaphysical double who appears in mirrors any times he feels like a chat about the nature of reality - and meets the exact double of his true love, who'd married another in their youth. At which point, you're probably saying "wow". I don't want to say it was a bad film, because there was clearly buckets of invention and talent. But the end product was a total mess - there were six great films, which had been muddled together into one, well, bad one. And yet...it wasn't a totally wasted experience. Because I enjoyed the direction and acting, I admired the weird stuff and thought it looked and felt lovely. In other words, I was satisfied with every reason I was watching it. It just fell to pieces as a coherent experience. Damn shame, and I'm still painfully disappointed.

Last week, I told Calypso that actually all a film needs to do to have my full attention is to be beautifully shot with a tight colour scheme, and have great music. I am that easy to please, and oh I stand by the soundtrack: http://www.youthwithoutyouthmovie.com/

Click on -> soundtrack when you get there. Highlights are the main theme and Dominick's Nightmare.

>I love film soundtracks. They have to be right for the film, of course, but for me they should also be gorgeous in their own right.

Lets start with my favourite film composers - step up James Newton Howard: Unbreakable, Signs, The Village. Arguably it helps that he always collaborates with my favourite director - yet, arguably it's M. Night Shyamalan who is helped by Newton-Howard. The way he puts tunes together is the perfect back up for the beautiful moving stories he's trying to tell. Did I like The Village? Very much, but the music is above and away the thing I love best about it. I also like the Blood Diamond music. This man is good enough for me to give films an extra star. In fact, it's always a safe bet that I'll love the music of a favourite film. Most recently, he co-wrote The Dark Knight with Hans Zimmer, to staggering effect.


Harry Gregson Williams: Spy Game, Narnia. He comes second, mostly because he hasn't done so many films as N-H. Spy Game, like Signs and The Village, makes me blubber like anything - and the music is an important part of that. Spy Game was at one point my favourite ever soundtrack, and it's still a serious contender. Alas, I can't find any on Seeq, so you'll have to make do:


Ennio Morricone: isn't so much a favourite, as someone who I like all his films. Yes, the spaghetti westerns - Once Upon a Time in the West particularly. But also Legend of 1900, and that's very much helped by having Tim Roth on a boat with a grand piano for the whole running time.


And everyone else: Black Hawk Down is a true favourite soundtrack from Hans Zimmer. Made up mostly from jam sessions, it aims to replicate the streetfight between increasingly confused American soldiers in dusty Mogadishu by throwing traditional African beats and voices at electric guitars and rock music to see what happens. The results are intense.


Donnie Darko's original score is lovely, but then as soon as you add a piano to the mix I become unbearably biased. Incidentally, these pieces are some of the few which sound any good on Hampstead piano.



A bit of an odd one now - Battlestar Galactica. Oh, how I adore Bear McCreary's music for that show. It's one of the chief reasons I watch it, despite the fact I'm fundamentally opposed to what its trying to do. The soundtrack was one of the reasons I always enjoyed Heroes, but I physically don't have the effort to watch it any more. I'm not obsessed, and I've no one making me. I'm also a big fan of the Firefly tunes, which like many others on this list also involves warm strings with cold piano. Naturally, I enjoy the Doctor Who music - but only 50% of the time. Both new and classic can be broadly divided into awesome, and awful. Utopia and Planet of Fire: awesome. The Three Doctors: awful.





Tideland and Brazil are two favourite films, and I'm listing them together. Tideland is a piano thing again; but Brazil is a musical work of genius. I strongly recommend it to anyone considering a career in composing to see what can be done with a simple, irritating motif. He makes it sweeping. He makes it ethereal. He even rips off "Rhapsody in Blue":









Blade Runner, of course - I physically feel like I'm drowning in that soundtrack. And a new favourite, the original music for Watchmen, which is listed here due to it's obvious debt to Vangelis.

This list is sans Jackie Brown, Velvet Goldmine, Lost Boys because I'm only doing original scores. But Moulin Rouge is on the borderline, and it's not so much the songs they've chosen but what they do with them - those gorgeous new arrangements.



And Twilight. Yes, I know. No, I'm not changing my mind. In fact, I'll be talking about this film in a minute, but this is the ultimate expression of (what I feel is) great music redeeming anything. Anything at all. Our famille have oft noticed that film's debt to Galactica both stylistically and musically, and Galactica in it's turn owes a lot to the score of Black Hawk Down. Oh, Two Towers: Extended Version. And Youth Without Youth. And others I've forgotten, and will curse when I remember them later.

Of these, I only have 2 or 3 on CD. Partly because I never got around to it, partly because I'm cheap. But partly because I don't want to overlisten to them, particularly those ones which make me burst into tears, as it's an important part of the film experience for me.

Hrhm. Essay. Now. But anticipate my return next time I'm bored, bearing a quite literally, erm, glittering review of Twilight.