Jackman式的噪音
作者：James Southall（IFMCA(国际电影音乐评论家协会)成员之一）
美国队长等了三年终于回来了。
……
《美队1》的音乐对于漫威的电影可算是个转折点，以前的漫威系列里也有过好音乐，却不能在整部配乐中都保持那样的水准，Alan Silvestri最终做到了，而且交出了一份令人满意的答卷，给我们带来了漫威系列里第一个真正值得回味且鲜明的人物主题。这段音乐在他自己的《复联》和Brian Tyler的《雷神2》都客串了一下。制片人总算对好音乐有点概念了。但在Henry Jackman的《美队2》里，那段旋律却被完全抛弃。
《美队2》的音乐从一开始就很差劲，而且越听越可怕。开头的《Lemurian Star》融合了《谍影重重》和《盗梦》，《Project Insight》 应该就是所谓Henry Jackman式的人物主题，根本不能给人留下任何印象，《The Smithsonian》至少带着些美国风，但是很短。但如果听到这里然后想：哦，这没那么差，那么接下来的《Fury》，马上便会告诉你它有多糟。这种电子音乐的轰炸似乎和爆米花电影契合度还算不错，但一旦脱离电影就呵呵了。这就像是小夜曲后面跟着冬兵，乱七八糟的哔哔声四处飞溅。想象一下你掉到一口井里，腿受伤了，密集的雨点从天而降，将井渐渐灌满，你只能看着水慢慢上涨，却不能动弹，电话也不在服务区，不得不听着那噼里啪啦的雨点。死亡只是时间问题。相信我，这种感觉就像天堂而来的人不幸听到了《冬兵》。更糟的是，还有48分钟，48分钟的煎熬。没错，大量千篇一律的爆米花动作片配乐。这种形式顶多制造出一张平庸的娱乐专辑，而这种音乐的门槛则是极低的。有时候他们会试着注入一些情感，不时地在其中穿插一些由弦乐和钢琴演奏的伤感主题，这真是鲁莽过时的配乐方式。如果这种音乐出现在一个动作片配乐里，那可真是不妙。美队2的配乐本可以更好。
我在网上看到一些关于配乐师的有趣讨论，从一个新鲜的角度谈论了现代电影音乐面临的挑战。这些低质量作品的出现是谁的责任？配乐师，还是制片人？当今最有影响力的配乐师汉斯•季默给出了一个明确的答案：这取决于配乐师，由配乐师来决定他想写哪些他感兴趣的音乐，并让制片人相信让他上没错。可是谁知道这部配乐怎么了，我很难相信Henry Jackman早上起床，接着满怀激情投入到音乐当中，却写出了和成百上千现代动作配乐如出一辙的东西。那他做这些干什么？他是不是认为这就是制片人想要的，因为这似乎是他们都想要的，于是他自己写出了这些低水准作品？或者他真的认为电影音乐就该像这样？显然我不知道答案。Henry Jackman是一个很有才华的作曲家【靴子喵、破坏王就很不错】，难道他不是因此才干这一行的吗？我可能不太公平，也许这种配乐正是他所迷恋的，而且他确实坚信电影配乐就是这样写。这样一来，对于那些他感到很勉强的镜头前，我也许会更难过。但我也承认我对此不甚了解，甚至有些脱节，说不定这些作品会给予无数青少年以启迪，正如以前一代人受《宾虚》和《星战》的影响一样。
这和我心目中的好配乐差得太远。他们似乎根本就没有想要给这部电影一个独一无二的身份，于是自始至终都没有任何新意，同过去十年里这类配乐一个样。电影很黑暗，到处都不见光明——这就是音乐告诉我们的。它告诉我们一切都很悲惨，一切都很阴郁，我们不妨放弃，因为没有任何美好的希望，这有意思吗？诚然，并非所有东西都一定要充满光明与欢乐，但如果始终这么悲剧这么简单，没有情感的抒发，没有戏剧性的伏笔，谁愿意听？
什么时候制片人才会对他们说，抱歉，我们不要一个只会模仿季默的人，你的音乐、你的风格都去哪儿了；什么时候作曲家能敢于对制片人说，你想要这样的音乐，行啊，曲库里多得是，有什么必要来花大价钱买“原创”两个字……我做这么多就是为了替你的电影贴些和别家一样的墙纸？我想做的，是让你的电影更完美，而且能带有我的激情，以及我倾注其中的灵魂。
可是谁知道呢。或许会有这么一天吧。但同时，我们还得一直面对这类。。。唉。不得不说，这部作品简直就是烂作（安德的游戏、特种部队2，说的就是你们）中的拖拉机。讽刺的是，季默常常同他们被归为一类，然而事实上，他本人反而挺有创新精神，他可以很疯狂【说的是独行侠里敲铁轨么】，有时候很精彩，有时候很可怕。但至少他敢于创新！他的徒弟们，则吸收了师傅的糟粕，对精华视而不见，急于抹去一切带有个人风格的作曲痕迹，弄出令人作呕的配乐快餐，一个个都从一个模子里刻出来，与电影音乐的本质相悖。真令人伤心。
Composed by Henry Jackman
Hollywood Records / 2014 / 75m
Captain America is back in The Winter Soldier, three years after his first film. It seems likely that the extraordinary success of the Marvel films will continue, with an outing very different from his “origin story” that was the focus of the earlier film; this time round the Captain is in the modern world and has to do battle with the nasty winter soldier. The film is directed by Anthony and Joe Russo, who have worked extensively in television comedy (and also made the amusing Welcome to Collinwood a few years back) and they’ve already signed up to make the next film in the series, to be released in 2016.
Captain America: The First Avenger was a bit of a musical turning point for the Marvel series; there had been some good music in the series before but rarely sustained across a whole score, but Alan Silvestri finally did the obvious thing and wrote the first truly memorable character theme in the series – and what a great theme it was. It made cameo appearances in Silvestri’s own score for The Avengers and also in Brian Tyler’s Thor 2 – finally, a bit of musical continuity. The filmmakers had seen sense. But it doesn’t appear anywhere in Henry Jackman’s sequel score – and indeed sense is something notable by its absence throughout.
The album starts badly and proceeds to get much worse. The utterly generic opening piece “Lemurian Star” blends the same tired old Bourne action ostinatos and the now-ludicrous, laughable Inception HORN OF DOOM with some obnoxious electronics; “Project Insight” introduces what is presumably Jackman’s own theme for the main character, an instantly forgettable piece of fluff; at least “The Smithsonian” features some pleasant Americana, though it only lasts a few seconds. But if you listen to that and think – oh well, it’s not that bad – then you get to “Fury”. And you realise that yes, it’s that bad and then some. Suddenly there’s an assault of electronics. It may work just fine in the film but it’s utterly repulsive away from it. And yet… it’s like a nice rendition of “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik” compared with what follows in “The Winter Soldier”, which sounds like Ross’s keyboard music in Friends, apparently randomly-placed bleeps and squirts appearing every few seconds, exceptionally silly synth parts that are like vintage 1980s Casio, sudden jumps between incredibly loud and incredibly quiet, occasional transitions from awful parts to somehow even worse parts. Imagine for a moment falling down a deep well, breaking both legs, the well gradually filling up with water thanks to heavy rainfall – you can see the water level rising, you can’t move, your phone has no reception – that constant drip-drip-drip – death is imminent – it’s only a matter of time. Believe me, that experience would be like manna from heaven to anyone unfortunate enough to listen to “The Winter Soldier”.
To make matters worse – there are still 48 minutes to go. 48 minutes of slow, painful torture. Yes, there are plenty of rubbish Remote Control generic action scores, just as there are some enjoyable ones. At its best, the style can yield a generic-but-entertaining album. Some moments here are like that. The bar is very low and occasionally the music reaches it. There’s even an attempt at times to inject some emotion – what a foolhardy, old-fashioned concept of what a film score might be used to do – with a vaguely elegiac theme that crops up now and then on strings and piano. If it appeared on one of those three-star generic Remote Control action scores, you’d think it was the worst thing about them. It’s by a million miles the best thing about Captain America: The Winter Soldier.
I’ve read some interesting discussions on the internet recently between film composers, opening up in a way that is rare but refreshing about the challenges of modern film music. Who is to blame for dreck like this – is it really the composers, or is it the filmmakers? The most unequivocal answer came from the most influential film composer of the day, Hans Zimmer – it’s up to the composer to write music he is passionate about and convince the filmmakers that his way is the way to go. Who knows what happened on this score – I find it very hard to believe that Henry Jackman gets up in the morning and becomes passionate about writing music that sounds like offshoots from literally a hundred other modern action scores. So, why did he do it? Did he assume this is what the filmmakers wanted, because this is what they all seem to want, and so he deliberately wrote below himself? Or did he truly believe this is the best score the film could receive? Obviously I don’t know the answer to that. Henry Jackman is a talented composer – surely this isn’t truly what he wants to be writing? I may be being unfair – this may be exactly the sort of thing he’s passionate about writing and he really does believe that this is how to score a film – in which case I’d probably be even more upset than in the scenario where he feels forced into it (while acknowledging as I must that perhaps I am hopelessly out of touch and there are loads of youngsters who will become as inspired by music like this just as much as previous generations were inspired by Ben-Hur and Star Wars). There may be far more to it than I could comprehend – that isn’t difficult, because I comprehend very little, being just a computer keyboard warrior of such limited brain.
I do know that this is the polar opposite of film music – indeed, of music – that I would ever consider to be any good. There is seemingly no attempt at all to give the film a unique identity – it’s all a generic wash of the same tired old sound that Remote Control (and more recently, a lot of others) have been churning out for the last decade. There is no sense of fun, anywhere – maybe the film’s darker, maybe there isn’t a single light moment in it anywhere – that’s what the music’s telling us. It’s telling us that everything is miserable, everything is bleak, we may as well give up because there’s no hope of anything good happening – it is utterly without pleasure. Not everything has to be bright and happy; but if you’re as miserable as this and as simple as this, it’s really hard to see the point, harder still to see what would possibly make someone ever want to hear it. There’s no expression of feeling, no dramatic undercurrent.
When will filmmakers grow a pair of balls and reject this sort of approach to their films – when will they say that no thanks, we don’t want you to sound like a fourth-rate Hans Zimmer impersonator, we want you to sound like you. When will composers grow a pair of balls and say – if you just want it to sound like everything else then just licence some library tracks, save yourself a million bucks by not commissioning an “original” score that sounds exactly like everything else – my job is to give you a score that doesn’t just sit in your film and act as musical wallpaper, it actually makes your film better than it otherwise could do – and it sounds like me because I’m a passionate creative person and my music is me. Who knows. One day maybe. In the mean time, we’ll keep on getting this sort of garbage; I have to say, even in the stupefyingly bad context of this sort of thing (Ender’s Game, GI Joe 2, you know what I mean) this is the absolute pits. The ironic thing is that the composer most often tarred by the brush of this rubbish produced by his associates, Hans Zimmer, actually dares to do different things in his own scores – he has crazy ideas, sometimes it’s brilliant and sometimes it’s appalling, but at least he dares. His disciples seem completely the opposite, obsessively removing all distinguishing compositional features and churning the tasteless gloop that seeps out into an endless stream of mass-produced film score McNuggets, indistinguishable from one another and a world away from what film music can actually do. It’s desperately sad.
Rating: No stars
英语差，请海涵。
美国队长等了三年终于回来了。
……
《美队1》的音乐对于漫威的电影可算是个转折点，以前的漫威系列里也有过好音乐，却不能在整部配乐中都保持那样的水准，Alan Silvestri最终做到了，而且交出了一份令人满意的答卷，给我们带来了漫威系列里第一个真正值得回味且鲜明的人物主题。这段音乐在他自己的《复联》和Brian Tyler的《雷神2》都客串了一下。制片人总算对好音乐有点概念了。但在Henry Jackman的《美队2》里，那段旋律却被完全抛弃。
《美队2》的音乐从一开始就很差劲，而且越听越可怕。开头的《Lemurian Star》融合了《谍影重重》和《盗梦》，《Project Insight》 应该就是所谓Henry Jackman式的人物主题，根本不能给人留下任何印象，《The Smithsonian》至少带着些美国风，但是很短。但如果听到这里然后想：哦，这没那么差，那么接下来的《Fury》，马上便会告诉你它有多糟。这种电子音乐的轰炸似乎和爆米花电影契合度还算不错，但一旦脱离电影就呵呵了。这就像是小夜曲后面跟着冬兵，乱七八糟的哔哔声四处飞溅。想象一下你掉到一口井里，腿受伤了，密集的雨点从天而降，将井渐渐灌满，你只能看着水慢慢上涨，却不能动弹，电话也不在服务区，不得不听着那噼里啪啦的雨点。死亡只是时间问题。相信我，这种感觉就像天堂而来的人不幸听到了《冬兵》。更糟的是，还有48分钟，48分钟的煎熬。没错，大量千篇一律的爆米花动作片配乐。这种形式顶多制造出一张平庸的娱乐专辑，而这种音乐的门槛则是极低的。有时候他们会试着注入一些情感，不时地在其中穿插一些由弦乐和钢琴演奏的伤感主题，这真是鲁莽过时的配乐方式。如果这种音乐出现在一个动作片配乐里，那可真是不妙。美队2的配乐本可以更好。
我在网上看到一些关于配乐师的有趣讨论，从一个新鲜的角度谈论了现代电影音乐面临的挑战。这些低质量作品的出现是谁的责任？配乐师，还是制片人？当今最有影响力的配乐师汉斯•季默给出了一个明确的答案：这取决于配乐师，由配乐师来决定他想写哪些他感兴趣的音乐，并让制片人相信让他上没错。可是谁知道这部配乐怎么了，我很难相信Henry Jackman早上起床，接着满怀激情投入到音乐当中，却写出了和成百上千现代动作配乐如出一辙的东西。那他做这些干什么？他是不是认为这就是制片人想要的，因为这似乎是他们都想要的，于是他自己写出了这些低水准作品？或者他真的认为电影音乐就该像这样？显然我不知道答案。Henry Jackman是一个很有才华的作曲家【靴子喵、破坏王就很不错】，难道他不是因此才干这一行的吗？我可能不太公平，也许这种配乐正是他所迷恋的，而且他确实坚信电影配乐就是这样写。这样一来，对于那些他感到很勉强的镜头前，我也许会更难过。但我也承认我对此不甚了解，甚至有些脱节，说不定这些作品会给予无数青少年以启迪，正如以前一代人受《宾虚》和《星战》的影响一样。
这和我心目中的好配乐差得太远。他们似乎根本就没有想要给这部电影一个独一无二的身份，于是自始至终都没有任何新意，同过去十年里这类配乐一个样。电影很黑暗，到处都不见光明——这就是音乐告诉我们的。它告诉我们一切都很悲惨，一切都很阴郁，我们不妨放弃，因为没有任何美好的希望，这有意思吗？诚然，并非所有东西都一定要充满光明与欢乐，但如果始终这么悲剧这么简单，没有情感的抒发，没有戏剧性的伏笔，谁愿意听？
什么时候制片人才会对他们说，抱歉，我们不要一个只会模仿季默的人，你的音乐、你的风格都去哪儿了；什么时候作曲家能敢于对制片人说，你想要这样的音乐，行啊，曲库里多得是，有什么必要来花大价钱买“原创”两个字……我做这么多就是为了替你的电影贴些和别家一样的墙纸？我想做的，是让你的电影更完美，而且能带有我的激情，以及我倾注其中的灵魂。
可是谁知道呢。或许会有这么一天吧。但同时，我们还得一直面对这类。。。唉。不得不说，这部作品简直就是烂作（安德的游戏、特种部队2，说的就是你们）中的拖拉机。讽刺的是，季默常常同他们被归为一类，然而事实上，他本人反而挺有创新精神，他可以很疯狂【说的是独行侠里敲铁轨么】，有时候很精彩，有时候很可怕。但至少他敢于创新！他的徒弟们，则吸收了师傅的糟粕，对精华视而不见，急于抹去一切带有个人风格的作曲痕迹，弄出令人作呕的配乐快餐，一个个都从一个模子里刻出来，与电影音乐的本质相悖。真令人伤心。
Composed by Henry Jackman
Hollywood Records / 2014 / 75m
Captain America is back in The Winter Soldier, three years after his first film. It seems likely that the extraordinary success of the Marvel films will continue, with an outing very different from his “origin story” that was the focus of the earlier film; this time round the Captain is in the modern world and has to do battle with the nasty winter soldier. The film is directed by Anthony and Joe Russo, who have worked extensively in television comedy (and also made the amusing Welcome to Collinwood a few years back) and they’ve already signed up to make the next film in the series, to be released in 2016.
Captain America: The First Avenger was a bit of a musical turning point for the Marvel series; there had been some good music in the series before but rarely sustained across a whole score, but Alan Silvestri finally did the obvious thing and wrote the first truly memorable character theme in the series – and what a great theme it was. It made cameo appearances in Silvestri’s own score for The Avengers and also in Brian Tyler’s Thor 2 – finally, a bit of musical continuity. The filmmakers had seen sense. But it doesn’t appear anywhere in Henry Jackman’s sequel score – and indeed sense is something notable by its absence throughout.
The album starts badly and proceeds to get much worse. The utterly generic opening piece “Lemurian Star” blends the same tired old Bourne action ostinatos and the now-ludicrous, laughable Inception HORN OF DOOM with some obnoxious electronics; “Project Insight” introduces what is presumably Jackman’s own theme for the main character, an instantly forgettable piece of fluff; at least “The Smithsonian” features some pleasant Americana, though it only lasts a few seconds. But if you listen to that and think – oh well, it’s not that bad – then you get to “Fury”. And you realise that yes, it’s that bad and then some. Suddenly there’s an assault of electronics. It may work just fine in the film but it’s utterly repulsive away from it. And yet… it’s like a nice rendition of “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik” compared with what follows in “The Winter Soldier”, which sounds like Ross’s keyboard music in Friends, apparently randomly-placed bleeps and squirts appearing every few seconds, exceptionally silly synth parts that are like vintage 1980s Casio, sudden jumps between incredibly loud and incredibly quiet, occasional transitions from awful parts to somehow even worse parts. Imagine for a moment falling down a deep well, breaking both legs, the well gradually filling up with water thanks to heavy rainfall – you can see the water level rising, you can’t move, your phone has no reception – that constant drip-drip-drip – death is imminent – it’s only a matter of time. Believe me, that experience would be like manna from heaven to anyone unfortunate enough to listen to “The Winter Soldier”.
To make matters worse – there are still 48 minutes to go. 48 minutes of slow, painful torture. Yes, there are plenty of rubbish Remote Control generic action scores, just as there are some enjoyable ones. At its best, the style can yield a generic-but-entertaining album. Some moments here are like that. The bar is very low and occasionally the music reaches it. There’s even an attempt at times to inject some emotion – what a foolhardy, old-fashioned concept of what a film score might be used to do – with a vaguely elegiac theme that crops up now and then on strings and piano. If it appeared on one of those three-star generic Remote Control action scores, you’d think it was the worst thing about them. It’s by a million miles the best thing about Captain America: The Winter Soldier.
I’ve read some interesting discussions on the internet recently between film composers, opening up in a way that is rare but refreshing about the challenges of modern film music. Who is to blame for dreck like this – is it really the composers, or is it the filmmakers? The most unequivocal answer came from the most influential film composer of the day, Hans Zimmer – it’s up to the composer to write music he is passionate about and convince the filmmakers that his way is the way to go. Who knows what happened on this score – I find it very hard to believe that Henry Jackman gets up in the morning and becomes passionate about writing music that sounds like offshoots from literally a hundred other modern action scores. So, why did he do it? Did he assume this is what the filmmakers wanted, because this is what they all seem to want, and so he deliberately wrote below himself? Or did he truly believe this is the best score the film could receive? Obviously I don’t know the answer to that. Henry Jackman is a talented composer – surely this isn’t truly what he wants to be writing? I may be being unfair – this may be exactly the sort of thing he’s passionate about writing and he really does believe that this is how to score a film – in which case I’d probably be even more upset than in the scenario where he feels forced into it (while acknowledging as I must that perhaps I am hopelessly out of touch and there are loads of youngsters who will become as inspired by music like this just as much as previous generations were inspired by Ben-Hur and Star Wars). There may be far more to it than I could comprehend – that isn’t difficult, because I comprehend very little, being just a computer keyboard warrior of such limited brain.
I do know that this is the polar opposite of film music – indeed, of music – that I would ever consider to be any good. There is seemingly no attempt at all to give the film a unique identity – it’s all a generic wash of the same tired old sound that Remote Control (and more recently, a lot of others) have been churning out for the last decade. There is no sense of fun, anywhere – maybe the film’s darker, maybe there isn’t a single light moment in it anywhere – that’s what the music’s telling us. It’s telling us that everything is miserable, everything is bleak, we may as well give up because there’s no hope of anything good happening – it is utterly without pleasure. Not everything has to be bright and happy; but if you’re as miserable as this and as simple as this, it’s really hard to see the point, harder still to see what would possibly make someone ever want to hear it. There’s no expression of feeling, no dramatic undercurrent.
When will filmmakers grow a pair of balls and reject this sort of approach to their films – when will they say that no thanks, we don’t want you to sound like a fourth-rate Hans Zimmer impersonator, we want you to sound like you. When will composers grow a pair of balls and say – if you just want it to sound like everything else then just licence some library tracks, save yourself a million bucks by not commissioning an “original” score that sounds exactly like everything else – my job is to give you a score that doesn’t just sit in your film and act as musical wallpaper, it actually makes your film better than it otherwise could do – and it sounds like me because I’m a passionate creative person and my music is me. Who knows. One day maybe. In the mean time, we’ll keep on getting this sort of garbage; I have to say, even in the stupefyingly bad context of this sort of thing (Ender’s Game, GI Joe 2, you know what I mean) this is the absolute pits. The ironic thing is that the composer most often tarred by the brush of this rubbish produced by his associates, Hans Zimmer, actually dares to do different things in his own scores – he has crazy ideas, sometimes it’s brilliant and sometimes it’s appalling, but at least he dares. His disciples seem completely the opposite, obsessively removing all distinguishing compositional features and churning the tasteless gloop that seeps out into an endless stream of mass-produced film score McNuggets, indistinguishable from one another and a world away from what film music can actually do. It’s desperately sad.
Rating: No stars
英语差，请海涵。
- 表演者: Henry Jackman
- 发行时间: 2014-03-17
- 流派: 原声
- 出版者: Hollywood Records
- 专辑类型: 专辑