Music to find your blue self with #glass #watchmen
Last night I put frustration aside and I waited the 4 minutes for my Blu-ray player to start playing Watchmen. At 3+ hours it’s more film than most people have attention span for. I was captivated… A movie hasn’t done that to me at first watching since Blade Runner or Star Wars, and friends, that was a LONG time ago.
The next thing that leaped out at me was the soundtrack. There’s SO much great stuff in there. There’s only one place I can begin. Philip Glass… Oh my GOD, Philip Glass! Through the seediness, the violence, the surreal characters comes Glass’s music, clear like a crystal day. Vibrant as a latex glad heroin. Gritty as a stogie smoking righteous bad guy. My God, Glass….. Symbolic. Evocative. In-yur-frickin-face fantasic!
The tracks used in the movie are from Glass’s seminal soundtrack to the movie Koyaanisqatsi. ”Life without end”… The soundtrack to armageddon. The music that gets you off the couch and makes you run into the street ready to take on the wrongs that ale this world.
Three hours of looking at our life under a lens that shows us vulnerable, conflicted, human. Juxtapose our desire to be free with our inability to let go of the things that bind us to the torment that we deride. Riveting stuff! All the time Glass, driving home the point that without us, we are nothing. Obvious yet so often overlooked.
I confess to being a Philip Glass groupie. He of all the “experimental” and ”minimalist” composers of our day has gone the furthest to bring what was otherwise inaccessible art to the masses and has done it with such finesse and passion that to not be moved by his work is inconceivable to me. Philip Glass is bold, subtle, gentle, brutal and bizarre. Without him we would have a stunted view of the sounds around us daily and be blind feeble, beings with no hope of understanding the greater world we live in.
No matter if you love classical music or if you are avant-garde, you have to at some point come to Philip Glass and wonder at the majesty of this man’s vision and craft. He is without question the reason why modern classical music remains relevant.
And, oh yes, the movies’ pretty good too!
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Glass is one of the few composers to make dissonance and ugliness into beautiful and harmonious shards of musical artistry. Simply amazing. I think the work of Johnny Greenwood is reminiscent of Glass’ music, if only in that he takes unconventional musical form and deploys it in such ways as to make lovely and ultimately listenable songs.
As far as Watchmen–it’s incredible. I really think Zakk Snyder nailed it. I think he gets a lot of undue crap for being overly faithful to the source material (as if in this case that’s a bad thing), but I think he pulled off the trick of being faithful, reverential and referential, while deviating just enough to make it all work to become a fantastic cinematic experience in its own right.