I started with the OST and like it! Good performances, a healthy representative mix of jazz, classical inspirations and good old film music, arranged not badly. The Eiger is a pretty meh finale, I like it better with the extra tracks put after it, works out great. Source music is okay, kind of just generic 70s background music, not especially fun or interesting to me.
And then the film score - holy moly. The performances are better, the cues themselves are better, the sound is INCREDIBLE, this 46 year old 3-track mono source sounds like it was recorded yesterday! I don't know how much Mike had to do but the end result is mindblowing. The first half is about what one expects, a varied damn good score for a mediocre movie. Felicity introduces the classicalesque element early so the Montage is more like a return, I like that. Also a lot of jazzy cues, i love that. Also lots of great main theme renditions, I love that. Also early on it can feel more like a small Morricone-esque, europeany sounding score almost blending into source, then the film scory film score grows out of it gradually. Cue combinations don't stand out at all, executed perfectly, even nonchrono ones like Top of the World.
But then comes the latter half. An utterly gorgeous whole different kind of score the music grows into. A blend of cold icy textures, relentless unforgiving snowy soundscapes and emotional or melancholy main theme statements, this section is incredible. I don't know what goddamn movie JW was watching, it sure as hell wasn't the same one I did! Or he scored the movie he wanted it to be, drawing on the core ideas and possibilities, not the execution - hell, rather than scoring 4 spies or whoever going up a mountain but then coming down but then dying, with a cloudy motivation for the hero that's 100% abandoned and unexplored until it's over, to me this felt more like JW closing the book on this chapter of his life with Barbara's death and everything, right before the watershed moment was coming with Jaws, as if he knew. Absolutely fantastic.
So overall it ends up being somewhat of a blend of Long Goodbye, a tiny bit of Images, Earthquake (so I'm told) and Black Sunday - but ends up growing past them in the latter act into something greater than all of them.
I won't ask for a replacement disc for this kind of mistake, if I ever listen to the disc, it's unnoticeable, just the master playing through as intended, and I fixed my rip in literally a minute. Unfortunate but of a better kind.
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