Birthday Tunes

So, it was my birthday a week ago, and to treat myself, I went on a bit of a shopping spree on iTunes, spending 5 whole dollars!  As you know, I love film scores, and some times, soundtrack albums consist of just 1 totally awesome piece of score, and 11 crappy pop songs.  And then I realized, thanks to iTunes, I could buy that 1 piece of awesome score and skip the rest.  So I decided to finally go for it and grab a few that I'd been eying on iTunes.  And since I feel that music must be shared, I'm sharing my purchases on my blog.

What did I get?

Opening Titles from Crocodile Dundee - composed by Peter Best

Always love this.  It has a great "descending into wilderness" vibe to it.




The Captain America March from Captain America - composed by Alan Silvestri

Alan Silvestri is one of the best composers working today.  Of course, I still fondly remember his stuff from the 1980s, believing his Back to the Future score to be the stuff of legend.  With the glut of superhero films, I was waiting to hear him tackle a superhero theme, and I got my wish when he did the music for Captain America.  For some reason, The Captain America March -- which is the end credits music for Captain America -- didn't appear on the actual soundtrack album.  Too bad, because it's when Silvestri's "Captain America Theme" sounds its biggest and most heroic.



Can You Dig It? (Main Titles from Iron Man 3) - composed by Brain Tyler

In my opinion, though, there aren't a lot of great superhero themes out there, as most movie music just start to sound the same after a while.  So I was pleasantly surprised by Brian Tyler's music for Iron Man 3.  While it wasn't anything spectacular, at least Tyler finally gave us a good heroic theme for Iron Man that I could pick out of the score.  And Can You Dig It?, the variation of Tyler's Iron Man theme that plays over the end credits, is big and jazzy and beautiful.



007 - composed by John Barry

John Barry did the music for the majority of James Bond films, and is long accredited with creating Bond's musical style.  For the first James Bond movie he composed in its entirety, the second Bond movie From Russia With Love, Barry created a special "action theme" to accompany the James Bond films' biggest action sequences.  He called this theme 007, and he slipped it into most of James Bond scores, ending with Moonraker in 1979, as he felt the theme was starting to sound kind of dated.  That being said, 007 has firmly established itself as another piece of iconic James Bond music.



Finale from The Lone Ranger - composed by Hans Zimmer;contains exerts of The William Tell Overture composed by Gioachino Rossini.

For my birthday movie this year, I saw The Lone Ranger, and as I said in my earlier review, what really made the film for me was the climactic train chase.  What really enhanced the scene is it's in the only time in the film that The William Tell Overture (pop culturally known as "the Lone Ranger Theme") is used in a gigantic, epic way.  And of course, Hans Zimmer and his team do their thing to it to turn it into a modern day action score.  I'll probably wind up buying the entire soundtrack for the Lone Ranger, as I did enjoy Zimmer's score for the Sherlock Holmes films, and Zimmer's score for The Lone Ranger does come across as Sherlock Holmes sampling William Tell.