Retail Therapy

Friday was just a crummy day for me.  I couldn't put my finger on it.  Things were just a little off.  So to cheer myself up, after work I went on to iTunes and had myself a $5 shopping spree.  I was hoping to get that cute song that Howard wrote for Bernadette on last week's episode of The Big Bang Theory, but it hasn't been released to iTunes Canada yet.  So I just started going down my wish list and grabbing the few movie themes I'd been wanting.


Main Titles from Quigley Down Under composed by Basil Poledouris

When I did a Fishing in the Discount Bin on Quigley Down Under, I was surprised by how many of my friends liked it on Facebook and said that they enjoyed that movie.  It seems to be a movie that nobody hates.  If you've forgotten, Tom Sellick plays a sharpshooter from the Old West who takes up a job working for a cattle baron in Australia.  When the cattle baron wants Quigley to murder the aborigines on his land, Quigley says no, and they duke it out across the Ouback.  Part of the film's charm has to be the very traditional Western score composed by Basil Poledouris, who also brought us RoboCop and Conan the Barbarian.




Father's Funeral from Hellboy composed by Marco Beltrami

Back in the summer, I re-watched the Hellboy movies to get me ready for Pacific Rim (all directed by Guillermo del Toro, in case you're wondering about the connection).  Watching the first Hellboy again, I was instantly taken by this haunting tune, played when Professor Broom, Hellboy's adopted father, passes away.  Just a very sad tune.




Arrival to Earth from Transformers composed by Steve Jablonsky

When I first saw Michael Bay's Transformers in the summer of 2007, nothing about Steve Jablonsky's score struck me as remarkable.  I was in the minority, though, as an overwhelming demand from the film's fans got the score its own album release.  And I'll admit, watching the movie many, many times over the past few years, it's really grown on me.  This is the music played when the Autobots arrive on Earth.  I must agree with an online critic...with how ridiculous his Transformers movies tend to be, this is one of the few scenes that Bay treated with a real sense of gravitas.




The Avengers by Alan Silvestri

Holy moly, why did it take me so long to get this?  Silvestri is already a pretty legendary composer, with a career stretching back to the early 1970s.  And, the big Back to the Future geek that I am, I've listened to his Back to the Future score for ever.  Doing the music for The Avengers was actually Silvestri's second turn at a Marvel score, as he also did Captain America.  In fact, if you listen very carefully to Silvestri's Avengers score, you'll notice he did slip in his Captain America theme for a few moments of Cap's heroics.  Silvestri's main theme for The Avengers was a pretty good superhero theme.  And my I say, on my iPhone playlist, it dovetails quite nicely with the Captain America theme.