NOTES ON A SCANDAL: GREAT PERFORMANCES: HORRIBLE MUSICAL SCORE BY PHILLIP GLASS

NOTES ON A SCANDAL

Rotten Tomatoes On (Notes On A Scandal)

VERY FINE REVIEWS; NOT AS CONCERNED WITH MUSICAL SCORE AS I AM!

IMDB.com (Notes On A Scandal: Full Cast Links)

Yahoo Movie (Full Screen Trailer Available)

What Other Reviewers Have To Say About My Complaint:

The score, by Philip Glass, is a study in egregiousness—the usual busy undercurrents with a top layer of bombast.

Accompanied by a Philip Glass score that rolls along without building to a climax.

Combined with a shrieking, hyperbolic troubling Philip Glass score.

The bold music dominates almost every scene, expressing the inner turmoil of Dench's character while also attempting to drive the pace of the movie. At times it is almost too heavy handed, and makes the movie feel rushed.

Philip Glass' score is all over the thing, foisting the menace and the threat of violence every second. It is over the top and over done constantly clubbing away like an aluminum baseball bat beating a dead horse!

The Academy Award Nomination is without merit, a tragic error.

The novel is presented to the reader in the form of a manuscript written by Barbara Covett, a history teacher in her early sixties who has set herself the task of minutely recording all the details of the case. Spanning a period of almost two years, her manuscript starts in the autumn of 1996, when she encounters for the first time Bathsheba Hart, the new pottery teacher at St George's, where Covett herself has been teaching for more than two decades. The report ends some time in June 1998.

It soon turns out that Barbara is neither a reliable nor a disinterested first person narrator. An old spinster, she is a very lonely woman who, willy-nilly, has learned "to construct an entire weekend around a visit to the launderette or to sit in a darkened flat on Halloween night, because you can't bear to expose your bleak evening to a crowd of jeering trick-or-treaters". Although she is eager to make friends with work colleagues she has not been able to make those friendships last as she seems to be too possessive, domineering and generally in the habit of looking down on people who, for some reason or other, do not live up to her arbitrary standards.

When Sheba Hart joins the staff of St George's Barbara immediately senses that they might become friends. However, she soon finds out that Sheba, who is thirty-seven, is married with two children—her eleven year old son, Ben, has Down's Syndrome—and leading a fulfilled, busy life. What is more, Sheba seems to be associating with some of the teachers Barbara considers beneath her. Eventually, however, Barbara and Sheba do become acquainted when, on the spur of the moment, Sheba invites Barbara for Sunday dinner with her family. ("I wondered if I ought to make some nod to the notion of having to consult my diary. But I thought better of it. I didn't want to risk her glimpsing the white wastelands of my appointmentless weeks.")

In her very first term at St George's, Sheba falls in love with a 15 year old student named Steven Connolly who has literacy problems. Although they frequently have sex right from the start of their relationship, and although they make love in various unlikely places—behind the kiln in Sheba's studio at school; on the floor of Steve's bedroom while his parents are away; in the basement of the Harts' house in Highgate; and, mostly, in the open on Hampstead Heath—no one ever seems to notice anything. At one point, Sheba tells Barbara a highly expurgated version of what has happened between her and Connolly, claiming only that he has tried to kiss her.

When Barbara eventually finds out about the affair on Guy Fawkes Night 1997, the response that overrides her sympathy for her friend is a sense of betrayal that she was not Sheba's confidante in the early stages of their friendship. When, some weeks after Sheba's confession to Barbara, Brian Bangs, a mathematics teacher, asks Barbara to have Saturday lunch with him in a restaurant in Camden Town, she accepts although she has always considered him a "cretin". But when she realizes that he has a crush on Sheba and is only trying to use her to get information about Sheba's private life, her hatred of Bangs, Sheba, and her life in general gets the better of her and she gives away Sheba's secret. ("'Sheba likes younger men, you know. Much younger men.' I paused a moment. 'I mean, you are aware of her unusually close relationship with one of the Year Eleven boys? '") She cannot summon up the courage to tell Sheba what she has done. Rather, she hopes Bangs will not report what she has told him.

In the film this encounter tasks place in Barbara’s home just after she has buried her cat Portia. The change and circumstances surrounding the death of Portia serve to accelerate the pace of things necessary for the film, and provides a powerful catalyst to the witches brew.

In early January 1998, however, the headmaster is informed about the illicit affair. Sheba is suspended from her job and charged with indecent assault on a pupil. Her husband demands that she leave the family home and prevents her from seeing her own children, especially Ben, except on rare occasions and only if supervised by a chaperone. While Sheba's life is quickly disintegrating, Barbara thrives on the new situation, which she considers her big chance to prove her qualities as a friend, even when the headmaster, glad to rid himself of one of his severest critics, forces her into early retirement.

The film is all about Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett , and they carry the day in wonderful performances. The remainder of the cast fades in the fog. The film is damaged seriously by the musical score of Phillip Glass. So much so that I venture the fracture inflicted by the Glass score removed this film from any chance at a “Best Film” Academy nomination. The music does not fit the mood of the film. There are moments where Glass interjects suspenseful themes appropriate to impending violent disaster that are so entirely inappropriate that you ask yourself: “What the Hell is going on here?”

The score intrudes, drowns out dialog at some points, and is so over bearing and disjointed that it hard to believe that any movie viewer will not share this perception. It is awful…Dench and Blanchett are great!

I had not intended to put this much effort into this review, but years of frustration with the music of Glass, and the fact that he does so much film scoring just provokes me to anger over his latest piece of, not only disappointing or annoying rubbish, but down right egotistically over done, over bearing scoring. This film would have been better served with no musical back ground given that which the director approved!

DOWN WITH GLASS!

Wikipedia (Philip Glass)

Philip Glass’s ideas are at their most basic, using only addition and subtraction of notes in simple scales to create “epic, hypnotic musical forms.” About as epic as a highway median and hypnotic as a stamping machine. Early Glass, ’67 or thereabout, I haven’t troubled to Google, mye dominant mood and motivation being, trash this assaultive stuff!

The trouble with Glass’s music is that it doesn’t seem to go anywhere. His greatest musical innovation was to take the parts of music one normally considers accompaniment—the rhythm and the harmony—and make them the central content. He rarely offers melodies in any conventional sense. There is also no development of musical ideas—which is perhaps the classic tradition’s most significant achievement in world music. What Glass offers instead are colorful, emotive, but largely static blocks of gorgeous sound. His Minimalist aesthetic is based on obsessive repetition. The same musical pattern, sometimes a single chord, is played over and over until it creates nervous tension in the listeners. The more closely one listens to his scores the more claustrophobic and constrained they feel as pure music.

His style of writing, the repeated rhythmic patterns, the micro-motifs, and the entrenched ‘minimalism’ just doesn’t appeal to my ear. And when Glass has written compositions that are musically appealing they end up disconnected from their stated themes. That may be unimportant to those who just generically listen. That is not me!

There was a brief moment in an earlier film “The Illusionist”, just one and very fleeting, when a little flicker of hope ignited in me in that movie score. I really wanted to see this movie and fortunately it was so well done, that it is still memorable and praise worthy despite, yet another Phillip Glass disaster and disappointment.

The first film track, unsurprisingly titled “The Illusionist”, gives the score something of a false dawn. It’s an absolutely spellbinding opening piece, in which a decadent bed of strings gives way to a deep, graceful cello passacaglia and a refined, elegant violin theme.

It’s one part John Williams, one part Wojciech Kilar, one part Michael Nyman and one part Glass, and (in my case at least) caused me to sit up and take notice. Could this, finally, be the Philip Glass score which blows me away with thematic beauty?

Sadly not, and although on the whole The Illusionist does have several other excellent moments of lyricism and grace, far too often it reverts back to the churning, repetitive Glass style which has alienated and just plain irritated me for years.

I am well aware that there is and always has been a diversity of opinion in the world of music criticism/evaluation, sometimes even physically violent, and Glass is not without his supporters. I am not sure whether it is a matter of their tastes, or they have been sucked in by his self-promotion.

It really doesn’t matter because this is a far as I go with any attempt to fair in my evaluation of his work. As extensive a collection of Classical, Orchestral music as I have; I have no glass within it, and I cannot foresee ever acquiring a single piece of his “work”.

The good moments include the arrestingly arrhythmic opening to “Do You Know Me?”, which offsets elephantine trombones against a twittering woodwind effect and rumbling percussion; the enchanting, romantic piano and woodwind theme at the end of “Chance Encounter”; the restatement of the opening motif in “The Orange Tree”; the clever harp element in “The Mirror”; the oddly mesmerizing percussion collision towards the end of “Sophie's Ride To The Castle”; the dramatic and tense “A Shout from the Crowd”; the relentlessly fluid “The Search”; and hopeful new theme and superb restatement of the main thematic material in the finale, “Life in the Mountains”.

Most of the rest of the time, though, I found myself wishing the score would do something else, like yesterday’s: go away! Part of the problem, for me at least, is the fact that I have never truly appreciated Glass’s style of writing, with its dense orchestration, endlessly repeated motifs, microtonal key shifts and staccato rhythmic centre.

At its core, The Illusionist had all the trademarks of a classic Glass work - Mishima, or Kundun, or Koyaanisqatsi. Many of the middle-album cues, from “Meeting in the Carriage” through to “Frankel Appears” tend to coagulate together in a relentlessly undulating, monotone mush which threatens to undermine the strength of other parts of the score, and certainly makes waiting for the admittedly rather good finale something of a slog. In “Notes”, the Glass score just screams and pounds relentlessly. I don’t know what he was thinking.

In a way, The Illusionist is simultaneously Philip Glass’s most accessible and frustrating work - on many, many occasions it gives a tantalising glimpse of the kind of amazingly beautiful work he is capable of writing, without ever fully embracing them, and even shows that he could write some decent action music. He never pushes the envelope enough in any one area. I fully understand that Glass is Glass, and he’ll never be anyone else, and so anyone who appreciates him or any of these other referenced works will likely find this score to their taste. The Illusionist is a score written very much in Glass’s comfort zone, which fans of his will adore, but which I found just infuriating, but unlike his “Scandals” score, one could ignore it, not so in “Notes”: that trash just INTRUDED WITH BELICOSE EGOMANICAL SCREAMING AS IF HE WERE TRYING TO COMPETE WITH DENCH AND BLANCHETT!

It is probably a good thing that I am not a professional film critic, because I would probably be inclined to post with any film review with a Glass score, a warning label like that on a package of cigarettes or can rat poison.