Sometimes I'm not even sure where these come from, but after hearing that True Grit and Tron Legacy and Inception all had "repetitive" scores, I started thinking about films that truly test my patience with an over-reliance on one or two pieces of music, and this edition of Five Movies finds offenders far more egregious than any of 2010's punching bags. Take a look for yourself, and when possible, a listen:
5. The Creature from the Black Lagoon - It's not that all of the music for Creature is so tedious, but the fact that there's one theme for the Creature, and that it plays every time it appears onscreen, really robs the film of actual thrills or chills.
4. Dead Man / Human Highway - I'm lumping the two of these together because it feels like there isn't a piece of music that Neil Young doesn't love to play to death when he's in charge of the soundtrack. Dead Man's first half is punctuated by the same guitar riff played ad nauseum, which does add to the hypnotic effect of the film, but is nevertheless taxing on one's patience after a certain point. In Human Highway, we're subjected to the same Devo song ("Worried Man") every single time Devo appears on-screen during the narrative proper, so much so that it's a minor relief to hear the unbearably long "Hey Hey My My" during the film's dream sequence. That said, no sooner are we out of the dream sequence than the rest of the cast is performing "Worried Man."
3. The Graduate - I rarely have complaints about Mike Nichols' The Graduate, but its famous soundtrack, featuring music from Simon & Garfunkel, has the unfortunate tendency of playing "Mrs. Robinson" in different incarnations for most of the film (among other S&G songs). If there's such a thing as beating a song into one's head, The Graduate finds a way of doing it, and in the process sullies an otherwise entertaining piece of music.
2. Man on the Moon - Like The Graduate, R.E.M.'s score for Milos Forman's 1999 Andy Kaufman biopic suffers from the overuse of an instrumental version of one song - R.E.M.'s "Man on the Moon," which plays over and over and over again with little variation over the course of the film. Were it not such an obvious choice or not performed by the band whose song title inspired the film's title, or if it had simply been held back just a little bit, I might not be so perturbed by it, but nearly every time the film changes location, or the progression of Kaufman's life or career switches, it's back to the same old theme.
1. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring - The number one, without fail, all time worst example of "playing a theme to death" I can think of. Howard Shore has two major pieces of score for The Fellowship of the Ring, and depending which part of the movie you're watching, you'll hear them both repeatedly. Early in the film, he plays the "Concerning Hobbits" theme for all its worth:
In the second half of the film, after the fellowship is forged, Shore relies on its theme for nearly every transition, action sequence, or musical bridge:
If you've ever tried watching The Fellowship of the Ring on television, or found yourself in the second half of the film, it's embarrassing how much of a crutch this "theme" is; it's one thing to return to a theme, touch on variations of it during other pieces of music (take Danny Elfman's Batman score, for example), but to play the same theme without variation for half of a three hour movie is taking it too far. Considering how toned down the repetition is during The Two Towers and The Return of the King, it certainly seems like Shore was aware of this too.
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