The kid wanted to see Bridge To Terabithia this weekend, so we went. It's actually pretty good, much better and more emotionally honest than you would expect from a movie produced by the Moral Uplift factory of Walden Media and released by the Disney empire.
Unfortunately...
As with most movies these days, the credit Music Supervisor appears before a credit for a composer. A music supervisor's job is to spot a movie for sequences that might be able to feature a potential hit single or two (or three, or however many may be necessary to fill a "Songs Featured In And Inspired By" soundtrack album).
Music supervisors have been a part of movies forever, from the nameless studio functionaries who coordinated the music in AIP Beach Party movies to the hapless Gordon Zahler, who received credit for merely compiling library tracks for no-budget wonders like Ed Wood's filmography. And that's fine, music supervisors are an important part of filmmaking, and certainly deserve credit.
But they've taken over in recent years, and the determination of studios and music superviors to use movies to sell albums hurts the movies. In the case of Bridge To Terabithia, the story is occasionally interrupted by pointless montages scored to bland tweener pop, which doesn't fit the mood of the film, and seemingly comes out of nowhere. It doesn't ruin the movie--though the abrupt appearance of a you-can-do-it anthem over the end credits does kind of kill the impact of the final scene--but it does diminish it.
The rise of the gratuitous pop song has gone hand in hand with the devaluation of the original score. Aaron Zigman's score for Terabithia is frankly nothing special, but it's buried so far down in the mix, it's hard to hear it anyway. Most scores these days are just noise, just another sound effect on an already bombastic track, and they have very little impact.
Too bad. Think of famous movies of the past. Try to imagine Gone With The Wind without Max Steiner's swooping strings, or The Great Escape without Elmer Bernstein's great march. Many of the great directors understood the importance of music, and considered the composer an important part of their team. Consider the great work of Alfred Hitchcock and Bernard Herrmann, Sergio Leone and Ennio Morricone, Federico Fellini and Nino Rota, Francois Truffaut and Georges Delerue. There are directors today who recognize the value of an original score--David Cronenberg's always fascinating work with Howard Shore, or Tim Burton's with Danny Elfman--but they are rare.
Not every movie needs a musical score, of course, and the use of pop songs can be artistically valid, but only if the director supervises their use. (Martin Scorsese remains the gold standard when it comes to this approach, even though his instincts failed him miserably in The Departed.) But the vast majority of movies are assembly line jobs, and music is unfortunately considered just another option. The fact that the prominent use of music in a contemporary style might date an otherwise good movie in a few years is of no interest to the suits in charge. They make money, not art.
