Review: Rollerball soundtrack
Published August 12, 2002
DAH-DA-DA, DAH-DA-DA-DA-DA-DAH-DUM: Stopped by the Barnes & Noble in the Citibank building near the hotel Nina and I are staying at, and wandered through the music section. Just for giggles, I looked for the soundtrack for 1975's Rollerball, the music to which I've always liked, but could never find, because it was never actually issued on CD, and the original album must have had a very short pressing, judging by how quickly it was out of print after the film left theaters.
Until now.
I had to double-check the cover to make sure it wasn't the scraping-the-bottom-of-the-remake-barrel-version with Jean Reno, LL Cool J and Rebecca Romijn-Stamos. Fortunately, it wasn't. I was holding the real deal, from the film starring James Caan, directed by Norman Jewison, with the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by André Previn.
Rollerball was made during that fallow period of science fiction films that bracketed Stanley Kubrick's epic, but elegiac 2001: A Space Odyssey (still the best science fiction film, ever. If you have an evening to kill, I'd be happy to tell you why, how it was made, what the ending means, etc.) and George Lucas' Star Wars, which proved there was an enormous market for science fiction, provided it was fun, fast paced, and didn't require a whole lot of brain cells to be engaged while watching it.
I won't go into depth about Rollerball, the movie, because I've already written about it a couple times, first as a 1998 review of the DVD, and more recently, in an email to Orrin Judd, which he graciously posted (with my blessings) on the Brothers Judd book review site (as opposed to the Brothers Judd Blog).
A few moments ago, I called 2001 elegiac. Not surprisingly (because every science fiction film made after 2001 borrowed in some way from it until Ridley Scott created a bold future-retro look for Blade Runner (which every science fiction film set on Planet Earth made after it seemed to borrow from)), elegiac was the word for the soundtrack of Rollerball. Perhaps because Kubrick made such good use of Khachaturyan's Saber Dance adagio, Previn (or perhaps Jewison) suggested Albinoni's classic Adagio, which had already been used to nice effect in Orson Welles' suitably creepy version of Kafka's The Trial.
While the tune most associated with Rollerball is Bach's demonic sounding Toccata in D minor (notice how accurately I nailed the melody in my attempt at scat-typing above), the soundtrack always appealed to me because of its early 20th century classical compositions by Shostakovich and the afore mentioned Albinoni (I know, but see the footnote). There's a headiness to those harmonies, a slight dissonance, particularly on the Shostakovich pieces, without entering into the clanking silliness of most 12-tone pieces (which signaled the death knell for 20th century classical music as a creative force, until, arguably, Philip Glass's minimalism and much more understated harmonies).
- Review: Rollerball soundtrack
- Published: August 12, 2002
- Type: Review
- Section: Music
- Filed Under: Music: Soundtracks
- Writer: Ed Driscoll
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Hey people, a movie is a movie...why are we watching? Last time I checked, movie stars and the high end crew make lots and lots of money to make movies. Right? So why are we bitching on every movie review internet site that this movie completely blew? Of course the movie was bad. Of course it was terrible. The name of the movie is "Rollerball." Was that not an indication of what you were about to see? It tires me so to see bad reviews for movies. Most movies are not exceptionally good, like life for most people is not exceptionally good. But this movie, like most to all "not exceptionally good" movies allow the regular (majority) person to be somewhere else for a while. And it is damn fun to be somewhere else for a while. It always feels good to be there. Somewhere else. And that is exactly where this movie, and every average movie takes us...to somewhere else. Regardless of how average to below average to excellent a movie is to each person, somewhere else is a great place to be. I wish every movie was perfect and ideal and just plain spectacular, but I know that I can only love the truly great ones by knowing the average and less exist. And as great as the great ones are and will always be, I need the average ones just as much, because the real movie lover loves the thrill of the hunt.
I was amazed when I first saw this movie in the theatre. For those that understood the background scheming and dealing, it is the ultimate horror movie in that it represents a corperate society that has killed the spirit of man leaving nothing but the shallow masses that follow a brutal game as the only accepted outlet. The idea that life is decided by the corperate oligarchy is a horror nightmare that is almost becoming true with the globalization of corperations. They are no longer bound by the laws of any one nation and do as they see fit with impunity. This movie was a shocking vision of the future that can very easily come true. James Caan played the fly in the corperate ointment with the utmost perfection and threatened the corparte view that the individual is no longer important and is now an asset that is manipulated for convenience and the maintenance of power. He was not a heroic character but someone who did not want to give up something that was a part of his life.
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Rollerball to me was about the imagery. The stark modernism of early 70's Munich was such a perfect choice for this films locations. I just love the coldness of it. A promise of this antiseptic future free of the impending misery that many doomsayers predicted back in the 70's. I never thought of it as a repudiation of leftist ideals but the more I look at this imperfect film, the more I understand it to be such a damning criticism of the leftist utopia. Comfort is not freedom. These so-called corporations that control this vision of the future don't really act like capitalist enterprises at all. They represent this nanny-like state of existence we see today that threatens to weaken all of western society. They want to take away all risk. All chance. All daring. The "suits" become more powerful than the cowboys. Litigation replaces sweat and fists. Jonathan E. is the cowboy. I wonder if this was Jewison's intent. I plan on buying the soundtrack.
Thanks.