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  • Mank. Oh dear ...

    I tried to watch Fincher's 2020 film "Mank". I just could not go further than about 15 minutes before abandoning it in disgust. I don't care if I'm in a minority of one: in my book this film sets new lows in absurdly stilted dialogue and entry-level bush league scoring.

    The Reznor-Ross scoring partnership might (or might not) come good in another 10 years or so, but right now they're nowhere near up to scratch.

    If anyone was still in any doubt that Hollywood nowadays is more interested in 'social profile' than talent as the chief criterion for backing film-makers and film score composers, Mank screenplay and score provide yet more evidence. (And yes ok Mank isn't a Hollywood production, it's a Netflix movie; and Netflix go entirely their own way without the slighest smidgeon of taking Hollywood's practices as normative, right? Suuure.)

    Hollywood (by which I mean US mainstream film-making in general) seems to be settling ever deeper into self-harming and self-sabotage. And the signs are that it'll get way worse before getting any better - assuming its salvation will ever come.

    These days I tend to favour international films. Recently I've enjoyed Max Richter's superb scores in Werk Ohne Autor (aka Never Look Away) (2018) and Ad Astra (2019); also Herbert Grönemeyer's score in A Man Most Wanted (2014). I have no doubt that plenty of real composing talent is out there, but far too little of it is finding good exposure and actual contracts.

    Ok, whinge over.  Back to my humble work. Thanks for listening - if you did. :D


  • I have to admit, I had not heard of this picture or any of the hype surrounding the score. Your strong reaction piqued my curiosity, however, so I sought the score out on YouTube. I was astonished. Not so much by the music itself, but more by the powerfully negative effect it had on you. Oh, I get it that we all have our own taste. There is music I like very much that I understand is probably not all that hot; there is also music that I don't really dig that I know to be significant works of art. I cannot comment on the film; I have not watched it, but I listened to this score in its entirety (1:33!). I doubt I will ever invest the time to repeat the experience, but it held my interest and evoked images in my mind that I have to believe are of the type the filmmaker intended to accompany and reinforce his story telling. I liked the minimalist chamber orchestra the best, but I also liked when they brought swatches of big, lush 50s Hollywood, too. The Swing Era stuff worked; especially the cues that had that Minimalist Big Band vibe (sort of like if Duke Ellington and Steve Reich had a love child). And all of it really authentically performed/recorded/produced. No, this isn't going into my regular listening rotation. But "sets new lows in...entry-level, bush league scoring? Nowhere near up to scratch?" I am not nearly musically sophisticated enough to have heard that.

    You are, of course, entitled to your opinion. Your intense dislike and offhand dismissal of this piece just surprises me, that's all. I have always read your contributions to this forum with great interest...often while nodding in agreement. In this case, I disagree. But more than that, I don't understand the criteria upon which you based your total rejection of the value of this score. For me to get anything useful out of a critique of a work of art, I need to have that. In other words, Macker, why do you think the score to Mank sucks?


  • Thanks for taking the time to respond, Tom. Your view is most welcome. Seriously, in matters of the arts I'm disinterested in unified opinion. Differences of opinion go hand in hand with the arts; I'm not only comfortable with that but often happy about it - if a work of art doesn't elicit diverse opinions then it's failing to reflect the essential nature of human existence.

    Be that as it may, I'm not convinced this film managed to produce much art at all - in terms of the screenplay and the score as a supposed artistically unified entity. I'm not concerned with either of them in isolation but both together, in that film. Scoring to film is (at least should be) an art in its own right. These two main ingredients should ideally be inextricably married, and my main criticism is the sheer amount of non-connection or incoherence between them in Mank. As one huge consequence, I was unable to engage affectually-emotionally with the film - and I'm certainly not interested in watching any film merely for its intellectual content. (To address your concern as well as I could, Tom, I went back and endured the film up to about 1hr 15mins.)

    In fairness, one could say that any film score composer would have had serious difficulty with the awful lack of affectual-emotional fluency and coherence in this film's dialogue and, most importantly, in what I guess is supposed to be the storyline. But isn't that exactly the kind of situation in which real scoring talent is most desperately needed? Reznor & Ross clearly weren't up to the task of at least mitigating if not ameliorating that situation, let alone fixing it. What we're presented with, most of the time, is the dialogue/storyline on the one hand, and the score on the other, both going in their own directions with an appalling degree of disconnect between the two.

    Spotting was also amateurish in too many places, especially in the early part of the film where the score was overly present. Spotting is an art in itself but here again the lack of tact, intuitive delicacy and emotional coherence rears its ugly head. I've no idea who is to blame for that.

    Reznor & Ross seem to have divided their efforts mainly into two categories of music - atonal and a bit weird, anomic, even schizo, on the one hand, and '40s swing/jazz band on the other. It seems they intended the atonal stuff for narrative purposes, and the swing/jazz for period-authenticity in scene setting. Perhaps my biggest complaint is that they failed miserably in trying to meld their atonal music with the screenplay.

    I've never been much of a fan of atonal music, and the Mank score simply reinforced my opinion that ET-centric atonality is extremely difficult to pull off such that it stands as genuine art, rather than a crafty evasion of art. (Goldsmith and Horner both pulled it off nicely in the Alien franchise; a rare feat.) There are a few moments in the Mank score where clearly an atonal passage comes off the rails; it may have passed as ok on piano (or perhaps electric guitar) but really should never have been given to orchestral instruments to play - in some places it just sounded out of tune or merely faulty harmony, through no fault of the instrumentalists.

    I'm totally fine with swing/jazz band stuff as such (my absolute fav being bebop) - I recall always with great pleasure that wonderful score in Billy Wilder's masterly film, Some Like It Hot. Well, I could say that in Mank the swing and jazz were a bit too much on the tepid, anaemic, simplistic side, despite being played well by skilled musicians who clearly knew what they were doing; but that's by the way. My main complaint is that it was simply detached, incidental music; nothing to do with the dialogue or storyline one is supposed to be engaged with and following on screen. It's somewhat like the old habit of TV soaps in having a radio playing contemporary pop in the background, just for scene-setting purposes. Really, for purposes of period-authenticity Fincher could have done much better by adding a few excerpts of genuine classic swing/jazz tracks at apposite moments.

    All in all, Mank is said to be a hit job on '40s Hollywood. An extremely tough and tricky assignment, yes, and I'd have enjoyed it if it worked to that end. But Netflix shot themselves in the foot with Mank - I don't suppose I'm entirely alone in having found it unwatchable.


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  • Thank you, Macker, for this thoughtful reply. I feel that I now have a better understanding of your strong negative reaction to a score that struck me as reasonably interesting and original (even if I could hear influences of this and that throughout). In fact, I was comparing apples and oranges. In my case, I listened to the score with only the vaguest understanding of the story it was written to accompany. I imagined how the cues might work to enhance a film that I was just imagining; sort of like envisioning a movie of Till Eulenspiegel after listening to the tune and reading Strauss' bare-bones outline of the story in the score. You, on the other hand, experienced the music in the context of its support of the actual movie...and found it wanting. Fair enough. At this point, I think I may give the movie a shot, if only to see how the score works for me in performing the task it was actually created for. Thanks again!


  • I didn't watch at the film, so I could listen to the soundtrack without any distraction. And I liked it very much. I'm not surprised, since I liked very much the work that Reznor/Ross did for The Social Network.

    I found a lot of mastery in this score. They dug in the styles of the referred epoch, and made very credible recreations of it. Light music and avant-garde pieces are all much in line with the time, so I guess music and picture match perfectly.

    In some way, I found this soundtrack similar to what Howard Shore has done with Cronenberg's most experimental films (Crash and The Naked Lunch), even if here we are on the lighter side of experimentation.

    So, I don't know how it works as a soundtrack, and how it is when listened with the movie, but I would say that is a well-made score, matching or not each one's tastes, but admirable in being creative and – why not? – historically informed.

    Paolo


  • Paolo, as I indicated to Tom, I'm not the slightest bit concerned here with Mank's score ripped out of context to be considered as a separate work. My comments are focused entirely on the screenplay and score as presented together in that film. It's the whole, the gestalt, the forma, that I'm referring to here, with special regard to the crucial question:- is it more than the mere sum of its parts?

    Nor am I in the least concerned here and now with the previous works of Fincher, Reznor and Ross.

    The unfortunate outcomes of Appollo 1, Appollo 13 and Space Shuttle Columbia happened despite the track record of NASA's previous projects; in these named cases the immediate task of the systems engineers was to get to grips with the current facts of these failed systems. And that's all I wanted to do here in the case of Mank (which failed for me), albeit in a far less technical and exhaustive way of course.

    I can't unravel all my systems engineer's mentality; nor would I want to - most especially not for the sake of trying to cast a kinder light on an awful screenplay and an awful film score in an awful film.

    Hasn't anyone watched this film?


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