Pablo Zumarraga, AKA ZMG, composes original scores for video games and motion pictures. Give his work for the upcoming film Thorns from a Rose a listen; you can find the trailer here. (It is gruesome enough not to embed.) Also check out his soundtrack to the Romanian-produced video game Two: Beyond Fear.

Zumarraga’s latest EP is The Sect, which has already turned up on several concurrent feeds (Black Square, Subwise, and the indefatigable Webbed Hand Records). But what convinced us to listen was the simultaneous Bumpfoot release. Good enough for Mr. Keifer is good enough for The Muse.

The horror film bona fides are not forgeries. These are vast terrains, distant war drums, growling ambiances, sudden bursts of orchestration and samples. Tracks exist beyond tempo and harmony. Some of the more industrial clips recall the work of Carlos Suarez. Don’t answer the phone. Don’t open the door. And never, under any circumstances, tell us you’ll be right back.

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Such snobbery! Tron Legacy wasn’t that bad by half. Sure, the I, Robot ethic of blue-glow good, red-glow bad got a little false dichotomy-y, repeatedly spelling ewe-gee-aitch in its abbreviated form. Sure, the plot was self-winkingly thin (check out the lead character’s disbelief before eating a computer-generated vegetable, or the antagonist’s incredulity upon discovering a grid-pillow). And sure, the dog was annoying. Aren’t they all?

But the action was half-spark, half-gasoline. The primary antagonist? Dictator, jackboot, and wartime philosopher all at once. (If by the end of the film you don’t detect at least a touch of mid-century fascism in the form of the red team, you’re watching the wrong film.) The art direction? Smashing. Refreshingly warm and unclinical. The film even boasts a somewhat intellectual (slash) Zen (slash) socio-political core, giving air time to the family of spontaneous order theories that date back to, well, Zhuangzi. Or do you believe it to be an accident that, while fixing a broken program, the programmer is surprised by a butterfly that seemed to be created by the repair process?

But what you all want to hear about is Daft Punk’s soundtrack (cue grumbling that one of your favorite artists dared score a film that wasn’t about a greedy, murderous oil goon). No, it doesn’t represent the pinnacle of their catalog, but neither does the motion picture behind it represent the height of filmmaking, either. Yet the steamy coupling of beep-boop-beep compuserve and out-to-the-horizon architectural sprawl not only conceives the ideal audio companion for a motion picture of exactly that description, it also stands on its own as a complete work of art. We must know where that drum sound came from. We must know immediately, if not sooner. The frequencies are (ahem) pitch-perfect. The strings are stringier than even these strings. And it’s a good thing there wasn’t a sex scene. We don’t even want to know how Daft Punk would have scored that part.

Film: 5 out of 10, two points of which are borrowed from the soundtrack, which scores a 7 of 10. Experience them both, together (a 12 out of 10!), then go buy only the music at one of your most hated e-tailers, say, Amazon, Insound, or eMusic.

Jonny Greenwood’s original film scores don’t get nearly the ink that they should. So let’s try our dutiful best, such as it is, to start reversing that trend right here. The Radiohead guitarist scored Bodysong and There Will Be Blood — both soundtracks are excellent. Greenwood also won the Radio 3 Listeners’ Award at the 2006 BBC British Composer Awards for his piece, “Popcorn Superhet Receiver.” And yesterday, Stereogum reported that his latest solo work will accompany the film adaptation of Haruki Murakami’s Don’t Read What Hasn’t Been Baptized by Time (agreed). A short clip is below. Be held:

The co-bloggers aren’t terribly excited about it, but hey, it beats Phil Selway’s solo work. And two minutes of silence. And a stick in the eye.

The scene will raise the hair on your arms. A young boy leafs through a book of animal classifications, some of the information contained in which he — and the audience — already knows to be wrong. He comes to the last page, the one describing an animal he has trapped in a remote glade. He is looking to confirm his own sketch, but the page is blank, and what little information he finds is ancient hyperbole, assumption, and fearmongering. So he takes his own notes and simply lays them on top of the empty page.

The animal in question is something called a Night Fury. The boy, a skinny, precocious Viking named Hiccup. And the film, DreamWorks production How to Train Your Dragon. It is a film about coming of age, about young love, about a father and son, about the old traditions and the new ways. But much more, it is a story of filling in the blind spots in our knowledge. About questioning authority, about suffering the consequences for doing so, and about ultimate triumph. In a word, the film is about enlightenment.

And to those who are wont to let out a weary sigh with that description, think back to the scene where Hiccup looks away and puts out an open hand to the reluctant dragon. Tell us with all candor that this film isn’t also about leaps of faith.

How to Train Your Dragon could only have been filmed with sketches and voiceovers. First, the technical aspects: the multitude of dragons — each breathing a different fire composition — would never have fitted into live-action footage so seamlessly. But much more, animated films allow us a different filmwatching psychology: we demand from conventional motion pictures a hyperrealism of both image and narrative. Animated features (better to use the old word here: cartoons) urge us to lower our gloves. To accept the premise, no matter how foreign. The message carries through this way.

This is not to say the message is particularly sterile or saccharine. The lead character is named after an annoying, involuntary reflex that plagues us from before our birth. His people were a pillaging, feudal society, bound to the normal medieval biases against personal and national sovereignty, and class equality. And notice that Hiccup becomes a Viking at the exact moment when he becomes a dragon: when he loses his foot in combat, and is fitted with a prosthesis.

Certainly a music site should briefly mention the soundtrack (it’s just lovely, considering), but How to Train Your Dragon is more than just a collection of sounds and images. It is that all-too-rare work of art: accessible, moving, and brainy, all at once. No review of 2010 is complete without its mention.

Stream or sample “Behold The Black Light,” here. The track begins with a plinky, troublesome still life intro with Bonnie & Slide guitar (ripped straight from the headlines!). Then, the slow-mosh drum beat; the frowny, barely-sung vocals; the child o’ goth guitar lick, and all of it dripping with that warehouse-down-yonder reverb that does it for you whether you know it or not. Like “Disappearance Of The Skyscraper” by SUUNS, it is all over far too soon. Behold? Yes, absolutely. Black Light? Sure.

While doing some reading in preparation for an upcoming post, I came across this old gem. You’d be forgiven for not knowing this was Brian Eno. (Still image alert.)

That’s from the 1984 David Lynch film Dune.

Coincidentally enough, a few years before the second set of three films showed up, I had posed the question to my wife of David Fincher directing a remake of The Empire Strikes Back. Imagine how the mind behind Alien³ and Se7en would handle the story of a gifted resistance warrior who keeps hearing the voice of his fallen master. Just before an assault on their base, he suffers a full vision of his old teacher, then collapses from exposure to the cold. In the hallucination the old man had given instructions, which the warrior remembers hazily: he is to head a remote outpost for further training. The assault comes, lead by the dictator’s second in command, who — unbeknown to all — is the warrior’s father. So the warrior heads into deep space: not in an explorer craft, not with a crew, but in a tiny, short-range fighter, alone. With an android. In deep space.

When he arrives at last, a centuries-old, reptilian creature appears: his new master. His training begins, but the warrior is still plagued with hallucinations and terrible anxieties, and with what may be visions of the near future. This way his father is able to lure him from his training, set an expected trap, then make an unexpected offer: kill the tyrant with me and we will restore peace to the universe.

I’ve taken pains not to alter the details, but nevertheless, is this the film you saw? Are you sure?

And by the way? She hated the idea of David Fincher directing the remake.

It would be hard to think up a film that more whitewashed its own gravity than The Empire Strikes Back. That is to say, hard until George Lucas produced Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith. The tyrant, years earlier, to no other ends than the expansion of power, openly sets one army against another in a war that tears a horrible swath across the galaxy and engulfs entire worlds. The first army is underwritten by a deceived separatist movement. Their soldiers are battle droids, true believers, and the occasional Sith assassin. The opposing force is a clone army, so their recruitment goals are no object, either. It is simply a matter of spawn, deploy, spawn, deploy, spawn, deploy. It is the perfect mix for the emperor’s endless war and seizure of power.

Again, are those the films you saw? Maybe David Fincher should direct remakes of episodes II, III and V.

All that said, don’t even pretend for a second that you don’t want to hear this piece of music:

Mansell, formerly of Pop Will Eat Itself, has since earned himself some pretty snappy composer credits. “Lux Aeterna” appeared in Requiem For a Dream. “Death Is The Road To Awe,” in The Fountain. Internet Movie Database lists scores for nearly three dozen films or television episodes. Here’s a sip, from Smokin’ Aces:

Times have changed.

One of the remarkable things about the film version of Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs is that, in spite of the fact that it is so radical a departure from the book, both the film and the book work on their own. The novel — hardly older than my co-blogger — reads as a warm, timeless classic: maybe not chicken soup for the soul, but certainly a steaming cup of French onion. The movie plays as urgent political satire in which two of our greatest national anxieties collide with terrifying (that is to say: hilarious) results. Yes, both are excellent pieces of art, but that the motion picture also works as a children’s film gives it a leg up on the book, which is only a children’s book. Yes, the print version has some silly, subtle visual puns (a noodle on the noodle, indeed) while the movie opts for over-the-top Yankee humor (in the same scene the victim shrieks “I’ve got a macaroni on my head!”). But I enjoyed the film much better. FLDSMDFR, indeed.

Oh, yeah: nothing to report musically. I take it that the iCarly girl is sixteen now and handling the continued, awkward transition from child star to hottie quite … awkwardly, thank you very much. The latest installment of which is the harmless non-track It’s Raining Sunshine, which she contributed to the film.

Our previous remarks on the film are here.