About “Lair”

Tonight I’m listening to John Debney’s soundtrack for Lair¹, one of the much-hyped titles unique to the PS3. The score is excellent — evocative, textured, exciting without being immature — to the point that I went to check out whatever I could find about the game’s setting at the official website. Go there, click on the Behind the Scenes link and see what may be the best concept art gallery I’ve ever seen on a video-game’s website. It’s not just pretty, but informative. It really makes me want to know more about the designers were intending for the game to be (since their testimony is the closest I’ll probably ever get, since I vow to never buy a PS3). Dragon-riding sky-knights duking it out in a war-torn, post-apocalyptic fantasy world with a full orchestral score? Sound’s terrific. Too bad… about… the game, …though.

Music: John Debney, “Elegy”

_{1. I wouldn’t have known it was even released if I hadn’t searched for it, since iTunes does such a lousy job of listing, cataloging, and announcing their soundtracks.}

Again With the Bourne Ultimatum

My excitement for The Bourne Ultimatum continues to grow. I’m looking forward not just to the movie — which is almost here — but for composer John Powell’s score for the film. (You can hear some of it at Amazon.) Both of the previous Bourne soundtracks are staples in my “Get Work Done” playlist, and are great background noise for writing and editing.

The updated Bourne Ultimatum website is excellent — this is what movie websites should be like. Instead of cluttered, jerky MySpace pages (gross), they should offer this kind of enticing setup and additional footage. Go there, enter the site, and you’ll get a nice long stretch of footage introducing you to key characters and context for the story. It’s like an extended remix of a trailer, with little tags showing you what’s what. If you want, you can get all the production notes and cast bios and all that usual stuff, too, but this is kind of footage is what you really want. Simple. Good.

Plus, we get another clever little tie in to the end of a previous Bourne movie — this time the first one. At the end of The Bourne Identity, after Abbot (Brian Cox) has had Conklin (Chris Cooper) killed and shut down Treadstone, he lies to a Congressional committee about the nature of Treadstone, and reports its closure so he can get out from any unwanted scrutiny that could lead to him getting pinched. That done, he moves on to another project, which just gets brought up to show how casually Treadstone gets shut down at the political level, and to provide us some dialogue to go over the visual transition to the Greek coast, where the movie ends.

In this dialogue, Abbot mentions a project called Blackbriar. I remember thinking, “Blackbriar’s a terrific name. Better than Treadstone.” Now we see that Blackbriar is a big part of the new movie. It’s, apparently, a “Treadstone upgrade.”

I’m sure that wasn’t an idea built into the Blackbriar reference in the first movie — deleted scenes from the first movie make it pretty clear that Doug Liman had other ideas in mind for Brian Cox’s character — but Tony Gilroy (and Co.) continue to make great use of little details in the previous movies to create a sense of tight continuity out of what was, before, just the illusion of depth. I love Tony Gilroy’s work on these films.

Next week, I’m going to see the hell out of this movie.