ME AND THE MUSIC OF THE MOVIES

Basically, it's wasted on me.

I'm not good with movie scores, to put it mildly. 90% of the time I don't even notice that the

movie has music at all. Occasionally, a brief segment will make aware of the score, but

usually these are negative moments. It's either, "wow, that music doesn't fit what's on screen,"

or, even worse, "good lord who wrote that lousy music and why does it exist?"

Occasionally, the music is so powerful that it's undeniable: PSYCHO, 2001: A SPACE

ODYSSEY, ROCKY, some others.

But most of the time, it just slides right past me as if it wasn't even there.

So, of course, I recently took a YouTube "Identify the Movie by Its Music" quiz. Of course

I did.

60 movies were included in the quiz and I had seen every one of them. I identified exactly

13 by the music sampled. That was actually better than I'd expected, but, truth be told, the

quiz included some particularly famous or memorable themes.

These are the titles I got: JAWS, JAMES BOND THEME, TITANIC, ROCKY, MISSION IMPOSSIBLE, GHOSTBUSTERS, PSYCHO, EXORCIST, GODFATHER,

HALLOWEEN, BRAVEHEART, THE THIRD MAN, THE SEARCHERS.

Here, plucked from a long list, are a few I did NOT get:

     STAR WARS (after listening to about one second of music, I shouted, “SUPERMAN!”

Of course I quickly recognized my error, but too late. I got it wrong)

    THE GOOD THE BAD AND THE UGLY (knew it was a spaghetti western, guessed

the wrong one.)

    SHREK

    INCEPTION

    HARRY POTTER

    HUNGER GAMES

    LORD OF THE RINGS

    AVATAR

    UP

    and to my eternal shame, THE SHINING.

I also didn’t get DR. STRANGELOVE, but I don’t count it against myself because

it was a cheat. They played a rendition of “When Johnny Comes Marching Home”, a

song which is definitely integral to STRANGELOVE, but the version they played was

not from the movie and had a much different sound.

And, possibly worst of all, I half-heartedly guessed that the SCHINDLER’S LIST

music was actually from…YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN.

So sue me.