The Fallacy of the Like-Minded Soundtrack

Rating: Null/10 (17 September 2002)

Not bad, not great, not anything much, but it gets better as it progresses, and it ends up being more than the lump of bland nothingness that "Almost Famous" is. Herek makes only one real mistake...
I call it The Fallacy of the Like-Minded Soundtrack. This is the story of a musician from the 1980s: the "Steel Dragon" songs he slavishly reproduces, strangled high note for strangled high note, and the songs of his own (well, one of them) which he ends up singing instead. So we hear a decent amount of 80s-style rock. But what of the moments when nobody is singing? What should the soundtrack consist of then? Why ... more 80s-style rock, right?
Wrong. The actual songs, the songs that are being presented to us, come across as just another part of the musical wallpaper (which, for the first part of the movie, is just too darned relentlessly loud). You can't really HEAR when the songs that aren't part of the story end and the songs that are begin. And rock songs make poor soundtrack material even in the best of circumstances. While I'm aware that a traditional orchestral score might clash with the subject matter, and synthesised minimalist drivel is too bad in itself to be worth considering, there IS at least one other option: silence.