It's the music!

Rating: 10/10 (6 November 2006)

I love Tim Burton movies in general, but I think that this one is something special. Not only do I like the characters and the story, but since there are already a bazillion comments about those things, I'd like to point out the prodigious gifts of Danny Elfman, who wrote the songs and the score for this film. He's amazing.
Of course, anyone who loves "The Simpsons" as much as I do is already an Elfman fan... and as Jack Skellington you can hear just a hint of the singing voice of Sideshow Bob!
But it's the music that just blows me away. It ranges in style from the 1920's Kurt Weill- Bertolt Brecht adaptations (right down, on occasion, to the rhythm banjo and mournful alto sax), to the Russian composers, Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev, and Shostakovich, all done with a sense of humor and homage that keeps it fresh, unlike, say, Kander and Ebb, who keep writing Weill-Brecht material to the point that there's more of their music in that particular style than there is by Weill, who figured out by the 1930's that it would only go so far, and who wrote some of the great tunes of the American theatre, as well as the incredible and underrated opera "Street Scene."
Elfman is a film composer whose work ranks with the best of (and this is high praise, indeed, coming from me) John Williams, Bernard Herrmann, and Erich Wolfgang Korngold. Even if this weren't a wonderful movie to watch (and it is) it would be a wonderful movie to hear.