Practicalmadness

I find myself craving the end title themes for two films scored by Howard Shore (now best known for his work on the Lord of the Rings movies): Philadelphia, which is sort of an intimate, kinda melancholy strings-and-horns deal, and Looking for Richard, which is a choral piece reminiscent of low-budget Wagner.

In some ways, these Shore pieces are the most memorable parts of these films for me, although this could be because I have the attention span of a small rodent.

Searches on LimeWire and Gnutella are fruitless; I'm not sure these scores are even on CD, and even if they are, nobody's sharing them. (You wouldn't believe how impossible it's been to find a shared copy of Philip Glass's score for The Hours, and that one's recent and relatively popular!)

In fact, I'm pretty sure that Looking for Richard (Al Pacino's docu-fictional love letter to Shakespeare, Shakespearean acting and the conflict between American anti-aristocracy and--zzzzzz...) exists now only as a video tape I haven't accidentally stolen from Facets yet. No DVD yet, and certainly no soundtrack album on CD.

The problem with videotape is that, well, in order to get to the end title music I have to sit through Looking for Richard. Aidan Quinn aquits himself fairly decently as Richmond, but while Al Pacino is many things, my children, we find that King Richard III he most certainly is not. Winona Ryder's involvement is duly noted, but I don't remember her in the movie. I can remember the various British actors and scholars who talk about Shakespeare, and I remember various slow-motion shots of Pacino walking around on a basketball court. No Winona. The IMDb tells me she was in the movie, however, and I'm inclined to believe them.

I don't want the movies. I will take their exit music, and sell the rest for scrap.