Word: elfman
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...green glob dances. In one of the more fantastic scenes in recent Disney films, the filmmakers decide to let loose. The story screeches to a halt, the characters are silenced, and flubber performs the mambo. Pulsating to Danny Elfman's spectacular score, the dozens of energetic lumps of goo twist and turn around the room. They organize themselves in pairs, in kick lines, in symmetric circles. It's hilarious and wondrous to behold. The dazzling scene is a classic one--it almost makes the whole movie worthwhile...
Perhaps the best thing about "Men in Black"--besides Danny Elfman's deliciously campy score--is its ending sequence, in which Earth is visually reduced to an alien's plaything. This and occassional lines from Jones referring to Earth as a little backwater planet almost smack of Douglas Adams. Too bad he didn't have a hand in writing the script...
...along with his otherworldly harmonies for Apollo 13; Elliot Goldenthal's dashing romp through Batman Forever; Michael Kamen's lounge-lizard gloss on the great Latin lover Don Juan de Marco; and James Newton Howard's swashbuckling music for the otherwise waterlogged epic Waterworld. Together with the idiosyncratic Danny Elfman (Batman, Pee Wee's Big Adventure) and the rhapsodic Trevor Jones (The Last of the Mohicans, Cliffhanger), not to mention such still active veterans as Jerry Goldsmith (Basic Instinct), Ennio Morricone (Wolf) and, foremost among them, John Williams, whose 1977 score for Star Wars single-handedly revived the Technicolor genre...
Despite all the cautionary tales, they keep coming. Disney, last year's disastrous Newsies notwithstanding, seems on the verge of turning its hegemonic attentions to live-action musicals: the studio has the splendid composer Danny Elfman (The Simpsons, Tim Burton's films) and Alan Menken, & Newsies' composer, each developing a new live-action movie musical, plus Oliver Stone in preproduction on Evita...
Catherine O'Hara, Paul Reubens and Elfman provide voiceovers which match the exaggerated style and music. The cackling trio of children voiced by these three are the standouts. The humans and Christmas characters are suitably subdued. The actors voicing them wisely refrain from trying to keep up with their ghoulish co-stars...