Mao's Last Dancer (Soundtrack) by Christopher Gordon - Review

A Dance to Remember
Review by Marius Masalar

The music of CHRISTOPHER GORDON will no doubt already be familiar to readers of Tracksounds since we recently covered the Australian’s dark score for DAYBREAKERS. In that review, I mentioned that GORDON’s most notable score was not DAYBREAKERS or MASTER AND COMMANDER, but MAO’S LAST DANCER, and now that the film has been widely released in theatres since August, it’s finally time to take a closer look at this fine score that earned him a Best Original Score award from the American Film Institute.

Considering the almost documentary-level intimacy of the story, it’s no surprise that the musical score is, for the most part, quite reserved. That being said, when highlighting the movie’s most dramatic moments, GORDON allows himself to unleash the full breadth of his considerable musical abilities. This is immediately evident in the rousing and mystical opening track, “Out of the Well” (1). The film’s primary theme is introduced softly on a Chinese flute before the more active secondary theme takes over. Over the course of just under two and a half minutes, we are presented with an extremely attractive and charismatic blending of Eastern and Western sensibilities with some very idiomatic writing for both hemispheres of instrumentation.

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Daybreakers (Soundtrack) by Christopher Gordon - Reviewed

An Undying Genre
Review by Marius Masalar

Among the stream of recent media ventures capitalizing on the craze started by a certain author who castrated the vampire myth with her book series, it’s refreshing to see a more sober and — dare I say — authentic rehash. The Spierig brothers wrote and directed an interesting genre clash in DAYBREAKERS, landing somewhere in the sci-fi/vampire horror crossover zone that the BLADE series inhabits, and yet managing to be sufficiently distinctive.

In an appreciated break from expectation, this film’s dark sci-fi world is graced with a primarily orchestral score by talented Australian composer CHRISTOPHER GORDON, whose work was probably not familiar to American audiences until MASTER AND COMMANDER. GORDON has had a fruitful year, with this score and MAO’S LAST DANCER, from last year, thrusting him into the limelight and earning him an award for Best Original Music at the AFI awards in December. While MAO’S LAST DANCER deserved its award and showcased the best of GORDON’s talent, DAYBREAKERS falls a little short, providing a largely inconsistent underscore of significant orchestral might but little sophistication, occasionally punctuated by gorgeous interludes.

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