17 Again (Rolfe Kent)

Albumbeschreibung

Director Burr Steers' 17 Again is a romantic comedy, specifically, one of that subgenre of rom-coms in which an older person and a younger person magically exchange bodies. Composer Rolfe Kent says that Steers explained to him "that this movie was about a man in crisis, a man who had lost his way and was energetically trying to figure it all out." The same clichés could be said about, say, Casablanca or Friday the 13th or My Man Godfrey or several thousand other movies, of course, but the message Kent took from it "was to take the drama seriously, while having a lot of fun with the energy and humour of the film." That may help explain why his score, heard by itself on this soundtrack album, doesn't really sound like the music one would expect to accompany a comedy starring Zac Efron. It does sound, at various moments, like music that could accompany Casablanca or Friday the 13th or My Man Godfrey, however. It's almost as if Kent, who has scored over 40 feature films, simply went through his library of music and randomly picked out a bunch of cues. One minute, stirring anthemic music is heard, then adventurous chase music or an action cue or a wistful, romantic interlude. Using a full-scale orchestra (billed as the Skywalker Symphony Orchestra and consisting of players recruited from around San Francisco), Kent writes agreeable enough string-based music that would function adequately in any one of many different Hollywood movies. For this one, however, it must go against type.
© William Ruhlmann /TiVo