Who would’ve expected to mention Ben Affleck alongside Stanley Kubrick in terms of music?

The website Film Music Reporter ran this piece on the music for Ben Affleck’s upcoming movie Air about the invention of Air Jordans, something I never imagined would be a thing.

We’re used to needle drops in film and other media, as raised to an art form by Quentin Tarantino in the 1990s and beyond. But it’s a little worrying when it seems to make original music take a back seat proportionately.

Back when a five-year-old Quentin was doing… whatever the hell five-year-olds did in 1968, Kubrick famously forwent an original score for overpraised snore fest 2001: A Space Odyssey and ensured “Thus Spake Zarathustra” would be forever to monoliths from outer space, as well as overshadowing what Wendy Carlos, Gerald Fried, and Alex North actually wrote for him. Not that Ben Affleck is ever likely to be responsible for anything with that kind of cultural impact, but the principle is the same.

Perhaps the presence of cues from Desperately Seeking Susan, Beverly Hills Cop, Firestarter (the Drew Barrymore one), Beverly Hills Cop II, and 2015’s Suffragette (scored by Alexandre Desplat… who ironically scored the Affleck-directed Argo), among others, could just be a case of temp-track love but only having a sprinkling of original scoring in there from Paul Haslinger rubs me the wrong way… It’s not something like an Alan Silvestri cue from The Mexican tracked in Hannah Montana: The Movie or the first example that leaped out at me while sitting in a cinema was actually from a Hong Kong actioner whose name I cannot recall for the life of me.

All I can remember about the on-screen action is a sexy lady in leather falling on a rake… That and the unexpected aural cameo of an ( almost certainly not cleared through Paramount) cue from Basil Poledouris’ score The Hunt For Red October! I’m pretty sure it was “Chopper.” That movie tracked in a cue from another movie scored by Poledouris; the music for No Man’s Land is embedded at the end. Safe to say more people heard it in The Hunt For Red October than in the movie it was written for.

Things like that irk me less than a Major Hollywood Film heavily using recycled score cues. Air also employs songs of the period. Apparently, using an original score along with songs of the period. Apparently, that would never work.

I mean never at all.