Review: Sound of Noise

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Sound of NoiseAmadeus Warnebring (Bengt Nilsson) is the unfortunate tone-deaf offspring of a concert pianist and a famous conductor. His grandfather was a world-famous musician, and his younger brother is a childhood prodigy who began playing violin at four and wrote his first symphony at 12.

But Amadeus, a police inspector and head of the anti-terrorism division, has absolutely zero musical ability and in fact hates music. It is therefore sad irony when he must chase down a group of terrorist musical protestors who hate traditional music as much as he does. While they act out a citywide performance art piece like a miniature flash mob, he draws ever closer, and the scope of each piece gets bigger.

Sound of Noise, like its characters, refuses conventional description. It is quirky, fun, surprising, and charming, but it suffers from an emotionally detached ending that neither fully satisfies nor entirely disappoints. The use of everyday objects as musical instruments is not at all new. Stomp has been performing for over 20 years. The idea of performing such pieces as musical protest, and on such a grand scale, however is novel. Though Sound of Noise won a jury award for Best Fantastic Film at Fantastic Fest 2010, it has a few flaws that make it fall flat.

The largest issue is the terrorist characters. They're self-absorbed, unsympathetic and generally unlikeable (aka drummers ... kidding). They come off as snobbish thanks to their bad attitude toward music and other musicians. There is no personal interaction between any of them, and they are in short generic bad guys. Somewhat like the nihilists in The Big Lebowski, their goals and message are unclear. As an audience you want to see their cool performance, but its anarchic nature obfuscates their message. Maybe they don't have a real message; they just want to make cool music.

The music itself throughout Sound of Noise is entertaining and catchy, moreso the first two of the four movements. As the scale of the performances increase, the complexity decreases, so the finale is somewhat less spectacular than had been anticipated. So to summarize, Sound of Noise was fun, but not GREAT fun, grand, but not spectacular, funky and quirky. The movie dances to the beat of its own drum.

Sound of Noise was directed by Ola Simonsson and Johannes Stjärne Nilsson and follows the 2001 short Music for One Apartment and Six Drummers, embedded at the end of this review. The feature film begins a run for a week at Alamo Drafthouse Ritz and Slaughter locations this Friday, March 23.

[For a different point of view on the movie, check out Jette's review for Cinematical from Fantastic Fest 2010.]

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