Daily Times

Film director and screenwriter Brian De Palma has used musician and film composer Pino Donaggio on and off for over 40 years, ever since their first collaboration ‘Carrie,’ in 1976. Pino Donaggio, with his lushly purple neo-Bernard Herrmann dissonant extravagance, is to Brian De Palma what composer Angelo Badalamenti has been to filmmaker and painter David Lynch: a composer of rapturous dread-infused melodies that evoke a kind of meta-romantic Old Hollywood delirium. Yet to hear the unmistakable sounds of yet another lavishly orchestrated Donaggio swoonfest laid over the flat, static expository scenes of the choppy benumbed “international” police thriller ‘Domino’ is to watch De Palma trying to create cinematic fire out of burnt-out matchsticks. There are legendary examples of directors claiming that their work was cut to ribbons by clueless producers: the 1954 George Cukor version of ‘A Star Is Born’, or Jonathan Demme’s ‘Swing Shift’.