For whatever reason, Cliff Eidelman seemed to get pigeonholed into a composer of music for light chick flicks remarkably early in his career.  By far his most impressive work to date has come when he has been able to demonstrate his skills at using the whole orchestra with scores like Triumph of the Spirit, Star Trek VI and Christopher Columbus: The Discovery, but some of his more lighter fare has also been very impressive, especially Now and Then and Untamed Heart.  Now, hot on the heels of The Lizzie McGuire Movie (!) comes The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, the most peculiarly-titled film that's been released in a while.  Cinemas the world over will be full of women watching it and loving it and their boyfriends and husbands staring at their tickets, not quite able to believe how much they've paid to see it.

Eidelman has long been one of my favourite composers and I think it's a great shame that he is unable to flex his muscles on films which would allow him to demonstrate his considerable gifts; the irony of him becoming composer-in-residence of these chick flicks is that they are by no means his strong suit, with exceptions as noted before.  It is very difficult to avoid falling into "twinkly piano syndrome" with scores like this one, and Eidelman doesn't bother trying to avoid it.  What separates scores like this into those worth hearing and those not tends to be the strength of the themes on offer, and Eidelman certainly provides a couple of very attractive ones here.  Most effective are one which seems to echo James Horner's brilliant opening title music for A Beautiful Mind (and many other scores), with a solo, wordless female vocalist singing over the piano; and an upbeat theme first heard in "Rules of the Pants", which is the latest of many, many film themes to have owe a debt to Carl Orff's "Musica Poetica".

The score's real problem is that the vast majority of its thematic material is contained within the opening "Prologue", which doesn't even run to four minutes, and virtually everything that comes afterwards reprises something from in there.  For sure, some of the music which follows is very attractive (the guitar solo of "Us", for instance), but it is virtually all rather low-key and predictable and doesn't leave much of an impression.  The best music comes at the end: "Together" finally sees Eidelman producing the sort of emotional scoring you might expect; and "The Traveling Song" is easily the best version of the score's main theme, with piano, violin and vocals combining beautifully.  This is an average score.  I'm delighted to get my hands on a new Eidelman score (it's been far too long), but wish he could score something other than films like this: he is capable of being one of the very finest film composers out there, if only he could get the projects to demonstrate it, and I hope the big break is not too far away.