Soundtrack Information

Wide Awake

Wide Awake

Promotional Release

Release Date: 1998

Conducted by Edmund Choi

Format: CD

Music From

Music By

Track Listing

1. Opening Title
2. The Rose Ceremony
3. Biological Reactions
4. Grampa and Me
5. Football
6. Kyrie
7. Gloria
8. Toy Store
9. The Wootan Fleet
10. Grampa's Sick
11. Recess
12. Good-Bye Freddie
13. The Bucket Chase
14. The Snow
15. Brickman
16. School Days
17. Gym Class
18. Stealing the Math test
19. The Race
20. Freddie's Dismissal
21. The Mission
22. Dave's House
23. Don't Give Up
24. The Last Day of School
25. Wide Awake
26. Hosanna
27. A Little Like Me
Track lengths not available for this album. If you have track length/time information for this album, please e-mail it to us at mail@soundtrack.net and we will add it to the database.

Review: Wide Awake

by James Barry May 10, 2003
3 / 5 Stars

With the runaway success of The Sixth Sense, writer/director M. Night Shayamalan has become quite the commodity in the film business these days. Before tackling the realm of the undead, though, Shayamalan touched upon the often more mystical world of childhood in Wide Awake. A comparison of the two films will show the director's interest in both children and Catholicism, but there is little more that links the two.

For the score, Night turned to a friend from NYU with whom he'd worked on several student films, Edmund Choi. Like the film itself, Choi's score tends to border on overly sentimental, but still manage to be enjoyable. While the writing in the film tended to stray from the usual dumbed-down idea of how children think and speak, Choi tends to go pretty much by the book with what one might expect for a "wonderment of a child" score. While it's nice, much of it feels quite familiar—I won't say generic, but familiar. The greatest exception to this is track 7 ("Gloria"), which, in its brevity, manages to be the most moving and wonderful music on the disc. The American Boy Choir is put to good use when they are employed, if at times sounding a bit like Williams' Empire of the Sun; as I was once told, "If you're going to borrow, borrow from the best."

All in all, an enjoyable listen, if a bit bigger than the film sometimes called for. We can forgive Edmund Choi such minor trespasses—this was his first feature film, and if it's any indication of what might be to come, he's got quite a future.

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