HIGH SCORE

Having just seen “Big Fish,” I was going to say that Danny Elfman’s music was somewhat intrusive and that he should back off a little. I was going to make a crack about him graduating from the John Williams School of Film Scores, where they teach composers never to shut up. (I’ve felt this way about Williams at least since 1984, the year of “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.”) I was going to.

But I got sidetracked. Check out Williams’ resume -- all 200-plus credits of it, including “Daddy-O” from 1959, which I can only assume lives up to everything I’ve heard about it -- and prepare to be similarly distracted. Not only is the sheer number of credits impressive, but the fact that Williams, 71, has two films due out next year and four in 2005.

A prolific composer that ruins movies with constant, useless music brings to mind Pascal’s aphorism: “I have made this letter longer than usual, because I lack the time to make it short.”

But it is impossible not to spin even further out of conversational orbit when you notice the massiveness of what he has coming: “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban” next year and “Star Wars: Episode III,” “Indiana Jones 4” and ‘Jurassic Park IV” in 2005, another year of the sequel, and, finally, tragically, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” in the same year.

Think about it for a second and you’ll guess whose vehicle it is. Right: Jim Carrey.

Jim Carrey and John Williams.

With this, the original topic is barely registering. “Big Fish” is a dim memory. We are lost, lost ...