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Guess we know you haven't bothered to read the trumpet concerto Kickstarter thread! Hale and hearty

The Witch Finally caught this on Netflix last night. Good film. A fine portrait of early New England life and the commonplace religious fanaticism of the time. There's a certain stillness and simplicity to all of it that leads to a wonderful payoff. This is a family period drama first, a horror film second and that definitely benefits the work.

Ok, some thoughts on ALWAYS. I saw it in America, on its first night. I watched it at a very "emotional" time of my life, and the theme of not being able to connect, coupled with the idea of people moving on, and eventually forgetting the past, resonated with me. I've changed over the years, and as I've changed as a person, my attitude towards the film has, also changed. I now see it as a good, funny, technically very well-made, simple story about enduring love. It brings warm feelings to my heart, whenever I watch it. Its a good "autumnal" film. As Dorinda transcended her relationship with Pete, I have transcended both my original circumstances, and my reaction to the film. A more "stable" me, is able to kick back and enjoy it. I'm going to stick my neck out by saying that I prefer ALWAYS to the Spielberg films either side of it. In precis: its not the best film our Steve has done, but it's not the worst, either, and I truly think that, with ALWAYS, Spielberg has nothing to be ashamed of. Plus, any - any - film with Roberts Blossom, is immediately watchable.

Solo: A Star Wars Story 2018 I enjoyed this one a lot more than I thought I would. In fact, I enjoyed it immensely. A fantastic theme by Williams with a great score by Powell. Some cool set pieces and great action sequences. The kid (can't remember his name) does a surprisingly good Han Solo and in a few scenes channels Ford nicely. Again, pleasantly surprised. The supporting characters were all mostly good, even if some were underused. Glover was good in his overhyped portrayal of Lando (even if it doesn't quite match with what Billy dee did with the part). I did find the SJW robot to be a bit annoying, and thought the heist crew did feel a bit much like Guardians of the Galaxy. The guy with all the arms reminded me of that rocket rabbit from Guardians. Not that this is a bad thing. This movie had more interesting planets, by far, than TLJ. The film's far from perfect. They should have ditched the scenes with Han as an infantry grunt, which dragged, and instead showed him training as a pilot in the Imperial Navy (perhaps a Top Gun homage with Han buzzing the tower in a TIE fighter). And it does have a bit of a cobbled together feel, and the vague feeling that they didn't quite know what they wanted to do with it (which is unsurprising, given the production history). It did annoy me that we only saw Han the charmer...Solo (particularly the Star Wars 77 Solo) had a rough side, and we didn't see much of that. Still, a fun, if entirely inconsequential (though aren't they all inconsequential) Star Wars movie that I enjoyed far more than I should have. And one I was wrong about b/c I thought at the time making it was a mistake. I think had it been promoted better, and given a December release date, the film's fortunes might have been different. As it is, I'm disappointed we won't get a sequel. Ron Howard, the king of hollywood mediocrities, was a perfect choice for this (something I'll concede @Stefancos said a while ago). I think Solo is probably his masterpiece. 3.5/5

You're buying me a half?

SUPERMAN. Sublime. Just sublime. There's no other way I can describe this score. I'm approaching JONATHAN'S DEATH. Oh, those basses!

I find that whole opening to be an amazing sequence, that immediatly sets up a tone that only the Indy movies have been able to pull off. One of my favorite details is how Wille actually stands in front of the movie title. It's just incredibly well done tongue-in-cheek

Mandy by Johann Johannsson Good stuff. It's essentially a dreamy synth-scape with touches of 80s industrial grunge, guitar and drumkit calling cards. Maybe the album is a little longer than it needs to be, but still a treat and a reminder of how singular a voice we lost with Johannsson. Oh, and this is pretty much an anti-JWFan score.

You can thank that tit Ben Burtt for that, who went out of his way to bury Williams' scores when converting the OT mixes into 5.1. The scores sounded perfectly fine before the advent of surround sound (which should've ENHANCED film scores but have instead become a dumping ground for sound designers to shove even more unnecessary noise into the mix). As @Holko mentioned, there was enough outcry over Burtt completely removing parts of Williams' score in the ANH DVD that they corrected it for the Bluray.

Just read the Bluray review which was appropriately scathing: Barely comprehensible: No back-lighting, no separation between objects, crushed shadows/blacks: Crushed blacks, actors' faces barely visible and muddy: What should be the the focal point of shots is often the darkest object in frame/shrouded in shadow: Just a mess. And say what you want about The Last Jedi as a narrative, but visually it is probably the best photographed movie in the franchise. Even its 'darker' scenes are lit concisely, often symbolically. There's layers and depth to the frame, performances are clearly visible: I understand they want to branch out with the spinoffs and try something different. But there's different, and there's bad.

The parameters are so wide, I wouldn't know where to start or stop (this is a particular favourite "genre" of mine). But I could easily rattle off a dozen or so Hans Zimmer scores in this idiom alone, which IMO are the pinnacle of this particular approach.

Just like a David Yates movie! Just like a David Yates movie!

The film has often been criticized for being too maudlin, but I disagree. Rather, I think Spielberg was going for the same type of melodrama that Victor Fleming nurtured in the original A GUY NAMED JOE (Spielberg also channeled Fleming beautifully in WAR HORSE, and the ending of BRIDGE OF SPIES is pure Howard Hawks -- I love it when he makes these tributes to his Golden Age heroes). The lush cinematography by Mikael Salomon is beautiful -- alternating between nocturnal blue and ravishing orange. Interestingly, I hated the ALWAYS score initially. Before I got the soundtrack, I only had the two tracks on the FILMWORKS compilation, and I thought the rest of the score was like that. To my amazement I discovered that "Follow Me" and "Dorinda Solo Flight" were, indeed, the only really thematic pieces on the album, and the rest was mostly 'droney', textural stuff with glittering harps and directionless harmonic structures. Remember, this was the time I was into big theme Williams (mid 90s)! However, as I've grown older and more refined in my taste, I've come to appreciate it for the exploratory tone poem that it really is. These days, I really enjoy the soundtrack -- although I could be without the country songs and the hundred variations of "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes".

Agreed! What's the point, from our perspective, to discuss a film you havent seen and arent going to see with you?

JANE EYRE; Its so damned English!

What I truly admire about the film is that it defies the typical love story tropes, and yet the connection between the characters played by Dreyfus and Hunter was definitely there. In my opinion, it was able to transcend the touchy-feely part of love stories (often ham-handedly told) precisely because one of the lovers was a non-corporeal being, and so the audience and the screenwriter were left to tell a love story purely through dialogue and body language. Pardon the ghost-related pun, but that part of it was truly "touching." AIFan

The parts of the film that worked least for me were most of the jammed in fan service bits, the 'going to Tatooine to work for Jabba' being the worst offender. That reminded me of the cringey scene at the end of The Hobbit when Thrandruil tells Leggy to go look for Aragorn.

Speaking of Reich, my current muse:

On London prices?

Spielberg directed that movie like Fats Waller flies his piano.

A Bond movie doesnt need a plot!

Not only is it a fabulous arrangement, but I think it’s reached the pop culture saturation point where it is the definitive arrangement, the one most people think of when (if) they think of Anything Goes. Not sure if this has been posted before but there was this neat nugget in an old interview with the Dancing With the Stars music director:

This was actually the first Reich piece that I got really into, even before 18 Musicians. Weird, I always found it one of his most accessible works. Probably just indicative of the type of minimalist sounds that my ear is drawn to.

Well hopefully WIllow is in the works as well, but tonight's title is unquestionably Batteries Not Included so I'm not sure why there's still debate about it

Yeah, it's real hit and miss. Which makes the bad shots so puzzling. ILM was clearly able to do better even considering the effects capabilities at the time.

Born on the Fourth of July and Superman, then. As ethnically American as you can get. As for "ethnic" scores, little can top Far And Away.

Gladiator The Lion King The Power Of One Black Hawk Down An Everlasting Piece Sherlock Holmes Casi Divas The Last Samurai Tears Of The Sun A World Apart Kung Fu Panda

Superman and Batman no longer work for today's darker, disturbed and more sophisticated audiences.

Did they apply the sound mix "corrections" all throughout or like how they "fixed" Luke's lightsaber colour on the Falcon? (You know, bragging with promo pictures how it's blue now... in that one wide shot, in the 8 other shots it's still green because fuck me, that'd take 5 more minutes of work and we still have Ewok eyelids to animate, and it's not like we're fixing up something important that people care about!)

To say something actually positive, the one technical aspect I think really works (seeing how lighting, cinematography, grading and sound mix are all a huge mess) is CG character design and animation. Both L3 and the Ardennian looked and moved very nice and believable.

Ha, ha...indeed. Would have been an awesome programme, though.

Ireland: Michael Collins. Better than the twobyouve mentioned! Titanic and Braveheart have always sounded particularly Irish to me. France: Hugo by Shore sounds very French to me.

Exactly. I'm all for having a different visual palette in these spin-offs but you still need to retain a basic requirement of cinematography: being able to see the actors' performances clearly. I could not believe how crushed the shadows were when analysing the photography on a calibrated monitor. Not to mention the total lack of backlighting so there's no layering whatsoever in the image. The result is flat, muddy and visually fatiguing over 2+ hours. Actors' faces should not consistently be in shadow and the darkest part of the mise en scene unless for specific dramatic effect. Almost makes AVP Requiem's cinematography look Academy Award worthy by comparison. A heavy shame because the lighting ruins what is otherwise very impressive production design.

You need artificial lighting to make it look more natural.

Never.

But, but--_I_ could be filthy rich one day! Never mind I'm middle class and have no inclination for upward mobility, _I_ could be paying those taxes one day! To hell with your tax increase, filthy hippie!

And how when she finally does speak we can't understand the first 4 words she says!

Here is a spectrogram view of "Return to Tatooine". All of that purple is hiss. I've never seen anything like this before. For comparison, here is a track from ROTS. This is how a normal spectrogram should look.

I recall enjoying TFA for its characters more than anything. I liked Rey and Finn a lot more than I ever gave a darn about the original trilogy's cast. I was looking forward to the next film plugging the characters into a more interesting, more original story. Maybe someday that'll happen!

There's nothing inherently wrong with it, it's not like there are flubbed notes or anything. The performance is just not to my taste and I don't think it showcases what I love about Williams' writing for this piece. The Harjanne performance is excellent, but a recording conducted by Williams and recorded in an actual studio will almost certainly supercede that album for me. I think the piece calls for a subtler touch, personally. Sandoval is like a bull in a chinashop on that recording for me. Not to disrespect Sandoval generally of course, he's a great artist. (awaiting Thor to let us all know once again that the Sandoval recording is great and there's no reason to listen to any other)

Well...yes. But it's clearly intentional on Williams part. He's setting up Spielberg's subversive opening by giving the audience something over the top suspenseful, which is supposed to be paid off by the surprise dancing and singing. If the film didn't open with a dance number, I doubt Williams would have written in this way. It's very good, and memorable. But not subtle...more like Williams as Salieri. The whole thing is consistent with the kind of thing they did with the first film, just dialled up to 11...i.e. just when you think you're going to see some kind of straight up action scene involving a straight up action hero, you're thrown a curveball (Indy running from the boulder, Indy not knowing how to fly a plane, Indy shooting the guy with the sword, Indy's afraid of snakes, etc) As an aside, that film, including the marketing, is oddly self-aware.

But JW's "Anything Goes" arrangement is awesome!! Brilliant orchestration.

Yeah, but did you forget that the score continues right after the dance number? I mean, what follows is JW at the very top of his game! Such breathtaking, mesmerising, hilarious, unbelievably fitting non-stop action music: Indy Negotiates, The Nightclub Brawl, Fast Street of Shanghai, Map/Out of Fuel, Slalom on Mt. Humol.....

Hello, The date is Sept 24th, coming up soon! I know that John is making a few orchestra revisions but I don't think it's anything major. At least I don't think, I'll find out soon when I get the parts. Thanks, Tom

Hi all, A year and a half ago, I began a project in which I began typesetting all of John Williams' cues from his 2005 movie "War of the Worlds." Most of them are done in PreSonus software called 'Notion.' If you'd like to see the full scores to awesome action cues like The Intersection Scene, The Ferry Scene, Escape from the City, Attack on the Car, etc. check out my YouTube channel (which is almost half as popular as the Antique Milk Bottle Collecting channel!) A lot of this was done using my musical ear and using his sketch scores as a guide. Here's my latest two: Escape from the City (not the soundtrack version; the film version) and Epilogue Enjoy! My channel has a bunch of cues from War of the Worlds, a lot of which aren't in the film.

Could've very easily cut this up into two shots, but the camera carries around the cockpit like never before. One of my favourite shots. Not too long, but not cutting in a place that most would. A similar idea with Solo, a lovely shot that follows a Beckett maneuver.

Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov is mandatory.

Haven't you heard Karajan's early 60's Beethoven symphony cycle on Deutsche Grammophon? Say what you like about the interpretations, but the sound is still top notch!