Chen G.

erm...just how much fun are they having with those boys?

An example much closer in time and in style to 2001 is Cleopatra: another runaway widescreen production (though for different reasons than Kubrick's), it pulled impressive numbers. But it cost so damn much to make...

The figures on Box Office Mojo seem to be an amalgamation of several theatrical reruns through the 1970s.

In 1968?

But given how much it cost, it wasn't a success. It took for reruns well into the 1970s for it to really make any decent profit. I also think its noteworthy that Kubrick never again undertook a Cinerama project, nor another special effects-heavy project: shortly after 2001 he would reject Lord of the Rings. It doesn't seem the painstaking effects work was something he enjoyed or saw much success in.

Yes! Oberon seems to have a similar issue. The only production I can find is this, which has the upshot of having Annette Dasch whom I like very much (although she had looked better) but its plays the whole thing as a big lab experiment: Its also translated back to German: Oberon was originally in English. A historical anecdote comes to mind: When Freischutz was revived in Paris in 1841, translated to French and appended (by one of its great admirers, Hector Berlioz!) with Weber's much-loved "Invitation to the Dance" as the obligatory ballet, it was a fiasco. And Wagner (still living in Paris and working furiously on Dutchman) writes very movingly that: "They have not been able to kill it, our dear, beloved Freischutz."

Music - especially leitmotivic music - can bring out the inner world and psychology of the character, but Williams perhaps doesn't do much of it, and even if he wanted isn't granted the opportunity to do so by the films (understandable given their idiom). Again, the exception mostly being some of Anakin's music, probably.

At the risk of overwhelming a college assignment, regarding first your point of "over-reliance" on the themes... the whole point of leitmotives is that the bulk of the score comprises of the leitmotives and their derivations. If its just a musical signpost that comes up every once in a while, we're in the realm of what's called the "Reminiscence motif" of Weber and Dalayrac, which scholarship considers distinct from the "mature" leitmotif of The Ring. Now, to speak to the point that the use of the motifs is unsubtle...that's kind of in the eye of the beholder. Some people just do not abide the leitmotif technique in principal - Debussi comes to mind, at least in theory - and to be fair, in Williams a substantial amount of the individual themes are more "indexical" in the sense that he composed a single theme identified unequivocably with a single character (Leia, Yoda, Boba, Sidius, Jabba, young Anakin, Jar Jar, Grievous, Snoke, Poe, Rose), pair of characters (Han and Leia, Luke and Leia, C3PO and R2D2) or characters presented as a group (Jawas, Ewoks, battle Droids, Knights of Ren). So you can "predict" musically that when one of those characters enters the frame, you're probably going to hear this theme. Dramatically, however, the predictably fostered by the leitmotif technqiue can actually be a strong dramatic tool: one of the most significant uses of the mature leitmotif, after all, is as a greek chorus that intentionally "spoils" things: the portentous uses in the prequel trilogy of both the Imperial March and the theme associated with the Emperor count as that. By having the music tell us something the characters onscreen are not privvy to, it creates tension and a sense of dramatic irony.

Oh sure! And there's the only movie-version that has a pretty good cast as well with Gottlob Frick as Caspar.

Continuing on our Weber tour! I know Freischutz and while I still maintain it has the sappiest damn ending, its musical characteristics are continually revealing themselves to me. We all surely know and love its evocation of nature and Schauerromantik eerieness, but there's much more still to be had here. The spoken dialogue sequences mean it doesn't have the seamlessness of Euryanthe, but I was surprised to see that it has a similar structural conceit: The disonant textures of Samiel and Caspar finally resolve to C major, and while it doesn't happen quite at the very end like it does in Euryanthe, here its also part of a larger tonal conceit: really clever! Certainly, the dramatic-musical interpertation helps and one could hardly ask for a better hand on the wheel than Thielemann. Good cast, too: Georg Zeppenfeld is, as one would expect, fantastic as Caspar.

Its kind of important to have these trash film series. We have such amazing and seminal film series...but they wouldn't be nearly as awesome were it not for having a kind of nexus in the form of patently trash film series as their counterparts.

Grunts in the direction of Fifty Shades.

Yeah. Its all striped anyway (which does make one wonder: are they not done with the editing?) and they're clearly going to manipulate the sound significantly in the mixing, if they want 18 violins to withstanding playing with six horns and a Rauschpfeife, which sounds like a cousin of our old friend the rhaita. So they could definitely cast some of these sounds to the background of the texture. But I do assume at least some of these colours were concieved of as cultural, so we should expect to hear some of them with some characters more than others. And since the film does have quite a few such factions - Rohirrim, Dunlendings, Wizards (Saruman), Orcs, Haradrim and presumably Gondorians - its interesting to speculate. Certainly, the first bit of music Gallagher shared sounds to me more like something to be expected of a scene with Wulf than anything else. I will say, the absence of, ahem, a certain instrument is as of yet quite glaring: I know that when Gallagher was doing "Blunt the Knives" he couldn't find a Hardinfelle in New Zealand, so you gotta wonder... Maybe in the coming days, though! And the really interesting thing? Some of these Medieval instruments tend to come tuned to the Dorian mode...

Yep. Also Tibetan singing bowls (a Smaug-y sound!), wooden fish and the now-mandatory taikos. Gallagher also told someone in his notices that there are more medieval instruments yet to come! I kind of did a roundup of the orchestrations from what I could tell from the pictures and partitura: Strings: 10 Violins I, 8 Violins II, 6 Viola, 4 Violoncelli, 2 Contrabasses. Woodwinds: 2 Flutes and 1 Piccolo, 2 Oboes and 1 Cor Anglais, 2 Clarinets and 1 Bass Clarinet, 2 Basoons and 1 Contraforte; at least two Crumhorns, doubling multiple registers, seemingly bass, tenor and soprano; at least two shawms also doubling several registers and on Rauschpfeife and Dulcian. Brass: 6 horns, 2 Trumpets, 2 Trombones and 1 Bass Trombone. Keyboards: 1 Grand Piano Percussion: At least 2 percussionists on Taiko (O-Daiko, Chu-Daiko, Hira-Daiko and Shime-Daiko), gong, fish temple blocks, tibetan singing bowls, possibly vibraphone. Interesting to imagine what some of these colours are for: Even not bearing the Shore scores in mind, I'm having a hard time imagining Helm striding into Meduseld and hearing singing bowls, and somehow it also doesn't strike me as a Dunlending sound: Maybe for the Southrons?

Hoiho! Hoiho hoho! https://www.instagram.com/stephengallaghermusic/p/C4WHHg-MVFb/?img_index=1

If a film is an entry in a series, it HAS to be judged both as an individual entry and an installment in the series. And I'm fine with sequels and prequels, and depending on the series, with a great many of them, too. But some films lend themselves to sequels, and some don't. Some sequels lend themselves to even more sequels, other don't. Some films lend themselves to prequels, but others do not, etc...

Meh. Lots of sequels suck, too. I've never subscribed to this notion that prequels are somehow more likely to suck than - or are somehow artistically inferior to - sequels. That's not to say I want prequels to Gladiator, either!

I should add, I don't entirely object, but I think prequels are typically better for that than sequels.

Seeing as this thread turned mostly to laugh lines, possibly the funniest comic relief ever in a movie:

I think the moment I realised just how reductive the whole process is was when I saw a theme "guide" for Tristan, where almost all the themes listed were named like: Love, Love's longing, passion, love's bliss, love-death, love's desire, love's caresses, love potion, love's overwhelming power, the magic of love...

We get this a lot recently: sequels to stories that, whether told in one entry or more, ended on a full-stop. Off the top of my head: Indiana Jones (sorta) Toy Story (sorta) Star Wars The Matrix Marvel (post Endgame) Hollywood had developed a topical allergy to finality.

But it is a sequel to Gladiator! They basically nabbed anyone of the veteran cast that they could, and I seriously doubt they're there for cursory roles.

And even there, I feel, it would have been better served by having Endgame be the actual, err, Endgame. An audience knows a climax and coda when they see it, and once that cadential feeling had been fired-up, it can't be taken back.

Yeah, I find it depressing. What does Gladiator ends with? It ends with the sad but heroic sacrifice by the main character and, like all the best dramas, it ends with a sense of promise for the future and we're left to imagine a rosier Rome and, for all they've weathered, a "happily ever after" for Lucila, Gracchus, Juba and Lucius. By making a sequel - not "another film set in that world", a sequel - you're forced into going "well, actually!" and show that those characters still have terrible trials and tribulations to go through, if they manage to go through them at all... It ruins it.

Good sequitur: if The Fellowship of the Ring was ABOUT Middle-Earth, then no sooner would Frodo arrive in Rivendell, ol' Figwit/Lindir would have taken him on a guided tour through the entire place. But he doesn't: Because that's not the point of the movie. Of course, you're not going to go to the trouble of making beautiful visuals and not give them a chance to breath (see every David Lean film ever), but there's a difference between a film taking its time, and a film misplacing its focus from the story to the setting. I honestly can't see many people lining up to see a mockumentary/travelogue of the geography of Tatooine or Khand or what have you. What's more, Gladiator itself is not the kind of movie Thor fancies: Gladiator is a plot-oriented movie, and I'll bet Nick's house that the sequel will be that, as well.