The Illustrious Jerry

The assertion that people choose en masse to identify however they may because it's morally advantageous to them or because it fulfills some self-righteous image is frankly disgusting. That's a woefully armchair assessment disguised as a genuine attempt to get a finger on the pulse of the here and now. On an individual level, the identity age isn't some malicious smokescreen with an ulterior motive for a disproportionate or overcorrective response, however fragile your definition of that might be. Casting the persecution complex net over the reactions of marginalized communities and their allies to long and very real histories of victimhood is in itself a reinforcement of those injustices. I think you know better.

Crazy how many people still think detached, performative Hollywood politics are a good litmus test for where modern liberalism is at. Not that detached, performative liberals aren't still a thing, or that Hollywood isn't at the same time capable of making an actual effort in the types of films and filmmakers they give exposure to, particularly those that have been all but non-existent historically. Point is, reactionaries thrive on taking whatever straw man they can find and running it into the ground so they can return to their comfortable seats. The Oscars tend to be a favourite because they're annual fodder and already pretty dumb to begin with. Lame as that may be, this thread also charts some insanely warped mental gymnastics, starting at "why does everyone make everything about race and gender, it shouldn't matter" before finally coming around to "my problem is actually just seeing other races and genders existing in media." Also pretty typical that we still managed to get in a few knocks at today's accepted terminology, with most of the ones brought up being all-too-classic bad faith examples from the right-wing wolf-crying handbook. It may interest you to know that in real life, people prefer to be acknowledged the way they do, for one, because it's a way of taking back the decades and decades where they were exclusively referred to by demeaning slurs. I would say that's an extremely reasonable and simple request in response to ages of systemic mistreatment (which I'm sure if you perused today's headlines, you'd find still very much exists on a tragic scale). Anyway, this is one of the basest back-and-forths in my time scrolling this forum, and in combination with some of the most dire, juvenile, bottom-of-the-barrel "differently abled" jokes I've encountered since maybe high school, it's doubly pathetic.

SCORES Interview with the Vampire (Daniel Hart) The Book of Boba Fett (Joseph Shirley w/ themes by Ludwig Göransson) The Fabelmans (John Williams) Succession: Season 3 (Nicholas Britell) The Batman (Michael Giacchino) Avatar: The Way of Water (Simon Franglen) The Outfit (Alexandre Desplat) Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (Ludwig Göransson) Special mention to Austin Wintory's Traveler: A Journey Symphony. TRACKS - The Journey Begins from The Fabelmans - Main Theme from Glass Onion - The Run (Urban Legends) from Nope - Leaving Home from Avatar: The Way of Water - Can’t Fight City Halloween / The Bat’s True Calling / Catwoman Suite from The Batman - Rigaudon / End Credits – The Raid from Succession: Season 3 - Vengeance Has Consumed Us from Black Panther: Wakanda Forever - The Book of Boba Fett / The Stranger / Train Heist / The Ultimate Boon / Teacher’s Pet from The Book of Boba Fett - Are We the Sum of Our Worst Moments / The Fantasy of Happiness / Vicious from Interview with the Vampire - Galadriel / The Stranger from The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power I'm including The Book of Boba Fett and Succession: Season 3 on my lists because while both are 2021 shows, their scores were not released until 2022 and weren't on my list last year. FILMS The Fabelmans (dir. Steven Spielberg) Nope (dir. Jordan Peele) Tár (dir. Todd Field) Top Gun: Maverick (dir. Joseph Kosinski) Avatar: The Way of Water (dir. James Cameron) The Banshees of Inisherin (dir. Martin McDonagh) Ambulance (dir. Michael Bay) RRR (dir. S.S. Rajamouli) The Batman (dir. Matt Reeves) The Northman (dir. Robert Eggers) Glass Onion (dir. Rian Johnson) It's been an incredible year for populist cinema and I've enjoyed almost all of the big ones. Hoping to fill in the gaps with a few I still intend to catch in 2023, including but not limited to: White Noise (dir. Noah Baumbach), Decision to Leave (dir. Park Chan-wook), Aftersun (dir. Charlotte Wells), and The Eternal Daughter (dir. Joanna Hogg) SPECIALTY LABELS I was only able to buy Empire of the Sun from LLL this year, but I'd really like to nab Amistad and Jurassic Park soon. Thanks for another year at JWFan!

Soooo this isn't dead in the water...yet. Deadline is reporting that Bradley Cooper is set to play the lead and that the film is still in development. Excerpts from the article: Would honestly be a little surprising if a third attempt at Spielberg and Cooper working together winds up fizzling out out or going in a different direction (à la American Sniper and Cooper's own upcoming Bernstein biopic Maestro). Colour me intrigued!

The longest in recent memory was probably Reznor & Ross' score for Mank at a generous 52 (albeit mostly short) tracks. Certainly stuck out as an anomaly upon release. Amen. He absolutely has the compositional chops to pull that off, and then some. Sadly not feeling these singles. 'Twould be a real shame if we don't get anything symphonic out of this, and looking at the tracklist I wouldn't be surprised if it ends up being 95% uproarious party music in the same vein. Won't speak too soon but I'd hate to have to start counting down the days until the next, *next* Hurwitz-Chazelle for the chance at hearing another Planetarium/Epilogue/The Landing (since he apparently doesn't work with/get hired by anyone else).

Correct! The sample starts at the beginning of the film's last cue, which has that more playful pizzicato tone I referred to yesterday, and the credits start at 0:47, which is when the Haydn excerpt comes in. I don't think the piano sonata runs much more than a minute, so the remainder of the piece is still mostly Williams. I remember some lovely expansion on the mother's theme over the credits, probably a good three or four minutes.

Nope! As Stu said, that's from the trailer music, which does not reference Williams' score. Yep, although I think there are more piano solos in the film than there are on the album, so maybe not necessarily this one. There we go! You can hear the celeste playing the reflective, melancholy theme for all of three seconds. I'm pretty sure this is track 11, The Letter. I didn't watch the whole featurette but that's not really the case at all. His parents' separation is the film's major conflict, albeit secondary to Stevie's filmmaking! I think it's just a more interesting perspective because it focuses on his relationship with his parents individually during the family drama, rather than the relationship between the parents themselves. We understand everything through Steven's perspective.

I could be misremembering but length-wise it looks like the film's short final cue plus the credits suite, in which case I think the Haydn is interpolated as part of the score rather than being particularly distinguishable from any Williams material. I honestly can't recall the melody of the last bit of music before the credits but tonally it was very different from the rest of the score and could definitely have been rooted in something classical, as a nice bookend for the mother. The Haydn piece is certainly enough of a lighthearted allegro to fit the bill, but I really can't say for sure. Whatever it was must have transitioned right into the credits suite, although I imagine they were recorded separately, so that might "solve" the FYC problem. Who knows! In any case, it looks like the opener must be an album arrangement. If so, curious to hear how it differs from any theme variations in Mitzi's Dance and The Journey Begins. I also listened to a recording of that Bach adagio and man, it serves such an effective dramatic function in the context of the film that my brain thought for sure it was Williams scoring that scene. Props to Spielberg for that choice! Piecing the album together in my head only makes the combination of Williams' score and the classical selections more and more coherent. This is going to be a lovely listen.

What a welcome truffle this is. Nothing particularly showy, nor venturing into pastiche, just an intelligent score well-versed in the romantic stylings of the chamber Gothic voice that Hart adopts here, and cast in the mould and tradition of better days to boot, the ones when you could expect this level of no doubt serviceable artistry on a consistently workmanlike basis. One of the few "real" scores in recent memory, possibly the one I've taken to the most since Blanchard's Da 5 Bloods, making it basically chocolate in the waning months of 2022. Recommend.

Typical JWFan to have confirmation of an album release for John Williams’ latest and potentially last collaboration with Steven Spielberg in 2022 at the age of 90, and a significant portion of the response is that it’s “not enough”. Scoring a film is never about how much music there is but where it goes and how it supports a scene. Being fortunate enough to know what to expect from this, a 30 minute “concept” album with a healthy serving of the main theme, rounded out coherently by the classical piano, sounds like a perfect presentation and a guarantee for many reflective listens in the years ahead. Rest assured Williams has delivered a gorgeously restrained outing that’s no less effective than his most wall-to-wall work. I said it before, but being reminded of his grace and deftness after the sequel trilogy years of blockbuster bombast is almost doubly impactful. I welcome something smaller like this, because it will always stir that same feeling of hearing the maestro’s work for the first time. That’s why we love JW, because he’s always finding ways to bring us back to that moment, while still transporting us to new ones. Anyway, the runtime comes basically as expected after seeing the film. People will probably spend the next decade talking about the 20-second toy train insert we never got to hear clean, and I say why not, that’s their right. I’m thinking the opener must be the 4-5 minute credits suite, but then I’m not sure what the last track is made up of. And that’s all I can remember really, other than Mom’s Dance. I can’t wait to hear this with you all.

You can't go wrong with the triple threat of Signs, The Village, and Lady in the Water (my personal favourite JNH). That early to mid-2000s Shyamalan period remains his best work, I think. In more recent memory, A Hidden Life is another one worth checking out, although definitely more oriented towards Malick's propensity for keeping his classical music temps. Happy discovering!

I can't speak to how accurate it is to the sheet music, and it's a little vague in my memory hearing just the piano part isolated this way, but otherwise that's very much in the vicinity of the score's main idea. I think the first few notes of the melody are also outlined by celeste at one or two points in the film. Good work, Fabulin!

Slightly preemptive word of caution for anyone on the hype train who was getting their hopes up about the chance of another gold statuette for Williams. It's honestly a little funny to read many of the reviews citing the mother's "memorable" piano pieces which are understandably being misidentified by some press members as original score instead of pre-existing classical music. I don't know what the Academy's rules are for this particular category anymore but I wouldn't be all that surprised if somehow Williams winds up being ineligible for the nomination and nobody realizes it yet because the critics...don't know any better? I mean, the ratio is pretty significant. There's simply not that much Williams material here, even though it is quite lovely. Nothing certain, just something to keep in mind as we wait for the awards campaign to kick off.

My mistake! I looked at Young's filmography to see if I could remember the title and it's actually from The Greatest Show on Earth, although there may have been others. The track from The Searchers was definitely Ethan Returns. I think that's the last bit of info I've got in my head more than 24 hours later, so hopefully this will tide everyone over until November when we find out I completely misremembered everything

Yeah, not sure what the construction will be like. If I had to guess, I'm thinking the OST will be a mix of the classical piano, which I suspect Williams may have even lightly arranged to fit the film, interspersed between a few actual score cues and any other potentially unused pieces or suites. Again, there's really not a lot of Williams music, but that combination would form a coherent listening experience and probably bring the album to around The Post length. Keep an open mind and we'll see! The credits cue is a lovely summary and maybe the only significant full piece aside from the first appearance of the main theme. I forgot to mention, but after the ovation for Spielberg's credit, John Williams also got some modest but noticeable applause (plus cheers for David Lynch). Oh, and it was announced this morning that the film won the TIFF People's Choice Award. Cool!

My thoughts on the film and score: Spielberg’s usual knack for sentimentality and wide-eyed wonder manifests itself so effortlessly in this tender autobiography about the healing power of art in a broken family. It feels like he’s been making movies for decades with this in the back of his mind, not as some grand end goal per se but as another big piece to fit comfortably into the later chapters of his oeuvre. There has always been a little spot in his filmography left open for this one. Those skeptical about the material will be happy to know that it plays less like the stock coming-of-age-meets-homage-to-cinema vanity project that you’re probably thinking of and more like a warm and fuzzy flicker of home movie memories from the all-time great. The first hour or so is as close as the film gets to saccharine, not so much sweetened as it is a little corny, but never cloying. For anyone allergic to Spielberg in that general mode, this won’t change your attitude. The film fittingly grows up over the runtime, but still skillfully walks the bittersweet line between the dramatic weight and the tongue-in-cheek dorkiness of Spielberg’s youth from the get-go. It’s never self-serious and has a good sense of humour about itself without compromising the emotional resonance of the familial tensions. If anything, the lightness authenticates it. I’m not sure if it was just emphasized by the receptive festival crowd, but this might actually be one of Spielberg’s funniest, filled with lots of naturalistic sibling banter, interjections from old Jewish relatives, and the usual awkward teen moments. The monkey is good too! After the wide-shot flourish of West Side Story, which naturally saw him throw his whole cinematic toolbox up onto the screen, Spielberg’s direction scales back and excels in the light touch of his patented formal economy. He’s still bringing the goods as necessary, from a couple of lasting compositions to one incredibly memorable visual gag, but don’t go in expecting any show-stopping long-takes. Ultimately the heart of the film is the script, co-authored by Tony Kushner but so clearly a personal outlet for Spielberg. Sure, the recreated anecdotes will be familiar to admirers of his work, but there’s a whole groundwork of thematic subtext there to deepen the scenes that would otherwise have us pointing at the screen DiCaprio-style. In fact, it's pretty remarkable how well so much of the stuff I "recognized" translates to the screen without that embarrassing feeling that it’s only there for the sake of it. The performances are really solid in an ensemble sort of way. Obviously Paul Dano and Michelle Williams as the parents goes without saying, but the main guy who plays Spielberg at high school age is actually really good too. I recall some of the early reactions mentioning Licorice Pizza as a reference, which makes some sense considering how certain characters will just wander in, own the movie for a few minutes, and then leave (Judd Hirsch and David Lynch, baby!). Fortunately, that’s as far as the comparison goes though. I didn’t like the rose-coloured glasses the PTA film insisted on wearing but no matter here. Just as my film brain is always focusing on the camera movement and editing, my film score ears are tuned in to catch and place as much music as possible. Williams’ score is sparse but thoughtfully spotted and quite elegant in a sombre way, as KK has already mentioned. My estimate is probably not much more than a half-hour of original music, if even that much. It’s possible Williams wrote and recorded some other suites or arrangements intended for the album, but otherwise I imagine the OST will be a combination of licensed music and original score. There are a couple period needledrops from the radio, a number of classical piano pieces played by his mother (credits listed Satie’s Gymnopedie, and others by Beethoven, Haydn, and maybe Bach), as well as some diegetic Western music heard on records during the movie screenings (I recognized the villain theme from Bernstein’s The Magnificent Seven and the title melody from Newman’s How The West Was Won, credits also listed something by Victor Young, Max Steiner’s The Searchers, and more Alfred Newman- Captain From Castile may have been it). As far as Williams’ score goes, there’s one main idea for celeste, strings, harp, and what I think was an oboe or clarinet. It appears about three times in the film proper, and is also the basis for the 4 to 5-minute end credits suite, which is a unique recording and the longest piece of music altogether. That one is sure to get a lot of plays. All the players are listed, including a standard string section, french horns, and soloists on piano, celeste, and guitar. Whoever drew the Book Thief comparison was about as close as they could have gotten, even though this is still pretty unique territory from a functional standpoint. Being reminded of Williams' grace and deftness after the sequel trilogy years of wall-to-wall tentpole scoring is of course another testament to his genius. Certainly worth a closer listen. Anyway, it was really cool to attend a TIFF screening for the first time and to have it be the new Spielberg/Williams collaboration of all things. I’ll definitely be seeing this again in November. My favourite part was the post-credits stinger where a silhouetted man clearly wearing a turtleneck appears in a doorway and we get a booming, "Hey Stevie, baby!" accompanied by a bass pizzicato Jaws theme before it cuts to black. Seriously though, count me as a Fabel-fan.

I will be seeing a TIFF screening of this film on September 17th. I've actually never been to the festival in any capacity and am very excited for the experience! I mean, what could be more special than the latest Spielberg/Williams collaboration? Looking forward to reporting back in a couple of weeks!

Obviously this is just wonderful to see and hear, not just as an early treat but also as a reminder of the blessing that Williams is alive and well to write, record and perform this piece and an entire new score at the age of 90. I thought the Obi-Wan theme was alright and understand why it was structured the way it was, but this right here is a return to a type of full-bodied and well-developed standalone piece like only the maestro can deliver. Every progression where it should be, covering so much ground in just a 4-minute arrangement. The warm harmonies are very reminiscent of TROS and conform beautifully to the kind of classy and mature style of Williams' later years. Seeing Mangold's active involvement in the process is the cherry on top, and hopefully bodes well for the treatment of the score proper and I suppose just the film itself too. "Why don't you play it at the Bowl?" is such a great line for the anecdotal Williams pantheon. Amazing.

A top-notch order from earlier in the year. Jumped on Empire of the Sun instantly after years of it being out of stock. Also very happy to finally own one of Goldsmith's finest. À ta santé!

I purposely haven’t been engaging with the forum for a little while, but I really do feel that this sentiment bears repeating, even though others have already put it much better than I can. As someone who only really started digging into film scores not but a few years ago, at a time when a lot of the sets I would now be interested in purchasing had already sold out, I find myself extremely grateful for the hard-working folks at La La Land Records (and all the specialty labels in general) who continue to make reissues like this possible. This will no doubt be a superb release of an all-timer score that should ideally and unequivocally be available for anyone to purchase at anytime. The same was the case with A.I., which became a favourite of mine thanks to the availability of a new edition. All told, I’m extremely glad it’s become possible to purchase this score presentation again, and I look forward to picking it up very soon. Cheers to all and stay well!

This gorgeous work now has an official release:

I maintain my guess (and sincere wish) that it’s Powell, based on the Williams connection, the London sessions players, and his relatively open schedule as of late. It’s the ideal scenario and seems most likely to me right now. Still prepared to be surprised though.

Funny how much of a boring, pointless, overlong, and unnecessary waste of time this discussion about West Side Story supposedly being a boring, pointless, overlong, and unnecessary waste of time is. And now we're a full page into Film 101 with Professor Ulyssesian and the Tenet guy for some reason??? We're all very tired and I think you should give it a rest.

Wonderful news! I feel like we're bound to be saying this for any new Williams project, but who could've guessed we'd be looking forward to this and so much more from the maestro in 2022 and beyond? Unbelievable. Mind you, we're still a minus a composer announcement for the score proper, so allow me to speculate a little bit as to why I'm almost certain it's John Powell... 1) Who else would Williams be comfortable writing a theme for than somebody who he's already worked with in this capacity? And quite successfully too, I might add. It's very easy to imagine Williams agreeing to a Solo situation if it were to mean the arrangement was with Powell again. 2) I'm pretty sure we know thanks to IMDB credits that London musicians are attached to the score. Powell also seems to have a pretty empty slate as far as upcoming projects go. He has Don't Worry Darling coming out later this year, but I believe most of the work on that should be done by now (especially considering he was posting previews not but a few weeks ago). 3) This last one is really speculative, but Powell posted this to his Instagram story today: Obviously the CD releases are a big deal for Powell fans in general (HTTYD 2 DE and his new opera should be two of them, I believe), but I wouldn't be surprised if the digital only album is for Kenobi (as all the Disney+ music releases have been), and the 1 surprise track is a new Williams piece. Who knows... Exciting times!

POV: a new composer assignment has been announced and you're reading the subsequent JWFan thread