Marian Schedenig

I probably have more film holy grails than soundtrack ones now. Classics that never made the jump to Blu-ray like Captian Blood, The Sea Hawk, Arsenic and Old Lace and Scaramouche, and newer films that apparently aren't considered commercially worthwhile enough, like De Palma's Femme Fatale and Leconte's La fille sur le pont. One of my remaining soundtrack holy grails is a complete Hallelujah Trail, which will never happen because the original recording is destroyed and nobody cares enough to do a re-recording.

I've been slowly rewatching TNG on (the first time) Blu-ray. Very slowly made my way through S1, had a break watching some other stuff, then picked it up again and watched S2, which still has a lot of crap but actually some solid stuff that makes the season overall better than I'd remembered it. But now I'm at the end of the season, and for the past week or so I just haven't been able to bring myself to watch Shades of Gray.

I've mostly forgotten the film, but I seem to recall that it gave up typical Trek traits like compassion and a reliance on intelligence and cunning over pure force for standard modern action set pieces. I don't remember enough to compare my thoughts of the details now, but I remember mostly agreeing with Wil Wheaton's thoughts back when he posted them. I will watch it again and reevaluate it at some point, when I can pick it up really cheaply. But I don't expect it to move up from its clear last place on my personal ranking of Trek films.

I liked the first two, but Beyond was mostly awful. For some reasons, it has apparently been well received especially by those who complained that there was too much Star Wars and not enough Trek in the first two movies of the new series. To me, Beyond was clearly the un-Trek-est of all Trek films. Not just a lack of Trek stuff, but a general anti-Trek sentiment. And people complain about The Final Frontier...

All I can think of when reading this thread is this:

An iso score for this? Now it's getting grotesque. I have 1 & 3 on DVD (will pick up the new Blu transfers as soon as the price drops) and 4 & 5 on Blu. I've always found them very rewatchable.

It's the art of film music freeing itself from art.

I've missed this thread so far, for the same reason I miss most of the big franchise threads: I don't like reading much about a film before it comes out, mostly for fear of spoilers, and when I've finally seen it the thread is way too long for me to ever catch up. So I only read a few random posts here. But the big question for me is this: Why in the world does someone invest time and money to learn (to some extent) to write music and then take a big assignment for a film score and write an endless stream of rhythmic noise that has no personality, virtually no merit as standalone music, and doesn't do much more for the film it was written for than any other random stream of rhythmic noise would? Film music can be art. The nature of the business (financial demands, the need to please a huge number of diverse people, etc.) means that it's usually hard to make it high art, especially nowadays with ever shortening production deadlines. But all art is part inspiration and part craft, and the great film composers have usually found a way to produced worthwhile music that has merit when listened to on its own. Yes, it is perfectly valid to score a film in a way that doesn't necessarily make much sense as a standalone listening experience. I thought Zimmer's Dunkirk score worked very well in the film, but I don't see any reason to listen to it on its own (in that regard I consider it more sound design than film music, and would have been annoyed had it won the music Oscar). But unless a "non-musical" score really fits its film so well that I find it hard to imagine a different score with more inherent musical interest, I considered it at least a missed opportunity. Scores like Williams's Images and Goldenthal's Alien³ have a strong sound design aspect to them, yet they're still musically relevant, even when divorced from their films. But the MI: Fallout score is clearly "music", in a very basic form. Standard chords and rhythms, even with catchy themes (Schifrin's). It even tries to work with the themes by making them "epic" with Epic Choir. So it's clearly not an abstract sound design approach. But it's also musically empty, devoid of personality or any sort of complexity, intricacy, or inspiration to make it musically interesting. Its only contribution to the film is a steady rhythm and a constant loudness level, and I fail to see how anyone possessing the skills of either writing good (in whatever form of "good") music and/or producing a sound design to give a film atmosphere and personality and with a desire to work in the film score business could aspire to write something as empty as this and be satisfied with it. The primary goal of a film score is to support the film it was written for. When it succeeds in doing that, it's "good enough". "Good enough", in view of what else a film score can be, is a missed opportunity. But this score so obviously aims at just "good enough" that it isn't even that. (I am aware that this probably sounds utterly hateful towards Lorne Balfe. I haven't heard much else of what he's done. Some of what I've heard I didn't like, some I don't recall but didn't mind (Marcella, for instance). But after seeing MI: Fallout, this is what went through my mind as a longtime film music listener)

...because you'd have to include the so-called "alternate" main title. 😛

And that will probably turn out to be a planet.

I mostly know her from Blues Brothers and haven't actively sought out her other music, but I'm sure I'd like it. RIP. Here's something I just found:

Because there was, I think, no clear definition of the term "planet" until 2006 and Pluto happened to be the first object of its class that was detected: Wikipedia: Anyway, I don't see why this is still so hotly debated. As Sagan was fond to point out, the greatest thing about science, the one thing that sets it apart from mere belief systems, is its in-built mechanism of self correction. For a while, Pluto was considered a planet, until it became clear that the concept of a planet wasn't clear enough. We now have do have a clear definition of the term "planet", which means that Pluto is not considered one anymore. Nothing about Pluto has changed, it's just not assigned an unclear label anymore because that label wasn't clear enough to be scientifically meaningful. PS: Melville argued in detail why whales, despite their biological properties, must clearly be considered fish. Same pointless argument, really. Something doesn't belong to a specific class of things just because it looks like it, or because we're used to thinking it does.

No true Italian would mix up spaghetti and tagliatelle!