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Williams talks briefly about The Book Thief with Variety's Jon Burlingame: http://variety.com/gallery/eye-on-the-oscars-composers-sound-off/#!3/john-williams/

This been posted yet? http://hereandnow.wbur.org/2013/12/13/howard-shore-hobbit

I don't like Gravity's score. It's coarse and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere. Not like The Book Thief. There everything is soft and smooth.

There was something really special about that first hour or so of FOTR that in my view no further portion of the entire saga thus far has come close of matching

You should go home and rethink your life.

Seriously, who's this John Williams dude I keep hearing about? Is he any good? Doesn't he play guitar or something?

D) Cowabunga

My arse it does! Every song is brilliant.

I didn't want to get into the #4-5 Ring connection yet and, in my haste, did not express myself clearly at all. For this I apologize. The AUJ titles are actually more Ring inspired than Dwarf inspired. This was why I said I'd say more at a later date. To be (slightly) clearer: claiming that the AUJ passage "is the House of Durin" theme is categorically incorrect. The line is related to both Durin and the Ring--more the latter than the former--but it is also its own thing. This is why I personally put no stock in list making per se. Lists always lose so much nuance. Of course, I couldn't even phrase my previous post correctly, so I guess I'm not one to talk, eh? D

Trailer looks quite good. Looking forward to it. Not new, you can clearly hear its origins from "The Thin Red Line". But it sounds refreshing compared to his latest stuff. The thing is, like Stefan, I no longer trust trailers. They offer so much promise, and the product often ends up being pretty different from what we were teased with. Case in point, MoS. Even TDKR never quite lived up to the scope the trailers seemed to show off. But still, colour me excited.

May i introduce...THE PROFESSOR

That good?

Maybe. But for me Sarah Conner = Linda Hamilton

Most pleasing news. Daenerys Stormborn and Arnie together, at last. Hottest Sarah Conner ever to boot!

Happy Alvar's day, Jason!

BB nice to read your initial thoughts, but upon subsequent listens I am sure you'll find it fits in with AUJ and the LOTR scores more.

*Insert joke about hummed House of Durin Theme*

All right, but apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, what has BloadBoal ever done for us?

Oh snaaaap!

I hope so, if only to see all of the speculation on how the opening of TABA must be a premonition of the main theme of Silmarillion 1.

Shore didnt really vary the theme much throughout AUJ I thought. But wait, first PJ got blamed for having some other people raher then shore write the main theme, now Pj is getting blamed for not having Shore use that theme? Sigh.

Really? Personally, I find making movies with directors like Scorsese, Nolan and Friedkin more interesting than playing a dumb stud in romantic comedies. When I say, on a roll, I mean artistically, not financially.

In general, that is a problem that I have with these Hobbit movies versus LOTR. Lots of beheadings and killings yet it all means so much less. There's so little time spent on showing the actual pain and suffering that the violence causes these people, especially compared to LOTR where the action felt at least a little more...responsible? PJ went over-the-top plenty in those films, as well, but it's disconcerting to not have those moments of reflection.

Oh wow, I just got Gloins screen name! I miss artyjeffrey

Just saw it. After the first hour or so (when they did an intermission), I was VERY happy. At the end of the film, I was considerably more frustrated than in the middle, but I still enjoyed it overall. I've only seen AUJ once and loved about 30% of it and hated another 40% or so. With DOS, the frustrating bits couldn't hurt my enjoyment as much, perhaps because they were mostly limited to storylines that don't even show up in the original. Some thoughts: - Absolutely loved the HFR. I liked it in AUJ, but it was even better here and does exactly what I'd been expecting since it was first announced. Once again I was the only one in my group to think that though. - After the Mirkwood sequence, I didn't mind Legolas and Tauriel. Legolas doesn't have to be in the film, but at the same time there's no reason for him not to be there, and there's no reason not to have another non-anonymous Elf character. The beginnings of the Kili/Tauriel relationship were too sappy (not the opening innuendo, that was fine) but ignorable. But when it got dragged out and the plot structure and overall logic suffered from changes made just to keep the love story going got increasingly frustrating. By the time they meet in Esgaroth, the whole thing had turned ridiculously cheesy and entirely pointless. - I'm getting tired of the ever increasing battle feats of the Elves. They were great in LOTR, but it seems they're trying to top them with every new film, to the point where Legolas and Tauriel now appear to be invincible Orc army destroyers. The choreography looks fake, and Legolas is reduced to performing variations of his most stupid moves from the LOTR films. - Esgaroth's people seem to fall into a coma at night. Yes, it bothered me a lot that an entire Orc army could assualt the city and have a loud battle with two (!) Elves with not a single human (other than the bunch of cute Laketown children) noticing anything. It's things like this that make it hard to forgive the love story. Not only is it badly executed, it's also forced into the plot at the expense of internal logic. - The dwarves taking on Smaug doesn't really work. It's mostly enjoyable enough, and I understand the reasoning behind it, but it tends to make Smaug look incompetent and suffers from too much Indiana Jones type stunt work that doesn't fit into Middle-earth (at least not the Middle-earth established by the LOTR films, and while I fully support the Hobbit films having a lighter tone, the world should remain consistent). The Alien³ plot also doesn't convince. - Other than that, Smaug is utterly fantastic. Especially his initial confrontation with Bilbo, which is easily among the strongest scenes from all 5 films so far. The design, CGI and Cumberbatch's voice acting are all brilliant. - Freeman is great as usual. I thought he had a brief Holm moment in the first film, and he actually has at least two not so brief ones here, intentional or not. But he's just as great when he plays his own Bilbo. - I thought the Necromancer was handled reasonably well, if you accept that he is shown at all. The force field battle between Gandalf and him is reminiscent of Gandalf's shield spell against the Balrog in FOTR which I sorely missed in the film. - The many score interruptions did bother me, as there were a lot of scenes that were suddenly and noticeably without music - too many to have a supporting effect, if that was the intention. And I'm only listening to the score for the first time now, so it's not due to familiarity with the music. - The spiders were amazing. I was always a little disappointed in Shelob, who was handled well but not scary to me. But the 3D Mirkwood spiders fully activated my arachnophobia, and not just mine, judging from the audience reactions around me. It's sad though that Bilbo's pivotal role in rescuing the dwarves from the spiders was pretty much eliminated from the film, but then again it wouldn't have had its intended (from the book) effect anyway after the premature bromance ending in the first film. - The film ended exactly where I expected it to. - I liked the Bree opening. Aside from a few modifications (and for once, they actually worked in tying some of the other modifications into the overall logic), it was pretty much straight out of the appendixes. And PJ's cameo is his best so far, beating the one from The Frighteners.

Marian

FOTR has the strongest and clearest narrative. The closest to the book by far, despite the many changes. And the enviroment feels the most real. In the last point TTT is a close second, starting with ROTK it starts to feel less like New Zealand and more like a CGI created/colorgraded world.

A follow-up to: Richards, Mark, The Music of the Original Star Wars Trilogy: An Analytical Approach.

All I could think of was the ballet scene from Amadeus. "Herr Jackson, his Highness would like to see the scene with the music in."

I'm not a musician, so the analyses would be more in a musico-dramatic/aesthetic/philosophical style, I'm afraid (with only some basic musical terminology). It will be a book where I talk about absolutely everything, though, in some form or fashion. We need that kind of thorough literature that doesn't just cover the 'big titles', I think. And for that, I need to watch a whole lot of tv episodes (that I haven't yet found) and the film STORIA DI UNA DONNA:

This.