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"Wait a minute. I think I already wrote Benny a theme. Ah yes, here it is." "Mr. Williams, that is a different Ben." "I said I already wrote Benny a theme, and here it is."

This was the thirteenth different John Williams-scored film I have seen live in concert (all of them at the Royal Albert Hall) and I must say that it was a thrill to hear the music 'properly' without the muddy sound of the soundtrack releases to date. That it was performed by the London Symphony Orchestra (led on the Sunday evening performance by Carmine Lauri) made it extra special. I heard and saw details in the orchestration which I had not noticed previously, which is one of the tremendous benefits of the live in concert format. I mentioned double bass player Patrick Laurence earlier in this thread as probably having played on the original soundtrack, so it was good to see him on stage with the rest of the double bass section.

I’m not offended by Brittell’s approach (In fact I don’t even notice it 😆) But I listened to this the other day. A Williams-esque approach in this mode would be so cool for this show. This is grade-A tension scoring.

You know, as a rule, I try not to look too deep into the 4D chess of John Williams' musical mythmaking and usually just chalk these things up to some sort of enlightened coincidence, but this one is particularly convenient lol. Two Bens.

To be fair, there are so many great artworks done of Valinor, that I really wanted it on screen. The writings of Tolkien are so strong and evocative that the myth reading it can't be teinted. What is demystifying Valinor way more than that short image of it with the trees is Galadriel's awful journey there. The mystique of Valinor comes greatly from the fact that there are accounts of people going there and leaving it, but as a sort of metaphor, and you're left imagining how you actually get there. Since they are clearly marked as lands, but it's also a place of myth. Showing an actual divorcing wall is just a very dumb idea. When Theoden says he's going to the Halls of his fathers, of course you don't show him knocking on a huge wooden door. It's metaphorical. Just like in every movie telling Jesus Christ's life and death, you show him crucified, and not flying up the sky in big fluffy clouds until he hears harps playing. I'm very grateful the writers don't have the rights to the Silmarillion, otherwise I swear they would take the phrase "Halls of Mandos" and show actual halls of Mandos. I'm angry now. How can you be so stupid as a writer? I swear, sometimes you just look at people and know they're the reason there need to be instructions printed on shampoo bottles.

Yes as much as I can. I do that with all the Lucasfilm movies, and in general most movies I really care about. Sometimes I accidentally drill through a post and happen upon a spoiler, which is a drag. Damn you!!!!

That was part of the problem with the Star Wars prequel trilogy...the Jedi order, the Clone Wars, etc. we're all spoken of as myth and legend in the OT. There was no way the on-screen portrayal was going to be able to live up to whatever people conjured in their imagination while watching Star Wars....and it didn't. At least for me. Shows with contemporary settings, and that are more character driven, especially psychologically complex characters like those in Breaking Bad, are more suited to a "backstory", IMO. How Saul got to be the person he becomes is interesting and even relevant, whereas portraying how Mordor became Mordor just takes away from the magic.

It's ironic that, among the people who are bashing McCreary's work in this thread, there are some who criticize the "lack of intellect" in his scores, and some who find them "too intellectual", in comparison to Shore's work. The reason of this contradiction is that both positions are based on a wrong premise, that one of the two works is intellectual and the other one is not. Actually, both Shore's and McCreary's works are "intellectual"; the difference between the two approaches is the main (and I stress it, the *main*, not the only) target of their intellectual endeavour. Shore put more effort in realizing overarching structures and connections between themes pertaining to different but related characters or situations, at the expenses of the average complexity of the building blocks (which are often very simplistic if taken on their own). McCreary focused more on the building blocks, i.e., the complexity of the themes, harmonies and orchestrations, without giving much thought to interconnections - at least, as far as I have noticed until now. Personally, I'm more favourable to McCreary's approach (which I find conceptually similar to JW's), while others here prefer Shore's approach. But I firmly believe that the reason of the disagreement can be explained with the differences that I described above in an extremely simplified way. In any case, it's wrong to assume that one of the two approaches lacks intellect. They are both "intelligent" scores, in their own way.

I know there's no point to this, but I'll post it anyway.... (01:12)

Hmmmm...

Battle of Britain is another film which had two great scores, the replacement by Ron Goodwin and the original by Sir William Walton whose Battle in the Air was the only piece to survive in the film as released. I like to play both scores around this time of year (Battle of Britain Day in the UK is 15th September) as a tribute to those brave men from the United Kingdom, the Commonwealth and its European allies (biggest shout to the Poles and the Czechs) who saved our country from Nazi invasion in that summer of 1940. Walton's score is more overtly patriotic than Goodwin's but that is no bad thing. The march at the end makes me want to fly a Hurricane at a Dornier and damn the consequences!

Here's a mostly spoiler free* follow up interview with Armato: *) mostly in that it's accompanied by gameplay footage from somewhere a bit into chapter 1, and talks about the prologue. Here's a relevant Ron Gilbert tweet: And here's an excellent extended comment over at the Mojo forums on the ending and overall meaning of it all by @Romão.

A recent interview covering a lot of what was in his latest blog. Interestingly: - Elrond's theme was revised several times after they watched his scenes and weren't sure if Elrond had a theme. - After episode 2 they didn't do spotting sessions. He just scored the episode and they gave some notes in return. Apparently they realised that they were in sync in terms of what the music needed to do and really didn't put any creative restrictions at all on Bear, so that pretty much all choices were down to him. Detractors, check out around 44 mins in for a couple of minutes, and then I dare you to send Bear hate mail telling him how much you hated his score - he's pretty much asking you to! (although if anyone still accuses him of treating it as 'just a job', you're beyond hope)

The second Smith > Capaldi control room is a thing a beauty.

I actually think the current one looks cheap, the crystal things just looks like plastic moulded shapes with lights in (because they are) rather than either something pleasingly structural or something a bit more magical looking. It's a bit over-production designed for my taste, the Paul McGann one I feel similar about. I really liked the console rooms for Matt Smith and Peter Capaldi though.

Yeah. Appreciate them taking advantage of the increased budget and studio space available for the interior from the McGann movie onwards, but the current one is too much ... central console column being some sort of rock/crystal thing, with others bending overhead towards it like the legs of a dead spider on its back? Nah. 'Oh, you've redecorated. I don't like it'.

Yeah, I don't object to backstory: I do object to those kinds of backstories that demystify more so than illuminate. Creation myths tends to almost always do the former.

I mean, I’m sure I’d enjoy it almost as much, but seeing scenes makes me anticipate when they’re coming while I’m watching it, so I’m not really all in. My favorite teaser is the Terminator 2 one that simply shows the assembly line of the Terminator. That’s how you get me excited about a movie. It’s all delayed gratification and getting the most I can out of the first view experience.

I haven’t watched this. I’m going spoiler free. And it’s really requiring discipline, because I haven’t looked forward to a film this much in I don’t know how long.

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Try being an Elmer Bernstein fan. It’s his freakin’ centenary year and *nothing* from the labels so far, alas (and there’s so much still unreleased, or even LP programs which haven’t made it to CD yet). Yavar

I MIND the speed issues in Willow’s “the sled ride” so….

Fixed that for you.

I know what you mean. L'Oréal keep telling me I'm worth it

They're listed in the episode's entires here. (Search by AV productions)

Seeing the light is one thing, hearing the thunder is another!

Super late to the GoT party, but finally finished it so wanted to unload some totally unsolicited thoughts (some spoilers, but not sure anyone reading this won't know them already): I really like the music for the most part. Djawadi wouldn't be my first choice of composer (I don't know who would... these days I guess Amazon and HBO would be fighting over Bear McCreary), but the main theme has (rightly) reached iconic status and I was gratified that he used it here and there throughout the series. Never to the point of it feeling overused, but it nicely ties everything together. His finale based choral version is terrific. I'm sure someone has catalogued the other recurring themes and I'm sure I spotted a few, but I can't say I'd especially recognise them out of context. The music for the quieter, more haunting scenes is definitely the more interesting. The action is a bit RCP, but not in a distracting way - I rather think that most of the bigger battles could just have been tracked with James Horner's battle music for Braveheart. It just needs a lot of acoustic percussion and horn calls. The 8th season is much better than its reputation suggestion. I rather wish I didn't know about the controversy but I can see that, based on the pace of the show to that point, the 8th season should probably have had a couple more after it. It definitely felt like; Night King. Gone. Cersei. Gone. Dany goes mad then gone. Everyone agrees on something marginally less tyrannical. The end. Having said that, the two culminating battles (one per season would have been more than enough) are superbly staged with some genuinely haunting moments. The real shame is that Dany's fall into madness/tyranny/whatever would have been far more powerful over a longer period. You only really see the start of it and then it feels they pushed it so she goes OTT quickly so they can wrap the story up. Shame. The directing, at least from a cinematography/imagery point of view, is often exceptional. Interesting to compare it with The Rings of Power which looks undeniably lovely, but is all quite brightly lit and clean/neat/production designed. GoT on the other hand is all shafts of light, dust, snow/ash, light and dark, fire and ice (obvs), with innumerable artfully framed scenes that have a wonderful painterly quality but without standing out or being distracting. The effects are mostly excellent. The dragons, in particular, are perhaps the best on screen dragons I can recall. They look plausible in terms of size and proportions (even if, from a physics perspective, they probably aren't), have a nicely realistic/quasi dinosaur type look and act something akin to real animals rather than just being monsters. The effects for them only really falling down when doing close-ups of the characters riding them when the blue screening looks a touch janky, but that kind of match moving is probably hideously difficult. The set extensions stuff such as the huge castles and so on is almost always brilliantly executed, making great use of the locations and extending them into a plausible fantasy realm. It might get explained in House of the Dragon, but it always struck is as implausible that such a violent and regicidal society could have built so many amazing buildings and other edifices. Sure, they are meant to be heightened versions of real historic castles and churches, but it kinda feels that life is so expendable in Westeros that there never would have been enough societal cohesion to come together to build them. The spin-off should clearly have been Aya going off to explore. Enough with effing prequels. They are blond, they have dragons, they go mad. The end. GoT connections to my life. I have been to both Valetta in Malta (first season King's Landing) and Dubrovnik (rest of the show King's Landing). In the latter, they were filming some crowd scenes and I managed a few photos (despite the security people... but hey, it's a public place). I don't recall seeing any of the main cast alas. I used to work for a company who had a Belfast office next door to where they filmed GoT at Titanic Studios (seriously). I never saw them filming there but colleagues said they often saw some outside semi-studio bound scenes being filmed. The family of one of my former colleagues from said office owned the land on which they filmed (I think) Winterfell. Apparently they did quite well of it... as you can probably imagine.

Well, that's just the prequels being stupid. You could concievably show a realization of the Clone Wars that wasn't stupid and a depiction of the Jedi Order that didn't make you want to reach into the screen and exterminate them yourself. But something like Valinor or the creation of Mordor or the genesis of Mithril (who the hell even asked for that?! Never ever even crossed my mind!), that was going to be demystifying even if the realization weren't stupid (which it is).

I didn't make it to the end of Dawn Of The Dead either when I tried to watch it ... eh, reckon that more recent zombie (and consumer capitalist satire) stuff with higher production values etc just made it seem kinda cheesy to me. Probably would've had more of an impact if I'd seen it in my teens on VHS in the Eighties.

Myth Demystified

I also avoid trailers when I can. I don’t see the point of getting big reveals in the trailer on my phone than in the cinema or when watching a TV season.

I was going to watch this, but stopped being interested, after I read the words "Zack Snyder's".

You should have watched this one instead:

You’ve got more control than i do. As soon as I saw that it leaked i immediately clicked the link🤣🤣

Indiana Jones is in it.

MV posted they were going to redo Innerspace, but that was years ago now. I wonder what happened

Pathetic! Make you a coffee at least!

I really liked Black Widow but this piece sucks, so lifeless it’s sad that this is where things are going

The 4K release of Planes, Trains, and Automobiles promises a bonus disc of over 75 minutes of deleted and extended scenes -- although it's not quite clear if the bonus disc is a regular Blu-ray

"End Title" from JAWS 2, is a lovely, meandering theme.

Good for you for not continuing the bizarre sadistic practice so many people feel compelled to engage in… I don’t understand this at all. It’s like forcing yourself to eat every donut of a flavor that makes you want to vomit just because you like donuts in general… if it’s truly this awful, just walk away and don’t look back.

Dude could probably kick my ass if we got into a street fight.

Three and four are absolutely peak Gold - I vividly remember the albums coming out when I was just starting work and listening during commutes in the dark. Both are such wonderfully constructed albums, an art I think Gold lost a bit from the specials album onwards. Without a doubt, the absolute highlight across both albums for me is The Runaway Bride, a cue which entered public consciousness when it was performed at the musical celebration concert with Tennant. I don't think he wrote cues like that in later seasons - maybe the show's stories didn't allow for it. Also that Voyage of the Damned suite... couldn't possibly pack more cinema, action and Christmas into 10 mins.

I was listening to Gold's Series Four today. I'm way more of a Moffat guy than a Davies guy (I mean, they're both great). But wow. Gold didn't get better than this. Three and Four are Peak Gold. He wrote some great music after this and he certainly wrote some killer themes. (I am the Doctor is so good you can be fooled into thinking you're tired of it. You're wrong.) All the years of original Who where they tried to re-do the theme. IMHO they really did it once (Howell) where it came close to equaling the original. (Yes, I like Glyn. Yes, Debney has its charm.) Then Gold comes along and dashes off four of them!

Anyone else find it weird that there's less than a month to go to The Power Of The Doctor and we haven't had a sniff of a trailer? Chibnall was clearly really glad to get the hell out of Dodge after Legend Of The Sea Devils.

Flux album is up on digital https://music.apple.com/nz/album/doctor-who-series-13-flux-original-television-soundtrack/1645455579

Yes! So those were rustling leaves I thought I heard. I’ll be performing the score live to projection this Autumn as I do my yardwork.

Another really great performance by (I think, they didn’t have programmes) the Philharmonic Concert Orchestra. A few thoughts: I really didn’t miss the choir in the Emperor passages and it was great to be able to hear the underlying orchestral parts. Have any of those sections been reworked to compensate for the lack of choir or is the choir just omitted? This seemed to have more instances of cues crashing into each other/overlapping between scenes than the first two. Must be especially horrible to perform as you lose musicality and timing when a short passage tramples over another section. Great to hear the score in obviously superior quality to the various soundtrack releases. Especially passages like the superstructure chase which I assume will always sound naff given the recording issues. As a prelude to the second half, they played an excerpt from Carbon Freeze from Empire. Bit odd. They performed the percussion passage as the heroes are taken to the Ewok village which I’m pretty sure isn’t on any version. I mean it’s just some percussion so you’re not missing much but it was nice to hear. Performing the Ewok horn calls on trumpet was a nice touch. The orchestra only version of Victory Celebration I actually liked more although it sounds oddly more wistful and melancholy like that. I still can’t understand how the join with the end credits is so bad though…

Wow, there's a lot that you love about it. I only like the moment in the beginning of the movie when Cruise is fascinated by the strange dark clouds that are gathering above the city. That's it. Overall, I would say that War Of The Worlds feels very much like a Shyamalan film. The topic, the style of the movie, the cold, unnatural relationship between parent and kids, the naiveness, the sombre mood, the same kind of stillness ... Up there with Spielberg's best? That's a bold statement.