Leaderboard

C’mon, his peak at least started in the 70s… Jane Eyre, his first Oscar win for Fiddler on the Roof, The Cowboys, Images, JAWS (and its first sequel), Close Encounters, The Fury for DePalma, Family Plot for Hitchcock, SUPERMAN, a little film called STAR WARS??? What’s this 1954 film score you’re referring to? Was it a student film or something he did for the Air Force? Because his first Hollywood film score was Daddy-O in 1958… And while I’ve got my pedantic professor hat on… Anyone who regards it as such is being ignorant; anyone who declares it as such is either that or dishonest. King Kong in complete form is a little over 70 minutes long. And it’s not even “wall to wall” because the film has almost half an hour without music. Check out this great podcast episode for interesting commentary on that: https://www.settlingthescorepodcast.com/14-king-kong/ In the previous decade composers such as Gottfried Huppertz (Metropolis, Die Nibelungen) were composing even larger scale and more wall to wall orchestral film scores of much greater sophistication and complexity than what Steiner did for King Kong (or similarly for the same creative team the previous year for The Most Dangerous Game, for that matter!) (2.5 hours!!) (4.5 hours! It was an epic two-part film, but still…) Hell, the very first original orchestral film score by Camille Saint-Saens way back in 1908 was virtually wall to wall itself! (It’s just that the film was only about 20 minutes long.) (Start on Track 5.) My favorite French film score from the 20s is Salammbo by Florent Schmitt: (This isn’t even the complete score, but three suites from it cut down for concert performance purposes.) None other that Doug Adams (The Music of the Lord of the Rings Films) is another champion of this one: https://florentschmitt.com/2014/06/12/film-music-specialist-doug-adams-talks-about-florent-schmitts-salammbo-and-other-music-scores-from-the-silent-film-era/amp/ And it’s not just the French and Germans. Dmitri Shostakovich started writing long form film music in Russia during the 1920s. His score to Odna was years before King Kong, was long form, played with diegetic and non-diegetic, and even was the first film score to feature the theremin, many years before Rozsa or Herrmann used it! (79 minutes long) Then we have Spanish composer Ernesto Halffter (Carmen, 1926): (66 min long) Finnish composer Armas Jarnefelt with the very first original orchestral film score written in Finland (just 11 years after Saint-Saens’s sole film score): (99 minutes long!) Italian composer Pietro Mascagni’s score for Rapsodia Satanica (he’s best known for the opera Cavalleria Rusticana but he did this one film score in 1917): “But Yavar! Max Steiner was the first person to write full length orchestral scores in HOLLYWOOD!” Nope! None other than La-La Land Records released a restoration of the Zamecnik score to Wings (1927) years ago — 76.5 minutes, longer than King Kong: https://lalalandrecords.com/wings-limited-edition/ And he’s not the first in the United States either! That might(?) have been for the odious (but historically important) Birth of a Nation (1913), with original orchestral score composed by Joseph Carl Breil: https://moviemusicuk.us/2022/01/10/the-birth-of-a-nation-joseph-carl-breil/ And for Spotify users, we have this new (released earlier this year!) Mark Fitz-Gerald-conducted recording of The Thief of Bagdad — no, not the well remembered 1940 version by Miklos Rozsa, but one by American composer Mortimer Wilson for the 1924 Hollywood version starring Douglas Fairbanks… 74 minutes on album, also more substantial than King Kong which it pre-dated by nine years: Wilson was something of a film music specialist all through the 1920s in Hollywood, by the way… at least a half dozen film scores starting with 1920’s The Mark of Zorro and going through 1928’s The Good-bye Kiss and The Night Watch. So yeah, while the 1933 film King Kong was the first Hollwood film to achieve *that* level of popularity, and therefore Steiner’s lengthy (but not unprecedentedly so) orchestral score has gotten a lot of press and attention over the years… NO, it wasn’t “first”… by any meaningful metric. Yavar

This was a really good film - very entertaining and wonderful score. It didn't always feel like Horner but felt like someone who tried to embody Horner and that's the most we can ever hope for. I'm totally fine that he wasn't cloning Horner but embodied him while doing his own thing too. It had otherworldly themes too. There were new themes that I thought were gorgeous and I could feel the synth connection to so much of Horner's earlier scores like Titanic which to me, this film had a lot of connection to. Thumbs up for lots of use of Lydian mode and multiple pianos ala Horner. I loved it.

Well, I just returned from seeing it and loved it! I thought it was a good sequel to the original with some amazing visuals and excellent action/combat sequences. I haven't seen the original in years but think I might like this one better. I thought Simon Franglen did a great job capturing the spirit of Horner considering the obvious constraint that it is NOT and never will be Horner. I didn't mind it was quite noticeable where Horner came in and where Franglen came in. I have no doubt he tried his best to embody the spirit of Horner and I hear that effort. Overall, the film was a worthy successor and very good popcorn flick. Outstanding visuals and I found the characters (the kids) more interesting than the villains of the original. I enjoyed myself but actually think it could have been a bit longer...I thought the same of the original even with the director's cut. Not that it isn't long (it's quite long) but some sequences felt rushed and cut down and I think would have flown smoother with more material. I can imagine this as a 3:45 film. Yes, yes, a bit heavy handed at times. But no worse than Star Wars. I had a great time. I saw it in Dolby real 3D which includes reclining seats and subwoofers in the seats which gave me a bit of a headache, but the 3D was excellent visually. It was pricey for me, $21 for a matinee. The frame rate changes were a bit jarring. At the high frame rate, looked excellent but stuttered a bit in the low frame sequences.

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!

Yeah, the score has definitely turned out way better than I anticipated. Karol

It being New Year's Eve, I decided to make a best-films-of-the-year list, except not for the year that's about to end. 2020 is the year from which I've seen the largest number of films by a huge margin (around 175 now, I think). The twenty-four months since its end have given me the chance to watch most of the films of that year that I'm ever likely to, and also to see which of the best ones retain their impact over time and/or hold up on rewatching. I couldn't decide whether to pick a top ten, top thirty, top fifty or whatever. For no good reason I've opted for twenty-five. I'm counting a film as being from 2020 if (to the best of my knowledge) it had its first release in any country in that year, excluding special screenings at premieres and festivals. (Nomadland was originally a contender here as I'd read that it had had a limited release in Australia or New Zealand very late in 2020, but it seems that may have been a mistake and I'm counting it as a 2021 film instead.) Saint Maud (Rose Glass) First Cow (Kelly Reichardt) Identifying Features (Fernanda Valadez) Shirley (Josephine Decker) Lynn + Lucy (Fyzal Boulifa) Black Bear (Lawrence Michael Levine) The Nest (Sean Durkin) Atlantis (Valentyn Vasyanovych) La Llorona (Jayro Bustamante) Small Axe (Steve McQueen) Riders of Justice (Anders Thomas Jensen) I'm Thinking of Ending Things (Charlie Kaufman) The Assistant (Kitty Green) This Is Not a Burial, It's a Resurrection (Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese) The Personal History of David Copperfield (Armando Iannucci) Dear Comrades! (Andrei Konchalovsky) The Disciple (Chaitanya Tamhane) Promising Young Woman (Emerald Fennell) DAU. Natasha (Ilya Khrzhanovsky and Jekaterina Oertel) The Macaluso Sisters (Emma Dante) Saint Frances (Alex Thompson) Calm with Horses (Nick Rowland) Sound of Metal (Darius Marder) Asia (Ruthy Pribar) Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time (Lili Horvát)

Inspired by the great Jim Titus, I had to put these mockups together. Never gonna happen, probably, but a man can dream!

'Hard To Starboard' is peak Horner Anvil.

Good lord haha. And apparently it went up hugely in China as well. It's basically increasing business everywhere. Cameron is ridiculous...yet again.

There is reportedly a version which is 30-50 mins longer so hopefully we get a proper extended cut on the blu ray. 10 mins of action scenes were cut and Franglen mentioned having written more music that was performed on set so I assume that a few additional “song / live on set performance scenes” were filmed as well that weren’t in the theatrical cut.

Those aren't templates, I built those shots myself in Blender.

That might be true but I would say the standards have improved slightly in recent years. There's definitely more colour and melody creeping back into film scoring. To give you a simple example, in 2008 we had Djawadi's Iron Man and in 2021 we had Djawadi's Eternals. Not a huge leap necessarily but an improvement for sure. 😀 Karol

BEST SCORES OF 2022 The year haven't produced a single score I would call a "classic", but I liked Giacchino's The Batman, Elfman's Multiverse of Madness, McCreary's Rings of Power and GOW: Ragnarok, Gorannssonn's Wakanda Forever and Franglen's The Way of Water well enough. TOP 10 BEST TRACKS OF 2022 Family History by JNH from Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore (the only track from that very long album I find myself returning to); Vengeance Has Consumed Us by Ludwig Gorannssonn from Black Panther 2 Leaving Home by Simon Franglen from Avatar 2 BEST CATALOG TITLES OF 2022 Willow Amistad Spider-Man Presummed Innocent SpaceCamp FILM SCORE LABEL OF THE YEAR All of them! BEST FILMS OF 2022 Everything Everywhere All at Once Avatar: The Way of Water BEST TV SEASONS OF 2022 Better Call Saul S6 Severance S1 SPECIFIC HIGHLIGHTS OF 2022 The labels thriving and releasing a lot of beloved film scores from the past (aka when film music used to be good). SPECIFIC DISAPPOINTMENTS OF 2022 As @Jurassic Shark said: The mostly mediocre standard of film scoring.

I just listened to this and Franglen calls the underwater theme “the way of water theme” so it’s a safe bet that that is the official name of the theme (in into the water, return of the tulkun etc).

That was the most hillarious thing! People betting against James Cameron. Will they never learn?

To my big surprise, this airs on Norwegian TV tonight. But already available to stream. Watching now, not sure there is much from the first day when I was there. The anecdotes are a little different from what I remember. Probably already explained earlier in the thread. Anyways, just a heads-up to Norwegians here.

90 some hours away, at the most, until we find out what these January releases are!

Still mystified by why the Race Against the Sunset cue was omitted from the original CD. It was the most obvious highlight missing from an already generous album. Getting Kilar to score the film was an absolutely brilliant move by Coppola. Not surprising that Jackson explored getting him to do LOTR with Shore's score exhuding some of those dark earthly tones as well

Don't forget the crashing pianos.

I liked St Maud too but didn't love it. Galadriel was really good in it though. Karol

Where's Shithouse? Nice to see some love for Black Bear!

BTW I finished binging season 1 of The Bad Batch since Tuesday and pretty much loved it across the board. I've also watched the first 6 episodes of Rebels and it's not bad at all! I think the first half of Clone Wars was just uniquely creaky and boring for me. Filoni & co. got so much better at what they were doing over time. The quality jump in the D+ era is especially noticeable IMO. Honestly it's a big relief for me that I was able to get into these shows with perseverance. It was always such a huge part of Star Wars that I felt cut off from and now I feel more fully engaged as a fan.

1985 No Jacket Required. Everything else.

The 80s are amazing. My second favourite decade after the 70s.

I can (list names of 3 pop/rock albums that is, not speaking of quality here) Invisible Touch So Raised on Radio Chicago 18

For no real reason, my top 10 pop/rock albums of 1986 1. The Smiths - The Queen is Dead 2. Paul Simon - Graceland 3. XTC - Skylarking 4. Sonic Youth - EVOL 5. REM - Lifes Rich Pageant 6. New Order - Brotherhood 7. Kraftwerk - Electric Café/Techno Pop 8. Cocteau Twins - Victorialand 9. Bruce Hornsby - The Way It Is 10. Huey Lewis & The News - Fore! Just missed the top 10: Robyn Hitchcock - Elements of Light, Peter Gabriel - So, Prince - Parade

I will end up with ten, yes (and some runner-ups).

Amazing 2020 videogame score by the best darkwave/darksynth composer around (sorry, Perturbator and Carpenter Brut!). Funky, dark, delicious.

https://www.jpc.de/jpcng/poprock/detail/-/art/simon-franglen-avatar-the-way-of-water/hnum/11131277

To be fair, here we go:

I freaking love Sunken Condos. Great album. The worlds created by Fagen in his albums are just so irresistible, populated with all those sad fucked up characters. I just want one more of those worlds.

Yes, all the way. Although the fun bit is these early parts that few others have heard.

Yeah, I read that. A true satirical genius. BREMNER BIRD & FORTUNE is brilliant.

I’m not saying it wouldn’t be worth watching/hearing, just wouldn’t count as his first score. It’d be like what gets called “juvenilia” for classical composers.

BEST SCORES OF 2022 None TOP 10 BEST TRACKS OF 2022 None BEST CATALOG TITLES OF 2022 Jurassic Park FILM SCORE LABEL OF THE YEAR La-La Land Records BEST FILMS OF 2022 None BEST TV SEASONS OF 2022 None SPECIFIC HIGHLIGHTS OF 2022 The Magnificent Seven soundtrack collection / The Godfather expansion. SPECIFIC DISAPPOINTMENTS OF 2022 The mostly mediocre standard of film scoring.

Would you anyway?

Since Universal owns the rights to this score themselves and doesn't share rights with a music label, they will likely replace the digital album they put out through Back Lot with this new edition at some point in the future This would be similar to what recently happened with Star Trek The Motion Picture, which is entirely owned by Paramount and not shared with a music label anymore, so they put Mike's LLL rebuild on digital sites themselves.

If it's anything like mine (and I don't know if I want to call mine sycophancy necessarily), it stems in large part from the fervent hope that there may still exist on this earth some form of reasonably original IP that can make a ton of box office money and has nothing to do with godforsaken superhero shit. I'm so done with the MCU and the ever-imploding DCEU, but they certainly aren't done with us.

Yes you will

My La-La Land package arrived - the first surprise is that I don't have to pay any customs, the second surprise is that LLL doesn't have those cheap jewel cases any more - wonderful!

I can't speak for anybody else, but for me, I've seen so few 2022 films so far, and heard so few 2022 scores so far, I don't remotely feel ready to rank the year yet. I need a few more months to catch up

I've spoken to Simon Franglen via Twitter and he has very kindly accepted my invitation to an interview on behalf of the forum, which he spoke highly of. So, while I arrange and schedule it through the proper channels, please throw out any questions you would like answered!

How many steps from that to this?

I find this already irritating: "Look, sometimes a TV soundtrack is so good that you have no choice but to make a whole podcast episode about it." All the incredible TV scores this year, and then you pick this one to highlight. That's baffling. I like Britell, but Andor's score is not amomg the best scores of this year at all, amd other scores should warrant episodes lile this.

Third time’s a charm, Bes!

getting?