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Ah, welcome back into the Statler & Waldorf box! Yes and yes. If it's released separately as an album then it's a valid question. 'How dare he not make an enjoyable album, but just dumps 150 minutes of recording session cues before us?' is an especially valid question and i guess it's exactly the reprimanded fans that demand shit like this because, i mean, what better world can there be but waste your spare time editing through piles of boring underscore? Giacchino was obviously given a much bigger reign on Batman, because it's miles better than the clumsy stuff he usually comes up with for this kind of blockbuster stuff - there's even some faint Penderecki in there and two rather solid themes that don't sound like a half-assed tip of the hat to old Universal monster music. But he surely could've cut off 30-40 minutes and nobody would've complained.

Lovely stuff!

Good to see two european titles. Joan of Arc by Friedhofer, certainly (and a much better candidate for a re-recording than painstakingly re-creating short Goldsmith oldies which are not that interesting to begin with, but hey, i still put my $ in the Kickstarter, so...).

What are the contenders?

Ludwig Goransson's, shall we say, eclectic pop score for this already controversial new Pixar film rivals 'Mr. Baseball' as far as the authenticity of his Asian idiom is concerned, but otherwise there is a exuberant mood, somewhere between Röyksopp and the Zimmer/Powell cooperations. The pure underscore pieces are rather uninteresting and mainly quiet patchwork. But the kitsch pop is fine!

I guess 'The Imperial March' will be everyone's favourite piece this year.

Anyway, he had to deliver hard $ apologies.

It was a very particular problem, of which this movie had quite a few. A built-in concern was that by 2003 this particular IP was pilfered by many others (include this board's two favourite words STAR WARS here, but many others, too). The marketing department had to sell a thing that was half Time Machine, half Mad Max and entirely too much Star Wars prequel in its artifical computer look. Disney had its doubts from the beginning, but gave in to reward a major Pixar guy. As punishment he had to deliver 'Cars 3'.

The new Deluxe version of 'The Iron Giant' is already up on Spotify, but alas, it leaves me as cold as the 1998 soundtrack release. Kamen just ain't for me, a few notable exceptions.

Red Planet, too.

Movies featuring the word 'Mars' in their title are doomed commercially.

Let's forever be thankful that he at least did one bad movie that enabled Jerry Goldsmith to write a dark superhero score.

It's certainly better than the usual Giacchino standard (simplistic/derivative as it is). But now i see reviews popping up on FB in which the music is described as Herrmann reborn. MG has now officially reached Zimmer status.

HTTYD2 already had a MORE THAN adequate release with almost 75 minutes on it.

Spotify offered me today this most-cherished (by me, anyway) old Williams 'war horse' in its perfect-length LP incarnation. Two impressions from listening to it again today: Williams and De Palma should have worked together more often (just imagine Williams scoring 'Dressed to Kill' instead of 'Heartbeeps' in the early 80's) and that the last two cues, 'Death on the Carousel' and 'Epilogue', as curated specifically for this re-recorded LSO album, are two of my all-time favourite Williams pieces, edging out several of his more famous franchise scores.

Love JNH for several reasons, though i also admit that his pragmatic approach to his employers' laundry list of bad suggestions not always makes for the most compelling music (not FILM music). First of all, he's the only one today carrying the Goldsmith torch of a strong, to-the-point theme augmented by short characteristic motifs in an orchestral/synth framework and he does it with style and like Goldsmith for every genre imaginable (like in JG's later career phase, that automatically leads to a good number of merely functionable scores, but that's the nature of the beast). Secondly, i love the understated elegance in a lot of his themes - think King Kong's emotional material, and under which conditions it was conceived. And his recent concert works are proof that he's really a very capable, accomplished composer, whom i wish better assignments than the many lame CGI spectacles he has to labour over in recent times.

I was just riffing on the situation as is, i. e. remaking a proven property. Of course an original would have been preferable, but with the fiftieth Batman or Spider-Man reboot leading at the box office, who's gonna delude himself?

That's it in a nutshell, i know that there will be tremendous shots in WSS, but i just can't be arsed to put it on because i give a rat's ass about this musty old warhorse glossied up for a 2021 audience. A miscalculation. Given recent geo-political events, Spielberg would have made a home run if he just remade i. e. 'Fiddler in the Roof' - you just can feel the timeless relevance - and it would've fit his jewish heritage to a T. Or something like that.

The Britten...

Not even themes, but whole building blocks that are inserted again and again. But if you trim the most egregious repetitions, you end up with one of the most entertaining sledgehammer action scores of the 2000's.

Hero worship is unforgiving. I laugh my ass off when outraged fans claim they purge all that stuff from their collections for a lack of `purity`. I mean, why? When you like the music?

Calling the MIG attack cue in Air Force One and Battle for the Castle from Last Castle, which are so obviously not Goldsmith even though they had access to all his core material.

But even in the olden days, guys like Herbert Stothart were exceptions to the rule (and also at least 50% administrator), the music guys in Hollywood were top talent with a vast education and ability. I guess when pop guys like Randy Edelman & Co. started to make it big and had to write for orchestra (before Zimmer), this practice really became a de facto norm. At least i do not remember pop/rock guys writing 'real' scores before that to any real extent. People may cite guys like Quincy Jones, certainly for big western scores like 'McKenna's Gold', but he also remained mostly in idioms he could handle. Maurice Jarre was a rare case where orchestrator Gerard Schurmann later claimed having to largely write out 'Lawrence of Arabia', because Jarre was not really equipped to handle it.