publicist
-
Posts
17,837 -
Joined
-
Last visited
-
Days Won
42
Posts posted by publicist
-
-
-
15 hours ago, LSH said:
He does strike me as somebody who is incredibly easy to work with, agreeable, and will do exactly as he is told. He's never had a score rejected as far as I know?
JNH acknowledged in several interviews that he was quite an asshole and hard to work with early in his career. He didn't mention exactly when he changed, but i guess when he bedded Babs Streisand and was her choice as John Barry replacement for 'Prince of Tides' he was a different person. Streisand is famously not a person you disagree with. Btw, the score for 'Prince of Tides' is mushy and awful.
-
'Babylon': Not a film score, but a ragtag collection of what is supposed to be a greeting card of the era (for fans of the movie) the movie is set in but really isn't: either it's a deliberate choice or Hurwitz just doesn't have any feeling or affinity for the music of the 20's/30's, as all the mambo, bebop, jazz and so on sounds like nothing of that time but filtered through a weird prism of modern latin pop and hiphop. Having not seen the movie i reserve judgement, but it sure isn't my thing.
Much better. Desplat's 'Pinocchio' is firmly anchored in his style, but if you compare it with Silvestri's bland Zemeckis version, you easily can tell what's the artist and the hack version of this zillionst retelling of the famous story. Apparently Desplat was heavily involved with the handful of songs that permeate the story, and though the actor's voice work varies noticeably (the Pinocchio voice actor has a Broadway inflection that doesn't sit well with me), Desplat holds it all together. There's a very european vibe here, kind of Fellini-esque, though i rather not seek to find out out why this Pinocchio joins war (?) - the score has a very prominent song-like main theme, though it's also eclectic (it doesn't rely too much on it and then there are cues like 'Paint Battle' that stand alone rather well).
-
8 hours ago, Thor said:
Could be, although I've seen a few great things since that time.
Yeah, but better not starting to weigh it against all the formulaic filth that makes up 90% of the rest.
-
23 minutes ago, Thor said:
Indeed. This is one of the shittiest things I've seen in a while, and there's really no excuse for it in the socalled Golden Age of Television.
Note to Thor: the Golden Age of Television has long ended. It was in its final throes in 2015-2016, and then the formulas took over. By 2020, it was a miracle when something truly remarkable came along, say 'Chernobyl'.
-
8 hours ago, Jurassic Shark said:
His scores do what they are supposed to do, which is to support the film. But away from the film they're rarely interesting.
That's a half-truth. His themes and/or motifs often are very memorable, when he gets the spotlight in a crucial scene, he's up there with the best of them.
The downside: he's by his very nature submissive to the filmmaker's wishes, even when they're stupid and ill-considered (meaning obvious temp-track rewriting or carpeting long sections with atmospherics). The truth is that is exactly the reason for his longevity in the business.
As for the question of Edmilson, that's easy: he does these movies because they are either simply good and he wants them on his resume or because he's chummy with the makers or he's just happy not doing stuff like 'King Kong 2' (probably a fan dream) all the time.
-
On 01/12/2022 at 6:38 PM, GerateWohl said:
You know how it works in history where historians say, this and that king build this or that castle.
Same here. Just the king himself is talking.
Yes, and here he is (after the grosses are in):
When I first came here, this was all swamp. Everyone said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built in all the same, just to show them. It sank into the swamp. So I built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So I built a third. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp....
-
36 minutes ago, Marian Schedenig said:
Ace in the Hole is one of the Wilders I still haven't seen, and I realise that until reading this, I didn't even know anything about it (save the title, director/writer, and actor). I really should catch up with it. I loved Nightcrawler.
I didn't love 'Nightcrawler' either, but it's good to have them. What's remarkable about Hole is how Wilder ties all the people together, even the trapped guy was out to rob sacred artifacts for his own benefit when fate beckoned. And nowadays, where even our public tv stations who pride themselves on their journalistic integrity don't particularly object using Twitter shitstorms as regular news source, the hustling duplicity on all sides is out in the open.
-
Finally got around my Criterion edition of what is probably Wilder's most unpleasant film, 'Ace in the Hole', which is to say it's unflinching in its bleak analysis of human nature in the guise of a desert film noir, often mistaken for being a scathing indictment of US media, but that's just the coathanger.
A man is buried in a mine collapse. He has to die because an ambitious and unscrupulous reporter, Kirk Douglas in a gloriously over-the-top performance - deliberately delays the rescue operation in order to achieve his great comeback through sensational reporting by making lots of copy with his very own 'human interest' story.
The movie was beyond unpopular in 1951, because there was no one to root for, certainly not the gloating public or the local economy, being in a most blissful mood for the money windfall the spectators bring in and finally, figures of authority, forget it. It was only decades later that we have wholly accepted not only the draw of bad news but the prurient public appetites they satisfy as well (Nightcrawler updated the story for the 21st century).
It's really not a film to like, but there's so much acid brilliance in the dialogue (it's Wilder and has such hard-edged lines as 'I don't go to church. Kneeing bags my Nylons') and even in its tiniest nuances, you should watch it once at least. I love how Wilder frames Douglas when he finds his victim trapped: from below where the poor guy lies the camera looks up and sees a badly lit through a hole Douglas face with the granite chin staring down, and he looks like a ghoul who's out for his victim.
- Naïve Old Fart and Romão
-
2
-
I plead not guilty!
-
-
Peeked in yesternight. A corporate abomination, as expected, but when Warwick Davis properly enters in episode 2, there's a light comic spirit that lifts it. He probably had a hand in his own dialogue/scenes and they just should have made a small-scale series about a bumbling sorcerer's apprentice (Disney+ refers to him as 'dwarf builder'!) . All the rest is dreadful LOTR leftovers. The score has not many moments to shine, but when it does, it's fair-to-good JNH (Maleficent meets Jungle Cruise, perhaps).
-
1 hour ago, crocodile said:
the fact he combines of so many genre elements makes it very entertaining all the way through.
That makes it sound like a David Arnold Bond score, which is not a recommendation by any means. It's all familiar, for sure, but it's constructed in such a sturdy way and creatively embellished at exactly the spots where it would make a difference that i would point this out as old school mastery that just vanished with composers of this generation.
By the way, someone on FSM linked to this bummer one-hour interview with Goldsmith from 1977. The interviewer sounds like an 11-year-old hammering Goldsmith with National Enquirer-like zest, asking hard-hitting questions á la 'You like more Europe or you like more America?'. Goldsmith is remarkably polite and composed by his standards, but begins every answer with an incredulous 'What (*the fuck*) are you talking about?'
-
- Popular Post
My honest pick as Best Soundtrack Release 2022 is, to my own surprise, Goldsmith's 'Hollow Man', Intrada Edition. You need affinity for high-grade thriller and suspense textures to really *get it*, but the thematic and motivic base are laid out in very clear terms, so it's no elusive rocket science. Science though, it is, and the lilting 'Explorers'-vibe combined with the slithery sensuality of the 'Basic Instinct' years plus a good splash of harsh, modernistic spikiness - clearly the biggest surprise of 'Hollow Man' - makes for a thrilling combination.
My fairly pronounced respect for this score's finesse back in 2000 didn't prepare me for the depth and detail of the whole thing. It's truly pearls before swine considering the rotten product it was conceived for, so i guess it was as much a love letter to favourite director Paul Verhoeven (on his last Hollywood legs back then) as well as a final lion's roar from the maestro himself, who surely saw the end of the rope in terms of his career. Be that as it may, the lack of fan favourite checklist material (love theme, theme-driven action set piece, more love theme etc.) is also HM's USP. In fact, the score's most dreary when Goldsmith gets the old crashbang chestnuts out in the final half an hour: the composer even bemoaned this on the dvd commentary he recorded, basically acknowledging that his only real music interest lay in getting the movies three complex transformation sequences right, all of them in the first half of the movie (in a discussion panel with director Phil Alden Robinson for whom he scored 'The Sum of all Fears' 2 years later, Goldsmith visibly sighed in relief when Robinson agreed to leave a big action scene unscored for better effect, 'Ahh, one fight less!').
For those who 'know the score' i just marked the before-unreleased cues that enriched the content of the original album for me immeasurably, and for fans of Goldsmith's more populist material there's the revised 'Big Climb', which bangs up the fairly mundane original version to a sizzling degree (this is what additional material always should offer in terms of value!).
04. Chasing Isabelle (2:04)
08. I Liked It (1:41)
09. The Buttons (Revised) (3:28)
11. Not Right (4:50)
15. I Can’t See Him (4:31)
19. He’s Here (3:13)
20. Dead Dog (1:31)
24. No Code (4:05)
25. Find Him (Revised) (4:55)CD 2 Complete Score (Continued)
01. Wet Attack (Revised) (1:23)
03. The Big Climb (Revised) (3:09)
12. Broken Window (Revised #1) (2:53)
17. Wet Attack (1:10)
-
9 hours ago, Naïve Old Fart said:
It's interesting how a film that has been lauded, left, right, and centre, by critics, can fail, so emphatically, to connect with audiences.
I can't speak for general audiences, but to me the simple fact that this particular director has paraded his pet themes in remarkably open fashion through his whole filmography makes such a naked biographical spell-it-out an afterthought at best, at worst an inflated ego trip. But then, it's the same director who found 'The Post' a thoughtful comment on Donald Trump's America.
-
-
1 hour ago, Jay said:
Spielberg must have been unsure about this scene because Williams recorded not one, not two, not three, but four different options for this scene, and they are not all as over the top as the one that went into the film.
Interesting, that makes his final decision fit my old theory that he often uses Williams as the last safefguard on the soundtrack - when he's afraid the 'masses' (whoever they may be) are either confused or don't get it. Which Williams probably does with clenched teeth in some of the cases.
2 hours ago, Brundlefly said:Imagine that scene unscored, how disillusioning it could come across: Djimon Hounsou gets up and shouts - silence. The white folks just staring at him, not in awe, just confused, until the prosecuting attorney demands him to shut up and sit down. He believed that it could be of any help for him, but it just isn't that easy and neither the film nor the score imply that action being of any merit. Sadly, Spielberg never really dared to enter the reign of disillusioning his viewers.
The whole movie stinks, it's completely disproportioned in favour of eloquent speechifying and instead of dealing with the victims, the reality of slavery and systemic racism, he boils it down to 'courtroom drama', 'moralizing monologues' and - well-tempered - 'political outrage'. That the few gripping scenes dealing with the Amistad slaves themselves got in is a minor miracle.
- GerateWohl and Tom Guernsey
-
2
-
28 minutes ago, pete said:
Is that the choral section at the end of OST track The Middle Passage? - I've only seen the film once, and that was a long time ago. And for those in the know, is the choral piece its own track on the new release? The Prisoner's Song, perhaps, as it's about the same length?
Yes and no idea.
Where in Africa were those pics taken?
-
Federico Jusid's surprisingly good score for a new tv series that just came out. A revisionist Western drama with Emily Blunt about a woman seeking revenge on the man she blames for the death of her son. It's a curious recall of the edgy intricacy of Goldsmith's 60's westerns (think of an updated 'Hour of the Gun') in spots, especially with the prominent featuring of prepared piano and the driving string triplets, coupled with a broader theme full of european melos, which could also grace a modern setting (which gets a surprising, for a tv series. that is, workout in the 8-minute 'Soon has Come' cue). And with hardly 30 minutes in length it avoids the usual stillstand that befalls so many of the longer recent releases.
-
The movie is a pious abomination and Williams' ever-present score strengthens its shortcomings immeasurably. But i'm kinda interested if the african material gets more spotlight here, it's the only reason to get this.
'Amistad' has an awful scene etched forever into the annals of movie awfulness: Djimon Hounsou, sitting in the dock with his band of fellow prisoners, has secretly learned english (and read the holy bible, what else) suddenly gets up and shouts 'Give us free!' to the movie-astonishment of the frocked present whites. On cue, a huge chorus swells into a molto-vibrato edification of the main theme while the camera lovingly feasts on the whole embarrassment. And it would be embarrassing even for an old Bible movie from the 50s. Unbelievable.
- Brando, Dr. Rick and JonathanAsh
-
3
-
The theme from 'Knives Out', Part 2 in its harpsichord-flavored playfulness seems like modernized Marple-Goodwin - the general dreariness of current mainstream scoring makes this a very welcome anomaly indeed. Unfortunately, the complete score can't keep up and meanders along (like part 1) - but reduced to 15 minutes (first quarter, last quarter) it's still a nice year-end highlight.
-
Elfman in a time capsule. It's not bad, but apart from 'Mars Attacks' his circus stuff never held much appeal for me and this makes no exception.
-
5 hours ago, Nick1Ø66 said:
It's all about expectations. I had a great time at the cinema seeing Maverick (Cruise, not Smith), but I didn't go in expecting Shakespeare.
Many people had a great time, but that was because it wasn't painful and slyly acknowledges that aging catches up with dumb jocks, too.
Cameron may use 'plots' and 'stories', but they never seem touched by human hands, they are part of the machinery. The last Cameron movie i really liked was 'True Lies' (and that was probably because of Jamie Lee Curtis and Bill Paxton...and that those rousing effects really meant something back in 1994).
-
Xmas bliss with Yamaha charm.
Quartet 2022: FRENZY (Ron Goodwin / Henry Mancini)
in General Discussion
Posted
Short as the Mancini is, i want that.