Jump to content

publicist

Members
  • Posts

    17,837
  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    42

Everything posted by publicist

  1. Jeff Bridges is too interesting an actor to pass on this, even if it's in the dreaded 'Homeland' genre. Former CIA agent Dan Chase secretly absconded thirty years ago and has lived self-sufficiently and under the radar ever since. But one day his dark past catches up with him when a hit man shows up and tries to kill him. He realizes that the only way he can find peace in the future is to face his past. John Lithgow is his old acquaintance, the FBI Assistant Director for Counterintelligence, and he is in on the hunt. Several women enter the story at various points, and their contributions will make the most crucial difference to the story. Pitched at the loudness level of current tv storytelling and not particularly innovative in itself (which is to say it's competently made), the story has intriguing turns that rise way above the low-IQ level of something like 'Homeland'. Veteran actors like Bridges and John Lithgow know important scenes when they are coming, and they (and others) make the most of it (Bridges remains more of a cypher, though). So what remains is that within these limitations, it is a recommendation. I don't know if the decision to make a season 2 out of this material is reason enough to celebrate (or wish they would make formats fitting their stories, not building 5 floors on top of a bungalow, like these additional seasons often feel).
  2. Now we finally have it, the oft-requested dump of expository filler material to complete 'L. A. Confidential', a move that Goldsmith's wisely compiled 30-minute album eschewed. It's an oddity: a rare case of a really good movie that also catched on with audiences, but the lean material demanded hard-boiled restraint. Goldsmith just hadn't to do a lot, in sharp contrast to the many bad pictures he was scoring.
  3. https://open.spotify.com/album/1w3u4kuJ8SzccCpuiWMNMi?si=CVh3PGGwQlmuJ82qOrrxGg Pretty good Netflix-Elfman for a mystery drama by Noah Baumbach - a novel adaptation (from the mid-80's) that vacillates between marriage drama, disaster movie, action cracker and paranoia study (the translation from book to movie didn't fly with many critics). The music is really good and in Elfman's somewhat more reflective and measured late style. The 'genre bender' described above can also be made out in the music, but here it has a rather invigorating effect. Next to the usual choir-and-wonder stuff it is especially the 'relationship' scoring where Elfman's reflective writing adds (longer string-and-woodwind cues like 'Duel Lecture' or 'Terribly Sad Moment' may not be musically that exciting, but you can tell there's not a wasted note which is usually sign of someone who really knows what he's doing). 'The Son' is supposed to be written by Hans Zimmer, but truth to be told, it's completely empty of any of his (or anyone else's) characteristics - it's 20 minutes of wafting (it could be used as background for hospital recovery rooms without offending too many). I will point out brevity as a surprising addition for this (maybe) last addition to the Spielberg/Williams catalogue. Taking a backseat to Spielberg's mother's piano fixation (she was a rather virtuoso pianist with talent), Williams contributes not much more than the occasional sweet, sometimes rhapsodic editorial comment. There is an underdeveloped (due to its shortness) sense of poignant depth in the scoring of the scenes relating to, i guess, the mother (Mitzi's Dance, Reverie, Reflections, The Letter) - either the movie afforded Williams not more space to musically explore it or Spielberg just didn't want to make a divorce drama, take your pick. But with all this out of the way, all you really need to 'get' 'The Fabelman's is the ultimate 'Journey Begins' cue, which encapsulates in Williams's elegant style not only a summation of his own themes plus a short bouncy introduction that surely is to be read as kind of ironic comment on his collaboration with Spielberg (the movie ends right when the kid leaves for Hollywood), but also a short excerpt of a Haydn sonata. Knowing Willliams deep affection for Haydn, Bach & Co., i think the recordings of the classical cues to be worked into the movie might have secured his personal satisfaction in this project (when he says his goal is to preserve the music of the ages, i believe him).
  4. That's an easy one: it was a short alert GoldsmithTM motif that would cut through a barrage of sound effects and effectively sold the typical action beats of the 90's (note that it is often used a the beginning of transitions to big locations). For super-economic Goldsmith, it was clear that he would use it in much more widespread fashion as narrative device, because that's how he approached scoring. It worked really best in 'Air Force One', all the others could have done without it. To claim 'Ice Chase' is boring as fuck in light of what action music has become in the last 25 years is ridiculous, though.
  5. The number of woodwind solos alone give me hope for the future of film music. Thank god they didn't include an action scene, because then i'd have immediately lost it again.
  6. It was not *his* decision, anyway. Eventually, all this semantic beating-around-the-bush just conceals the simple fact that this very short and rather inconspicuous score doesn't invite much discussion. To frame it in a bigger context, Spielberg's movie feels like something that would be a perfect fit for one of the current streaming providers (whatever he may preach about communal experiences), and the music is like a last whisper of Old Hollywood, namely what modern viewing habits allow to remain of it. Which is neither good nor bad, just a statement that the editorializing scoring approach Spielberg brought back into the mainstream and which allowed composers a big playground (and this board to exist) is on the verge of extinction. I can live with that, but i'm also surprised that i feel more urge to make myself familiar with a Marvel score (Wakanda Forever) than with a Spielberg/Williams one. Go figure!
  7. The phrasing suggest others don't, but i don't think that is the case. Cruise (here and elsewhere) is the only one who still knows how to make a mid-size blockbuster that not only rouses, but also scores a few points by hinting that the dumb jocks of the original movie gained some wisdom after 1986. What i'm saying is that TP:M is remarkable in its avoidance of all the possible missteps. As for Cameron, only god knows. And we, in a few weeks.
  8. Don't even remember those movies (filmic cannon fodder), as far as Williams goes (who had the unenviable legacy duties): - all the concert pieces (not that there were many) - a handful of cues per film, i. e. the finale from 'Force Awakens', 'Ach-To island', 'Canto Bight' and 'The Fathiers' from the second and actually quite a few ones from the most awful of the films by far, 'RoS', starting with the desert chase cue (naturally hardly in the movie) and ending with the more sentimental final farewells Apart from that i'm afraid Williams musical grammar has become so separated from modern cinema mores that there were few moments where movie(s) and score really clicked.
  9. Devoted fans of 'classic' narrative Hollywood may turn away, but Goransson's second Black Panther outing is actually more interesting than the first. The fusion of ethnic music styles, vocals and percussion, with the (occasional) demands of action film scoring makes for an eclectic but engaging listen. And eclecticism is the motto of the day: like Zimmer's 'Power of One', 'Lion King' (partly) or 'Black Hawk Dawn' (i even spotted some of Marco Beltrami's 'Soul Surfer' Maori vocalizing), Goransson uses the movie more as a springboard for ethno-musical world-building than for addressing specific narrative developments, and even when those turn up, they are the weakest part of the score. The result is too long (rule of thumb here: the longer the cue, the lesser it is), but when the gazillions of elements coalesce into their own kind of pop (like in 'Wakanda Forever' or 'Vengeance has consumed us), the score sizzles. And for a Marvel sequel score, that's quite a feat.
  10. Verhoeven always is a winner as interview guest (though his animated engagingness has regressed a bit, no wonder, he's incredible 84 years old now) and his Carolco reminiscing makes me a bit sad the outfit hadn't had a few more years in it. 'The Crusades' is the major loss, of course. As for the 'Starship Troopers' offer, the movie opened late 1997, and Goldsmith scored both AFO and The Edge shortly before that (and had 5 big pictures on his schedule of which US Marshals and Deep Rising both opened in early 1998). Plus, he had his RSNO recording gigs also spread during that year, so it isn't like Kraft maliciously concealed the offer, but just reported him fully booked. And to be honest, 'Starship Troopers' is a great movie, but i'm not sure the world needed another 90-minute nonstop actionfest by JG that desperately.
  11. Trust me, i wouldn't. I listened to enough 'promising' young musicians in this field to know how to level my expectations. But what we find here is a typical case of reverse engineering gone wrong: people get something simple and unassuming, which has not exactly a lot of layers, and then construct deep meaning via third-hand inferences and sometimes wishful-thinking observations that are completely off-base. There just isn't enough substance in the short musical contributions by JW that allow for more than the comparably unexciting conclusion that it's not even trying to add something to Williams' familiar idiom - it's just a small parade of familiar strokes passing by (orchestrated with his usual flair, but that isn't saying much when we are talking a few strings, piano and celeste). Like i said earlier, i find the decision to treat the music as exactly that - a pleasant little souvenir - perfectly fair. But apart from press releases by Amblin/Universal it's hard to tout it as anything of much substance (an Oscar win for this would be exactly one of those sops to sentiment that is rightly criticized, though i have no idea if there even is a more deserving winner, which is a shattering conclusion for something that used to be a favourite art form of mine long ago).
  12. I don't know what kind of up and coming composer would try to come up with a piece like *that* as his*her first piece. Except if your only frame of reference is unassuming Hollywood movies.
  13. Because it was a lot of crap on the menu. It was around the time Goldsmith scored 'Deep Rising', Goldenthal 'Batman and Robin' and Horner 'Deep Impact' and 'Mighty Joe Young' (Williams got 'Stepmom', and to be honest, choosing between that and some of the others options, 'Stepmom' would still take the booby prize).
  14. I find especially both the underscore and the themes - americanized Brahms - much more sophisticated than Williams' own scores of that time (middlebrow stuff like 'Far and Away'). Williams came around a few years later (when he started to feature prominent players from the classical world, especially in 'Tibet', which is the first Williams where i noticed the concertant approach, though this was mostly the concert suite). Either way, Bernstein was the most-rejected film music composer, so a case could be made that his more idiosyncratic style didn't do him mich good after his prime (he chose many interesting movies like 'The Grifter', 'The Field' etc., also rather uncommon for such a famous guy).
  15. But that wasn't up to Williams. It's just a few nice and unassuming melodies bracketing Spielberg's late stroll through memory lane, and hey, why not? It may not add up to more than, say, 'Pete'n'Tillie', but you could interpret it as a mutual agreement that a little sweet and direct piece is what you take away from it all (life, i mean, not the movie). This is not an uncommon sentiment for old people, when all the sturm and drang has vanished.
  16. I don't think that's true (think of Copland's scores like 'Red Pony'), but this might be the first with a main title sequence framing a story in such a way. Neither Robert Mulligan nor Bernstein pushed for that scene (it came by accident), but it lifted the movie to another level, because it could have been also a Greg Peck courtroom movie, after all.
  17. About what could be expected from a handful of 2-minute cues. It's a nice, warm souvenir though it's hard to muster more enthusiasm about it, it gains its only significance from the fact that it's probably the last Spielberg/Williams collaboration.
  18. So according to Spielberg, our best hope for cinema rests on movies about pop-star legends? Because that's obviously the only USP movies like 'Elvis' or 'Bohemian Rhapsody' have. That's some limitation there! As for 'The Post', it's the kind of movie you need neither cinemas nor streaming platforms for. Just try reading again.
  19. It's an ancient complaint, though in this case the label 'dialogue' is of course reductive. What Morricone weaves in here is slices of sicilian life (human sounds, of a village waking up, peasant greeting shouts etc.) and it's actually more interesting this way as a programmatic piece of music. If you take that away, you are left with good but typical Morricone (we've heard variations of it a million times by now).
  20. The Desplat sounds first depressingly familiar - his noncommittal waltz-y style - then gets engagingly emotional in the middle and then back to the less interesting stuff. Let's wait.
  21. Probably those who invested in it - depending on what they invested and what percentage they get of the gross. The finer points of Hollywood dealmaking makes me suspect that it is impossible to beat TG:M, because it's just a - by today's standards - little action movie that Cruise has set up with his business acumen, which seems to me much more impressive. I mean, who would've bet on that? Right between 'Herbie Goes Bananas' and 'The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes'!
  22. It's obviously slight, but in a in an elegantly measured, thoughtful way, compare that to the boring, editorializing approach of The Book Thief. The organic inclusion of classic music is a cute way of acknowledging the impact of 'serious' music on Spielberg's life, which is of course the chief reason he approached the music of his movies as he did.
×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

By using this site, you agree to our Guidelines.