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'March of the Soviets'?

Or maybe the master tapes of 'First Knight' or 'Powder' aren't as tightly guarded as those of 'Jurassic Park'? One wonders why...

Why don't you just wait if you even want more?

And you wonder why?

Apples and oranges. These movies are so obviously from a different era of moviemaking (and sound effects) that i wouldn't complain about the composer's appraoch. Williams did really the best he could with it.

Just forget it.

Although i find it debatable if 'A Beautiful Mind' really functions well in the movie - the music makes the film even more sappy, but what do i know, it got Academy Awards...

At least the action music would be better. for me to poop on, thank you. Coming from you, that's hardly a sound argument against Supergirl's action music...

At least the action music would be better.

And isn't that the point of the whole debate? "I" (capital) like X or Y better...much too often, people try to prove 'scientifically' (our musical studied seem more guilty of it) that their opinion is right, often patronizingly so ('yes, yes, children, but now big daddy tells you how it REALLY is'), other people have heard three scores by composer X and touting their opinion about his lifetime achievements loudly like there's no tomorrow. And it adds up to what, exactly?

I guess i'm more pragmatic, i doesn't interest me per se - when i like the 'variation' of 'Beautiful Mind' more than 'Sneakers', i'll just take the latest thievery for my pleasure and delete the 'Sneakers' tracks. But if too many works have common traits, i'll run out of spots to cut out for my iPod...and that's bad, because i run out of new material.

Well, this is rather old news, actually spreaded by Horner himself on numerous occasions. The so-called 'principle-of-theme-and-variation' doesn't really apply here, though. More often than not there simply is no variation - it's just a thinly disguised copy, made to fit the frame of another movie. Throwing academic terms at it doesn't make it any better...and when i think of Rozsa's 'Themes and Variations', i know how varied a 'variation' can sound. It's an interesting discussion, though, since some of Horner's works fit this bill (let's say the infamous love theme from 'Enemy at the Gates' and a theme in 'Balto' and so on). But more often than not, letting every action scene passing by with square drum meters and passing it off as 'variation' is just nutty.

Not really. I really like symphonic Horner (some of it, anyway), but i'm simply bored to tears by this very device you're describing. Horner doesn't 'explore' it, he just recycles it and it becomes a joke in the process. To add insult to injury, in an old 'Soundtrack' issue Horner and Ron Howard joke about other composers and how they just use old music to phone it in. Horner, on the other hand, always tries something new. Since Howard now refuses to use Horner as his composer, i guess the joke's now on him...

UNDERSTATED? We have to write to Encyclopedia Britannica....they should change the meaning of the word according to whatever 'PS' is - and understated, it ain't. Why Tchaikovsky/Prokoviev ('Hedwig's Theme) mixed with Hollywood style saccharine (whatever forms the first minutes of 'Harry's Wondrous World') adds to 'depth' is another matter.

How much music is missing from 'Prisoner of Azkaban'? The whole musical approach for the third film is a healthy improvement on the Williams-in-a-wake-coma mode of the first movie where the music sounds exactly like a 70-year old man patronizingly writing down to small children: 'This is a CUTE/MAJESTIC/FRIGHTENING moment and i will ram it down your ears with a blunt instrument!' and so on... Watching the movie, you kinda know where he got the idea....

Why anyone who loves broad orchestral scores could overlook the joys of scores - even if it just amounts to parts of them - like 'Perfect Storm', 'Zorro' or 'The Missing' is beyond me. It's not that Horner has turned into Randy Edelman by 1992 and an elaborate epic/action piece like i. e. 'Escape' from 'Four Feathers' is something i gladly would take over some of the more acclaimed pieces by Elfman, Williams or Newton Howard. Horner certainly is a joke as a composer often enough, but some of this grossly exaggerated reactions come off more than petty.

I sincerely hope that "The Life before her Eyes" and "Boy in the striped Pyjama" have more than synth-augmented piano doodlings. If anything, Horner is probably one of the last 'old pro's' - and i think his productivity isn't sinking because he's offensive to Holywood, but rather because he's just lost interest to compete for fascinating assignments like 'Transformers 2'.....

If that is the new Williams adventure sound, i'm shuddering. Did it need 50 years of experience to arrive THERE? Probably Steve Jablonsky did the 'additional music'.

'Congo' was a movie made exclusively for the fact that Jerry Goldsmith was still around. I'm convinced there was an assembly line for cheesy action and adventure films just to keep Goldsmith busy. There is no other explanation for 'Baby - Secret of the Lost Legend', 'Chain Reaction', 'The Shadow', 'Supergirl' and countless others. And all the better for it!

As Hollywood composers go, i'd say that Williams' tutti heavy scores (Indy, Hook, Potter) warrant another shot, although 'Dracula' is high on my list, too. Goldsmith has 'One Little Indian', 'The Shadow' (at least of 'Mulan'/'Mummy' calibre and 80 Minutes long, most exciting stuff left off the album, like the finale), 'Baby - Secret of the Lost Legend' Rozsa's 'El CID' may be the last EPIC score i wanted complete, and it's coming this year

The problem with 'Last Crusade' is that it has some splendid themes, the Knight stuff in particular, but the themes come up too fragmented. 'Temple of Doom' at least has every theme developed full throttle, and they're pretty good, too. I'd like an arrangement of the lyrical grail themes in fashion of 'Restoration' from 'Jane Eyre', at least four minutes and with lots of ornaments. Did Williams ever do a concert arrangement of those?

It seems far more hard to endure endless viewings of the revolting and childish syrup of 'Hook' than '1941', which at least didn't take itself seriously to begin with... I remember a Broughton interview where he rightly stated that some bad films can be a lot easier to score due to the fact that they're not draining you, emotionally, as some heavy drama about war terror or cancer or whatever. Having to live with depressing thoughts for months is sure to give you some emotional scars, i guess.... Sitting in a screening room thinking up music for, say 'Congo', seems more of a logistical problem than an emtional one.

It's entirely possible to shut out your brain for the odd 10 weeks when you're working on some filmic horse manure and try to handle the current assignment as the best ever. To imply that a seasoned veteran like Goldsmith wasn't able to see 'Mom and Dad save the World' for what it was is just an insult to his intellectual capacities. Whatever Richard Kraft may have said certainly was meant more along the lines that there was an understanding not to make life harder than it is by actually bemoaning the badness of an assignment on a daily basis, so Goldsmith maybe trained himself into a state of mind where he could watch those films with a more innocous children's eye. Neither Goldsmith nor WIlliams, or Horner for that matter, would have reached their status if it weren't for the fact that they took the films they've worked on very seriously.

While a lot of the humour and the 'cool' scenes in POTC 3 were yawn-inducing (i. e. the giant woman, some of the interaction between the main characters, the 'wedding' in midst the final battle), i still find the movie somewhat compelling for the sheer monstrosity of the special effects and, listen up, the scope of Zimmer's score. The whole sequence where they are sailing into 'No Man's Land' is very moody filmed and scored. The love theme and the pirate theme (Hoist the Colors) are certainly stand-outs in the thematic department of 2007. The script vcertainly had it's problems, though. To put it mildly.

Williams's all the way. Kilar's lacks the dark romaticism and isn't very inspired, either. At the time, i thought why'd they go through all these troubles to hire a polish composer instead of a Hollywood man just to let him write a mundane score (approach-wise), although the Kilar has some nice elements, too. The only thing we really need badly is a better-sounding version of the Williams.