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And itunes has this valuable tool called 'least-played' or something to this effect. I regularly use this feature to see if stuff i never played has gained some importance in the interim. Often i keep new albums in their entirety and 2 years after i come back to i. e. 'Ice Age 2' and think 'naaah, 2 tracks will do' and delete the rest. On the other hand i keep variations of themes, even if they are very similar, in a different folder. Sometimes i'm tired of hearing my favourite version and then i switch to the alternate.

I thought a lot about that in the beginning. And i was very generous with keeping stuff. But there was so much where i looked at myself and asked me 'is THIS the reason i became a film music fan?', ancient sounding archival stuff, hours and hours of droning suspense, meager rip-off stuff and what have you. And of course, the bane of the collector, the complete collection. I don't need i. e. 'How to Steal a Million', 'Lost in Space', Poseidon Adventure' or 'Stepmom' (as far as Williams is concerned), it just doesn't engage me and i have so many composers of international cinema in my collection that i just accepted that no Goldsmith, Williams or, god forbid, Morricone needs a complete representation...and said gentlemen would (or would have) agree with me.

The most interesting development for me is the iPod age. I'm now relieved of many physical CD's, because i ebayed them. All the stuff i liked is there as computer files (a wav and a mp3 version)...and behold, i didn't need a lot of stuff i had in the first place. I actively had to select music i REALLY liked and so became much more aware of my preferences. The result is that i condensed both, scores and other albums, to roughly half their size (sometimes more, sometimes less). So i now can, at least partially, understand people like Thor, who rail against all this dreaded 'completeness' of things. Things may be different with musical lighthouses like 'Indiana Jones', where the amount of filler isn't very high (and even there i could easily dispense with some of the mood'n'suspense stuff). Most of the time, though, we get too much. And people hoard these things like treasures in their caves and rarely ever listen (or even understand) what they have.

As far as 'beautiful' is concerned: GEORGES DELERUE: Interlude: 'Time is like a Dream' (Timi Yuro) Our Mother's House: 'The Children Leave Our Mother's House' To Kill a Priest: Crimes of Cain (Joan Baez) J. WILLIAMS: Born on the Fourth of July: 'The Early Days' Seven Years in Tibet: 'Theme' Dracula: 'End Titles' J. HORNER: The New World: 'All is Lost' A Beautiful Mind: 'First Drop-Off, First Kiss' Iris: 'Part 5' J. GOLDSMITH: Legend: 'The Ring' Blue Max: 'Overture' Lionheart: 'The Lake' Medicine Man: 'A Meal And A Bath' MIKLOS RÒZSA: EL Cid: 'Love Scene' Sodom and Gomorrah: 'The River Pastorale'

Why? It's carnival hucksterism, Spielberg style. You know you're in trouble if a movie presents you a haunted house and all the protagonists look starry-eyed like 8-year olds at every flying object. It's certainly not a bad film as such, just terrible hokum. It gave Goldsmith a great canvas to paint on, though.

It was a crap story to begin with. Capital punishment for all remakers! Remakes (the latest rage is to call it 're-imaginings) of 'Back to the Future', 'The Goonies' and 'Ghostbusters' should be in order very soon - included in the ticket price is a frontal lobotomy for every filmgoer over 30.

Is it a Tobe Hooper movie? Is it a Steven Spielberg movie? It's both, and I love it. If the upcoming remake is half as scary, half as witty, or half as successful, I'll eat my hat. How could it be? Whatever novelty value the first one had is long gone...

Considering that he came aboard after Mark Isham was fired, Newton Howard did an admirable 4-week-job of scoring this big blue nothing. It's no great shakes and you better not say 'Waterworld' and 'original' in the same sentence, but a lot of great orchestrated fun it is!

According to film publicism, it is very much one of the great ones, but i found especially the first half dragging, too. And Orlok, well, a Langella, he ain't.

Oh god, i saw the trailer for that (ironically enough before 'Burn after Reading'). Isn't there a UN mandate against Hollywood making stupid cloak-and-dagger films which act as if they're representing the real world? And has Sir Ridley not something visually more arresting on his plate? Questions over questions...

Why this one got out and the others haven't? The most superfluous of all these albums...blech...

I sense that is sarcasm? No; sarcasm would be if he said that he's actually surprised.

Of course, when you not want your sentimental pap scored with 'usual piano stuff', James Horner is the man to call! À propos, i recently watched, for whatever perverse reason, 'Enemy at the Gates'. The film certainly is atrocious, but at the very least features some effective tension sequences. Why on earth Annaud thought it a good idea to use Stalingrad as historical background for a western duel will certainly remain his secret, but hey, if the rest of your film is brimming with subtle ideas, who cares? Examples: the intellectual wears glasses and is an unstable personality, who brings death to all involved (oh, them dangerous men who thinketh too much!), the hero is good-looking and manages to get the girl in the end, the antagonist has steel-blue eyes and kills children with no emotional effort whatsoever...there were moments my brain hurted and i couldn't stop thinking that this film was co-financed with german money and cost about 140 million $ to make...the mind boggles! Horner's score as such ranges between amazing and terrible. For the film, it's a complete travesty and almost baroque in it's overwroughtness. But some of his orchestral/choral writing is just too damn good to ignore. The 13-minute battle sequence which opens the film is quite an achievement and if people wouldn't be such idiots, they would realize that beyond this damn danger call from the horns and the love theme which somewhat references 'Schindler's List', there's some great orchestral film music to be found here. Of course, being by Horner, it's just too much of it, themes are too often quoted verbatim and the fact that a lot of the score is built around two very old stand-by's makes it easy to dismiss it. But talent, he has. Annaud is another matter!

Let us know if the sound quality is any better than the old SLC. The theme is pure gaelic Delerue gorgeousness. Listenend to some 60's beat'n funk stuff: Svezia - Inferno é Paradiso (Piero Umiliani) Scusi Facciamo L'amore (Ennio Morricone) Italians rule!

The mention of 'The Color Purple' rings a bell; while i found the fairy tale treatment of Celie's story too much too take, the images and visual storytelling are aces. Spielberg was on a roll, then...and somehow i wished that he would've filmed his 'Peter Pan' film in 1985. By 1991, his visual imagination seemed stale and tired, sadly.

If i like it, it's a masterpiece!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I was a 'critic' for a local magazine for years...and sometimes it was an ordeal of biblical proportions to write a journalistic examination of what i just had seen. How many 'Van Helsing's', 'Teenage Mutant Turtles', 'Another Gay Movie's and so on can you endure without giving up watching movies, altogether? My successor told me he had developed text blocks which he could apply to any kind of escapistic fare - his reasoning was that if these films are always generic, then why should he invest more into his review? But back to something completely different; i've seen the Coens' latest, 'Burn after Reading'. As i suspected, the plot does not allow for more than an agreeable entertaining romp, not even approaching the inspired divineness of 'The Big Lebowski' or even 'Oh Brother where are Thou?' and 'The Man who wasn't there'. The concept is rather simple and certainly well-trodded ground, namely that intelligence service is as clueless as Joe Schmoe and that most people are driven by rather low aspirations - sex and money foremost and then by the desire to stay as comfortable as they can without much effort. When all is said and done, one wishes that John Malkovich would have dominated the proceedings more. His pathetic, choleric nature would have allowed for some hilarious scenes. He and Brad Pitt certainly had potential together! When Malkovich starts to talk himself into a rage and Pitt sits there, helpless like a frightened kitten, you just can imagine the possibilities. Pitts acting is rather broad, but he pulls it off, Clooney is good but didn't add anything to his repertoire - he acts Clooney with a low sexual morale, essentially the same he was in 'Intolerable Cruelty'. MacDormand is good as always, but her character hasn't much thespian potential, either. At least the Coens' hand for freaky side characters is as strong as ever, so there are lots of characters you just look at and can't stop grinning. Fat people, ugly people, people with unbelievable faces...it's all there. Pleasant enough, nothing i would watch again soon...

You know, "fun" and "entertaining" (as someone else called it) are highly subjective. What entertains me might not entertain someone else, and vice versa. The point is: fun and entertaining isn't enough for some people - if they like it and the tickets sell, it has to be something more. At the very least a pop culture phenomenon, but these days, what is? In a world where 'Beverly Hills Chihuahua' can reach No. 1 at the box office, even thin escapism as 'Iron Man' may be taken as some kind of achievement.

How does someone like you end up a John Williams fan? The very same question applies to someone who can ignore the music in a film if he just likes the art direction...

You certainly also get all wet and giddy when the 'Star Wars' main title comes up.

I'm not as familiar as most here with either the movies or the scores, but i would appreciate any expansion of those great grail/knight melodies in 'Last Crusade' for which i would gladly trade away any 'No Ticket'-like cues. From 'Temple of Doom', i guess it's everything with 'Parade of the Slave Children' in it, especially those moodier cues in the village and the whole finale in the mine and on the bridge. The cruel irony has it that i'm absolutely not interested in interpolations of the 'Raider's March'. I'm just tired of hearing the tune and whenever it comes up in a cue, i want to remove it with a scissor. That's the downside of popular culture, i guess....

Of course it would. The saccharine guitar theme, which is repeated ad infinitum, is just a weak core idea for such a bleak film. If you can get past that because you like the costumes, perhaps you should register at rec.arts.movies.costumedesign.

Eastwood should've taken advantage of Ennio Morricone. 'Unforgiven' would've gotten a great Morricone score, so would several others. These thin musical concoctions of Clint himself remain the weak points of his movies. A Jerry Fielding ersatz, he ain't.

No. That is just silly. Even as a kid i thought 'what the hell is the fake moon doing there'?

Spielberg certainly remembered the similar scene in 'Oliver Twist' (a dog instead of a cat) and thought that what stood good 'ole David Lean in good stead couldn't do bad in his movie, either.