publicist

Neither 'Hook' nor 'Harry Potter and the PS' could make any claim to originality, though. Two polished, old-fashioned orchestral scores with heavy doses of Prokoviev/Tschaikovski and an overdosis of cloying Hollywood-sweetness (more apparent in 'Hook' for obvious reasons). But if that's what Hollywood wants from a Williams fantasy score, that's what they're going to get.

Why not make a press conference where Williams is accused in public? I imagine video streams broadcasting it to the whole wide world, complete with showing selections from both movies to proof the weighty accusations. That will show this SOB!!

Nobody IS discussing the film apart from the JWmessageboard. I f JNH had written the score, the JWMB wouldn't have a real reason to discuss it. So your whole dialectic is seiously flawed!

You always could watch Hoffman/Hoskins interact to see some thespian fun, apart from that , it's repulsive. The whole story stinks to high heaven, let alone the plastic look of a Toys'r'Us-Day-Care site. Plus Rufio and the grossly overweight black kid, which are some of the worsest PC-crimes Spielberg ever committed. Whoever did this surprisingly clean dvd-rip of the final Hook/Pan-duel is to be congratulated, though. The Korngoldian splendor of the first minute of this is hands-down the best imitation of this style Williams ever did. OF COURSE, it was neglected on the original CD in favour of the rather modest 'The Ultimate War', which certainly could've trimmed by 2 or 3 minutes to fit the final duel, especially since Williams loves to cut around like a mad tailor in his cues. Since 'Hook' is from 1991, we can expect this set around...2016?

I'm shuddering.

Addendum: It IS true, however, that there are alternate pieces on the album. The 'Main Title' is revised and ends with a much bigger re-statement of the 'Dracula'-Theme before it segues in the 'Storm Sequence'. Apart from it, Williams edited some of it rather deftly ('Dracula's Death'). But it's the same performance and not some L. A.-based version with 60 musicians, like 'The Fury' is.

According to Ford Thaxton, it was all done in London. I tend to think it was, since the LSO is credited in the movie.

Hardly, since it's only one recording. They just have to remaster it and correct that horrible volume drop in 'Night Journeys'.

'Dracula' just has more passion. The score runs around 55 minutes and i swear, that omnipresent theme never gets boring. I still remember how i saw the film as 6-year old and how it got my heart racing when i listened to the score the first time as grown-up and could exactly remember the whole climax, especially Williams' deeply tragic reading of the credit sequence, when the cape is catched by the wind and flows off...brilliant music. But 'The Fury's epilogue isn't something to be sneered at, either.

'Dracula' Wouldn't it sound so shitty, it would be most appreciated.

And a wise decision it is. Instead of broadening the horizon, let's flogging all the pretty TDH's (truly dead horses) til they're leveled to the ground. Most people here and elsewhere seemingly just cut'n paste the same answers since the start of the new millenium. 'The only good scores he EVER wrote were 'Krull' and 'Star Trek II'!!'...does this ring a bell?

Would that sound like something out of 'War of the Worlds' or 'Minority Report'? This messageboard would be practically brimming with delight....

And that should be the objective for every composer, godammit!

Publicist gets tired of the hobby, it seems. Of all the nominated scores i only 'know' 'Good German' and 'Pan's Labyrinth' and while the Newman has some excruciatingly good moments, it's an usual 40-odd-cues-job with only a handful standing out. 'Pan' has a somewhat recognizable melody (which in itself is oscar-worthy these days), but isn't this great in setting up a special atmo. Ennio Morricone should get simply 2 Awards this evening.

A. Goldsmith is the only composer whom i would've wished the 'Rings' trilogy as fitting end to an illustrous, but sadly under-appreciated career. He also would be the only composer who'd be able to distinguish between the different worlds in an ingenious musical way. Shore tends to sound rather samey. Williams? I don't know.... B. Howards 'Kong' isn't nearly as marginal as people try to paint it. It's not great music, but the writing is very polished and certainly still head and shoulders above most big scores of today. I don't even think that Williams would rise that much above it. The orchestration would certainly be less standard, but the basic content would be rather similar.

The fact that it seems always the question of 'Williams or Goldsmith', seldom 'Williams or Bernstein' or 'Williams and Friedhofer/Morricone/Barry' seems to be the proof that even die-hard-Williams groupies cannot overcome a nagging doubt about who's really BETTER... This benefit-of-the-doubt never seems to intrude in the infamous 'Goblet of Fire' or 'Superman Returns'-Threads, though...

Is this kind of trolling really necessary?

Now there's a time to drag out my most perverted dream: the wet-T-Shirt-Contest for film composers. You take some high profile films, say 'LotR'. 'Mask of Zorro', 'Titanic' and 'Pirates of the Caribbean'. Then you hire unbeknownst to each other Horner, Williams, Goldsmith, Morricone (random selection, obviously we know the outcome of two of the aforementioned Horner scores)...and at the end, the filmmakers can select their favourite score.... AND WE GET A CD FOR EVERY SCORE! Apart from that, my only real unfulfilled dream is the 'LotR' trilogy scored in 1982 by Jerry Goldsmith.

I got all that rather well...because of this i said 'rape', because that's what it basically is: is she turned on by the notion of being raped (read: sexually used) by an adventurous 'bad guy' after years in the comfort zone? I did not found this notion overly exciting. Nothing more than the idea of teenage girls getting wet when watching Marlon Brando in 'The WIld ONe'. Apart from that, i'll ask again: is 'the best film in recent years' really not capable of more than dragging out the old 'man with cloudy past is catched up by it' routine? I found it horribly contrived.

It's fascinacting what kind of subtexts and 'meta-ebenen' people find in all this stuff, if only someone let's them. While 'Crash' certainly did not approach new heights in filmic brilliance, i fail to see all these ambiguities and ambivalence in the Cronenberg and Spielberg films. (i mean 'History of Violence', not Cronenbergs Crash, which actually was sick and twisted, but at least it did something to your guts). My tirade against 'Munich' was made here not too long ago: a film made on an idiotic premise and, adding insult to injury, going further into the nadir by presenting a totally unbelievable (more importantly: demonstrably false) historic set-up - this film can be as ambigious as it wants, it never can be more than the sum of it's parts. 'History of Violence': Maybe someone can lend me a hand here...is there anything more than Aragon raping his women because being tormented by his past and Ed Harris and Will Hurt doing their bad guy routine? Is this 'movie-of-the-week' story about the gangster hiding himself from his past behind the curtains of suburbia really the best they could come up with to explore the nature of violence? The oscar goes to...?

Since obviously nobody here is in an intimate relation to Sony managers, what is there to talk? The scores itself certainly had discussion exposure to the point of comic relief and since it's unlikely they will be expanded, there's not much to talk about in the near future. What IS frightening, actually, is all this delusional squabble about these filmic wrecks being any credible incarnation of entertainment.

Not really. At the time, it was hyped as outdoing 'E.T.' as the ultimate Spielberg film (the boy who could fly). When it crawled to the 100 Mio. $ mark, the then-new Sony-Columbia managers, who'd hoped that it would be their earth-shattering first B. O. triumph had fairly long faces (or so i remember). The critical backlash only added insult to injury.

Well, if have listened through 'Apocalypto'...heads, tail, the whole damn thing. It may be interesting for world music aficinados, but i pretty much gave up on it after the fourth or fifth track. There's not much from a music-dramatic standpoint apart from a few moments here and there - forget about developed themes. It's sound design, inventive with it's rhythms and application of unusual instruments. 1st and last track are based on simple (fake) string chords which definintely recall the first tracks of 'The New World', which is much more conventional, but a better listen, too.

Newton Howards score isn't nearly as adept at mickey mousing as Williams' is. But 'Peter Pan' sounds not nearly as overstuffed and sugar-coated as 'Hook', which obviously isn't Williams fault, which every poor soul can attest who ever had the misfortune of enduring that filmic fiasco. Unfortunately, both scores are rather underrepresented on CD...and in both cases good parts of the final Hook vs. Pan battle are nowhere to be found on the album. A conspiracy?

You were thinking about this lately....on the basis of ONE score from 2005?