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Phrased in such a broad way, probably not. But as i said initially, going by what happened to JG on a personal basis at exactly this time coupled with the hefty amount of writing on this particular movie struck me as kind of...sad.

I attribute this to Verhoeven. Several times through the commentary he actually says aloud how boring the next 20 minutes are gonna be.

Fuck 'War Horse'.

Barry got enough Oscars, but yes, it's a curious thing.

It's also a pretty good movie.

The score sure suggests it. But still, it's such an unworthy project for both guys.

Gee, to know Goldsmith was sick during that year and was forced to write 'fairly significant alternates' for this piece of shit movie is sad. The 70 minutes that ended up in the movie are already much too good for it.

Gee, over the years there were so many supposed heinous sound crimes uncovered by the FSM ear police and what does it usually amount to? Private opinions by laymen. Thank god they don't know how to use Twitter.

Though shipping fees being what they are really make me second-guess this buy. Fake says it's Goldsmith longest recorded score, which seems ludicrous when you look at the picture (did Verhoeven secretly cut a second part or a cinema verité version?).

This cover is...evil.

Lay him to rest. RIP.

Who would've thought a Tyler Bates score ever would strongly recall an overheated John Barry romance? (but maybe co-composer Timothy Williams did the honours) And, to add to the initial surprise, 'Pearl' is a psychological slasher film (a prequel to a movie called X), and serves as an origin story for the titular villain, Pearl, whose fervent aspirations to become a movie star lead her to committing violent acts on her family's Texas homestead in 1918. But it's nice to have a modern thriller score building on a strong melodic main theme, for a change.

Once you've accepted it's *just* a series of clever sketches without a real narrative throughline (like a movie provides), it's about as good as it gets. Wintory's expected bows to Goldsmith are clear from the outset: 'Into the Hive' opens with an ominous phrase that could have sprung from 'Outland' (it recalls a racing motif from 'Hot Water') and is joined by his own variation on the famous 'Alien' tic toc flute motif. Wintory never loses sight of this basic material, but over longer stretches he abandons it in favour of his own, slightly more fiddly electronic manipulation that rely purely on rhythmic phrases (i can imagine Goldsmith having fun with the toolset from the 'Contact' cue). I wouldn't really compare it with the Goldenthal-Alien, but the pointillistic usage of electronic effects is similar. But this parallel existence also points to a certain flaw in the sense that when you are back to the more pointed Goldsmith material in 'Not a Simple Bug Hunt', you realize how random many of the cues before are (the ensuing cue has a great low trombone/plucked strings thing going on after ca. 01:50 that's also pure Goldsmith). Thankfully, things pick up after 'Search' with some urgency (time to get out the good old jagged orchestra rhythms of the 90's). What i like about his musical approach - probably more than the actual result - is how he's so analytical about it. Wintory knows what's expected of him in terms of providing excitement for a video game and delivers on that front but he also deep-dives into the the aesthetics of a wholly different era, namely Goldsmith's late 70's scores and tries to inject them as smoothly as possible. Compared to the awful bluntness that has crept into sci-fi/fantasy scoring in the last 25 years, that's remarkable.

Probably not always, but Ruby Cairo just has a damn catchy tune.

Let's settle on 'it was the most effective and influential film score of 1992 and should have won the Oscar over BatB'.

Aaron Zigman delivers a rather surprisingly detailed emotional score, for a Netflix movie that is. It has intimate woodwind parts, y'know...

'Little Shop of Horrors' is a slaphappy musical of carefree abandon. It's so endearingly stupid and comic-strippy even i can enjoy it. Frank Oz directs people like the muppets he used to, but it works in the movie's favour. Steve Martin and Bill Murray have this great cameo pairing as sadistic dentist and masochist patient which reminded me that this decade (the 80's) spawned a number of great comedians (and comedies) unmatched before or since.

His most famous works, The River and The Plow that Broke the Plains, are worth a listen.

The second was better. The first one is exactly the kind of overstuffed doll's house you get when grown men direct down to children as if they were braindead. It's really killing the imagination and the actors seem lost (the actors are, of course, the best thing it has going for it). I also don't get how people here can, say, celebrating E. T., another movie about young kid's that is really free-flowing and wonderfully complex in the emotions it draws on *AND* can stomach a big, operatic score by Williams and then celebrate something like SS all the same. It's night and day. It's like one of those awful big musical productions of the 60's that run 160 minutes and you have to pinch yourself every ten minutes to not fall asleep.

Yeah, it's like Home Alone on steroids, a throne already occupied by Home Alone 2 (another movie of deliberate awfulness). But i hand it to Columbus that he gave way to Cuaron and even invited him to execute a vision far beyond his own reach. And lo and behold, that score is something you can talk about without feeling a diabetic coma approaching.

It actually highlights the movie's dumb 'i spell everything out twice with pointed lips in case guys from Mars are watching' approach. Since we have gotten used to even worse filmmaking it doesn't stand out so much anymore, but apart from a few british thespians saving the proceedings by just standing around and raising an eyebrow to good effect it's like a bad Disney movie, with even more double takes.