Richard Penna

Great post - seconded. There can't be such thing as perfection - one man's trash is another man's treasure as the saying goes.

Yes, we've had this already somewhere. Oh well: This only includes my scores, no classical/other/musicals/audiobooks etc 45GB 7671 tracks Just under 400 hours, which is 16.7 days. I abandoned my lossless a little while ago. mp3s at 320 offer identical sound and the space increase simply isn't justified.

I second that. They tried to get too clever with the plot towards the end, but on a second viewing the third film was very enjoyable. Depp 200% sinks into his role in the whole series.

My only real criticism of the movie was that it's pretty hard to create a CG monster that scares me. I tried to sit there thinking 'there's a big monster attacking us..oh sh!t', but instead I just looked and saw this fairly convincing CG creation, some people doing some somewhat stupid things.

Yes, there's a shot of giant bees in one of the trailers. Hope they're going to do something more interesting than 'attack of the giant bees' with that. And yeah, I read about the 'massive' thing on BBC on Friday. It did raise my hopes slightly, but the problem with that type of CG is the same problem I have with Spider Man - it looks too soft, and doesn't have the real texture you'd expect.

I admit that the endless chases particularly in Ultimatum got a bit tiring. Also, There were many times when Bourne seemed to find a place for acquire information just a little too easily (still not entirely sure how he found out about Daniels - might need to watch that early bit again). Still, I thought it should be commended that a trilogy of movies has managed to stand up so well against sequelitis. If this series had followed tradition, Ultimatum would be a pure popcorn movie with an IMDB rating of about 6.0, but it isn't. Then why do you keep watching it?

Never happens for Lost or 24 (although some actual cues from S5 and 6 came dangerously close). House and Jericho have occasionally been guilty, but I felt they chose songs appropriately, and in many cases me wanting to know what the song was. Remember Prison Break ended with that solo voice (which I managed to find) over the character montage. No matter how cheesy some people may have considered it, I thought it worked just as well as a score cue would have.

I just can't make lists like this - my preferences change all the time. If I had to choose a favourite right now however, it would probably be Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.

Trailers are designed to raise hype and show all the best bits (which in some cases are the only good bits in a collective piece of garbage) in the hope that someone will think 'damn, that looked good'. I'm sure few studios would be willing to 'experiment' with trailers because they're a bunch of sissies that think 'XXX 3: Another Big Explosion' is a crowd winner.

I heard that Petersen thought Newman's score was just mocking the visuals. He does seem to like firing his composers for one reason or another, and not staying loyal to those he does actually get on with.

Just watched Office Space (slow Saturday). Absolutely hilarious movie - go Milton! "Take my traveller's checks to a competing resort"

Torchwood finale was a pretty complicated affair, but excellent. It'll take more than a few sentences to fully explain it. Greg - I agree with everything. The story was a little bit lame, but that moment near the end was a real 'WTF??' moment and the overall chemistry between the Doctor and Donna was wonderful. The charades bit got funnier by the second. I knew that but that was just freaky. The only thing I'm worried about with this show, is the amount of special effects heavy episodes seem to be increasing, but overall the FX are not up to film standard, and for someone who's heavily critical of fake looking SFX it's a little distracting.

The Bourne Ultimatum. The trilogy went from strength to strength for me, and I heard that there's a fourth movie being directed by Greengrass in 2010. I find Powell's mostly percussive score to get tiresome after a while though, so I just have a compilation of the best of the 3 scores plus that cool Moby song at the end (not entirely my glass of coke, but it works so damn well in the finale of movies 2 and 3)

B. Nice cue from a score that I think has some good parts.

I thought you were one of the anti-Zimmers. Clearly not. I'd never buy that set myself, as I don't like the first or second scores. My most recent purchase was a digital album, Newman's Ice Age. Had it on mp3 for years and finally decided it was worth paying for.

I know my favorite composer has more chops than that. I don't think he was really touched/inspired by the movie. Maybe not the action bits which I find rather formulaic, but the quieter piano stuff in The Reunion, Ray & Rachel and Separation of the Family have some really emotional writing in my view. But I agree about the movie - I was disappointed by it, especially the IMO naff ending.

The last Indy track was No Ticket. Then I played 5 seconds of Keeping up with the Joneses when for some reason I had the sudden urge to play the Back to the Future theme for a further 3 seconds, and then Evy Kidnapped from Mummy Returns. Winamp times these things to the second for some bizarre reason, and seems to keep listening records for the last month. I guess I was having trouble finding the right music to match my mood that evening

True it is the Academy's fault, but I still don't like Santa. as a composer. As a composer I guess he's so-so. I haven't seen either Brokeback or Babel, but I'm sure the music worked well (hey, it wasn't rejected). Problem is, it did nothing more than that, so no, I don't think Santa should be blamed - whoever decided that Babel was the best achievement in the entire year is the person who should be shot at dawn for either their pure musical ignorance or political reasons. Wait, this is the appreciation thread... dammit.

Listened to the complete First Contact the other day. Half of it bored the pants off me. I think I'm not a fan of how Goldsmith often used synth, because I didn't warm much to Hollow Man either. I wouldn't say this is a pointless debate, but there's only so much that will come of it. Greatness has no real definition, and one person will always argue their case based on their personal taste. If you were to ask me now what I thought made a score great, I couldn't tell you, partly because of the whole 'in the film vs on cd' debate, but also because everyone has their own tastes for their own reasons, and I've never really pinpointed why it is I love scores.

You got to be kidding me!!!! What an ignorant idiot!!!! That's exactly what my brother thinks when I whinge on to him about Santa's wins. In his opinion, if something works perfectly in the film, he doesn't give a rat's ass about whether it makes a good CD release. It does ask an interesting question though - what makes something exceptional for awards status in the case of film? I mean you could have a scene with no hummable music, but the music makes the scene feel hyper realistic. It's therefore done its job but only fanboys would want the CD.

Well they're not Williams. They don't belong in this elite trilogy.

Score #1 PoA has some fine material, and has a better CD release, but I find the first score to be a more consistent effort.

I've always seen it as a kind of 'back to reality' moment. They've seen the dinosaurs and been completely overwhelmed, now they have to get back in the jeep and get down to business. It's a bit hard to say what I mean, but it fits the tone of the film just right IMO.

I enjoy a lot of Zimmer's material as a guilty pleasure, and a lot of his smaller scores are very good, particularly Thin Red Line, which I think Zimmer put a lot of thought into, especially when you consider he was working with Terrence "replace everything with classical music" Malick. Gladiator though, is one of the scores that got me into film music to start with, and I hate the dialogue in the second CD as well. It's a real shame that they felt the need to commercialize the CD by putting remixes and stuff already on the first album, rather than actually putting some new music on. I believe there are only two tracks on it which contain unreleased cues completely untouched, although that nice 'arabic' desert theme just before they arrive at Zucchabar is on the DVD, played over the deleted footage montage. And that 2 disc anniversary edition was a pointless waste of space, not to mention false advertising. The film won an oscar, not the music, and 'all the music' should mean literally that. I was getting really geared up for that.

Why should Lucas do any editing, he's not the director. I think we should be more afraid of Burtt wanting to leave the Indy saga with a bang. I never got the impression from anywhere that it was Indy's son - just some kid who gets caught up in it.