Uni

He's eleventy-one.

Interesting. Guess we're all just being redundantly redundant today. Wouldn't you rather trade for them. . . ?

One of Inky's posts was repeated in another thread. I was wondering if there was a glitch.

Makes sense. I think of "A New Beginning" as a development of (rather than an alternative to) "Sean's Theme." The latter has a downward trend in the underlying strings, the melody is more melancholy, the minor key emphasized, the picture of a fragmented and lost relationship, whereas the former is the music of resolution, the picture of a relationship (with Anderton's wife) redeemed and reconciled, complete with another child on the way. Rather than alternates of one another, they work perfectly in conjunction to illustrate an arc of the story's characters. It's wonderful, too, in that it's not simply a note-for-note repeat of the main title (which happens too often, especially in these scores for smaller films). It's reshaping of that theme that approaches the material from the other end of the story, with a slightly quicker tempo and heavier hits--that "release" you referred to, and yet not an overly happy or completely resolved kind of release. Great stuff.

I actually like the stand-alone version of "A New Beginning" better than the concertized version.

Stupid computer!

No, no, silly . . . misogynist (for hating the Girl Scouts, obviously).

No, no, silly . . . misogynist (for hating the Girl Scouts, obviously).

Man . . . this is tougher than I would've figured at first blush. Not sure I can narrow it down further than the Top 5 (in no particular order, and all of which have already been mentioned): Close Encounters of the Third Kind The Empire Strikes Back Jurassic Park Temple of Doom Far and Away Close runners-up: SpaceCamp, "Harry's Wonderful World" from HP 1 & 2, and Born on the Fourth of July All of these present the major themes from the film in wonderful ways without simply photocopying what was in another part of the movie (POA is a great suite, but is very guilty of this). Gotta nitpick: technically, this is an epilogue piece, playing over the final scenes of the movie, not an end credits suite (once the credits begin to roll as the camera pulls away from the isolated house, it switches to the actual end credits piece). Aside from that, however, I'm in complete agreement. This is one of the most sublime pieces Williams ever composed, and it's one of my favorites as well. You really should. Presumed Innocent remains one of Williams's most overlooked scores from the 80s, and undeservedly so. It's not blockbuster material, to be sure, but it's a fantastic piano-based theme that fits the subject matter perfectly. It features a lot of rapidly-emerging secondary movements that never quite settle into themes of their own--an excellent musical allegory for a man torn in pieces by the circumstances of his life and work. Makes for a good end credits piece in its own right (I love how Williams changes its pace in the middle, accelerating it with high strings over a thundering low-string triple).

Guess they're really looking to cut time down by leaving out deserving nominees, tributes to passed friends, all that. Of course, if they'd eliminated Rock's ridiculous Girl Scout cookie antics, they could've put all that back in and had time to spare.

I need to catch up on some of your English-spoken episodes (particularly that one with Alan Silvestri!).

At the end of last year, La La Land gave us Braveheart and Dances With Wolves. What does Varese bring to the table? Executive Decision and Cocoon: The Return. Pretty clear who's got the mojo (and who doesn't).

Oh, that sucks. Big time. They've got a whole year to put that thing together (and keep a running list); how do you screw up something like that?

So do a lot of games that hit the market. Like any sandbox game, this one will depend largely on what you bring with you in terms of imagination. It'll be released in June. They've been making adjustments for new platforms and tweaking the matrix before the final rendering.

Agreed. This was a color-by-number effort for Goldsmith, and the additional music doesn't bring anything particularly revealing or unique compared with what's already been released.

"Frank . . . why?" We just finished with a tough In Memoriam segment, and we're already starting on the next one. Sargeant, Captain, Father . . . friend. He'll be missed.

So I mentioned in my earlier post that there’s a game coming out this summer that I’m really looking forward to. I did a search to see if anyone’s been talking about it, and was surprised to find it hadn’t come up. There’s been a lot of buzz about it, especially as the release date gets nearer . . . and the more I hear, the more I can’t wait to get my hands on it. It’s called No Man’s Sky, and it’s kinda tough to describe in a short summary. The essentials are simple: you survey different planets in a galaxy, mining and collecting resources in order to upgrade your ship, your suit, and your “multitool” (handgun/scanner/mining device). You can fly in combat against other fighters, set up trade routes, battle sentries and the like, but the primary purpose of the game is to explore. That’s the thing that makes this game extraordinary: it isn’t just open world. It’s open universe. It doesn’t provide a small area (like a country, such as in Skyrim) that you can move around in until you hit the borders and are automatically turned back. When you land on a planet, the entire planet is open to you. You could begin walking in one direction, and eventually—days or weeks later—you’ll come back to the place you started. Along the way you’d see all sorts of exotic alien wildlife that you can catalogue, identify and name yourself, and upload that information to the server so that the next person who visits and scans that planet or wildlife would see them identified by the names you’ve given them. You could become a specialist on one particular system, spending however long you wanted visiting the different planets and naming the hundreds of species you find on land, in the air, or in the oceans. (Whenever you name new planets or lifeforms you earn credits, which is one of the means of accumulating currency to purchase ships, resources, or whatever.) Or you could mine sufficient resources to upgrade your hyperdrive yourself, allowing you to warp to the next system and start exploring there, and so on and so forth. But if there are millions of people playing the game online, how could there possibly be enough worlds to share around? The designers’ approach—using procedural generation, similar to Minecraft—allows all of this to “exist” as mathematical formulas that only render when objects are within the range of the player’s sight. That allowed them to create a galaxy similar in size to our own (with roughly 100 million stars) with one or more planets around every one of those stars. And reportedly there are other galaxies you can eventually reach as well, with millions more stars and planets to find. It’s estimated that the final rendering of the game will feature something in the neighborhood of 450 quadrillion worlds (that’s 450 x 1015, or 450 followed by 15 zeroes)—plenty enough space for everyone to have a corner of the universe to call their own. And all of them are unique, generating lifeforms that don’t exist anywhere else. It’s an astonishing feat of programming and imagination . . . and perhaps the most amazing thing about it is the size of the group that’s done it. Most studios that create open-world games like The Elder Scrolls, Assassins Creed, and the Batman Arkham games employee 700-800 designers, animators, and programmers to create worlds that are limited in scope but replete with detail. Hello Games, the developers of No Man’s Sky, is a studio made up of exactly . . . four people. Four people mapped out and generated the means to fashion an entire universe that replicates itself based on a wide range of consistent variables. I’m not a programmer myself, so that kind of thing is something I find absolutely gobsmacking. So if you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to play a game that combines the Star Trek notion of exploring completely (and literally) uncharted worlds with the sort of outer-space battle elements of Battlestar Galactica in a Star Wars-sized galaxy (with technology design very similar to the last two) . . . looks like this is going to be your game. The video below is my personal favorite of the teasers so far, showing a bit of the scale, the variety of ship designs, and—most significantly—some idea of the breadth of the playing field. Keep in mind as you watch the camera pull out at the 2:22 mark that every star that you see zooming past has its own solar system waiting to be explored. Mind boggling.

And if that's your purpose, then fast traveling is obviously the best option. If you were really there, though--I mean, if it were a real-life thing--and you were in Riften and wanted to travel to Solitude, you'd understand that it was going to take a while to get there, and you'd be ready for plenty of adventures along the way. That's why we play that way; we want the adventures, the time on the road, etc. For us, the maps come to seem too small after a while. We want more world to travel around in. And honestly, it's not even that real a depiction of it. First off, none of us (I assume I can speak for others) actually travel at walking speed. The normal pace when you move forward is a brisk jog. And it's hardly to scale. A run from one end of Skyrim to the other (without stopping) would take no more than 30-45 minutes of real time, which translates to not much more than 24 hours of game time. One day to traverse the entire country. It's the size of a smallish city, really. And we would find it just as boring If there was nothing to do along the way. But they've packed every "mile" with caves, fortresses, ruins, barrows, and all manner of random encounters with creatures ranging from bears to dragons. It's a lot more than a simple "walking simulator" . . . if you choose to see it that way. But that's the beauty of these games in the long run. You have all kinds of different ways to play, something to appeal to everyone. S'what makes it fun for all of us.

I remember a time in the distant past when this show was about movies. . . . Not the worst one in years, not the best. But they're really all like that these days, aren't they? For an event that's designed to reward the best work in the film industry, the show itself has actually become a yearly exercise in mediocrity. Oh, well. See y'all again next year.

I thought The Revenant would take it as well. Seemed to have the momentum.

Pretty wide range of winners this year. That always makes for a better and more interesting show.

Wow. Spotlight beat out the rest. Amazing.

They said they were going to go in the order of production this year. That was BS. How do the actors come after the final mix?

Knew he was going to say that, too.

No big surprise there. He was overdue, and everyone voted for that (not necessarily for this particular performance).