Uni

I agree that he's a veteran. I wouldn't call him the successor of Williams. He's a great composer in his own right, but at his best he doesn't really compare with the Maestro. (I suppose that means that if he is Williams' successor, the clock really is ticking down on the era of great filmusic.)
It's unfortunate that he's never won an Academy Award. His most Oscar-worthy material is usually quieter and more subtle, and always seems to be pitted against shoo-in candidates (his score for Forrest Gump never stood a chance against The Lion King—regrettably). I'd like to see him win one someday. He certainly deserves to be acknowledged as one of the finer artists of his time.
I'm curious—which of Silvestri's scores have you been listening to that compelled you to make this declaration? Just wondering.
- Uni

Y'know, I don't think I've ever seen a case when someone's avatar and one of their posts fell into such perfect sync. Almost surreal to behold. . . .
- Uni

I don't hate Zimmer musically. I hate the bastard personally.
Kidding . . . I'm kidding, folks.
I'm tickled by the timing of several recent posts that reflect some of the thoughts I wanted to bring up when I came trolling back around these parts. (That Mr. Cosman has been the genesis of most of these preemptive threads is ironic and a little frightening: either he's mellowed a bit, or I'm dancing closer to the edge than ever—and I find both possibilities equally likely. ) I was planning on dropping a few lines on the current state of filmusic anyway, and the subject of this current thread was going to be a central theme. I was going to go about it a little differently, though. I'd mention Zimmer and his like, lament the loss of leitmotif,and even pull a quote from a completely apocryphal source, Modern Film Scoring for Dummies:
"The purpose of the various orchestral sections have changed over time as well. The string section, for example, is no longer needed for establishing a general tonal canvas, and certainly isn't to be used for melody. No, the strings now represent your rhythm section. All you need to put together a top-shelf score these days is to have your strings play a constant staccato progression, accenting every fourth beat to establish the cadence. If you don't have the budget for a full orchestra, don't sweat it; just sample some stringy sounds off a different soundtrack and lay those down as your beat track. Let the horns blow a long, swelling, extended note from time to time to add 'color.' Your woodwind people can fill time by turning the pages for everyone else (if you even need more than one page). You can save a few more bucks by firing everyone else. Sample in some sound-effect bursts from time to time for variety . . . and
voilá! Your score will be the talk of Cannes!"Realistic? Maybe not. Exagerrated, even hyerbolic, sure. But it reflects honest feelings that have surfaced as I've been working my way through a sizeable stack of recent acquisitions (another factor that brought me back here, actually). And I don't think there's any denying that Zimmer is a major influence on this trend. What Williams did in bringing back the classical, full-orchestral sound to filmusic in the late 70s, Zimmer has done in sending it right back into relative obscurity again. He set the stage, and too many others—Klaus Badeldt, Steve Jablonsky, Eric Serra, Daft Punk, and the like—have been all too willing to play his disciples. The result is bland, lifeless, assembly-line drudge that, though it may work well enough for the film it accompanies (and, indeed, if often does), makes for a miserable listening experience apart from the movie.
This sense came to a head as I listened to the "Ultimate" version of The Dark Knight Rises. I'm a complete-score junkie, but long before I finished listening to all three CDs I felt like I'd been consigned along with Bruce Wayne to that hole-in-the-ground prison in the desert. There's just nothing there. There's no music in his music. It's cut 'n' paste spotting, and frankly, it's a waste of good potential. I think the main "theme"—can it even be called that?—makes a good representation of Wayne's obsession, particularly in the first film; but you can do obsession musically and still get around to other emotions during the course of a two-and-a-half hour film. (Consider how Williams handled Neary's obsession in Close Encounters. Now try to imagine those four notes being all you heard during the entire course of the movie. How much great music would we have missed?)
Forget the trailer. I'm convinced you could switch the entire scores for both films and hardly tell that anything had changed. (Try it, in fact. Put on one or the other movie, turn the sound down, and plug in the opposite score. I'd lay money on the table that the experience will be nearly identical.)
Please, spare me the whole "the reason people persecute him is because he's too brilliant to be understood" thing—especially when it comes to the art of scoring films. I mean, the entire point of the endeavor is to create an emotional connection with the audience, to draw them more deeply through aural means into a story that's being told visually. This isn't an art form designed to appeal exclusively to "fellow artists or other like-minded" people. You're supposed to be reaching the masses. You may well be the Jackson Pollack of the music world, enthralling the elites with the way you randomly splatter notes on staff paper, but that doesn't mean I have to regard the resulting noise as some higher form of art. If a composer's gonna go Van Gogh on the music world, he should have the good class to cut off his own ears instead of making mine hurt.
Now . . . let me be clear that I'm not saying this is the complete picture of how I feel about Hans Zimmer. I do regard some of his work as outstanding (though I would note that a lot of his better stuff usually has a collaborator's name sharing space with his on the front cover). He's a capable guy. And that may be what's most frustrating of all, y'know? I don't look to Zimmer to give me the next Star Wars-esque masterpiece—but he has shown us he's able to create some excellent music. Why, then, are we made to settle for low-grade schlock from him so much of the time? Having proven that he can do extraordinary stuff, we can only assume that when he achieves less, he's chosing to achieve less. It's cutting corners. It's taking the easy road. It's just plain laziness, that's all.
So no, I don't hate Hans Zimmer, either personally or musically. But man, is he one exasperating guy. . . .
- Uni

Finally watched The Hunger Games last night.
And what a disappointment. The book turned out to be a very good thriller for a young-adult novel—and eminently filmable, or so I thought when I was reading it. Actually, I still believe it is; it just requires a director who knows how to elicit good performances and who can create a setting and atmosphere. The handheld approach and herky-jerky editing style worked for a couple of scenes . . . but having to put up with it for the entire movie made it look like director Gary Ross was trying too hard (and he was). It detracted from the natural dramatic elements of the story, which didn't need glossing up. The characters were assembly-line stock. Woody Harrelson—who's always been a hit-and-miss prospect anyway—was horribly miscast in the role of one of the book's most interesting personalities. By halfway through the film I was startled to realize how little I cared for characters I had already come to care for in the pages of the book.
What this project needed was just a little puff of Spielberg magic . . . or, at the very least, some small measure of competent pacing and ambience. I can't imagine those who didn't read the book were very satisfied with the ending of the movie, either. If you know what's going on in her mind, you have some clue as to how things are setting up for the next story. If you don't—and in this version, you didn't—then the story just sorta stops where it stops.
Not a good effort from someone who's done some fine work in the past.
** out of ****
- Uni

Outstanding points, all. Looks like you caught me using an analogy that was shaky at best. I'll stand on my central point, though: saying Star Wars "no longer exists" takes it a step too far.
Love your "CGI" additions to the epics, too. Very creative! (Might be fun to think about what Lucas would do to those classics if he got his paws on them. . . .)
- Uni

Cool . . . I get to be in the rather exclusive 8-Year-Old TESB Theater Participant club. So let me take you back to what was, for me, a formative experience:
Star Wars was, of course, the predominant event of my youth, as was the case for so many of us back then. It opened, then it reopened, then they'd replay it every year or so until Empire came out. In those days, the one announcement from an adult that could send you into the most delirious state of joy was, "We're going to see Star Wars!" It was the stuff of birthday surprises and magical summer afternoons when—for once—you'd rather be sitting indoors instead of playing outdoors. (That in itself tells you how long ago this was. . . . )
Then came word that another Star Wars movie was on the way. You have to understand something: for kids our age, there was no such thing as a sequel back then. The James Bond films weren't sequels; they were each a stand-alone movie that took place as part of a series. That was different. Jaws 2 came out a year after Star Wars, yes, but Jaws was the first-ever summer blockbuster, and therefore the first to warrant true sequalization—and we were too young to have seen the first anyway, and so took no note of the second when it came along. For us, Empire was the first, incredibly novel iteration of what has long since become a tired Hollywood ploy to score a few extra bucks.
We were beside ourselves. The toys that occasionally got a break from our constant attentions came out and were put through their rigors again. I had a friend—who later came to own that Bespin playset following Empire's release—who had the full-sized, 4-level Death Star playset, complete with extending walkways and foam "debris" for the garbage compactor. By our reckonings and retellings, the characters didn't spend mere hours trapped in the Imperial space station; they were there for days and weeks on end. Fortune had further smiled on me in that the main "jungle gym" on my elementary school playground—still made of wooden beams in those days—was a perfect "set" for the Death star sequences. It had walkways placed on various levels that served as the corridors where, just after lunch each day, we held whole platoons of stormtroopers at bay . . . and when their numbers became too overwhelming, we'd vault down through a gap from the top level into the center section of the setup, which was entirely lined bottom-and-sides with tires bolted together. (Guess what that area represented?) Eventually we'd escape the closing walls and make our way out to an extended platform at ground level: the landing bay. We'd hop onto the Falcon and make good our escape—only our Ben Kenobi always proved incompetent, and dammit if the tractor beam didn't catch us and pull us back in every time. . . .
[incidentally, it's worth noting that even as I had the liquid/electric sound of blaster fire coming out one side of my mouth during these epic battles, you could hear the Rebel Theme from the movie coming out the other side. For me, music was every bit as much a part of the totality of that world—even at that age—as the visual and sound effects were. And that didn't just apply to Star Wars. On the days when the Death Star's landing deck doubled as the Galactica's launch bay, and we dashed out into the wider field of grass with our arms spread low in representation of our own Colonial Vipers, I was blasting out Stu Phillips just as fervently. Film scoring was engraving itself into my psyche long before I was even consciously aware of it.]
We didn't just watch Star Wars. It lit up our imaginations, and we lived it, over and over and over again. And suddenly we were faced with the thrilling prospect of new material to draw from! Speculation of the unknown, particularly when you have limited resources from which to glean images and situations (less than 2 hours' worth, in this case), is a difficult task for a 2nd-grader. Will it look the same? Will it be the same? Will it just be more of the same? (That's not to say we wouldn't have been completely satisifed if that were the result. Give us 10 hours more of the same. We're in.) We wracked our brains for weeks even as we did due playtime diligence to the part of the mythology we already knew so well.
So the day finally arrived, a Saturday afternoon in early June, maybe the second or third week of the film's release. We drove over to the Continental Theater, at that time the largest screen in Denver (this was long before the days of IMAX, though the Continental did pretty well on its own terms). We waited in the long line as well—something any kid hates to do, and yet that day it wasn't that big a deal. Somehow it seemed appropriate to the occasion. It was those last moments, after we finally trundled in but before the movie started, that were the most interminable. I don't think that's a sensation that much affects kids these days either: the staggering awe of that gigantic, blank screen, the infinite potential it represented, being acutely aware of the paradox that others had witnessed something filling that vast emptiness that I hadn't yet. What was future for me was past for them, but would soon be past for me as well. . . . I dunno. It's a hard feeling to describe.
Then the space went blacker, filled first with blue letters, then exploded into the granduer of stars, music, and the best two words any child of our era had ever seen. What followed was a completely new experience for me: something that was, in fact, more of the same, and yet irrevocably different. For the first time the cinematic page turned, and I was all at once surprised, delighted, and deeply shaken as I endured the process of expanding an entire universe in my own head. There were thrills to be had, but some uneasiness as well. The Rebels lost at Hoth. (Huh?) Luke spent a good portion of the story in a dreary, sodden place learning hard truths. I also dealt with another element for the first time: real, and unresolved, conflict. That wasn't so easy. Up to that point, the characters in all the movies I'd watched had difficult problems to deal with, but they always worked them out in the end. I mean, that's the point of a movie, right? But to see a main character lose his hand (it was a grisly thing at 8 years of age to see Luke's arm socketed into that medical device on the Falcon), discover a harrowing secret about himself, nearly fall to his death (twice, in a way), and wind up beaten and downtrodden with no immediate recourse . . . and, on top of all that, to see Boba Fett escape with Han . . . and then to watch the Falcon zip away from the fleet, not knowing where it was headed . . . and then to see the blue lettering return and realize the movie was over without these overwhelming issues being settled . . . it was all a little too much for me.
I vividly recall the depression I felt that afternoon. I even remember exactly what my dad made for dinner (ham fried rice) and not wanting to eat much of it. I really struggled with this thing for a while. I did find some placation later in returning to the glorious action sequences of the movie, and it was enormously fulfilling to have our playground Death Star upgraded to Bespin status for a time. (For several months out of the year, we even had Hoth laid out for us every couple of weeks or so—simplest and cheapest play setting ever.) But it took some time to wrap my head around the concept of an entire film that was really only a chapter in a bigger story. It did provide some promise—no way they would end things on that note, so we were assured of at least one more Star Wars installment. And, even better, over time it taught me what has probably been the most important lesson I've learned about dramatic storytelling: that it shouldn't always be escapist entertainment. That there's a time for the happy ending, but there's also a time to leave the audience hanging, a day to let the bad guys win (if only to give the good guys the greater victory in the long run), and occasionally good reasons for not tying up every last thread. I've always place immeasurable value on that lesson, tough though it was to learn at the time. Ultimately, I'm glad it came when it did. I've grown up since with a much deeper understanding of, and respect for, storytelling, mythology, and dramatic theory.
Of course, I loved Jedi when it came out, in part because it finally resolved all those storylines (in a very satisfactory manner, too), and in part because I was only eleven at that point and wasn't as concerned with the elements of the story that I would come to realize later were severely lacking. It's now nearly impossible to imagine my childhood without the influence of those three films. For all of George Lucas's shortcomings as a storyteller—and he's replete with them—he gave so many of us a gift that can never be taken away from us. For that, he deserves all the credit in the world.
- Uni

I don't hate Zimmer musically. I hate the bastard personally.
Kidding . . . I'm kidding, folks.
I'm tickled by the timing of several recent posts that reflect some of the thoughts I wanted to bring up when I came trolling back around these parts. (That Mr. Cosman has been the genesis of most of these preemptive threads is ironic and a little frightening: either he's mellowed a bit, or I'm dancing closer to the edge than ever—and I find both possibilities equally likely. ) I was planning on dropping a few lines on the current state of filmusic anyway, and the subject of this current thread was going to be a central theme. I was going to go about it a little differently, though. I'd mention Zimmer and his like, lament the loss of leitmotif,and even pull a quote from a completely apocryphal source, Modern Film Scoring for Dummies:
"The purpose of the various orchestral sections have changed over time as well. The string section, for example, is no longer needed for establishing a general tonal canvas, and certainly isn't to be used for melody. No, the strings now represent your rhythm section. All you need to put together a top-shelf score these days is to have your strings play a constant staccato progression, accenting every fourth beat to establish the cadence. If you don't have the budget for a full orchestra, don't sweat it; just sample some stringy sounds off a different soundtrack and lay those down as your beat track. Let the horns blow a long, swelling, extended note from time to time to add 'color.' Your woodwind people can fill time by turning the pages for everyone else (if you even need more than one page). You can save a few more bucks by firing everyone else. Sample in some sound-effect bursts from time to time for variety . . . and
voilá! Your score will be the talk of Cannes!"Realistic? Maybe not. Exagerrated, even hyerbolic, sure. But it reflects honest feelings that have surfaced as I've been working my way through a sizeable stack of recent acquisitions (another factor that brought me back here, actually). And I don't think there's any denying that Zimmer is a major influence on this trend. What Williams did in bringing back the classical, full-orchestral sound to filmusic in the late 70s, Zimmer has done in sending it right back into relative obscurity again. He set the stage, and too many others—Klaus Badeldt, Steve Jablonsky, Eric Serra, Daft Punk, and the like—have been all too willing to play his disciples. The result is bland, lifeless, assembly-line drudge that, though it may work well enough for the film it accompanies (and, indeed, if often does), makes for a miserable listening experience apart from the movie.
This sense came to a head as I listened to the "Ultimate" version of The Dark Knight Rises. I'm a complete-score junkie, but long before I finished listening to all three CDs I felt like I'd been consigned along with Bruce Wayne to that hole-in-the-ground prison in the desert. There's just nothing there. There's no music in his music. It's cut 'n' paste spotting, and frankly, it's a waste of good potential. I think the main "theme"—can it even be called that?—makes a good representation of Wayne's obsession, particularly in the first film; but you can do obsession musically and still get around to other emotions during the course of a two-and-a-half hour film. (Consider how Williams handled Neary's obsession in Close Encounters. Now try to imagine those four notes being all you heard during the entire course of the movie. How much great music would we have missed?)
Forget the trailer. I'm convinced you could switch the entire scores for both films and hardly tell that anything had changed. (Try it, in fact. Put on one or the other movie, turn the sound down, and plug in the opposite score. I'd lay money on the table that the experience will be nearly identical.)
Please, spare me the whole "the reason people persecute him is because he's too brilliant to be understood" thing—especially when it comes to the art of scoring films. I mean, the entire point of the endeavor is to create an emotional connection with the audience, to draw them more deeply through aural means into a story that's being told visually. This isn't an art form designed to appeal exclusively to "fellow artists or other like-minded" people. You're supposed to be reaching the masses. You may well be the Jackson Pollack of the music world, enthralling the elites with the way you randomly splatter notes on staff paper, but that doesn't mean I have to regard the resulting noise as some higher form of art. If a composer's gonna go Van Gogh on the music world, he should have the good class to cut off his own ears instead of making mine hurt.
Now . . . let me be clear that I'm not saying this is the complete picture of how I feel about Hans Zimmer. I do regard some of his work as outstanding (though I would note that a lot of his better stuff usually has a collaborator's name sharing space with his on the front cover). He's a capable guy. And that may be what's most frustrating of all, y'know? I don't look to Zimmer to give me the next Star Wars-esque masterpiece—but he has shown us he's able to create some excellent music. Why, then, are we made to settle for low-grade schlock from him so much of the time? Having proven that he can do extraordinary stuff, we can only assume that when he achieves less, he's chosing to achieve less. It's cutting corners. It's taking the easy road. It's just plain laziness, that's all.
So no, I don't hate Hans Zimmer, either personally or musically. But man, is he one exasperating guy. . . .
- Uni

We need to open a new thread: Do You Truly Hate Jay-Z? (Musically.)
Coupla years of this, we'll be begging for Zimmer's latest.
- Uni

Cool . . . I get to be in the rather exclusive 8-Year-Old TESB Theater Participant club. So let me take you back to what was, for me, a formative experience:
Star Wars was, of course, the predominant event of my youth, as was the case for so many of us back then. It opened, then it reopened, then they'd replay it every year or so until Empire came out. In those days, the one announcement from an adult that could send you into the most delirious state of joy was, "We're going to see Star Wars!" It was the stuff of birthday surprises and magical summer afternoons when—for once—you'd rather be sitting indoors instead of playing outdoors. (That in itself tells you how long ago this was. . . . )
Then came word that another Star Wars movie was on the way. You have to understand something: for kids our age, there was no such thing as a sequel back then. The James Bond films weren't sequels; they were each a stand-alone movie that took place as part of a series. That was different. Jaws 2 came out a year after Star Wars, yes, but Jaws was the first-ever summer blockbuster, and therefore the first to warrant true sequalization—and we were too young to have seen the first anyway, and so took no note of the second when it came along. For us, Empire was the first, incredibly novel iteration of what has long since become a tired Hollywood ploy to score a few extra bucks.
We were beside ourselves. The toys that occasionally got a break from our constant attentions came out and were put through their rigors again. I had a friend—who later came to own that Bespin playset following Empire's release—who had the full-sized, 4-level Death Star playset, complete with extending walkways and foam "debris" for the garbage compactor. By our reckonings and retellings, the characters didn't spend mere hours trapped in the Imperial space station; they were there for days and weeks on end. Fortune had further smiled on me in that the main "jungle gym" on my elementary school playground—still made of wooden beams in those days—was a perfect "set" for the Death star sequences. It had walkways placed on various levels that served as the corridors where, just after lunch each day, we held whole platoons of stormtroopers at bay . . . and when their numbers became too overwhelming, we'd vault down through a gap from the top level into the center section of the setup, which was entirely lined bottom-and-sides with tires bolted together. (Guess what that area represented?) Eventually we'd escape the closing walls and make our way out to an extended platform at ground level: the landing bay. We'd hop onto the Falcon and make good our escape—only our Ben Kenobi always proved incompetent, and dammit if the tractor beam didn't catch us and pull us back in every time. . . .
[incidentally, it's worth noting that even as I had the liquid/electric sound of blaster fire coming out one side of my mouth during these epic battles, you could hear the Rebel Theme from the movie coming out the other side. For me, music was every bit as much a part of the totality of that world—even at that age—as the visual and sound effects were. And that didn't just apply to Star Wars. On the days when the Death Star's landing deck doubled as the Galactica's launch bay, and we dashed out into the wider field of grass with our arms spread low in representation of our own Colonial Vipers, I was blasting out Stu Phillips just as fervently. Film scoring was engraving itself into my psyche long before I was even consciously aware of it.]
We didn't just watch Star Wars. It lit up our imaginations, and we lived it, over and over and over again. And suddenly we were faced with the thrilling prospect of new material to draw from! Speculation of the unknown, particularly when you have limited resources from which to glean images and situations (less than 2 hours' worth, in this case), is a difficult task for a 2nd-grader. Will it look the same? Will it be the same? Will it just be more of the same? (That's not to say we wouldn't have been completely satisifed if that were the result. Give us 10 hours more of the same. We're in.) We wracked our brains for weeks even as we did due playtime diligence to the part of the mythology we already knew so well.
So the day finally arrived, a Saturday afternoon in early June, maybe the second or third week of the film's release. We drove over to the Continental Theater, at that time the largest screen in Denver (this was long before the days of IMAX, though the Continental did pretty well on its own terms). We waited in the long line as well—something any kid hates to do, and yet that day it wasn't that big a deal. Somehow it seemed appropriate to the occasion. It was those last moments, after we finally trundled in but before the movie started, that were the most interminable. I don't think that's a sensation that much affects kids these days either: the staggering awe of that gigantic, blank screen, the infinite potential it represented, being acutely aware of the paradox that others had witnessed something filling that vast emptiness that I hadn't yet. What was future for me was past for them, but would soon be past for me as well. . . . I dunno. It's a hard feeling to describe.
Then the space went blacker, filled first with blue letters, then exploded into the granduer of stars, music, and the best two words any child of our era had ever seen. What followed was a completely new experience for me: something that was, in fact, more of the same, and yet irrevocably different. For the first time the cinematic page turned, and I was all at once surprised, delighted, and deeply shaken as I endured the process of expanding an entire universe in my own head. There were thrills to be had, but some uneasiness as well. The Rebels lost at Hoth. (Huh?) Luke spent a good portion of the story in a dreary, sodden place learning hard truths. I also dealt with another element for the first time: real, and unresolved, conflict. That wasn't so easy. Up to that point, the characters in all the movies I'd watched had difficult problems to deal with, but they always worked them out in the end. I mean, that's the point of a movie, right? But to see a main character lose his hand (it was a grisly thing at 8 years of age to see Luke's arm socketed into that medical device on the Falcon), discover a harrowing secret about himself, nearly fall to his death (twice, in a way), and wind up beaten and downtrodden with no immediate recourse . . . and, on top of all that, to see Boba Fett escape with Han . . . and then to watch the Falcon zip away from the fleet, not knowing where it was headed . . . and then to see the blue lettering return and realize the movie was over without these overwhelming issues being settled . . . it was all a little too much for me.
I vividly recall the depression I felt that afternoon. I even remember exactly what my dad made for dinner (ham fried rice) and not wanting to eat much of it. I really struggled with this thing for a while. I did find some placation later in returning to the glorious action sequences of the movie, and it was enormously fulfilling to have our playground Death Star upgraded to Bespin status for a time. (For several months out of the year, we even had Hoth laid out for us every couple of weeks or so—simplest and cheapest play setting ever.) But it took some time to wrap my head around the concept of an entire film that was really only a chapter in a bigger story. It did provide some promise—no way they would end things on that note, so we were assured of at least one more Star Wars installment. And, even better, over time it taught me what has probably been the most important lesson I've learned about dramatic storytelling: that it shouldn't always be escapist entertainment. That there's a time for the happy ending, but there's also a time to leave the audience hanging, a day to let the bad guys win (if only to give the good guys the greater victory in the long run), and occasionally good reasons for not tying up every last thread. I've always place immeasurable value on that lesson, tough though it was to learn at the time. Ultimately, I'm glad it came when it did. I've grown up since with a much deeper understanding of, and respect for, storytelling, mythology, and dramatic theory.
Of course, I loved Jedi when it came out, in part because it finally resolved all those storylines (in a very satisfactory manner, too), and in part because I was only eleven at that point and wasn't as concerned with the elements of the story that I would come to realize later were severely lacking. It's now nearly impossible to imagine my childhood without the influence of those three films. For all of George Lucas's shortcomings as a storyteller—and he's replete with them—he gave so many of us a gift that can never be taken away from us. For that, he deserves all the credit in the world.
- Uni