mrbellamy

Do any of us even have kids right now? I feel like we're all talking out our ass. My little brother born in 2002 loved the Three Stooges as a kid even though he was also obsessed with Revenge of the Sith, Pirates, and Spider-Man. I put on Abel Gance's Napoleon VHS and he happened to walk by and he was bizarrely captivated by it, he was about 12 and watched the whole fucking thing with me lmao. Some stuff really doesn't age.

It also depends on what's meant by kids. A 10-year-old seeing Star Wars for the first time after being exposed to the whirlwind of today's media might be too jaded by that point, as opposed to 10-year-olds in the 70s who went wild for it. But a 3-year-old wouldn't know the difference and think it was made yesterday. Star Wars is a movie like The Wizard of Oz or older Disney films or Willy Wonka that I think will always work on children until they get too savvy and the magic wears off. Otherwise as an adult you can hope to come back around and appreciate these things for their finer qualities.

I've always been more of a John Williams fan than a Star Wars fan, so Star Wars is kinda just back to how I was thinking of it between 2005 and 2015, which is not much. Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back are great movies. The rest of the saga I mostly enjoy thinking about as pop culture objects and remembering for their best music moments, not really as favorite movies. Although I have especially fun memories seeing Revenge of the Sith and Force Awakens the first time...I actually saw both again in a theater this summer and they're still a blast on a big screen but with diminishing returns since their premieres. I've also seen Rogue One, Solo, Mandalorian 1-2, and Obi-Wan, none of which live "rent free" in my head as the kids say, unlike the saga movies (yeah, even Rise of Skywalker.) I am somewhat curious about Andor given the raves, but it sounds more interesting as a Tony Gilroy thing than a Star Wars thing.

Also what were all these amazing gigs Rachel Portman was getting post-Oscar? She was working plenty doing like 2-3 movies a year but there was nothing unusual or disproportionate about her career, they were just a bunch of modestly budgeted dramas. She maybe got the best (or highest profile) crop of movies for women composers at the time but that in itself is pretty average when the highest budgeted movies she got in her heyday ($70m-80m) were Beloved, The Legend of Baggar Vance, Mona Lisa Smile, and The Manchurian Candidate...like come on. I'm not sure I can even pinpoint an especially great Hollywood film she worked on, her two Best Picture nominees Cider House Rules and Chocolat were pretty standard Miramax weepies. I'm not saying it's a bad career, she had a perfectly decent run, but it's hardly too much even if we call her overrated. The one thing I'll admit is that those four higher-budget movies were possibly movies that could have gone to Howard Shore, Thomas Newman, and Patrick Doyle based on the director associations, and it really is too bad what happened to their careers because of Portman taking those movies. Oh actually I forgot Hart's War which was a pretty expensive movie, that director's previous movie was Frequency, scored by Michael Kamen, who died right after Rachel Portman took Hart's War. So there could be something to that.

I don't think The BFG is as highly regarded as you seem to think it is...

It is nice just to see them hanging together after five M Night Shyamalan movies have gone by now without JNH

8 has the great Rey's Theme ending, though...that alone would keep me from putting it last.

He's obviously not burned out from filmmaking in general but maybe from doing these giant blockbuster sized epics. Of course he could make something smaller but the docs have been a version of that, while still satisfying his technological ambitions and larger-than-life subject interests. I also kinda wonder if Andrew Lesnie's death had anything to do with Jackson not rushing back to the director's chair.

Love Delerue. Based on the temp influence on Color Purple and Hook, I'm sure Spielberg would have hired him at some point if not for Williams. Another mother-daughter (and Shirley Maclaine) theme that cycles through my brain regularly

Well, The Beatles should count. I wouldn't call myself a boy band devotee but I was a Backstreet Boys kid, l still like a few of theirs. My favorite trivia is that the bass of "The Call" is a sample of one of the boy's farts which you can't unhear. Catchy Max Martin chorus. Totally unfamiliar with boy band stuff since the early aughts but was listening to a podcast which shouted out "Little Black Dress" by One Direction as a counter against boy band prejudice, arguing that it pretty much sounded like a Big Star song taken on its own. Not bad.

Still have never seen this movie but the theme gets stuck in my head all the time

Yeah, in the sense that any film just is what it is, the score would be different if the movie was different. But dramatic arcs and editing rhythms aside, ultimately the composer deserves all the credit for expressing a film's particular musicality, which is infinitely variable and doesn't really exist except in their mind. It seems the hardest thing about bad movies would be just having nothing to work with and stretching to make something interesting. Christophe Beck once told a funny story about a director asking him to score the change in an actor's face which was just a blank stare no matter how hard he looked.

I bet there are things about scoring bad movies that are more fun than good ones. And it's probably not that different to some degree. Like, the moment in "The Great Eatlon" when Giamatti realizes the guy with one buff arm is The Guardian, that's just a great setup for music whether you think it's actually a good scene or not. And on the flipside great art probably just feels like footage after awhile.

Very cool Now do another one together