Yoda Longbottom

I'm younger than that!!!!

If we could go back in time and let Williams write a couple of his scores under different names, names that they wouldn't even think to associate with Williams, we could have been surprised at the doubled number of Oscar statuettes to JW's account. I mean each time Williams writes "untypical" score, he never wins no matter how great thing he pulls off. He never wins even though much less good scores by other composers win that particular year. LOL Sad but so close to come true. Roman

Seven Years in Tibet is Williams' ghostly Oscar; it's only shame the Academy realized the score's potential a year later in a reprise, with its flattened form of Crouching Tiger. It's very likely Geisha will get overlooked the same way as Tibet did a few years ago. So this is an appeal to other composers! Use Williams' Geisha score as a pattern for your next score and you have surely kneaded to grab yourself a few awards, including the Oscar. Chances are there, come take them!

Make your post count grow and tell us why this is your favorite work

WotW has its moments. I hate to bring it up all over again, but try to pick a few works from masters of past era, works that they wrote past the age of 65, and you will find a lot of more atonality in their music. It really could be the "side-effect" of aging, like that you automatically become more contemplative and such. Or maybe JW really became attracted to that style of writing. But Williams has never stooped down to the level of writing one strong hook per a score and the rest is "filler". We should be thankful for that. Even in his most "atonal" works there's still a lot of detail to be heard. It's not a bad thing.

Is it okay to judge the score to Munich so shortly after it was released? I don't want it to lose votes only because some of us may have not had enough time to get it to know better. In this view, RotS has that advantage neither Munich nor Geisha have. I haven't heard Munich yet, so I will not vote anytime soon. The score has not been released here yet. Of the three remaining then, I would have voted for Memoirs of a Geisha. It's an incredibly well written piece of music and it just engulfed me whole. When I read reviews before I bought the soundtrack, I feared it would sound too much like Tibet, at least that's what some reviewers were claiming it to be. I was happy to hear it's nothing like that 1997's score. It's just beautiful and it would get my vote. But I'll wait for Munich to come out. BTW, which of the four scores do you think works best in the movie? Even without hearing Munich, I can say 2005's was a great year for John Williams. Considering his age, he's managed to pull off wealth of quality music, something that younger composers can only dream of. I still think that John Williams doesn't have a compeer among living composers. At least among those I know. Roman

It's a swap! That belongs to the E.R. score review, not the E.T.! R man

What an interesting statement! Do you think the same with Williams, for him not to push so hard when composing? I am guessing that you are not one to have a high goal for yourself? I would like to encourage you to do otherwise, and you'll see that you'll be happier within. For me it's about this. Take for example "Alien" and compare it to "Aliens". I find myself hundred times more impressed with "Alien". "Aliens" boast with special effects and they have that Cameron's dialogue and scene preciseness imprinted within. But still, while I find "Alien" simpler in special effects, its plot directness and lankier visual feast give out much better overall experience. I think even in this advanced age of everything going full-digital, it is still possible to tell a good story and impress audience without being overly artistic and contemporary cost it what it may. And you know how this debate all started? I was always against re-doing "King Kong" and I didn't see any reason why this would have needed being remade. If Peter Jacskon thought he could tell the story even better than it was told years ago, I would be first to object that daring. So the only reason left there must have been the goal to make it look more naturalistic. And that's what I don't completely hold with. Too much money invested to earn even more by re-telling the story that has already been told, and possibly in a much satisfying way.

As I see it Horner's weakness is that he hasn't written anything original since Braveheart, yet his fans claim he's become the most unduly defamed composer of all time. His fans are definitely the most devoted and forgiving out there. But would you dare make change about what you practically succeed selling that well? James Horner has an occasional flare of bravado, but there is a big push missing to get him going and set him out for the mastery hidden in him. And if people keep buying his records and film-makers keep hiring him to score the films, why get stirred?

The way we perceive things, and music for that matter, is all nothing but subjective percept! I was NOT making "objective assertion" on that point and I am not used to "claiming" things and stating my opinions as facts! You like certain things, others don't, that's the way it works, which I'm sure we'll concur in this at least. What discomforts me is that when people collide in opinion on music, that as if closes the door and the wall between them is built. It might happen I will never discuss anything from Shore with you for some unspecified fear of getting "in little trouble" again. I just can't find anything much positive about the above challenged scores. I don't say they're utter trash, but at the same time I don't think them good enough to ascertain me Shore's King Kong would be great. Gangs of New York may have a few tracks I liked, but on the whole, it left me impassible. I had that luck to listen to Horner's ""new"" "Zorro" score, and despite the positive reviews it's been receiving, I'm totally disgusted. But Horner's fans are really edgy people who cannot seem to accept well-meant criticism so I refrain from talking about Horner elsewhere. But I don't want to be blocked to deliberately debate here even though I won't always find an accord.

I love "Fatal Instinct" with Armand Assante.

In my view, they are all quite poor scores. No need to argue about that, though. Whether The Cell was penned before Shore started piling up the material for LOTR is debatable, but in any case, it's not worth quarreling over that. I didn't hear The Cell outside of the movie and it didn't impress me half the way Lambs score did long ago and still is. I find the Aviator to be the weakest of the scores this year, especially when taking into account it came from the composer who pulled off great themes for LOTR. If any of you disagrees with me, I'll find the strength to get over that.

Maybe, and maybe not. Who knows. Not everything Shore has penned ever since he became popular due to LOTR has its quality to it. Scores like The Cell, The Aviator, Gangs of New York all have quite standard writing with no really remarkable theme to lose one's head for. I believe he outdid himself on LOTR scores, but given the long time he had to work on the music, I think some others would have pulled off equivalently good, if not better, composition. Peter Jackson is perhaps aware of that too. Roman.-)

I were shown the trailer and is it really dinosaurs in it? It felt like watching The Lost World for a couple of frames. Peter Jackson shouldn't push it that hard with aspiring to make every of his films remarkable! There could come times when special effects may not do the whole trick and his preciseness may not be paying off. Will King Kong be as impressive on small TV sets as it is designed to be on big screens? Roman.-)

In short, I am disappointed with GOF score. I hoped for better since I love Patrick Doyle's music. He broke the spirit John Williams set up and there's no way to amend that. Doyle ferried Harry Potter into the Shire.

The very disturbing attribute of GOF score is that it's at parts interchangeable with LOTR scores. It's so clear that denying that is a sin. But I love the love theme Doyle wrote. Its string drive reminds me of some sorrow music from a score in a film I have seen just recently only I cannot remember which film it was. What I don't like about the Doyle's approach is that it's quite too heavy on strings and there where Williams would give at least a couple of variations and quirkiness, Doyle sweeps those moments with utter string bombast. Williams is much more shrewd composer with a sense for detail and sequence despite the tunefulness of Doyle's themes.

Stepmom has, in my opinion, a fairly standard cover. It says nothing about the film, yet it's not any distracting. The result would be the same with, say, sun rising over the morning sky. I vaguely remember somewhere I said that the ugliest CD cover to Williams' soundtrack is the "Patriot". It's like a pose for a stamp without perforation. I like album covers of "E.T." and "Schindler's List", both of which have something similar. Is it the hands? Maybe. But my very favorite is CE3K

I noticed there's something slightly reminding of "The Color Purple" over the "Munich" cover. I hope the movies will be a lot different, though. At least we're getting Williams' score this time :-)

True. Well, I never had anything against the cover of Angela's Ashes soundtrack despite it being quite too non-representative of the film at all. Which is what many covers lack nowadays, anyway. And there were much better photos from Angela's Ashes on the official website as well, one of those made it to my avatar long ago. I don't know why they picked the one they did. The classroom-taken picture I have not seen on the cover so far. But it's really nothing of collectibles status. But the movie and the score are great, in my opinion. And Irish kids are not ugly I think. The lives they lived back then may have made them look poor in pictures, but they suffered a lot. Roman.-)

Geisha, by far. It's just an incredible picture and I saw it in the poster format yesterday on Goblet of Fire premiere here and I was amazed. I would have just bought the score for the photo alone! While Angelas Ashes was voted the ugliest, I want to hope that Geisha will become the exact opposite of it.

Ok, I should have put more stress on the conditional in the paragraph, apparently. I meant to say that I believe in earnestness of JW Fans in the way that they would never hesitate to point out the forte of non-Williams scores generally. I don't say GoF is superior nor I say it's inferior to the two Williams' complete scores for Potter. It's not because I'm indecisive in this matter, it's that I have not heard the fourth score yet. And if I eventually happen to like GoF more than the others, I'll make it clear hear. :-)

I haven't heard that much from the score as yet but I do hope Williams fans are fair enough to admit of the Doyle's score qualities even if that meant to "admit" some weaknesses in previous three scores. Myself I am convinced PoA is hard to beat for anyone including maybe Williams himself, as same as I believe new Love Theme in this fourth chapter won't overshadow Fawkes' theme. I just can't imagine that happening. I know Patrick Doyle's style too well to get so much surprised and eventually admit this fourth score superior in quality to the previous three.

Good remark! There's very little talk (if any) going on about the score anywhere at all. From the snippets of the score I've heard so far, it doesn't sound as bad as the thin interest would suggest it to be. I'm buying the album just for the sake of completing the series as score-wise. Not to mention Patrick Doyle's scores have their place in my collection. Roman.-)

THE CZECH PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA

No sequels any more, Mr. Spielberg! Please! I perhaps woudn't mind if he chose to extend upon "Always" or such, but when was the last time a director made a sequel to a great movie that was not a complete waste of time? "Terminator 2" maybe? Roman.-)