Mr. Brown

I was listening to Herrmann's "Change of Address" (I'm pretty sure it was that one, at least) from the Alfred Hitchcock Hour and I heard a lot of sounds that Williams mimicked in STAR WARS. Pretty interesting.

All of the STAR WARS titles are somewhat goofy, but can be justified with the argument that they're based on serials from the 30s, which often had similar titles. ATTACK OF THE CLONES and PHANTOM MENACE are probably the worst, though.

Indeed. And seeing how the art of movie posters is just about dead, they might as well make the move to using "animated" posters. It'd cause less of a headache than looking at some embarrassing photoshopped image.

No one thinks it's a f*cking mess of a theme?

THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS (1987) Excellent, except for the bits with Felix Leiter. A nice ending for the Cold War era Bond.

How do you change your username on this site?

OBSESSION (I'll never lose hope...)

Well, BARRY LYNDON was groundbreaking in its use of natural light (candles, fires etc. - what they call in the industry 'practicals'). The only lens with an aperture large enough (an f-stop low enough) to pick up the low-level light was made by NASA, which is what Kubrick brought in. Indeed. Pretty amazing. And considering those lenses came with many restrictions (in terms of camera movement, blocking, etc.), I'd guess that quite a bit of thought went into composing each and every shot for BARRY LYNDON. I think it's an excellent film. Haunting in some ways, based on the visuals alone.

Ray Harryhausen: Special Effects Titan (2011) Poorly crafted, but informative. As far as technical stuff goes, I don't know what the filmmakers were thinking. Half of it looks HD, half of it looks like it was shot on MiniDV. Then there are some decent interviews mixed with random clips of Spielberg and Cameron obviously reading from a script and strange transitions (where they shrink a still of the 90-year-old Harryhausen and embed it into a poster from one of the films he worked on). Looks like the type of shit a 12-year-old would throw together. Mentions his relationship with Herrmann, which was interesting.

Can't be any shittier than BATMAN BEGINS.

I wouldn't call BARRY LYNDON the best shot film ever, but it's certainly one of them.

At first, I thought the interviewer was Pastor Ted Haggard.

I recently came across this rather funny interview. "Dreamworks studios... where Steven Spielberg made JAWS and JURASSIC PARK..." Poor Mr. Williams. You can tell he's a really sweet and humble guy, putting up with that zany introduction. Nice enthusiasm from the host, though. I'd probably act the same way and then piss myself with excitement.

Agreed. Brilliant film. Excellent cast. Wish they'd do a sequel with the same talent.

What films were so f*cking awful that you'll never bother watching them again? A few that made my list... ATTACK OF THE CLONES (2002) -- I made my mother take me to this following my birthday. That poor lady. Even when I was 12, I could tell that she couldn't stand being there. 300 (2006) -- Just one of those films that really doesn't require a second viewing. I watched it because of all the hype surrounding it and found it to be a steaming turd, just like most of Snyder's films. SPIDERMAN (2002) -- Boring trash.

Jesus. Good luck with that...

About how many albums do you guys have in your collection? I've uploaded 85 so far. Surprisingly, they only take up about 15gigs.

I haven't had any issues with iTunes either. Not sure why a lot of people do...it's not hard to figure out if you have some tool bars viewed right away. After it started shitting the bed on my Windows system a few years back (although I've got a new PC now), I abandoned it. I don't think it plays FLAC files, either. I liked it for the convenience. Organizing my collection was so easy in iTunes. What are you guys converting the Apple Lossless files from? WAVs?

No love for STAR WARS?

I started upgrading back in February or so. Got half of my collection on my PC so far. Still need to add all of my Herrmann albums, which make up a lot of my collection. If you're a PC user, I recommend these tools: http://www.mp3tag.de/en/ (Makes it easier to tag tracks, add album art, etc.) http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/ (Awesome freeware when you get the hang of it. I rip my CDs as WAV and it converts them to FLAC automatically. Detects an errors in a rip.) http://www.winamp.com/ (F*ck iTunes.)

TAXI DRIVER Not exactly a traditional theme, but fitting for a groundbreaking film. Captures the grittiness of the film and it was obvious that Herrmann knew the subject matter--both New York and a life of self-conflict and contradiction. I don't think another composer could have done it any better. Since then, I can't think of a theme that really blows me away. Some of Williams's, I suppose. Early Elfman was interesting, channeling Herrmann (like BEETLEJUICE). Iglesias's theme for TINKER TAILOR was great, I thought.

What scenes in JURASSIC PARK are the missing cues from?

Which is understandable, just as long as they realize people are going to download the music if they can't get the CD copy. I wonder how many people have "obtained" that Herrmann at 20th Century Fox set? One thing it might do to prevent downloading is if a customer has confidence that it will still be in stock a few months from now, they may wait until they can afford it, rather than just assuming it'll be gone before then and download it anyway. If it's sold out, then this goes into the debate of whether anyone is losing out, because everyone involved has their required revenue from the set number of units. That would probably prevent some downloading. The trouble is that it seems these labels get to make x amount of copies of a film score and when it sells out, there's not a huge chance that it'll be back in stock any time soon. For example, once LaLaLand's titles sell out, aren't they sold out for good? I think I recently read that this will be the last run that they'll be doing of THE BLUE MAX. So, I'm guessing that if you miss out on this opportunity to get that score on CD, then you won't be owning it for a long time. Who knows when it'll get re-released?

I don't know what you're referring to there. In regards to CONAN THE DESTROYER, that's what I keep reading on the FSM forums. Hopefully it's true.