Bayesian

I'm late to this thread, but I gotta say it's really neat to see how talented JW was as a session pianist! Thanks for sharing these links and vids, @Thor (and others)!

“I love his music! He’s right up there with Hans Zimmer!” - far too many of them, unfortunately

Has anyone watched Titanic in the new 4K release? Does it look AI-fake now, or did they keep some of the grain that made the original theatrical presentation so gorgeous?

Hmm... I'm gonna go with Jane Eyre and TFA. Several folks offered TFA as his last great score and I agree. To be clear, every score JW has written since TFA has been great, but in terms of resonating with the public, TFA was indeed the latest (and probably last) one. While on the topic of TFA, let us take a moment to re-appreciate what this miracle of a man was able to accomplish. First, he gives one of the most iconic movies in history perhaps the most iconic score in the history of filmmaking in 1977. That's lightning-in-a-bottle shit (and we won't even get into TESB). Then, he comes back 22 years later, the Star Wars hype machine dialed up to 11, and gives us Duel of the Fates, the Flag Parade, and Anakin's Theme (and makes it onto MTV's Total Request Live (the first and only film composer to achieve that feat) with DotF)). That's dent no. 2 in the cultural universe, and creating it is something like a World Series-winning home run with the count at 3-2. Then... jump ahead 16 years. It's time to renew Star Wars for the 21st century. Filmmaking has gone completely different by now. Blockbuster film scoring has Zimmer-fied. New director, new crop of young actors, no George Lucas... does JW have what it takes to kickstart yet another trilogy in the same culture-permeating way he did twice before? Well, doubters, Rey's Theme and March of the Resistance would like a word with you. This was, and remains, a breathtakingly astounding sequence of achievements. We are fortunate to have been witness to it.

I love this film. Seen it twice already in theaters and I'm front row center for the 4-hr director's cut when it hits Apple TV+ (and, please please please God, 4K blu-ray). The soundtrack has similarly impressed me -- Borodino is a goddamned masterpiece, for instance, and I hope Phipps gets recognized for his work by the Academy. I'm so happy this FYC exists! What I've come to learn to appreciate about Phipps' approach to scoring this film (after my second viewing and, now, after listening to the FYC) is that he managed to create an epic sound that is truly different from the epic sound of Zimmer and his factory-farm clones. It's a considerably more intelligent sound, one that rewards close listening, one that has range and multivariate character. And it's an up-to-date sound -- you couldn't mistake it for any other decade than the present one. No pastiche (except perhaps the diagetic stuff). No overprocessed synth instruments or overpowering synth drums. And no one-trick-pony shtick like, say, Goransson and his violin that sounds like a cat being tortured.

One thing that having that death in the movie did was amplify the motivation for Indy wanting to remain with Archimedes. Unfortunately, the motivation was entirely depressing — an archaeologist whose marriage had failed due to the loss of their son, whose goddaughter was a thieving reprobate with no appreciation for the very field he spent his whole life in, and whose career had just ended in the most downbeat manner possible (the man didn’t even earn emeritus prof status after everything he’d done??)… given all that, do you blame him for wanting to live out the rest of his life in an archaeological playground like historical Syracuse? (And then Helena steals even that from him.) This culmination was actually very touching and well done, and I remember choking up a bit when I watched it in the theater. Problem is, these story beats are completely wrong for an Indiana Jones movie. You’re not supposed to feel bad for him. Is a 10-yr-old kid supposed to appreciate the subtleties of a character arc like that?

I’d split them up for sure. You have separate artwork, so it’s like you bought two separate albums. Regarding your second question, the film title should always come after the track title. And never capitalize the F— it must only be in the form of [Track title in sentence case] (from Title of Movie).

Yup. And for every three that make it into postproduction, one will get sacrificed for the tax write-off.

This co-branding bullshit is getting out of hand. Rolls Royce probably paid Zimmer some ridiculously large sum of money for a fucking chord. God help our idiot species.

I like you, Edmilson, so it’d be a crying shame if I had to (regretfully, unwillingly) block you for a month so I don’t have to see Boasty “I slaved for a year and went to all kinds of trouble to hire half of Europe to play my shitty music” McBoastface when I browse the forum. A real shame, because I think the odds JW gets nominated are well better than even.

That's my preferred interpretation too. Did you happen to receive a ship notice from DHL or a tracking number? It seems odd that for premium-priced shipping you wouldn't get a tracking number.

Just curious, but does anyone know what Quartet means by “completed” when I look up my order status on their website? Does it mean it has been shipped? (I see no tracking number or information on ship date, etc.)

Or look at the latest Mission Impossible, a very decent actioner whose score is a godawful abomination.

I wonder why DG didn’t opt to release this concert. It would have been a lovely complement to JW’s two prior high-profile European visits. And I suppose the window to capitalize on the Milan concert has passed, so it’s unlikely now that we’ll ever get this concert on physical media. 😕

How old was the oldest composer to write 2 hours of music and go through the whole process to do so, from spotting to conducting the studio orchestra? I firmly believe DoD will be the last "major" score in JW's film composing career. It's clear that TROS nearly wrecked him, and DoD was physically taxing on him too, right? In this age where picture lock doesn't occur until 10 minutes before the film's world premiere, composers who work like JW does are cogs that simply no longer fit inside the machine. Like others have said, Spielberg is the only one who could coax JW into one more score. I'd personally love it if JW scored the rumored Napoleon miniseries Spielberg is supposedly producing (directing???) from Kubrick's abandoned script.

Yeah, I was misremembering.

I watched the extended version of Dominion on Peacock and am realizing the movie isn’t quite as bad as I made it out to be in another thread recently. Treverrow stages dinosaur action pretty well and I’d forgotten the take-home messages about the perils of genetic engineering and Big (Bio)Tech resonate strongly. The extended version of the movie is an improvement over Fallen Kingdom and makes for a fine individual (but not final) episode in the JP saga. i now think the major mistake was in announcing that Dominion was the concluding chapter of the saga. So many questions remain unanswered at the end of Dominion that could be addressed in a seventh and final chapter—one that actually, properly makes good on the promise of showing us a world where humans have to coexist uneasily with dinosaurs. The only problem, however, is that Dominion continued making the mistake of all Jurassic movies since III, which was to treat the dinosaurs as monsters instead of animals. A seventh film would have to go back to Spielberg’s original vision to explicitly avoid portraying dinosaurs as human-hunting monsters to be interesting —perhaps within the confines of a plot that sought to eradicate dinosaurs once and for all. Ah well, to think what could have been... I have JP and TLW on 4K. That’s all the dinosaur movie I’ll need for the next many years, even after my improved opinion on Dominion.

Was that the situation? I’m only recalling what I read on this forum years ago (as I wasn’t yet collecting JW hardcore in 2012 and wasn’t there for that release). Even so, 3500 units in a week is still pretty amazing.

Is that quoted from actual liner notes for a JW release? It doesn’t ring a bell, but sounds entirely accurate.

With this release temporarily out of stock, I now wonder how long it’ll be before it goes OOP. The first Hook expansion infamously went OOP in, like, hours, if memory serves…

I've had this happen before. It'll arrive tomorrow. It's on the truck and hasn't been scanned at your house, so unless someone carjacks the mail truck overnight, you'll get it tomorrow.

Does anyone else think JW has become ASM’s favorite composer to perform? I mean, if you were to ask her publicly, I imagine she’d be very diplomatic and say that whoever she’s performing at that moment is her favorite among equals. But in her heart of hearts, I bet JW is her favorite. She’s not been shy about being his biggest fangirl and repeatedly goes to him for more music. And JW had written her a fiendishly hard concerto to perform, tailored to her technique. If that doesn’t make him her favorite, nothing will.

Don’t stress! (Even though I’d stress just the same as you if it were me.) If it says out for delivery, it hasn’t been scanned at the dropoff point (your mailbox). It’s still on a truck somewhere. And now that you’re home, you’ll be there when the guy does finally show.

Well, you could be in my position, whereby my status says "shipped," but the tracking info says USPS is still awaiting the item. It's been like that for me for three days now. LLL are obviously swamped right now and working diligently to get these orders out, so I hope mine can get boxed up today. I'm really eager to try out the Disc 3 listening experience.