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Posts posted by Bayesian
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6 hours ago, Edmilson said:
F&F is one of those series I could never understand its appeal or why they make so much money. The other is Transformers.
I just don't understand how people can like these movies so much.
I used to feel the same way. Still do about Transformers for sure. But F&F... there's something nearly heroic about how seriously they take the "family is everything" theme that makes it work.
I just got back from Fast X, actually, and am pleased to report I had a hell of a good time. Lots of people are praising Jason Momoa's interpretation of his villain character and, yes, it's every bit warranted. Indeed, the movie would have been a lot more forgettable if the Dante character had been more straitlaced. I don't mean the movie would have been boring -- the setpieces are pretty incredible and a lot of fun to watch -- but it would have been forgettable in the sense that we've all seen an uncountable number of movies with amazing setpieces, so that alone isn't enough to stick in the brain. Rather, you want memorable characters, and Momoa's Dante is exactly that. And John Cena. His buddy-road-trip dialogue cracked me up the whole movie.
(That said, there is a stunning dual donut-spinning moment involving Dom and Dante on a causeway in the third act that I can't get out of my head and I wish they edited it less frenetically so we could enjoy it longer. If that was done practically with stunt cars and drivers, well, goddamn.)
It was also satisfying to see, from a movie so bloated with returning (from the dead) characters and A-listers and Oscar winners, everyone given at least something modestly meaningful to do. (Well, maybe except Rita Moreno and Helen Mirren, but even with them their single scenes are played with seriousness and we can easily expect to see more of them in Fast XI.) And I like how they set up the sequel, almost in a Hunger Games kind of way where Fast XI will pick up literally from the moment they leave off on. (And then there's the two cameos at the end. Both were fun, although I enjoyed the second one more. Both are now likely spoiled for anyone who's read anything about the movie online in the last 12 hours, unfortunately, but if you managed to avoid the spoilers until now, stay offline and go see the movie and stay through the mid-credits scene. It's awesome.)
- Edmilson and JNHFan2000
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2 hours ago, Score said:
Your avatar is derivative!
Say what you will about the tension in this thread, but it certainly has driven up the clever joke and funny meme-to-post ratio nicely. We can all bury the hatchet after all!
- Score and Cerebral Cortex
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I’m not sure I like the attitude emanating from this thread. After everything JW has given us in his eight-decade-spanning career, hasn’t he earned the benefit of the doubt? Can’t we wait until we see the film or listen to the OST before worrying that JW has somehow let us down? And even if it turns out a couple minutes in his two-hour pencil-on-paper score are lifted, does that diminish the fact that that lifted music stands head and shoulders above what nearly anyone else on the planet could write?
We continue to get so much from the man and somehow it’s never quite enough. Fucking ingrates.
- Loert, Manakin Skywalker, Joni Wiljami and 13 others
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4 minutes ago, Chen G. said:
Then there are little bits of visual inspirations, mostly from covers of recent sci-fi novels:
Chewbacca:
TIE-Fighter (George Lucas' notes refer to this cover explicitly)
Lightsabers:
I hate that sinking feeling you get when it dawns on you that someone you respect is shown to be a lot less deserving of adulation.
I know you’ve written here a lot, @Chen G., about the way Lucas tries to rewrite his own history about SW. I never really wanted to buy into it because I liked the idea that Lucas started with inspiration from Flash Gordon and Joseph Campbell and created a vast fictional universe out of whole cloth. But with your last few posts, I think it’s finally becoming clear that Lucas isn’t the mastermind we may have thought him to be—rather, just really adept at picking and choosing from other people’s ideas and mixing them together in a giant space-based pot. This is a really disappointing realization to contend with.
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41 minutes ago, Chen G. said:
There are still some similarities: many of the people of Tatooine are dressed in a Japanese flair (later retconned as Jedi robes) and so is Darth Vader's helmet. But in terms of plot? Its really mostly in the guise of the Droids. The Star Wars film most indebted to Hidden Fortress is actually The Phantom Menace, which Lucas based on one of his early drafts, and even that film owes more to Flash Gordon, Galactic Patrol and John Carter than it does Kurosawa. Heck, Lucas doesn't even like Hidden Fortress all that much! If you ask him, he'll tell you the movie is more influenced by Seven Samurai (its not).
Meanwhile, the influence of John Carter (probably via a comic-strip adaptation that was rereleased in 1970) is enormous. George Lucas used to talk about it a lot in the 1970s: one of his synopsis actually says "in the tradition of Alex Raymond's Flash Gordon and Edgar Rice Burroughs John Carter." It features a desert planet with two suns (strictly speaking, two moons), a princess that must be rescued (she was often depicted by Frank Frazetta, a favourite of Lucas', as scantly-clad, a dead ringer for slave Leia), sun ships (Jabba's sail barge), a green-alien sidekick (Han Solo in early drafts, later Jar-Jar), a wooly companion (Chewbacca), a conflict between "Green martians" and "Red martians" (The Gungans and the Naboo). The names Jedi (Jed), Sith, Padawaan ("Padwar") and Bantha (Banth) all come from here, too. Heck, Lucas' first attempt at a space-opera was effectivelly an adaptation of Burroughs' A Fighting Man of Mars.
EE Smith's influence is even greater. For one thing, the Jedi of the later entries are pretty much a straight port of his Lensmen: they're a super-police that use Lenses (Kaiber Crystals) to harnass the powers of the Cosmic All (The Force, which in the shooting script was still often called "The Cosmic Force") and the "Force of life" to fight the Boskone pirates (the Sith were said in early drafts to use "The Bogan"). Within the covers of the book, EE Smith is also given as the author of "Skylark of Space", which I'll place a stiff bet is the origin of the name "Skywalker", and the eighth chapter of his book is "The Quarry Strikes Back." I'm sure "Eddore" is the origin of the name Endor.
And then we have the plot: there's a ship called the Britannia that's faster than any other ship and that the hero uses to blast into the fourth dimension to evade his pursuers. When they finally do catch him in a tractor beam, he passes the ship for scrap. Early on, he steals data spools about the enemy's deadly space station "The Grand Base", escapes the premises in a space lifeboat, and spends his free time sensing a remote while his blast shield is down. Finally, he flies low in a one man fighter over "The Grand Base" and blows it up with a well-placed shot.
Whoa, I never knew that SW was that closely drawn from prior material. That’s like lawsuit-level shit.
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I got a reply this morning. They haven’t got the CDs in hand yet but expect to soon, like this week, and then will be shipping them out posthaste. Which is perfectly reasonable. (My impatience gets the better of me sometimes.)
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Just curious, did anyone else order Summer School on CD from Rusted Wave -- and, if so, have you received your copy yet? I haven't received my copies in the mail and have heard absolutely nothing from them since receiving an email with a purchase confirmation on April 25. I've tried contacting them via their online customer feedback form and by replying to their confirmation email and... crickets. Their website has no phone number or physical address. Very annoying. If the CDs aren't in their possession yet to mail out, fine, but they need to tell us.
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31 minutes ago, crocodile said:
Nixon is an intriguing one. I am not altogether sure whether it is a good film but, at the very least, it is interesting.
Karol
You’re correct, it’s not a good film. It’s a fucking great film.
It’s the kind of film that could so easily have been overacted, so baroque is the soapy script (much like JFK, but less paranoid). It might be the soapiness of the script that keeps people from recognizing the brilliance of the movie, but every last actor tackles his/her material with such conviction that you’re spellbound.
For example:
They don’t make ‘em like they used to. Not even Stone himself, after this one. -
I binged all of Beef last night (until 3:20 in the morning). It’s terrific. I’ll admit I used to think that some of the media praise for the series was pandering to the near-total domination of Asian American talent in front of and behind the camera, but no, the show really is as good as everyone says. As far as payoff episodes go, Episode 9 is as awesome and batshit crazy as they come. I will not spoil a single thing about that episode and if you care at all about enjoying the ride this series offers, you will NOT read a word about it beforehand.
Inevitably, anything that would attempt to be said after Ep. 9 will be a letdown, and Ep. 10 (the last of the series) is very different in tone and feel and pacing. It needs to be watched to tie the self-contained story together and it gets the job done. If episodes 1-8 are a 9 out of 10 and ep. 9 is like a 13 out of 10, Ep. 10 is a 6 out 10 for me. But don’t let that minor quibble stop you. This is tragicomedy at its 21st century finest.
Beef—it’s what’s for dinner.
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On 5/5/2023 at 8:55 AM, Jay said:I dunno about that, but I will see every film JW ever scored. For now, there's still a whopping 45 I have not seen yet!
- 1958 Daddy-O
- 1960 I Passed For White
- 1960 Because They're Young
- 1961 The Secret Ways
- 1961 Bachelor Flat
- 1962 Diamond Head
- 1963 Gidget Goes To Rome
- 1964 The Killers
- 1965 None But The Brave
- 1965 John Goldfarb, Please Come Home
- 1966 The Rare Breed
- 1966 The Plainsman
- 1966 Not With My Wife, You Don’t!
- 1966 Penelope
- 1967 A Guide for the Married Man
- 1967 Valley of the Dolls
- 1967 Fitzwilly
- 1968 Heidi
- 1969 Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting
- 1969 Goodbye, Mr. Chips
- 1969 The Reivers
- 1970 Story of a Woman
- 1970 Jane Eyre
- 1972 Pete N Tillie
- 1972 The Cowboys
- 1972 The Poseidon Adventure
- 1973 Tom Sawyer
- 1973 The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing
- 1973 The Paper Chase
- 1973 Cinderella Liberty
- 1974 Conrack
- 1974 Earthquake
- 1974 The Towering Inferno
- 1976 Family Plot
- 1976 The Missouri Breaks
- 1976 Midway
- 1977 Black Sunday
- 1978 Jaws 2
- 1981 Heartbeeps
- 1982 Monsignor
- 1989 Born On The Fourth of July
- 1995 Nixon
- 1997 Seven Years In Tibet
- 1998 Stepmom
- 1999 Angela's Ashes
Nixon is an absolute must-see. It’s a goddamn operatic tour de force by an A-list cast (Paul Sorvino as Kissinger was incredible). Oliver Stone in the 90s brought out the Greek tragedy in JW like no one else. God, how I pine for an expanded Nixon soundtrack.
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2 minutes ago, Jay said:
Keaton drew widespread ire? I don't know about this
Yeah, apparently folks hated the idea that Michael "Mr. Mom"/"Beetlejuice" Keaton was going to play the Caped Crusader. Big letter-writing campaigns to the studio and everything.
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I never knew ESB was a gamble. Interesting.
I totally understand that filmmaking is a risky business. What I suppose I was wondering was how often has there been a situation where, like Batman, the largest hitherto budget for a film was entrusted to the hands of a twenty-something untested filmmaker, who then proceeded to cast an actor who drew widespread ire and hire a composer who the studio had severe reservations about, etc., and everything worked out spectacularly well. Or some other situation where risk and reward were both sky-high. Sounds like ESB was just the kind of example I was looking for.
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Interesting. Many, if not most, of these recordings were released by Sony in the early '00s as part of a Bernstein "Original Jackets Collection" box set now out of print.
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I happened to watch the making-of-Batman documentary on YouTube last night (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJEbLvFBbQM) and was struck by how much of a gamble this movie was. Young, untested director with a peculiar, distinct, and uncompromising (and expensive) vision for the movie... the enormous outrage at casting Michael Keaton... the skepticism of hiring Elfman to write the score... the largest film production budget up to that point... the widespread worry that people would revolt over the treatment of the Batman character... the massive and unprecedented marketing campaign that fed the unprecedented anticipation of the moviegoing public... it's easy to imagine how, in an alternate universe, Batman fails at the box office and destroys Burton's career before it really starts and heads roll throughout Warner Bros. But instead, the movie becomes an out-of-the-park grand slam and helps change Hollywood forever.
A generally similar story played out a dozen years earlier with Star Wars, as we know. My question is whether there are any other movies that were, from the outset, as much of a gamble during production yet paid off in a massive way. I can't think of any.
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9 hours ago, Miguel Andrade said:
I believe this is from the scene were Sabrina is working as assistant during a photo-shot session in the streets of Paris. Since this uses the Moonlight melody and Williams has composed other cues not all that unlike to this one, I never question that it was composed by him.
What makes this situation all the more incredible to me is the sheer apparent effortlessness that characterizes one-off cues like Learning the Ropes. It's like JW is the ChatGPT of music, able to give you a perfect (or near-perfect) example of anything you ask for. Need a Bachian chaconne? A 16th century madrigal? A '20s era jazz standard? JW could probably write these and we'd never guess they weren't actually composed decades or centuries earlier. Fuck, he could probably write the music to a Dua Lipa song if he tried.
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8 hours ago, Jay said:
Anyways, how funny would it be to build a Best Of John Williams mix for someone, and have it start off with this, Banning Back Home, Training Montage, Leaving Home (Film Version), etc
It would be fun to compile a list of, I dunno, call it "quirkiest" cues in JW's oeuvre. We could add the Mr. DNA track from Jurassic Park, the Eastern European national anthem from The Terminal, the cantina band sequel from TLJ, maybe the Knight Bus cue...
- Jay and Bryant Burnette
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I'm listening to the samples and there's no way I would have believed you if you told me JW composed "Learning the Ropes" outside of the melody the strings play. Like not a frickin' chance.
Either the liner notes will indicate he got a bit of outside help to program the synths or write the guitar part or whatever -- or I will be compelled to admit that JW really can write music in literally any style a scene might require.
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Ordered! #270307
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53 minutes ago, Bespin said:
I'm speechless, in fact I wil never speak again!
Yeah, but you’re probably gonna type again and that’s where we have the real problem. (jk!! We love ya)
That track list is something else, though. The entire second CD is ready-made for hosting your own cotillions or soirées. I can see how that reason alone could help sell units.
- Smeltington and Bespin
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8 hours ago, Jay said:
Yeesh. Talk about giving us something no one asked for.
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Is anyone else super curious what Desplat has come up for the upcoming Barbie movie? I can’t think of anything he’s done that’d resemble the soundscape I imagine the movie would require (i.e., bright, bouncy, uptempo). But he’s got such great chops that I know it’ll be good regardless of the score’s style.
Greta Gerwig definitely likes his work and appears to be knowledgeable about music and how to use it in film (https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/greta-gerwig-little-women-oscars-946360/amp/), so she definitely had her reasons for choosing him.
- Trope, Indianagirl, Will and 1 other
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This has turned into the stupidest thread about an expansion ever. Not only has the joke run out of steam, but the coal car is empty, the company supplying the coal has gone into chapter 11 restructuring, the coal mine has been depleted of all its economically recoverable ore, and, um, Congress passed an anti-coal bill with rare bipartisan support.
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Lousy inflation! Jay found the thread from 2 years ago that talks about JW drinking Blue Label and I wrote in it that $200 a bottle was too steep for my blood. And now it sells for $235??
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (James Mangold, June 30 2023)
in General Discussion
Posted
I’m definitely in the “form my own opinion” category for TOD and KOTCS!