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Chen G.

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Posts posted by Chen G.

  1. I don't have a problem conceptually with setting the film as early in Anakin's life as Lucas had: I think it would have worked better if Anakin were that little bit older: maybe eleven like Harry Potter? Twelve?

     

    Since the film is so removed from the rest, it functions more as a prelude than as an episode, which is fine...except at 132 minutes its a little on the long side for a prelude: Lucas should have tightened it to a brisk 90-something minutes for it to function in that way.

  2. 4 hours ago, Edmilson said:

    I mean, it wouldn't be the first nor the last time that a movie figuring out among the biggest of the year was still a flop. In 1995, Waterworld was the 10th biggest movie of its year and is still considered to be financially unsuccessful.

     

    An example much closer in time and in style to 2001 is Cleopatra: another runaway widescreen production (though for different reasons than Kubrick's), it pulled impressive numbers. But it cost so damn much to make...

  3. 2 hours ago, A24 said:

    2001: ASO was the second highest grossing movie of 1968, not much behind Funny Girl.

     

    But given how much it cost, it wasn't a success. It took for reruns well into the 1970s for it to really make any decent profit.

     

    I also think its noteworthy that Kubrick never again undertook a Cinerama project, nor another special effects-heavy project: shortly after 2001 he would reject Lord of the Rings. It doesn't seem the painstaking effects work was something he enjoyed or saw much success in.

  4. 14 hours ago, Marian Schedenig said:

    It has a very crude and naive libretto. It works because the music is great, and the music is great by being an honest, but heartfelt and direct realisation of the naive libretto. Modern stagings of course try to inject all kind of meaning and reinterpretation into the story, but the story doesn't have enough substance to sustain that. All those attempts manage is to make the music seem shallow and grossly out of place.

     

    Yes! Oberon seems to have a similar issue. The only production I can find is this, which has the upshot of having Annette Dasch whom I like very much (although she had looked better) but its plays the whole thing as a big lab experiment:

     

     

    Its also translated back to German: Oberon was originally in English.

     

    A historical anecdote comes to mind: When Freischutz was revived in Paris in 1841, translated to French and appended (by one of its great admirers, Hector Berlioz!) with Weber's much-loved "Invitation to the Dance" as the obligatory ballet, it was a fiasco. And Wagner (still living in Paris and working furiously on Dutchman) writes very movingly that: "They have not been able to kill it, our dear, beloved Freischutz."

  5. Music - especially leitmotivic music - can bring out the inner world and psychology of the character, but Williams perhaps doesn't do much of it, and even if he wanted isn't granted the opportunity to do so by the films (understandable given their idiom). Again, the exception mostly being some of Anakin's music, probably.

  6. At the risk of overwhelming a college assignment, regarding first your point of "over-reliance" on the themes... the whole point of leitmotives is that the bulk of the score comprises of the leitmotives and their derivations. If its just a musical signpost that comes up every once in a while, we're in the realm of what's called the "Reminiscence motif" of Weber and Dalayrac, which scholarship considers distinct from the "mature" leitmotif of The Ring.

     

    Now, to speak to the point that the use of the motifs is unsubtle...that's kind of in the eye of the beholder. Some people just do not abide the leitmotif technique in principal - Debussi comes to mind, at least in theory - and to be fair, in Williams a substantial amount of the individual themes are more "indexical" in the sense that he composed a single theme identified unequivocably with a single character (Leia, Yoda, Boba, Sidius, Jabba, young Anakin, Jar Jar, Grievous, Snoke, Poe, Rose), pair of characters (Han and Leia, Luke and Leia, C3PO and R2D2) or characters presented as a group (Jawas, Ewoks, battle Droids, Knights of Ren). So you can "predict" musically that when one of those characters enters the frame, you're probably going to hear this theme.

     

    Dramatically, however, the predictably fostered by the leitmotif technqiue can actually be a strong dramatic tool: one of the most significant uses of the mature leitmotif, after all, is as a greek chorus that intentionally "spoils" things: the portentous uses in the prequel trilogy of both the Imperial March and the theme associated with the Emperor count as that. By having the music tell us something the characters onscreen are not privvy to, it creates tension and a sense of dramatic irony.

  7. Continuing on our Weber tour!

     

    I know Freischutz and while I still maintain it has the sappiest damn ending, its musical characteristics are continually revealing themselves to me. We all surely know and love its evocation of nature and Schauerromantik eerieness, but there's much more still to be had here. 

     

    The spoken dialogue sequences mean it doesn't have the seamlessness of Euryanthe, but I was surprised to see that it has a similar structural conceit: The disonant textures of Samiel and Caspar finally resolve to C major, and while it doesn't happen quite at the very end like it does in Euryanthe, here its also part of a larger tonal conceit: really clever!

     

    Certainly, the dramatic-musical interpertation helps and one could hardly ask for a better hand on the wheel than Thielemann. Good cast, too: Georg Zeppenfeld is, as one would expect, fantastic as Caspar.

     

     

  8. Yeah. Its all striped anyway (which does make one wonder: are they not done with the editing?) and they're clearly going to manipulate the sound significantly in the mixing, if they want 18 violins to withstanding playing with six horns and a Rauschpfeife, which sounds like a cousin of our old friend the rhaita. So they could definitely cast some of these sounds to the background of the texture.

     

    But I do assume at least some of these colours were concieved of as cultural, so we should expect to hear some of them with some characters more than others. And since the film does have quite a few such factions - Rohirrim, Dunlendings, Wizards (Saruman), Orcs, Haradrim and presumably Gondorians - its interesting to speculate. Certainly, the first bit of music Gallagher shared sounds to me more like something to be expected of a scene with Wulf than anything else.

     

    I will say, the absence of, ahem, a certain instrument is as of yet quite glaring: I know that when Gallagher was doing "Blunt the Knives" he couldn't find a Hardinfelle in New Zealand, so you gotta wonder... Maybe in the coming days, though!

     

    And the really interesting thing? Some of these Medieval instruments tend to come tuned to the Dorian mode... :whistle:

  9. Yep. Also Tibetan singing bowls (a Smaug-y sound!), wooden fish and the now-mandatory taikos. Gallagher also told someone in his notices that there are more medieval instruments yet to come!

     

    I kind of did a roundup of the orchestrations from what I could tell from the pictures and partitura:

     

    Strings: 10 Violins I, 8 Violins II, 6 Viola, 4 Violoncelli, 2 Contrabasses.

     

    Woodwinds: 2 Flutes and 1 Piccolo, 2 Oboes and 1 Cor Anglais, 2 Clarinets and 1 Bass Clarinet, 2 Basoons and 1 Contraforte; at least two Crumhorns, doubling multiple registers, seemingly bass, tenor and soprano; at least two shawms also doubling several registers and on Rauschpfeife and Dulcian.


    Brass: 6 horns, 2 Trumpets, 2 Trombones and 1 Bass Trombone.

     

    Keyboards: 1 Grand Piano

     

    Percussion: At least 2 percussionists on Taiko (O-Daiko, Chu-Daiko, Hira-Daiko and Shime-Daiko), gong, fish temple blocks, tibetan singing bowls, possibly vibraphone.

     

     

    Interesting to imagine what some of these colours are for: Even not bearing the Shore scores in mind, I'm having a hard time imagining Helm striding into Meduseld and hearing singing bowls, and somehow it also doesn't strike me as a Dunlending sound: Maybe for the Southrons?

  10. 3 minutes ago, Thor said:

    But ultimately, one needs to judge the film on its filmic merits. What I don't get is people having a principal stand against prequels and sequels

     

    If a film is an entry in a series, it HAS to be judged both as an individual entry and an installment in the series. And I'm fine with sequels and prequels, and depending on the series, with a great many of them, too.

     

    But some films lend themselves to sequels, and some don't. Some sequels lend themselves to even more sequels, other don't. Some films lend themselves to prequels, but others do not, etc...

  11. 9 hours ago, pete said:

    Wait, there are people who haven't tried counting the themes and motives? Wow. 

     

    I think the moment I realised just how reductive the whole process is was when I saw a theme "guide" for Tristan, where almost all the themes listed were named like: Love, Love's longing, passion, love's bliss, love-death, love's desire, love's caresses, love potion, love's overwhelming power, the magic of love...

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