Chen G.

In terms of historical epics, Braveheart's my favorite. I like it more than Lawrence of Arabia; I like it way more than Ben Hur. It moves me far more, therefore it is the better film. And "Best Picture" is, to no little extent, the "best producer" award: That's why its given to the producer. And Braveheart is the most ambitious production of that year. A 3-hour, thick-accented, R-rated, on-location, harrowing historical war epic and a period piece, and a tragedy on top of that, with a script that eschews the three-act structure, all helmed by an actor of "mindless" action roles in his second directorial role, whose also starring the picture? the potential for it to be a disaster was there, but it turned out amazing.

It doesn't deserve Best Picture. It deserves "The Best of Best pictures."

Braveheart>>>>Everything, except Return of the King.

Oh yeah, that’s very nice.

Its not The House of Durin per se, its a theme in and of its own, that marries The House of Durin and The History of the One Ring. It occurs again near the end of the score, and I think it also occurs in the Battle of the Five Armies. The House of Durin proper plays in "The White Council" in a sort of embryonic form when Elrond and Gandalf discuss dragon sickness within earshot of Thorin, but the definitive form only appears in The Desolation of Smaug. On the soundtrack or the theatrical cut - in Laketown; in the extended edition - in the prologue.

Yeah, the achievement here isn't necessarily in the sheer number of leitmotives (which is staggering) but in that they are all divided into sets and subsets and sub-subsets of related themes. Certain sets of themes are contrasted against others (Mordor/Shire; Fellowship/Isengard) while others complement each other, but all are nonetheless connected. The dramatic effect is that Shore can introduce a new theme such as The White Rider and the Fellowship or The House of Durin late in the game, but it still feels like we did hear it before because we heard some of its building blocks in previous themes.

Yeah, in the sketch, Thorin's theme is Thorin/Erebor.

Which is what I'm here for!

I'll help you out: is it this theme or this one? The first is Erebor's. The second is Thorin's, but they're very closely related. Both are great, anyway. There's a great sense of yearning to them, which is appropriate given the story.

I’ll rewatch Braveheart, then!

I’ll watch An Unexpected Journey, my least favorite of the bunch, ten times on repeat before I’ll watch Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. And I don’t adore things. I like things.

Oh, I'm so sorry.

I'm not here to argue that they're brilliant cinema, but a lack of fidelty in adaptation isn't their fault. If anything, superflous fidelty is.

While I am in favor of using authorial intent to decipher the composer’s leitmotivic construction, it’s important not to get sucked into every fleeting comment the composer makes, often quite some time removed from the time in which he composed the piece in question. Williams had previous fleeting remarks about thematic material for the Battle of Hoth, Luke’s speeder, a secondary theme for Luke, etcetra... I believe that he didn’t mention a motif for Finn during the release of The Force Awakens, but he did make a fleeting mention of one regarding The Last Jedi, even though the action (or pursuit) ostinato in question isn’t really in that score.

Dislike them? Not at all. But that’s just what you do when you adapt a piece of literature. On the one hand, you are being respectful to the source material, but on the other hand you need to say: “to hell with that, I’m going to do whatever it takes to make this the best movie possible.” A good experiment would be to look at all of these adapted works as if they were original screenplays.

That's the consensus. But than, last entries are always tricky!

Its one of the stronger entries, to be sure.

Screw the book! All that matters is making the best possible film! The Goblet of Fire isn't a great movie, but its still quite good. Much better than the Chris Columbus entries, combined.

It’s just an action ostinato. It doesn’t represent either character. And I don’t recall it appearing in The Last Jedi. It’s most likely some of the new action material sounds close to it.

There are times, especially in The Goblet of Fire, where his intensity is way too much. But he’s much better acting as Dumbeldore than Harris, simply because Harris had to take direction from an incompetent director.

Exactly. He doesn’t approach these serialized scores as parts of a greater whole, but as interconected, but separate, pieces. Otherwise, we’d have an embyronic form of Across the Stars in The Phantom Menace, which we obviously don’t have. And that’s in the prequels where Williams at least had an inkling as to the traejectory of the trilogy, at least in rudimentary terms, which he didn’t have (and couldn’t have) in either the first or the current trilogy.

I’m sorry, but I just don’t think the acting in the first two Harry Potter films, especially as far as the kids are concerned, is acceptable for any reason, other than people trying to be apologetic about the films because they’re not being sincere in their assessment of them for whatever reason.

It’s not the actors who determine the quality of the performance, it’s the director! Look at Dumbeldore: it’s not that Michael Gambon is a better actor than Richard Harris - it’s that the directors he worked under in those films were better. Radcliff was more than alright in some of the later films, while Watson was unbelievably theatrical in the first two films, as were many of the adults.

I’m a big proponent of authorial intent as far as classifying leitmotives and connections between them is concerned. I parallel recurring musical gestures to words and sentences in a screenplay: you can have repeated words or even whole sentences that are so generic that you can’t refer to them as callbacks. I’ve written Hebrew translations of all six Middle Earth films and I’ve lost count of the number of times lines like “run!”, “come on!” or “No, it is not” are uttered. Is there a deliberate callback there? Hell no. Is every time the word “lightsaber” uttered in Star Wars a callback? Rey’s connection to The Force was, I believe, pointed out by Williams several times, so there’s your authorial intent. It’s also clear from the way he often plays one after the other or in playing them in counterpoint. His end-credits suites are also great ways to declare authorial intent, because he often runs through the various leitmotives of the score, and the connections often present themselves therein:

None at all.