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Chen G.

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Everything posted by Chen G.

  1. Chen G.
    This is an accusation that I've sometimes seen levelled at Williams and which clearly feigns ignorance towards the job of an orchestrator. Williams had been using orchestrators for most of his career, but as just that: orchestrators that fill-out his detailed, six-stave sketches, but don't change the substance of the composition. There are a few outliers where somebody like Williams Ross was allowed to "adapt" a sizable (just how sizable is debatable) amount of music, like Chamber of Secrets. For a while, it seems Dial of Destiny was going down the same route, but Mangold assures us that ended up not being the case.
  2. Chen G.
    That would have been a rather poetic idea!
  3. Chen G.
    That's also true. For this new, Disney-helmed iteration of Lucasfilm, Indiana Jones just doesn't have the same potential as Star Wars: It doesn't live in the zeitgeist in the same way, and most important it just cannot branch off into spinoffs: all they could have realistically done with it was "make another one" which they had, and the results thus far are...not all that reassuring. Along with Willow, it seems like two strikes against Lucasfilm vintage IP.
  4. Chen G.
    Lets hope. I'm not one to hope for a movie to not do well: its people's livelihood! But I'm skeptical.
  5. Chen G.
    There's still some faint hope for the movie for a later turnout from older audiences, but its a fool's hope because of Mission: Impossible coming to scratch the same itch for the same audience. Its such an expensive movie, and it has all of these parties taking slices off of the back-end, that it will be hard to recoup that expenditure. I think Ford's age is absolutely acting as a repelent for many people. They don't want to see an old, miserable Indy not any more than they did in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. They want him young, dashing and virile.
  6. Chen G.
    Pretty sure you can get it clean off of some of the appendices or something, but I never tried. There's more diegetic stuff we know exists but don't have: Plan 9 and David Longe also wrote a companion piece to "Flaming Red Hair" called "Flowers for Rosie" and Viggo Mortensen composed and recorded one of the alternates for Arwen's Return of the King scenes.
  7. Chen G.
    Some composers do that more than others, but yeah that's a fair statement.
  8. Chen G.
    Its not such a bizarre thing. There's some three motives associated with Rey, for example. By that same token, Shore has at least five different motifs just in the bassline of the Shire's music, and when Siegmund and Sieglinde get together, their music includes at least five different love motifs. The subject is the same, but each time its explored through a different musical "lens", as it were. Its part of my issue with these kinds of theme names. Take the Walkure case: we have "recognition" motif, "bliss", "rapture", "embrace"...they're so arbitrary, you could swap the names of the different motives at random, and it would still be the same.
  9. Chen G.
    Enviable work at dissecting the motifs here, but Lor save us from these theme names!
  10. Chen G.
    Its musical sound design by Plan 9 and David Longe. Its used in quite a few places, so it has a similar kind of mnemonic quality as Shore's leitmotives, and it was achieved with musical instruments on some sort (my bet is, in part, a tin-can Dan Bau that the band had constructed). My own feeling is that its as much a part of the score as "Flaming Red Hair", "The Green Dragon" or "Rock and Pool."
  11. Chen G.
    Right. My big question is how much of that is in Season Two. We're still in the process of uncovering that, but there's certainly some.
  12. Chen G.
    I get your point but that's a dangerous argument to take too far. It reminds of me of back when Fellowship of Fans had watch-parties for the show's new episodes, there was some pressure from viewers to mitigate any criticism because "if you didn't like the show, why are you reviewing it on a watch-party?" which is a dangerous argument, because if any show or movie was only watched and rated by those who are prone to love it, any movie or show would have a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes...
  13. Chen G.
    I try not to be, either. I just wanted it to be better-written and better told than it was. As it is - just a show - it was overly convoluted and much, much too slow. I bet that pacing was a huge contribution to the show's front-loaded viewership. They can better those two elements come the next season, and the way I see it the role of Fellowship of Fans is to try and give people a sense of whether they will change course or not.
  14. Chen G.
    Starting 4:34: which sounds a little bit like the very beginning of the Ring, but also like the music of Wotan putting Brunnhilde to sleep (including the arpeggios under the music of the magic flames) at the end of Walkure. Of course, all those motifs also appear in the closing immolation at the end of the Ring, but it ultimately reminds me more of Walkure and Rheingold - even of Lohengrin - than of Gotterdamerung. Whatever it is, its gorgeous.
  15. Chen G.
    I mean, Sir John Boorman did it with his almost-Lord of the Rings film. How well it works, depends on the section of the film. I've seen other films with a Wagner soundtrack - the Wagner miniseries not being the least of them - where it felt like Wagner's music was overwhelming the visuals. It was like putting a cheese cake on a burger and topping it all of with pizzas for buns. But the homage that Howard made to The Ring (Doug says Howard told him he had Gotterdamerung in mind, but in a recent interview Howard mentioned Walkure, which hits a little closer to the mark for me) is among his finest compositions.
  16. Chen G.
    Yeah, I suppose. Also, by way of Star Wars scores, Revenge of the Sith is quite heavy. Like I said, greatly intrigued by the idea, but I prefer what I got.
  17. Chen G.
    I think they are, but its the sort of thing where if it really, truly tanks, the different parties will find a way out of the contract. But I don't think it will. The show may not have had as big a following as Amazon might have hoped, and its viewership proved unsurprisingly front-loaded, but it certainly didn't tank. Season Two, however, will be a huge test in this regard, both in seeing whether it will be able to retain viewership after such a long lapse between seasons, AND because the cost to be recouped has doubtlessly been compounded by the move to the UK, not to mention the fact Warners are setting-up their own productions which might make The Rings of Power stand-out as the one making do with Peter Jackson's hand-me-downs. A show can be bad - like The Rings of Power is - and still be a commercial success.
  18. Chen G.
    I think Williams has a certain style, which is more suitable to those more fanciful, swashbuckling kinds of fantasy film, and Howard Shore has a certain style, which is more suitable for this more gloomy kind of fantasy film. That's not to say I'm not immensly curious as to what a Williams (or, more concievably, a Horner) Lord of the Rings score would have been like!
  19. Chen G.
    Well, that one - film and score - is a bit of an outlier. Its very much the satyr-play of the cycle (an inspired choice, I think). Easily the most whimsical turn from Shore for this series, and the one place where the style of a John Williams (or a Bear McCreary, for that matter) could have worked for it all. Its partially why Plan 9's praghiera works so well as a main, swashbuckling tune.
  20. Chen G.
    I disagree. Williams' villain music - stuff like the Imperial March or even Duel of the Fates - is too rhythmically propulsive. It makes it feel groovy. I remember back in 1980 Williams said he wrote a new theme for Vader and the Empire that's "evil but fun." That kind of treatment of evil - "evil but fun" - would not work for The Lord of the Rings.
  21. Chen G.
    This. Its not as pretty or as tuneful a sound as Williams', and that's exactly why it succeeds: too pretty a sound, orchestration-wise, coupled with those very fanciful visuals could get pretty saccharine pretty fast: its putting a hat on a hat, as it were. Shore's score helps instill a gloomy, pathos-laden mood from the outset, and maintain it and that's absolutely essential to the success of those films.
  22. Chen G.
    What did they reveal this time? I'm not very diligent with keeping-up with what we're putting out.
  23. Chen G.
    Just caught Black Hawk Down again on the tellie. It’s not much of a narrative - least of all, a character narrative: only Jason Isaacs and Eric Bana leave anything close to an impression - however, it’s as visceral and immediate an exploration of the battlefield as has ever been committed to film. A towering achievement from the characteristically meticulous Sir Ridley Scott. I miss the times when we had more movies like this.
  24. Chen G.
    The lesbian thing is pretty transparent in the film too, in a kind of coy 1960s way. She's "immune" to Bond's charms and she has an all-female flying troup. The whole things sounds might disturbing on paper. In the film it mostly just plays as bizarre.
  25. Chen G.
    Future seasons will probably be a lesser workload: he wrote most of the themes he needs back for Season One.
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