Larry O

This is a problem with the show in general: Filoni is neither writing, nor directing, any of these people to act like people. It's bizarre. It's as if in the jump to live-action he decided these vibrant, emotional characters needed to be almost completely desaturated not just in their aesthetic, but in their characterization. This is almost as true-to-the-prequels awkward and amateurish as Kenobi was. That said: Kiner is shining pretty well here, which is not what I was expecting based on most of his previous work, especially on Rebels and that last season of The Clone Wars where his original composing was pure wallpaper and his "inspired by" pieces were remarkable if only for how anemic and clumsy they were as impersonations (Zimmer, Vangelis, Williams, Trapanese, etc). But the score for these first two episodes, while still obviously very ersatz-Johnny, has a lot of really enjoyable moments and melodies in it.

Been awhile since I've done of these! 10) Catch Me If You Can 9) A.I. Artificial Intelligence 8) Superman: The Movie 7) Jurassic Park 6) Raiders of the Lost Ark 5) Star Wars 4) E.T. The Extra Terrestrial 3) Schindler's List 2) The Empire Strikes Back 1) Close Encounters of the Third Kind

Have a nice night, gentlemen.

"I'm not making fun of gay people. I'm making fun of effeminate men. It's totally different. You know who's REALLY making fun of gay people? Falstaft." "I don't understand what's happening here, it seemed like we were all having safe, mean-spirited fun being rude and ugly on the site dedicated to the nice, kindly man who scored E.T. - and then someone said our fun actually was rude and ugly and now I'm just shocked and bewildered? Is this what being gaslit is like? Anyway, if our behavior makes one of the best, most interesting, and most informed contributors feel like they don't have a place here, too bad for him and anyone else like him, I guess." This sort of hyper-casual disrespect is really unnecessary and unbecoming and I don't understand why it's even here. This is a forum dedicated to John Williams. When you search the name John Williams, this place comes up. When you ask questions on google about John Williams' music, you get links back here. The man is considered one of the nicest, most gentle, most friendly, most open people in the film industry, as well as being a legitimate genius. And now there's a thread on the site so closely associated with him where a small percentage of this forum's membership persists in being needlessly cruel to one of its best members, because it's more important to feel better about being casually nasty to weak straw figures in the shape of lisping effeminate PC men, than it is to be respectful and thoughtful to any degree. It's really disappointing to see. Nobody here is sticking up for the article. Everyone agrees its a bad article. But turning that into an excuse to wallow in some real repugnant (and beyond that, wholly unnecessary) rhetoric at the risk of alienating some of the best contributors here is not just sad, it's destructive. People don't have to be angels just because this site has John Williams' name on it. They don't have to post as if the Maestro might be watching just in case he decides to sign up. That's silly. But it doesn't have to be yet another repellent enclave of upset men, either. The internet's got enough of those already. There's no reason this little corner of the internet needs to join their ranks. I can't describe to you how disappointing it would be to stop visiting JOHN WILLIAMS FAN DOT COM because it assumed the shape of a bile-filled subreddit.

God this is such a weird thing to even have to broach on a place like JWFan... "Woke" simply means aware. That's it. "Stay Woke" is basically a call to pay attention to what's out there and looking to hurt you and yours. Over time it came to mean something more like "pay attention to political happenings and cultural movements seeking to make life worse for you or your friends," and through that usage, the term became first overused (as any popular bit of slang will) and eventually rendered meaningless by its transformation into a meme. At that point, it became demonized on top of losing its meaning, by people not just upset at the obnoxious overuse of the term, but also by the notion other people might actually believe in progressive ideas and movements, and whose cynical nature leaves them inclined to regard such statements or discussions as purely performative and "fake" for the sake of earning internet points from fellow "virtue signalers." At this point, the only people who still even use the term "Woke" are people who more or less the reject the entire concept of "Social Justice" (another term with a long history in America that has only recently become demonized and rendered useless by people made uncomfortable by its modern usage) and are mockingly/ironically deploying the term to diminish and demean the people who might have once earnestly used the descriptor. I'm honestly really surprised how often this sort of ugly, antisocial, and dismissive discourse tends to pop up here, of all places, a site dedicated to enjoying the music of John Williams, but hopefully this might help a few people out? I don't know. But there are lots of ways - more constructive ways, as more than a few posters here have shown - to engage with how poorly thought-out and badly written this thinkpiece at the Post is than to indulge in... whatever all the rest of this ugly stuff is.

So what you're saying is he's the Pauline Kael of music criticism

Bernstein was his mentor, wasn't he?

Guys, do we have to do the whole garage-grumbling Married With Children No Ma'am thing, as if there isn't any valid reason for #MeToo to exist? The concerns of and about so-called "Feminist Whackjobs" don't really have shit to do with any of this.

I think we're both on the same wavelength, but I'm actually probably a little more cynical about it - I don't think they were "trying to bring the franchise into a post-modern" whatever because they already did that when they rebooted everything, and then again with Skyfall. I think it's essentially just... for lack of a better term... starfucking. I'm imagining a scenario where they made Fukunaga ditch his composer after he turned in something thoughtful but untidy, and then basically went after the first giant name that popped into their head, and there was no more thought put into it than that. "Bringing the franchise into the modern era" probably didn't even occur to them, or if it did, they're not thinking about how the score would do that for them. The only thing that likely occurred to them is "What's a name we can stick on the credit block that sounds important." Thus: Zimmer. I really do think there's nothing more to it than that. First name conjured, first name accepted.

Arnold definitely wasn't asked, I believe he's said as much since this announcement. And it'd be weird for them to think Arnold is too old fashioned, wasn't he the reason the Propellerheads ended up contributing to a Bond score in the late 90s? Arnold is fairly adventurous for a composer, and I'd imagine he's certainly better at incorporating new influences into the score while still anchoring it to classic sounds than Zimmer/Wallfisch. Their score for Blade Runner 2049 isn't bad really, but it's also not doing much? It's just a lot of swelling chords and droning, buzzing crescendoes, with the one overt melodic reference to the old score. It works as like a La Croix'd reminder of what Vangelis had done, a hint of the flavor but none of the real taste. I'm afraid that's basically what we're going to get with this, too. Something that splits the difference between Newman's scores, Zimmer's sound, with probably one or two big statements of the Bond Theme and that's it. Powell would have done this right. Giacchino probably would have done a pretty good job as well, considering he's knocked out two Barry homages already on The Incredibles. But I get the feeling the producers didn't put any more thought into it than "Can we get Zimmer, let's get Zimmer." Arnold probably wasn't asked because it likely never occurred to anyone to ask anyone BUT Zimmer. re: TRON Legacy - IIRC that score was mostly Joseph Trapanese taking a couple Daft Punk ideas and doing all the orchestration and arranging. Zimmer had nothing to do with it. But Daft Punk didn't have as much to do with it as it's commonly believed, either. I might have that wrong, though.

If it had been Powell, I'd have gotten a little excited. I knew it'd be someone from Remote Control, but I was hoping it wouldn't be Zimmer/Wallfisch, who it'll probably end up being - which will make it the second time they've come in late to knock out the score to a big-budget sequel by a unique director - who unfortunately capitulated to the producer's requests to reject their preferred composer. Filmmaking is all about compromise, scoring isn't immune to that, but it's disappointing to see it happen like this. So now Romer's work on this movie goes on the shelf next to Johansson's work on Blade Runner 2049 - works I'm immensely curious to hear and possibly discover for my own self what about them was so "off" that the only course of action was to get Zimmer/Wallfisch to do familiar riffs on canonized pieces.

Speaking of which - when I watched the movie, I couldn't actually tell what differences there were between the album version of the end titles and the film version, but I'd been told the film version was a minute shorter. IS there a difference, or is the Finale presentation on the OST actually film-accurate for once?

I understand why someone might think it's botched if you're looking at it from a POV where soundtrack albums are meant to have as close to all the newly composed music for the movie as possible, or alternately, that it's supposed to have a collection of all the film's "big moments" represented. But if you're not looking at it from that POV, I also understand looking at it as a good album. I also consider it a good album on its own, I think the music placed on it is good, the listening of going front to back on it is a very fulfilling, entertaining experience. Not that you'd need support from other people's opinions to validate your own, but if you wanted to, you could probably go through the OST thread when the album first leaked and watch people here come to that same conclusion upon their first or second listen, in real time. Despite the fact there's a lot of missing music from what's in the film (as well as a lot of tracked music and a very weirdly "remixed" version of Darth Vader's Death I'm not looking forward to re-encountering when this hits home video) I think not only is the album still the best presentation of the Sequel Trilogy, but some of his strongest work in a very long time. I'm not AS down on the prospects for an expanded release as others are, but my current hopes are that the response to The Last Jedi's isolated score (the fact there was a response at all was honestly surprising in and of itself) means Disney recognizes what an important feature this might be in selling their big boxset coming in a couple months.

For my first viewing, I found it was very weirdly edited together. Jarringly so. And not just because of how it got rearranged (or remixed, I guess) but thematically it doesn't even work for the scene it was scoring. Heck, Darth Vader didn't even die in that room. The sense of displacement was pretty strong thanks solely to that music editing. I can't imagine there wasn't something Williams had already written that wouldn't have worked better. Or no music at all.

Apparently cam rips are already floating about, and academy screeners have been sent and received as well, so matching cues to picture (and discovering how the Finale plays in the film) should become a lot easier over the weekend.