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igger6

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Everything posted by igger6

  1. YES! This is what I wished for when I broke the window on 320 Sycamore! It’s like Night After Night for Williams. And can it be that this will finally be my access route to a gorgeous cohesive performance of the tonal melody from Images? Nah, with my luck, they’ll use the cello to simulate those drunken werewolf grunts from the OST…
  2. What a farce. Disney has gone so acquisition-mad under Iger that they’re now sending Bishop from X-Men (company employee!) decades into the past to inform various titans of pop culture that they’re actually working for Disney, who will own them forty years hence. I can’t quite articulate why this feels so icky to me, but it’s the same feeling I got when The Sound of Music and Miracle on 34th Street showed up in their respective decades on the Disney100 section of Disney+ last year. They were not affiliated with you! They were, in fact, directly competing with you! Disney is basically Mother Gothel now.
  3. I just realized this score would be a perfect candidate for a Mutter arrangement. Give us some of those sumptuous melodies without all the overcaffeinated-cannibal sounds!
  4. The other two concert pieces need to be released as "Nazuite" and "Archisuitees" respectively.
  5. Promising, but weird! On my end it says it's releasing on Monday. I thought all music releases have moved to Fridays.
  6. The Deadpool & Wolverine trailer made me sad. I wasn't a child when the MCU was in its glory days, but I thrilled vicariously to the fact that movies for 9–12-year-olds were having such an incredible run—movies that barely earned their PG-13 ratings but delighted in adventure and heroism without being stuffy or portentous. Marvel truly had the magic formula for a long, long time. Now, with the MCU having overstayed its welcome, devalued its brand through overexposure, and misread fan appetites in equal measure over the past five years, this is what we're left with: a cynical, sophomoric, hyperviolent middle finger of a movie that leans into everything the great Marvel movies managed to avoid for so long. And if you're a kid who loves superheroes, that's your Marvel option for the year. A once-great kid-movie empire is behaving like the kid in middle school who can't wait to show off the dirty books in his locker. If there's a silver lining, it's that Endgame was long enough ago—and the intervening movies and TV shows so disparate and haphazard—that they've probably lost most of the kids by now, and the only people lining up for this will be Fox-era nostalgics and frat boys. I just remember a time when Marvel didn't have to court that audience because they had a four-quadrant formula that still managed to feel fresh almost every time. When I was eight years old, I loved Wolverine, and I didn't need or want Logan levels of violence to do so, much less Logan levels of violence delivered with a nihilistic smirk and a side of dick jokes. I hope this flops and leads Feige to some soul-searching, but I'm not optimistic.
  7. Woohoo! I love this category, and I love that they so frequently honor film pieces in it. That's an even dozen for Johnny, although I have to say, giving it to "Angela's Ashes" over "The Egg Travels" from Dinosaur was a cryin' shame. But then again, skunking Hedwig was an equally cryin' shame, so I guess it's a dozen either way. P.S. Your humble correspondent had the dubious honor of adding Johnny's name to the chart on this category's Wikipedia page!
  8. Everyone uses the word "minimalism" to describe this score, but I'm not musically literate enough to venture it myself. I'd say expect something that starts out somewhat austere and reserved, takes detours into darkness and drama, and ultimately arrives at a place of warmth and beauty that somehow, in places, still retains a whiff of futuristic austerity—not in a way that diminishes the warmth, but in a way that keeps the sound rooted in science fiction. Even when the score hits its emotional heights, you won't mistake it for E.T.—which is also science fiction, of course, but of a purely Spielberg variety, rather than the Kubrick-Spielberg alloy that is A.I.
  9. Technically this doesn't fall directly under the umbrella of this thread, but I happened to hear the violin arrangement of Helena's Theme on a playlist today, followed very closely by a track from Jenny Oaks Baker's superb Disney album, Wish Upon a Star, and it got me thinking about the several folks who have mentioned they don't care for ASM's playing/tone/sound/insert correct musical term here. My euphoria over the existence (and increasing multiplicity!) of these new arrangements has blinded me to it thus far, but I'm starting to agree, and it makes me wonder if we'll ever hear other violinists attack these arrangements. (Baker's playing, for example, seems much smoother and less "harsh" than ASM's.) Does anyone know if they've been published as scores or made available for others to perform?
  10. My dude, Enguerrand Etc. Etc., is back! Looking rather like an Indy villain himself, here he is with a rather slickly shot Motorcycle Scherzo!
  11. Wow, that's striking. Makes me wish I'd picked up the ROTJ disc when the used bookstore had them all sitting there individually priced!
  12. This fascinates me as well, actually, as a SE lifer who doesn't know any better. I bought the ESB disc of the Anthology used because I just love that score the most. Can anyone point to any YouTube videos or anything that illustrate the quality differences between the releases? Is the current OST on Spotify the awful remaster or the 2016 one (or are those the same)?
  13. The John Williams Music Scene and End Credits
  14. Spielberg never runs out of brilliant bon mots about JW's film scoring! Also, with J.J.'s presence here, can we finally put to rest the notion that Williams has some sort of lingering distaste toward him? Also also, your move, Juilliard! Do they have yet to name anything after him?
  15. Great question! What a leprechaun's dilemma. I say DoD for film because, while I was rarely, how you say, entertained by it as I should have been, I spent way less time actively frustrated and angry while watching it. Also, each movie has one really big idea (send Indy back in time and tempt him to become one with his life's work rather than work through his family issues in the present; tempt Luke to lose hope in his life's work and redeem him last-minute with a noble sacrifice that inspires the future). DoD features a deeply flawed execution of a big idea I rather like, while TLJ features a mostly competent execution of an idea I abhor. Both films feature overhyped side characters who divert or muddy up the central plot, or just make no impact whatsoever where it would be reasonable to expect one (hi there, Benicio and Antonio). Both feature characters we're apparently supposed to like who come off as obnoxious (Helena and Holdo), and both fail miserably at comedy. (I do like Rose's line about "doing talking" with a Resistance hero.) For score, I'd say DoD for a couple of reasons. Frankly, my expectations were lower, because JW was six years older when it came out. But also, astonishingly, it features more new melodic material than TLJ, where you get past Rose's theme and Luke's island half-theme, and you're gnawing Harry Potter and prequel leftovers in the action music and trying for years to successfully hum Holdo's theme. DoD, on the other hand, has several notable minor motifs that actually feel like crafted melodies rather than riffs of a handful of notes. (I can't name any of them on the spot, but I just rewatched the CGI prologue a week or so ago and kept thinking, "Oh, there's that one again! Something about the Nazis/the Greeks/the Dial!") Both scores have more needle-drops than I'd like, but TLJ's are more obnoxious because they're straight from the concert arrangements (Leia and Yoda) or from extremely famous pre-existing score setpieces (Jedi Steps, the Emperor) or both (Here They Come!). I don't know the depths of Indy action music well enough (nor, I would argue, does the culture) for those drops to be egregious, especially for a 90-year-old composer. Finally, hearing Williams play around with Helena's theme, a new melody, in a million wonderful guises, is another gulp of the same oxygen I've been breathing as a JWFan for decades. TLJ had far fewer moments of that. You could also argue that, because of the prominence of Helena's theme in the score vis-à-vis Rose's in TLJ, DOD owes far less to previous Indy films than TLJ owes to The Force Awakens, where most of its melodic material comes from.
  16. igger6

    Fugues!

    I've been wondering about the minimum requirements for a true fugue since March of the Resistance was released. Let's see if this works like in the commercials: Like a good neighbor, @Falstaft is there! Maybe he'll appear out of thin air and explain fugues to us!
  17. Wow, that temp track-itis on “Banning” is BAD. Just license the cue as a needle-drop, Spielberg! Why make the greatest composer of his generation put on a chimp suit and squeal when you can just buy a real chimp?
  18. The hypertensive shysters at Giant Freakin' Robot jumped on the un-retirement train a couple of days ago with this juicy bit of conspiratorial confection... https://www.giantfreakinrobot.com/ent/superman-legacy-composer.html
  19. The Chicago PBS affiliate played a Christmas concert from DePaul Univerty the other night, which ended with “Merry Christmas! Merry Christmas!” blissfully transitioning to instrumental for the credits. I commented to my brother that it sounded like Dustin Hoffman swordfighting a T. rex on Christmas, which I proceeded to input into an AI image generator, and here’s what I got. I also highly recommend “Merry Christmas, Ya Filthy Animal” by the Black Flamingos if I haven’t shared it here before. A surf guitar Home Alone medley—what’s not to love? Merry Christmas to the filthy animals of JWFan!
  20. Wait, so Scherzo for Motorcycle and Anakin's Theme now exist in violin arrangements? This is headline news! When's the studio session? And when were these written? In the same flurry of cookie-inspired creativity, or later? Is there still hope for Jazz Autographs for Violin and Orchestra?
  21. That piece is a masterwork. The lyrics are insipid, but it's my vote for the best melodic Christmas work Williams ever wrote. There's hardly a Christmas movie in existence that couldn't benefit from having that theme play in its climax. It's like the Lost Boys and the T. rex are having a wassail together.
  22. Do we know how many times Williams has been double-nominated in one category and self-spoiled?
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