222max

Me too. Lots of crystaline detail in the sound and urgency in the performance.

And fun he will have. In spite of your patronising and boringly elitist remark. Boringly elitist? Perhaps you ought to let Koray rebut my post. Giacchino ain't Goldsmith. And as I recall, the mere mention of Giacchino being a young John Williams threw some forum members into an uproar. So I guess it's okay to equate a young and upcoming composer to a respected fixture in the film scoring community as long as it isn't John Williams eh? p.s. I'm really effing tired of people throwing out the E-bomb whenever someone entertains some kind of higher aesthetic about the quality of music. Angel, now you know better than to go upsetting the rainbow around here. People could actually get challenged about their views on music and we can't have that.

Or you could judge it on it's own merits instead of comparing it something else. Just a thought. Then what's the point? Ratings systems are MEANT to be a relative scale of quality. If I had never heard The Empire Strikes back then Raiders just might be a score I could give the highest rating to. But I have heard it so I can't. The problem with these things is that there is never a context so almost everything gets the highest rating. Like yeah, Stepmom is a 5-star score and so is ET. But we all know better than that.

I gave it 4.5 stars because it just CAN'T be a five star score. Why? Because I consider The Empire Strikes Back the greatest score John Williams ever did and Raiders isn't as good. I have to look at this in the context of other real 5-star scores.

I can see what you're saying about the sound quality of ST:TMP. Personally, I think it sounds fine. It was recorded the old-fashioned way with close mics versus the heavy reverb sound which is in fashion today. I think there's a lot of detail in the recording. Maybe it just doesn't have that expansive concert hall sound we've been accustomed to since the 90's.

Oh Please. Give us a break.

. If you still feel the same way, no harm no foul. Well, the second half is essentially the same tone as the original 2 LP (of which I had to buy a second copy after wearing the first one out) but I've got ol' Supes on my iPod so I'll give it a fresh listen today. I do love some of the stuff on disc 2 but it's overall just not as compelling as disc 1.

That's the thing for me. After Clark becomes Superman it's just a bunch of variations on the love theme and the heroic theme. As you say, highlights. I skip through the filler to get to those highlights. But everything on disc one is "don't miss a single minute of it" great stuff. I usually stop listening after The Fortress of Solitude. But the whole score to ST:TMP is consistently ingenious and imaginative. But There's NO WAY anyone here can actually PROVE which score is better. If fact, it's IMPOSSIBLE to. So this is a poll which asks the correct question... "which is your favorite". Of the 2 Star Trek is easily mine. maybe you need to listen again because its not at all what you said. I don't know what you're getting at but after listening to these 2 scores over the span of about 30 years I think I've heard them both enough to know what I'm saying about them.

That's the thing for me. After Clark becomes Superman it's just a bunch of variations on the love theme and the heroic theme. As you say, highlights. I skip through the filler to get to those highlights. But everything on disc one is "don't miss a single minute of it" great stuff. I usually stop listening after The Fortress of Solitude. But the whole score to ST:TMP is consistently ingenious and imaginative. But There's NO WAY anyone here can actually PROVE which score is better. If fact, it's IMPOSSIBLE to. So this is a poll which asks the correct question... "which is your favorite". Of the 2 Star Trek is easily mine.

The Love Theme is the ultimate theme when it comes to timid love. I agree. Nothing in TMP is as good as the Love Theme or the March, but overall TMP wins just by a bit. The quality of themes is debatable but one of the real beauties about Star Trek:TMP is that its whole conceptual structure is so elegant. Like the way the V'ger theme is really a more ominous and mysterious version of Ilia's theme... foreshadowing the relationship of the two characters as the movie progresses. Star Trek is so varied in it's textures and tones yet it all feels like it is of the same cloth. I think it's just brilliant.

The Peter Jackson King Kong is some of the best CGI I've seen so far. The Hulk some of the worst. Maybe the lousiest CGI effect I can remember in a big-budget movie is the Scorpion King at the end of The Mummy Returns. Benjamin Button has some amazing CGI in the virtual acting of the old Benjamin.

I feel EXACTLY the same way. Superman is simply sublime until it gets to all the Metropolis stuff and that goofy "March of the Villains theme". But The Krypton, Smallville and North Pole material is fantastic. Star Trek is sublime form start to finish and that's why I pick it.

Hope you're joking. If not, I refer you to the Mutant Kuato in Total Recall. "Open your miiind, open your miiiind".

Good idea to mention non-film music interests. My second love is jazz. I've been a Pat Metheny fan for many years.

It goes without saying that most here hold John Williams as their favorite film composer. It's the John Williams fan network for crying out loud. But that doesn't have to mean you're a Williams fan exclusively. I've been into film music since around 1973. I think I bought my first soundtrack in 1976 (it was Space:1999 by Barry Gray). For those who may not have been collecting at the time I have to tell you that the soundtrack section in most records store was SMALL. I'm talking about only 4 rows of LPs on the shelf. Shortly thereafter I bought my second album which was Jaws. I started out an absolute John Williams fan but it didn't take long for me to start branching out. Jerry Goldsmith came to my attention and I was soon addicted to his music and continued to be so for the next 30 years. But along the way I was certainly no stranger to the music of Elmer Bernstein, Bernard Herrmann, John Barry, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Alfred Newman, Miklos Rosza, Lalo Schifrin, Alex North, Jerry Fielding, David Shire and a few others. Later, I discovered the pleasures of Danny Elfman, James Newton Howard, Thomas and Randy Newman, Phillipe Sarde, John Scott, Alan Silvestri, Bruce Broughton, Howard Shore, James Horner, Christopher Young, Elliot Goldenthal and David Arnold. These days I'm quite enamored with Andre Desplat's work. But Jerry Goldsmith remains my top dog and Williams stands there right along side him. But, I'm by no means limited to them. I feel just as intimately familiar with the works of Herrmann, Bernstein, North, Rozsa, Elfman, Scott, and many of these others I've mentioned. My collection is full of scores form all these great composers. Who else's music, besides John Williams, do you feel you know well?

Goldsmith respected and admired Williams and it was no secret. He was very open about it on several occasions. In fact, I can think of more statements where Goldsmith praises Williams than the other way around. I remember, in particular, a live web chat Goldsmith did back in the 90's and someone asked if he thought Williams had "lost it". Goldsmith's reply seemed terse as he said... "go and listen to Schindler's List and come back and say he's "lost it." What Goldsmith didn't like was pretense and he found some of the Boston Pops posturing pretentious as well as film composers trying to cozy up to the classical establishment for validation as if film scoring was some lesser art form. Goldsmith strongly believed that film scoring was every bit a legitimate musical form as concert music. I even have an audio interview where he defends John Williams as the single creative force behind the 5-note Close Encounters theme when someone in the audience claimed that it was Spielberg who came up with it. Most of the competition and envy regarding these two giants more often stemmed from the fans rather than the men themselves.

I don't get this comparison at all. Memoirs vs. Seven Years in Tibet would seem more logical.

Not obviously and highly arguable. You can't be so dogmatic about these things.

It's not useless. It serves the purpose of showing our heroes arriving at Yavin. It's a necessary sequence, and a fantastic example of how great Star Wars can be without John Williams. And that "swooshing sound" is the engines of the Millennium Falcon. Why should it sound any different? Dude you did not get my point? I'm not saying that they suddenly appear on the surface of Yavin, but just one shot of the falcon in space arriving to Yavin and one shot of the Falcon landing on Yavin is enough. The rest could be considered 'useless' As it is, you notice (i did) something is wrong or too long when you hear the same sound (and doppler) effect several times since there is three (i think) shots of the falcon in space arriving to yavin, and then the landing on the surface which has two shots too i think. Lucas is a pretty artless director. A great visionary but hardly a good film maker. He is literal to a fault and he seems to think he has to illustrate EVERYTHING to his audience. Cases in point; In TESB when Luke is hanging upside down in the snow creature's cave. For whatever reasons, budget or technology limitations, Kirschner hardly shows the monster except for a few brief scenes of him coming towards Luke and then rushing forward before Luke cuts his arm off. In Lucas' revised version he shows the monster sitting there grubbing away on the Taun-Taun, then full-body shots of him getting up and when Luke slashes the arm off he we get to see that cheesy shot of the monster writhing around with a bloody stump. What was wrong with the scene as it was originally done? Then later, after Luke falls down the air shaft in Cloud City, Lucas has to show us Vader walking down the hall, then getting on his shuttle, then flying away from the planet, then flying toward his ship, then the ship landing and Vader walking off the ship. How dumb does Lucas think we are? Not only are these cuts unnecessary but they totally disrupt the momentum of the escape of the Falcon from the TIE fighters. Talk about ruining a good thing. In the Prequels, Lucas was this way about nearly every narrative development... that's why we have to see every ship arrival and departure in real time. But this ham-fisted method of story-telling also explains why he put music everywhere. He feels he has to explain everything to us.

Nicely said. But I would be interested in your opinion on Powell's contributions to the second two Bourne films and United 93, each directed by Paul Greengrass in his now trademark cinéma verité style. Can I correctly assume that you would decry these pictures as overscored? I actually admire how Powell scored the Bourne movies (as well as how he did The Italian Job remake). The Bourne movies have a quick-edit, almost montage style narrative which would seem somewhat disjointed without Powell's music there to tie it all together. But What the music seems to provide in this case is a sense of speed and rhythm rather than highlighting the drama. I think that was an effective approach for these movies. Just the same, some of the fights and chases could probably have been just as powerful without music. Watch this clip from From Russia with Love to see how a scene which might have easily been scored works without music. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YG25MNkdg0

That's also an interesting discussion. I for one, would rather there not be any music in The China Syndrome since it would diminish the relevant aspects of the film and make it feel more like a typical thriller. But the 70's was a time when music was generally very well utilized. Take the French Connection for instance. There is music in that movie but it works very subliminally. There's a near documentary grittiness to the movie which gives everything a sense of realism. I remember someone saying that that classic scene of Gene Hackman chasing the train in his car should have been scored and I cringe at the very thought. The screeching of the train, the growl of the car's engine, and Hackman's mad, obsessive cursing worked better than any musical score ever could. If that scene were done today you can bet that there would be music all over the scene. I would like to see a return to intelligent, less visceral uses of musical score.

I never understood why Lucas says that. It's utter nonsense since the Star Wars movies are the farthest thing from being silent movies. It's either a movie with dialog and sound or it's not. What he means is, just put the images up there with music and they'll tell the story just as effectively. Which is true, at least for the OT. Which still makes no sense. Silent movies needed music to play constantly because it had to not only heighten drama but to also carry the narrative. In a sense, music in silent movies has quite a different function than it does in movies with sound. Movies with sound and dialog are a very different animal. Dialog advances the narrative and sound effects add sensation to physical action. It could be argues that you don't need music for either case. Watch Fritz Lange's Metropolis, which is a silent movie, and compare it's structure to any of the Star Wars movies and you'll see the absurdity of what Lucas proposes. What Lucas has done is simply add another, often unnecessary, sonic layer to the film. It just becomes wallpaper. Even the original trilogy did not use John Williams' music in that way.

I never understood why Lucas says that. It's utter nonsense since the Star Wars movies are the farthest thing from being silent movies. It's either a movie with dialog and sound or it's not.

This is a viewpoint question. There is no correct position on this. Just your opinion. For me it's pretty simple. It's when the music become superfluous. There may be music during scenes which don't need any. Or the general musical approach may seem excessive, for example, a small, intimate drama being scored with a 150 piece orchestra. I have found that movies these days tend to have too much music in them. While it's true that Golden Age composers such as Rozsa, Korngold and Newman wrote literally hours of music for some of their more epic films others, such a Bernstein and Goldsmith, wrote only as much music as the films required. For example, the 3+-hour long Patton has barely 30 minutes of music. As a film music lover who basks in moments when the music can carry a scene I also find it irritating and distracting when the music is too prominent. One personal experience being during Legends of the Fall when it seemed that for the first 25 minutes of the movie the music just wouldn't stop. I think great composers should also be good spotters of music... using intelligent restraint and sensitivity in putting music only where the movie cries out for it. Your thoughts?