Humpty Dumpty

You can't get much more light-hearted and silly than Joel Schumacher's Batman movies. The films themselves are not that highly regarded, but the scores are first-rate.

What about Elliot Goldenthal? I always saw him as a possible successor to Williams; he probably has the greatest amount of technical expertise of any film composer aside from Williams.

It can be anything it wants so long as it has a cameo of Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury.

I didn't find the Johnny Greenwood score all that interesting or daring. It was just a hodgepodge of Bartok, Shostakovich, and Ligeti, and much of it sounded incongruent with the scenes with which it went along.

Then listen to this:

Korngold invented the "Golden Age." That sound was in his music before it was in Hollywood, even before Hollywood had sound at all!

Don't get me wrong because I love John Williams, but when it comes to film scoring, Korngold was the greatest there ever was.

One possible explanation for your feeling Irina's theme to be familiar to you is that it does resemble, to an extent, the famous slow theme in the Brahms 3rd Symphony. I'm completely blown away by what I've heard so far. From the subtle modulations of the new arrangement of Marion's theme to the sense of sprawling rhythmic variegation created by The Jungle Chase, how do you get better than that?

Yes, didn't you know, Morricone doesn't need clicktracks... HE can handle the orchestra without and keep the perfect tempo with his blssed hands! Korngold almost never used a click track either, which is even more challenging in his case because his music is so rhythmically limber and has all sorts of weird meter and tempo changes, whereas Morricone's scores tend generally to submit to the tyranny of the pulse. And now, I join in on the laughter:

John Williams’ style, in my opinion, has improved. He has assimilated over the years an ever increasing variety of influences into his music (You can hear hints of John Adams in his latest scores and concert works), his technical control has become more fine-tuned (especially in terms of orchestration), and his musical signature has evolved into something more unique to him (He relies on fewer Straussian, Waltonian, and Korngoldian gestures). The idea that he can no longer compose in his old style because of old age is absurd; the way he writes now is much more technically sophisticated than how he used to write. Every good composer looks to reinvent themselves in different ways throughout their career so as not to fall into the trap of recycling the same musical material over and over again.

What they are all listening to is something called a "click track," which is a metronome noise that helps the conductor and the musicians keep in time with the movie.