Marian Schedenig

Good. I've been meaning to revisit Berlin anyway. After three concerts in a row, I doubt he'll immediately go on another "tour" concert. I can totally imagine him also doing London and/or Vienna next year at this point, but I would expect that to be a separate trip. Perhaps he's reserving that for Vienna…

I didn't see Tár (primarily) as a relatable tragic character. She's too close to real life examples of conductors who were horrible tyrants, even if (perhaps even because of that) they produced great artistic results. Someone like Alsop probably had to contend with people like that throughout her career to become successful, maybe even had to oppose them, or maybe even oppose using their method herself (surely male conductors at least can get a career advantage out of at least some of that stuff, as long as they're artistically convincing enough and have enough people on their side). Tár is a character remarkably similar to Alsop in some aspects who probably behaves very much in a way that many people she encountered in reality do and in which she herself probably very deliberately doesn't. That doesn't necessarily make the film "wrong". But she has a point - at the very least a subjective, but valid one. How the film portrays this behaviour seems mostly very accurate. It's quite uncomfortably successful in that regard.

Maybe it wouldn't have to be a wall to wall score. It probably needs fewer busy action sequences than Indy, too. And I'm sure Spielberg would accommodate Williams and plan for his scoring habits along with editing. Provided Williams is healthy and wants to do it, of course.

Marin Alsop didn't like it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tár I didn't think it was "anti-woman". Comments have been made that making the lead character male would have been a cliche, and perhaps there's some truth to that - but is it really cliche just because it's so often the truth? I don't think the film suggests a specific connection between Tár being a female, or a lesbian, and her abuse of power. But given the still heavily male dominated field and the similarities between Alsop and the film's character, it's not really surprising that she takes it somewhat personal. Interesting point.

Much of it seemed believable, or even familiar. And then other parts felt like someone overshot by a dozen namedrops and ended up cliched instead of authentic (possibly without being aware of it). But then I don't think I fully grasped the film, so my perception may be off.

I felt it walked the fine line between authenticity and random name/technical term dropping very wobblily. But yes, always nice to see Glover.

I finally watched this a while ago after looking forward to it for a long time. I must say I didn't know what to think of it once it was over (and still don't). Blanchett's performance was very strong, but probably not among my favourites of hers, subjectively.

I'm confused now.

I hope so! What do you mean WotW is now older than CE3K was when I first discovered Williams's score!?

Ah. True then. Yes, the score always gave me strong Herrmann vibes. It's a fine score and works very well in the film, from what I recall. But I have the old album and I don't think I need more than that.

First one has to be What Lies Beneath. The bath tub and ghost leave little doubt. (A ouija board is missing, but maybe there's no emoji for that?) Don't really see Starship Troopers in the second one. What's a purple monster face, a drop of blood, Saturn (?), and that masked face got to do with it? (It's also not a horror film… but then I wouldn't really call WLB horror either)

Not of the anniversary remaster perhaps, but the original release was available on CD from GNP Crescendo: https://www.soundtrackcollector.com/title/1808/Hellbound%3A+Hellraiser+II

And with today being Mancini's 100th birthday, let me again point to where I think its syncopations originate:

This is a nice clip to show to someone who thinks they don't know Mancini: And the new Williams & Co Supergroup Peter Gunn has a new trailer:

I'd like that, not least because I'm already doing playlists with trailers and commercials and automated light dimming when I have movie nights with friends, and I'd like to integrated the actual feature film with that. Only I've still got several issues with that: I haven't found a player that can play ripped Blu-rays smoothly and with full audio pass through and proper remote controls (on Linux; but when it comes to these things, any video players I've seen on other systems usually fare worse) (I can play downloaded multichannel videos just fine, but I'd really like to preserve the original compressed streams from the discs) I'd want full rips without re-compression, and ripping all my Blu-rays (about 800 now) would take dozens of terabytes of space, and then I'd have to double that to have a backup in case something goes wrong (because see next point) Ripping Blu-rays is incredibly slow - seems to take at least an hour for an average film. The limit seems to be the drive speed, and pretty much all drives seem to be equally slow (2x seems to be the usual speed for video Blus, the "video" suggesting that there's some sort of deliberate hardware throttling involved to inconvenience ripping) And when I finally transition to 4K, these problems will only get worse.

Tried wiping it with a microfiber cloth, and with water. The problem persists on all players and at the more or less same location of the disc. No visible marks on the surface. It has to be some degradation inherent to the material or pressing.

Sold.

Every time. Always broken at the same spot on every player. Two Sonys, one Samsung, and an external computer drive. From what I remember, I've had it happen with The Departed, Wall-E, Cloud Atlas, CE3K, and now OuaTitW. Some basically break down altogether at some point in the film, other go all stuttery and garbled for a while (so that the player software hangs and only reacts to button presses every 10 seconds or less). With CE3K I had to skip several minutes, OuaTitW has at least half an hour that's unplayable. There was another one I can't remember now. And who knows how many that I haven't discovered yet…

I'm getting increasingly unhappy about spending money on Blu-rays since more and more of mine have been dying. The latest was Once Upon a Time in the West. Always in the middle of the film - must be either related to the layer change or to the radial distance of the affected part. I keep spending tons of money on films only to randomly have them fail in the middle of watching them (sometimes with friends).

That is correct.

But at least you can tell that it's not the original title (because it's not in English).

Yup. That's German titles for you. Sometimes nowadays the German titles are even in English, but still different from the original English ones. For example, Taken is called 96 Hours in German. Took me years to figure out they're the same film (I've never seen it).