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Marian Schedenig

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Everything posted by Marian Schedenig

  1. I'm surprised nobody has mentioned this yet:
  2. When they came out back to back in 1999, 13th Warrior was hailed as the latest Goldsmith masterpiece and The Mummy was considered a secondary knockoff score. I never understood why, because I loved the whole of Mummy from the get go and initially only really cared about a few individual tracks from Warrior. Over the years, my appreciation of that score has grown considerably, while at the same time Mummy has clearly taken over as Goldsmith's most lauded from that era, with Warrior seeming almost half forgotten these days.
  3. Collector's boxes are nice. It's not my favourite point & click series (I like it, but not as much as the Lucas/Doublefine games), but I couldn't skip this: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/revolution-software/broken-sword-reforged-collectors-edition?ref=section-homepage-featured-project#
  4. Not looking good - as I feared considering the asking sum. At the moment the campaign stands at $27,120 pledged of the $50k goal, with only 12 days to go.
  5. "Keep your lovin' brother happy." (In the German "translation", this was changed to "Spiel mir das Lied from Tod", i.e. "Play me the song of death" - which is even the German title of the entire film)
  6. Williams recorded the STTMP main title (and the Alien closing title) with the Pops in 1983. So Goldsmith might well have heard at least that version. I imagine he's probably also conducted it at Tanglewood at some point between that time and Goldsmith's death.
  7. Track 1 is The Hunt, so according to Shark, you've already heard the best part.
  8. Half of it is bumbling sacharine synth music (I presume for the dino family), in the vein of Legend, though not on that level. It can be a bit much, though at least some of it is nice enough and I generally don't mind it. But when the score goes into action mode, it rocks. Horner took one of its action counterpoints as a theme for Braveheart.
  9. I usually cite The Final Conflict, and it's definitely one of my favourites, with at least two of Goldsmith's most brilliant cues (The Monastery and The Hunt), amidst several other standouts. It's not necessarily my top favourite all the way through though, because it has its share of dull moments (I don't think any of the extended stuff before the finale ever really managed to catch my attention). In that regard, other favourites like Total Recall, Alien, Poltergeist, and The Mummy fare better (interestingly, I also always thought the densely romantic stuff before STTMP's climax drags a bit, although I adore the drawn out mystery music in the middle of the score). My favourite underdog is Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend. It belongs to Goldsmith's sacred action triptych together with Total Recall and Rambo 2, but unlike those never gets the attention it deserves.
  10. Interesting. Especially because it wasn't too long ago that I was surprised to learn the Mendelssohn indeed wrote his own Sommernachtstraum to a German libretto. I've long had the Previn/LSO recording (in English) and recently got the Ozawa/BPO (also in English). And it always sounded very much like it was set specifically to the English text. But I guess the German translation simply manages to more or less keep the original metres, and apparently there were a few rhythmic adjustments made to the music. I do have the Harnoncourt, in German, but I never liked that - partly because of the music making, and partly because of the text. But Shakespeare generally doesn't work for me in German, so I guess that shouldn't surprise me.
  11. Catherine Coulson would've worked but Laura Dern will do too. I wanted to have a current singer/actor in the list, that's why I picked Zendaya (and I thought she was great in Dune Part 2). That didn't leave me with a role for Coulson, or I would have mentioned her. I plain forgot about Dern, but if Lynch plays Q instead of M, Dern could be a formidable M.
  12. It has a very crude and naive libretto. It works because the music is great, and the music is great by being an honest, but heartfelt and direct realisation of the naive libretto. Modern stagings of course try to inject all kind of meaning and reinterpretation into the story, but the story doesn't have enough substance to sustain that. All those attempts manage is to make the music seem shallow and grossly out of place.
  13. I'll have to check out that Thielemann video. But the old Kleiber recording is hard to beat - Gundula Janowitz, Edith Mathis, Theo Adam, Peter Schreier, Franz Crass, and the ridiculously powerful horn section of the Staatskapelle Dresden:
  14. Kyle MacLachlan is an interesting choice as Bond. I can see Lynch himself as M. Shame Jack Nance and Harry Dean Stanton aren't around anymore to play Q and Felix Leiter. We'll have to do without the Julee Cruise/Angelo Badalamenti Bond song, too. Maybe Zendaya will be Moneypenny.
  15. I don't quite consider it a song (there's not enough singing on it for that), but aside from that I might agree.
  16. My God. It's full of stars! Wrong film!
  17. "Except for a single, very powerful radio emission aimed at Jupiter, the four million-year-old black monolith has remained completely inert, its origin and purpose still a total mystery."
  18. Pretty much. Mostly what Gerate writes about Berlin also applies to Vienna, though luckily fatal accidents don't happen all the time (they do happen too often though, and too little is being done about it, especially with the truck situation), and I've (almost) never had a bike stolen (though that happens a lot, so a decent lock is a must, and insurance doesn't hurt). Vienna has plenty of bike lanes, although they sometimes just vanish into nothing, or are blocked by trucks unloading stuff, or by pedestrians blissfully unaware of anything around them (including bicycle bells)… or slow/unskilled bikers. The main ones also tend to be overloaded on sunny days (partly for the latter reason). On regular roads, I'd often prefer to just ride on the road, but if there's a bike lane next to it, it's usually (though not always) mandatory. It takes me about 30 minutes from home to work by bike, and pretty much the same using public transport. Vienna has a mostly very good public transport network with several subway lines, so I don't have and don't want a car. I used to take the bike for almost all my routes, including riding it to the office 4 times a week pre-COVID. Now we're working from home most of the time and usually only have an office day once a week, *and* I've gotten lazy (I have to change that). One annoyance with bikes in Vienna is the Vienna Basin: The city is located in a basin, with the city centre at the lowest point… so most non-short distance routes will take you uphill in at least one direction. Often only rather slightly, and rarely really steeply, but it's enough to make me decide I'm too lazy more often than I'd like. But overall I think a bike is an excellent primary vehicle in Vienna, and we should be able to get rid of more cars more quickly than we are.
  19. Looks good! And Don't Breathe was excellent, so maybe this actually has a chance. Looks more colourful to me than the original Alien.
  20. Behold the train station in Oxford: Yes, getting there wouldn't be a problem I suppose. Getting back is the tricky part, because there won't be any buses after the concert. You'll have to stay in Lenox through the night, which is probably all right for semi locals, but if you're a tourist and have a hotel in Boston or NYC, having another one for a single day in between makes it rather complicated.
  21. …actually, I've just only now grasped the brilliance of this quote. I shall print it out at the office tomorrow to have it handy in the many situations where I can use it.
  22. "You have to learn why things work on a starship."
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