Elmo Lewis

I've been listening to this playlist nonstop this past week and I've found something that works tremendously with the concert arrangements: putting The March of the Resistance after Ray Meets BB-8 and before I Can Fly Anything. It helps the flow and it makes the March more familiar, and therefore sound more effective, when it returns in The Resistance. If you put it right when all the themes are getting introduced, it doesn't affect the flow terribly and it becomes much more integrated into the score. Just a little suggestion.

Really looking forward to reading this.

Yeah, it works amazing within Empire Strikes Back. But outside it, it's just four notes, a generic "ominous threat looming" musical idea that is not really worth revisiting when constructing a new project. I really doubt Williams remembered it when he wrote "Duel of the Fates".

Personally, I'm old school. I like the action music from the 80's, when the "boom-tzzz" meant something other than just a rhythmic tool. It feels to my ears as if at some point in the 90's, Williams got bored telling musical mini-stories and became content with just writing awesome music.

Musically speaking, it's a pretty boring four-note motif. If Williams ends up scoring these, and if he still has the patience to look back on the old score to fish back the themes, I hope he's busy writing new stuff to rescue such an andoyne concept.

It can't be Incanus. The video essay is not 25 minutes long.

Nobody that you would remember. That hurts Tom. Or was it Ross? Oh, you were pulling a Stefan. Is that the way things go around here these days?

Nobody that you would remember.

8:02 - 12:44 "Adventure on Earth", on the ET 1982 album. Five minutes of pure, heartfelt Williams otherworldly, ethereal magic.

I was introduced to Giacchino via the first Medal of Honor, so I may be biased, but I think that's a fantastic showcase of his style on a basic level. Everything you listen to after it sound more advanced in a logical manner. Then again, chronological order is such a boring way to discover an artist.

I'd love us three to have a drink, actually. It'd be a bloody laugh You think hell is just all of us in a bar for eternity? I can imagine now, Steef yelling "Idiot!" at everybody, and Alex in the corner wishing he had never joined the board. Oh joy, all of us regulars-turned-disenchanted-lurkers would be forced to spend eternity reluctantly there with our mouths shut. And Alex wouldn't be in a corner wishing the had never joined the board. If anything, he'd be condescendingly explaining to anyone who would listen how idiotic this new concept of hell is and how the medieval incarnations had more nuance and resonance.

Landa, by a long long shot. I never really got the Joker in The Dark Knight. He is the one that advocates chaos and the futility of planning with a series of carefully planned disruptions of a specific established order, right?

People who vote for Revenge of the Sith are being ironic, post-modern hipsters right? Anyway, on that note, I must vote for Empire Strike Back. It isn't much by itself, granted. But I believe it was designed to stand in contrast with the original (what the audiences from 1980 were used to anyway) and its dissonant, post-Romantic sound is so effective in establishing that is not going to be your 1977's Star Wars. It's both cool by itself and it has deeper meaning within the context of the saga, which ROTJ didn't use. And therein lies its genius.

Your explanation is quite satisfying, Incanus. Not as much as having it spelled out in the movie like every other plot point, but it makes a fair amount of sense. I had forgotten just how much fun this film is, by the way. It's as easy to watch as it is to forget.

I also just watched it at home. It's a shame, really -- this movie really deserves a big screen. It's so whimsical, visually speaking, that a lot of it gets lost on television. Also, can anyone explain why Sakharine is so obsessed with keeping Haddock alive during the first half of the movie and then spends the second half trying to kill him? As far as I know, he still needs "a true Haddock" to uncover the secret of the Unicorn and at no point during his change of mind does he make any significant progress.

The film hasn't opened in Spain yet, but I flew to London this weekend so I could see it along with the play. I liked it a lot, but it feels more like a guilty pleasure than a solid passion. Spielberg haters can have a field day with this. Funny. The way I saw it, the movie is tonally uniform -- almost perfectly so, perhaps the first Spielberg in years to be so eloquent. Just as Ryan in Saving Private Ryan represents every American who didn't need to fight in WWII and the whole movie is a series of ruminations on war under that perspective (why do they fight? what's the point?), the horse in War Horse seems to represent, or at least awake, the humanity in the characters that run into him. What makes it interesting, then, is that it's a (naive and old fashioned) movie about humanity in the most inhuman of times. Hence the brutal war scenes. As for the adaptation, Spielberg did some unfathomable changes to the original play, perhaps in a desire to stick closer to the book. See, in the play, there's no farm owner -- this character is the father's brother. He went to war, came back a hero and always resented his sibling for staying in the farm. This is interesting for three reasons: 1) It makes the mother character far more interesting. She condones her husband's alcoholism with much more passion than in the movie, because she understand that taking care of a family, like Albert's father did, is just as heroic as fighting a war. But she still resents his actions, so she's always torn between supporting him (her exchanges with her brother-in-law are memorable) and keeping him in line. Since the "villain" doesn't have any interest in the farm whatsoever, it makes his contempt more villainous. 2) This family dynamic explains Albert's loneliness and why he bonds with Joey so strongly. Albert doesn't want his father to buy Joey at first, but then sees him as the companion he has always lacked in this family. 3) The father only buys Joey (with the farm's mortgage money, not the rent) because his brother shows interest in him. When the brother tries to buy Joey off him because he is no good in a farm, he sets up a bet that Joey can be taught to plow. There is more tension to the scene that way. He only has to plow a certain distance. Other changes (the characters than run into Joey are way darker, even if the play is much less cruel to the horse) are easy to understand. It's a very complex story that Spielberg wanted to simplify for the sake of homaging Ford, De Mille, Capra and Hawks. (Funny how Spielberg, who used to negate any classic Hollywood influences in the 1970s and 1980s --"I get more out of a George Lucas film than I do from John Ford," he famously said -- has with age turned them into his template of choice. Did this all begin with the rank academicism of The Color Purple?) All in all, a movie by the same Spielberg that made Always and The Terminal, but with far more success. Since it doesn't add anything to his opus or to the state of current cinema, it will age poorly in the short term, but I'm sure it will be remembered fondly in the long run. PS.- In such an episodic movie with so many characters in so many different settings, why the hell isn't the music more varied? An Albert/Joey theme would have sufficed to structure it and make it cohesive. PS II.- The goose has the same role in both play and movie. And I was so ready to make a KOTCS prairie dog connection to it when I saw the film.

Me neither. It's very annoying. http://music-mix.ew....o/?iid=rcfooter I don't think that those who don't hate Reznor go to that extreme. He can't write good film music. In my case, it's not even that I don't like ambient/synth stuff, but Reznor can't even write good ambient scores. At least he hasn't in the two movies he's done so far. That's the problem, the guy can't write good film music. Personal tastes aside, he's simply not a good composer. I mean, I've had a really hard time connecting emotionally to Giacchino's scores. For some reason the guy's music just doesn't do it for me, but I will never say that he can't write music. I can't say the same about Reznor. He may be great with NIN, but writing music for movies, he fails. Well, I'm not going to defend the guy because that would be futile and I'm only a casual fan of The Social Network. But at least the man gives you something to hate. Not droning, MV stuff, but something fresh and original that usually fits the movie quite well. Dragon Tattoo is pretty much unlistenable on its own but it works very, very well in the movie so, in my opinion, that's good film scoring. And at least it wasn't a rehash of The Social Network. It is driven by a desire of reinvention.

I really don't get the hatred for Reznor on this board. But anyway, it's nice to see that unlike Spielberg, Williams still hasn't lost the Academy's respect. Any note he puts to paper gets nominated.

Serves me well for not reading the whole thread in one sitting. I'm developing an worrisomely annoying habit of doing this lately.

Anyone else saw that Lucas admits the "nuke the fridge" scene is his doing? Not the whole sequence, but the actual nuking the fridge: Other hilarious bits: And

I'm thinking of the Grail's theme from Last Crusade. It has a certain post-medieval ring to it. Like something that belongs to a 12th century cathedral.

There's an interesting concept. If Spielberg/Universal or what have you wanted to do things that way and come up with a fresh idea, how much do you think they would have to re-design the dinosaurs? How much can you change those creatures (and the way they move, sound...) that are what they are anyway? Also, if we accept Jurassic Park as the pinnacle of dinosaur design, would the new look go against the new movie's detriment? Or would the audience accept the same dinosaurs in a different franchise?

I doubt Williams' mind works in such historical parameters.

Black doesn't sell in Europe. Unlike the US, racial barriers are not a huge part of Europe's history. Sure, there are notorious examples here and there, if you're going to go to Wikipedia to debunk what I'm saying, but it never became a nation-wide issue. Hence, while the plight of black soliders in WWII might make for a good story, most people will probably fail to connect with the spirit behind it. Kinda like how the patriotism in Pearl Harbor infuriated a lot of the viewers. (I know Pearl Harbor was a big success but, from a marketing point of view, the characters were good-looking white people, so at least the average European guy could identify with them. Sad but true.) Only this case, there doesn't appear much of a personal, relatable angle other than the historic feat itself. You mentioned Fresh Prince and Bill Cosby, but you forgot the context. Back in the early and mid 1990s, there wasn't that much variety on Spanish prime-time TV, so people would watch that. Also, the dub removed all the black edge so, to people here, they were just average sitcoms competing with bad national programming. They weren't an old-fashioned movie (that type of nostalgia doesn't sell very well here either) trying to sell a hopelessly foreign story in one weekend against dozens of other expensive pictures. In fewer words: just because Lucas wanted to make it doesn't seem people want to see it. That Lucas simply doesn't exist anymore.

Trueness.