QMM

Giacchino's referenced Medal of Honor in The Incredibles, Ratatouille, and Lost He's also referenced Lost in Speed Racer and Land of the Lost

Actually not really, provided the movie is 3D animation, as opposed to 2D. It just takes twice as long to render since you're rendering once for each eye.

Sunshine Cleaning I was able to attend an early screening with the director present, since it hasn't been released in New Zealand yet (and the director's a kiwi). Nice dramedy that I really enjoyed because it had an interesting premise (two sisters start a biohazard removal/crime scene clean-up service) and I like Amy Adams and Emily Blunt. It's been oddly compared to Little Miss Sunshine since they share the same producers and Alan Arkin, but they're very different and even so, I liked this movie more. It looked great, there was fine acting, even from Steve Zahn, and the script had a nice structure and good pacing.

It gets a bad rap here, but when it's good it's really good and there's a couple of bits that are as good as anything Williams wrote.

I guess listening to Public Enemies pushed me into buying his Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within album finally. It's gotten a lot of praise around here, but it really is a staggering work of film score. There's so much weight and density in the music.

I bought it on a whim and I'm pretty surprised. The score didn't sound that good in the previews, but man you were right about Plane to Chicago. Chicago Shake's an excellent big band piece as well.

To each his own. Maybe I listened to The Mummy too soon after listening to The Wind and The Lion, which is one of my favorite scores ever. Goldsmith's action in the 90's just isn't as sprightly as it once was- more broken up into bite-size section, few seriously extended lines. I think that's why I like 'The Fire Dragon' so much- the strings towards the end are running on, and are not cut-off by the brass and percussion, like most Goldsmith action stuff of the era (Of course, he does do some terrific stuff with this more punctuated sound- puts it to some very good use in Air Force One, probably my favorite post Total-Recall Goldsmith actioneer). I guess I haven't heard enough Goldsmith if this is one of my favorites of his.

Meh, I've warmed up to the score.

Comparing Giacchino's argument to Zimmer/Howard's argument doesn't work for me since it depended on developing the themes from the first movie in TDK, which they didn't really do, as well as making a completely different Batman theme for the sequel. Without the Star Trek sequel, this argument isn't really going to go anywhere.

I haven't watched the movie in a long time and I don't have any of the "expanded" scores so I'm giving it a 4. Agreed

Phone Booth It's been a couple of years since I've seen it and I expected to dislike it now but I still like it. Maybe I just like the narrative constrictions put in place, but the acting's solid, Sutherland's great (first thing I'd ever seen him in when I first saw it), the script is for the most part tight, and it doesn't overstay its welcome.

huh, there's Public Enemies clips up at amazon

he's dead

Good I want to say it's a good (heh) movie, but I'm still puzzled about the ending as I was expecting the movie to keep going. Mortensen proves again that he's a chameleon, and Isaacs does fine work as well. Shame that there's no score release as the music in the first half I liked a lot.

So did you like The Hit? I've been meaning to buy it.

I enjoyed Knowing a lot more than Transformers

Link

Still shaky cam and filmed close to the action? Not as bad as the first one but it doesn't really matter. And thanks for raping my bandwidth, Charlie

Transformers 2 Ugh, it got pretty much the same reaction from me as the first one (maybe less so since I had less fun in theaters with this one than the first). It could be an hour shorter and it's got script problems (writer's strike didn't help) and I'm getting sick of Bay's humor.

Lot of bad things can be said about him, but I like that he uses long takes. Looking forward to the score.

Band of Brothers: The Pacific trailer

I'm talking about the late sixties, early seventies when, as Warren Beatty puts it, the lunatics were briefly running the asylum. Movies and filmmakers were a lot more artistically free back then and it shows. Serious marketing strategies only came around the mid-seventies with Jaws and Star Wars. Those two got the ball rolling but it was movies like At Long Last Love, New York, New York, Sorcerer, and most prolifically Heaven's Gate and One from the Heart that clinched it.

That's how I think art should be made. The artist should do what he wants and not what the audience wants him to do. Auteur-driven moviemaking doesn't work as a business though. That period is known for when directors had more power than the studios and it stopped because they almost (or did in some cases) bankrupted the studios. It hasn't gone away, Lynch's still doing his thing. If anything, it's gotten easier to make movies and harder to sell them. Lynch has to go to Europe and shoot on video because there's no more place for him in Hollywood thanks to the entertainment industry and their goal to create one product for all audiences so they can gain maximum profit. It's become too much of a business (instead of art). I think directors in the seventies were allowed more freedom because the studios didn't really base their decisions on marketing back then. But their decisions WERE based on marketing. The reason the studios hired those directors and gave them all the control is because cinema attendance was dwindling rapidly in the 60s. Theaters were flooded with musicals and historical epics and were failing hard (ex-Cleopatra). So, in an attempt to capture that hot indy (French new-wave being the most popular) feel, the studios hired the hot young directors and producers and let them make whatever they wanted, with little control.

I picked up Land of the Lost and I'm enjoying it more than I thought. I wish there was more variation in the End Credits though.

Man, I hope you're not trashing the Food Network. They've got some good shows.