Goldsmithfan

Thanks! I'd never heard of dvdbeaver.com before. I'll have to check that out more often. Quite odd that they wouldn't include an insert despite adding a little flap for it.

I got the region 1 version of this DVD for my birthday yesterday and I was wondering if it was supposed to come with a booklet. It has a nice little flap where a booklet might go... but mine didn't come with one. Any information would be helpful. Thanks much.

I just can't believe they don't allow the scores to PG-13 and R rated films to be played. It's insane! Big difference between the music and the movie itself.

That's an opinion! This is a court of fact.

I know, but people always want the Freud tracks included with Alien for God knows what reason. I don't care if it was tracked into the movie or not, I don't want it on there! And my DVD rip of Alien lasts around 70 minutes. 76 or something like that. Alternates included. So you're definitely right! It would be great to have legitimate versions of Dutch and Buckaroo Banzai, two scores Varese was supposed to release!

That 2 CD set sounds like Alien to me! I had to do it.

I won't bother to see that movie. Ever. I doubt they've gotten lax on sex. There's no way to be lax on sex anyway considering it's a bodily function. Unlike murder. A movie about sex, containing numerous scenes of "graphic sex" (one of the most hilariously idiotic phrases they've used) will most likely get an NC-17. A movie filled with violence, containing multiple scenes of torture and sadism (as seems to be the trend of the day) will most likely get an R. At least they're not naked!

That's a joke, right? Thanks to the BBFC I have never seen the full version of Temple of Doom, only recently seen the full version of License to Kill, was unable to see The Exorcist for many years and so on and so on..... I would much prefer to see films as the director intended, rather than pathetic little edits made to "protect" me from imagery that anyone else on the planet can see.... God I hate the BBFC. Although - they have relaxed somewhat in recent years as has already been mentioned.... Complete ToD, please!!!!!!!! Greg I would rather have the director's cut of every film released, but I'm trying to get the point across that I don't find sex offensive, yet I'm stuck with a system that acts like it's the 1600's with regard to freedom of sexual expression. Meanwhile, multiple gorefests are released on a yearly basis now because it's alright to see someone tortured to death . . . so long as there's no screwing in other scenes. In other words, at least the BBFC has a handle on REALITY! (No venom intended Greg, but the MPAA's hatred for anything sexual infuriates me) The FCC is even more ridiculous, but I'll wind up going on a rant if I continue.

I just wish the MPAA were more like the BBFC, cutting violence and not sex/nudity. God I hate the MPAA.

Gkgyver, every time I read a post by you I can't help but hear it being voiced by Wayne Knight. Damn avatar! I love it.

And scarcely left any room for hair.

There's a difference between running a business and standing on the artists' throats.

It's run by a bunch of greedy morons who refuse to admit when they're wrong. They make movies merely for the bottom line: $. They have no vision and no respect for the artists themselves. Case in point: They won't allow the director of April Fool's Day release his original cut of the film because it was "too violent" and they're a "family company". I'm not a fan of the film, but the principle is what matters. Why sign on to fund and distribute a slasher film and then gut the ending because it's too violent? Idiotic. It's not like they didn't know the ending was coming! They read the script for cryin' in a bucket!

This is a completly random question, but I'm curious as to what widescreen aspect ratio the people of JWfan like the best. I'm sure that most people will either pick 2.35:1 or 1.85:1, but we can't forget about the weirdos out there like 1.66:1, 1.78:1, 2.20 and 2.40:1. I'm a 2.35:1 guy myself. It allows for a great sense of scope (no pun intended) and looks better to my eyes than 1.85:1 or the others, well except 2.40:1.

Goldsmith can't work on it so, in my opinion, they should let whoever's scoring it write material that's 100% new. It looks like a terrible movie and having someone who's not Goldsmith rework his themes for the film is just going to be an injustice to the first three scores.

Ditto. The action "music" in the second half of the trailer was crap. The movie itself looks like an over-commercialized pile of garbage. It's got the now standard shaky camera moves during the action, but I'd expect nothing more from yet another installment in the Rambo franchise. I also find it strange that when Rambo shoots the man point blank with the gun, the guy splatters much like he would in reality. However, when he shoots some troops at a greater distance, they merely fall down bloodlessly as squibs go off behind them. So very Hollywood.

He's just not the kind of guy to overtly use synths in very many scores. Like previous stated, he usually uses them to augment or substitute an orchestral sound and that's usually it. It's not that he's not good with them though. I love the synth material for Luke's arrival at Jabba's palace. It's perfectly ominous for what the audience knows (or imagines) is about to happen. Not to compare myself to a film composer, but I enjoy playing around with compositions, as do many others here. Because I don't have access to an orchestra, everything winds up electronic, but I find myself sticking to the orchestral sounds about 95% of the time. It's not that the more "out there" effects don't have anything to offer. I just love the sound of the orchestra. And besides, I lack the music skills to properly insert certain effects without them seeming like they're a little too much. It's all in your style and mood I guess.

True story. And, as for Mr. Crichton's question, Shatner's original story actually had a fleshed-out third act in which the audience was supposed to find out what Sybok's power really was and where it came from, but the studio cut the budget and schedule virtually in half. It was an over-the-top idea but, if done just right, it could have been quite interesting. Basically, they were supposed to go to the planet and encounter the "god" which they did in the film. However, in the real story, the "god" was supposed to turn out to be "Satan": an alien. (Makes a weird kind of sense I guess) It was this entity that gave Sybok the power to heal people (a metaphor for manipulation) and the vision of Sha-Ka-Ree (spelling?) in order to bring him to the planet. The alien was stranded and merely wanted the Enterprise to escape. Of course, Kirk wouldn't allow such a thing, Sybok sacrificed himself to try to end what he inadvertently acted as an accessory to and McCoy was to be kidnapped by the "rock creatures". And then we were supposed to have gotten a real finale and an actual sense of closure instead of the rush job that's only made viewable by Goldsmith's music. It wouldn't have been a masterpiece, but it would have been pretty cool to see, if only once. The studio apparently didn't see it that way and assumed they had a shoe-in since the fourth film was so successful. But, that's what happens when you put Paramount in charge of making movies I guess!

Yup! "Conspiracy"! He gave Riker the Vulcan neck pinch.

I've just gotten around to re-listening to Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers. The OSTs that is. I remember really loving the second score when I first listened to it but, this time, it was jarring to go from the first score to the second. The first one seems to have much more going on than the second, but The Two Towers seems more evenly paced. Psh, what do I know? I'll have to give Return of the King another go, seeing as I've never made it through that one (which probably has something to do with the fact that I never saw the film). It'll be the first thing I grab during my next visit to the library.

Mark, you're forgetting the third category, which is "so bad that only the complete score to Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade qualifies." You must never have heard the boot for Goldsmith's score to Alien Nation. First off, nothing comes out of the left channel at all, except a midbass rumbling which isn't even part of the recording. The audio that comes out of the right channel is indeed the score, but it's so ultra compressed and digital sounding that parts of it make you want to pull the cotton out of your ears. Of course there's none in them. It's just the horrible transfer. It sounds watery and terrible and you've got to be downright determined to make it through the thing, which is sad because the score is pretty damn good. And, because of the compression and the low quality digital transfer, the boot has moments that almost seem like someone is driving an icepick through your ears and into your brain. Not fun at all. The expanded Last Crusade has perfect sound by comparison. And hearing the legitimate version of Alien Nation for the first time was like hearing another score entirely. It actually had sonic depth and clarity!!

At least someone else said it. Yes the Prequels still used physical models. Though many will say, "no they didn't!" but they clearly did especially from all the "Behind The Scenes" and "Making Of" featurettes.... They did indeed. The droid control ship and the vessel that Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan arrive in at the beginning of The Phantom Menace look very good. They got carried away after that though. The material during the finale of Episode II when the clone troops arrive and they tried to make it look like it was shot in camera with zooms and camera shake just looked too fake for my taste, as it always does. They also seem to forget physics. When one of the fighters is destroyed during the opening of Episode III, it explodes but much of the debris just floats there instead of rocketing off in all directions as would happen in an environment devoid of atmosphere and possessing only microgravity. Many other CGI effects in films do similar things. Objects seem to move too fast or slow, usually the latter. CGI blood is the worst as far as moving waaaaaaaaaaaaaay too slow.

I thought they overused it a bit, but there were lots of things in there that would either be very time and money consuming to do another way. Of course, I'm not a fan of the overt color filters that seem to be so in style nowdays so that might also have an impact on my opinion.

Watching the trailers for new, "blockbuster" films lately I find myself generally unimpressed by the stories presented, but what really gets me with regard to new films is the state of special and visual effects. It really wasn't all that long ago that films' effects were made up of a smorgasbord of sorts. You'd have a little bit of bluescreen here, some front projection there, stop-motion tossed in, and it all amounted to a cohesive and mixed structure. Now all it seems to be is a haze of CGI. I'm not saying that CGI is inherantly bad; there are certainly things you can do with it that you can't do with other effects, but is the mainstream American film industry going a little bit overboard with it? Models for spaceships come to mind first and foremost. At their worst, you're still seeing a physical object that occupies real space and looks real in that way. I've seen very few CGI ships look good at all. Sadly, watching Star Trek: Enterprise, I realized that the CGI enterprise there looks better than many of the ships in big budget films. If that's not a revelation, I don't know what is. It clearly demonstrates that CGI has the ability to look realistic, but filmmakers are spreading it too thin, distributing it all over the place, even for effects that could be duplicated otherwise, and hurting the look of the film as a whole. I freely admit that no film has "perfect" visual effects. Any film you point to is going to have something awkward about its effects at one time or another, but that's just what happens when you're trying to make the unreal look real. I've come to realize that all effects are going to look fake in one way or another, but it's best to go for what looks the least fake or, more appropriately, the most realistic. I don't see the effects of today as being realistic. People refer to them as "amazing" and "eye-popping" (a phrase I've heard over and over again since the 1998 release of Lost in Space; enough already!), but I'm not seeing all that much realism in it all. I think people aren't looking for realism as much as they are the whole, "Wow! Look at that!" factor. In my opinion, that's not what special and visual effects are for. I remember watching movies in the past and saying, "How did they do that?" Now my response is usually, "That's all CGI . . . That's CGI . . . And that . . . is CGI." The visual magic is gone. For example, Terminator 2. They spent about $150 million on the film and it still looks great today. Sure, it's not perfect by any means. The dummy head for Schwarzenegger when he's getting pummeled by the T-1000 is fairly obvious, but the T-1000 effects were genius. I'm not just talking about the CGI, but the puppets and vests they made for Robert through which the foam bullet hits were shoved through. In T3 they were done CGI and looked no better. What's the point if it doesn't convince the audience any more than the original? Think about it logically. If the events were actually taking place and were filmed, you'd see the actual "splats" on the T-1000's chest. So what's the point in doing it CGI if you can do it in camera and it's not that comlex of an effect. And don't even get me started on CGI blood. We need to expand our minds people! Stan Winston once said that effects get stale and you have to move forward. I wholeheartedly agree with that, but you don't just throw away models, stop motion, go-motion, front projection, rear projection, hand animation and backlit animation! They all look great when you use them properly, so what's the deal?!? Look at 2001 for example. Many of the African backgrounds for the ape scenes were front projected onto the background of a soundstage. It looks excellent. That's how effects should be put to use. You shouldn't showcase them, but rather use them as something to help carry the story on realistically. If the audience can't spot it, or can't pick it out of a scene right away, then you've done your job right. I know this has been discussed billions of times in the past, but it's just frustrating to see the way American films have gone. I'm really hoping it's just a trend, but we'll see . . . The studios seem to like it and that's all that really matters in the long run. For now I'll look to the past. No film looks perfect, but many of them weren't as over-the-top as movies are now. 2001: A Space Odyssey (Self-explanatory) Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome (Practical effects and stunts done quite well; although it wasn't a Hollywood film so that probably has a lot to do with it) Predator (The old cloak is an excellent effect; not too much, not too little) Star Trek: The Motion Picture (The Enterprise, looking its very best. V'Ger ain't too shabby either. The meld sequence is absoluely jaw-dropping. Wish I could have seen it on the big screen.) The Terminator (Excellent examples of rear projection as well as go-motion.) RoboCop 2 (RoboCain is probably the most realistic stop motion I've ever seen) Jurassic Park (Back when CGI and animatronics coexisted equally) Return of the Jedi (Proves that you can use models to do tons of spaceships flying really, really fast. I think George forgot) Tron (Special effects can be artistic?!?) Alien 3 (The alien running on the walls and ceiling seems to be a hot topic, but I think it showed a lot of potential and would have evolved into a highly polished effect had they continued with mo-motion. Still, for a first run, it looks excellent) Starship Troopers (An excellent smorgasbord take on special effects)

Ditto.