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James Newton Howard's Catching Fire (Hunger Games 2)


KK

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The OST CD contains only JNH's music; The final film had many of his original cues replaced by ones written by T-Bone Burnett.

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I don't know who T-Bone Burnett is, but I assume he was on it because they wanted a super-marketable name?

Nothing about JNH's score suggested to me that he collaborated with anyone else.

He's a music producer and arranger mostly. Works with the Coen brothers a lot, most notably on O Brother Where Art Thou?

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The Hunger Games: Catching Fire.

Generic. About a third of the album presents some rather interesting material to me. The rest of it seems to pass by pretty uneventfully. And when a good idea comes up, it's in a track which lasts 90 seconds...

In a rare Thor-like moment, I wish JNH would stop these 30 track CDs and make something more cohesive for listening.

My fandom of JNH is falling with every score quite honestly.

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the-hunger-games-catching-fire-james-new

HUNGER GAMES, CATCHING FIRE, James Newton Howard

Part deux, but you'd never guessed it by its content: hardly any material from the first film has survived (if not for some short snippets) - not that it matters much, it hardly was that great to begin with but had a distinctive americana grassroot flair that is all but lost here. JNH is doing us and himself a great disservice with putting 75 minutes including a sizeable amount of functional underscore on this disc, so i was already pissed halfway through it, like someone who is invited for dinner and then learns he has to bring meat and peel the potatoes first.

The achilles heel is, as often with JNH's lesser works, the lack of a distinct theme or motif that binds the material, as it is there are dozens of 'moments' that vaguely remind you of dozens of other functional blockbuster scores fearfully covering - the horror, the horror - quiet spots in the movie without having something to say, god forbid it might have some musical substance. Noteworthy is the addition of a wordless singer (Katniss is chosen), or promising ventures into solo violin terrain, that are sadly just fleeting moments (There's always a flaw). A playful little Brahms waltz breathes a bit life into the proceedings, though half a minute is hardly enough to heal the damages done by 40 minutes of low rumblings and directionless chord building. So while you theoretically could draw a 30-minute album of vaguely familiar JNH mannerisms from this, you might as well ask yourself why.

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There has to be decision in these cases, whether to become more enthused with those 30 minutes and buy the album, or decide it's a lost cause and buy mp3s of a few of the absolute best tracks.

Especially since I'm trying to restrict my purchasing to only the very best stuff these days, it's hard to make any sort of case here. I can perhaps see myself making a suite as I did with After Earth.

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Listening to the Hunger Games previews, sounding pretty good as I remembered in the film. Any JNH fans here, is he well respected as a composer?

He's written loads of great scores, but I think his output in the last 5 years or so has been very mixed.

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Listening to the Hunger Games previews, sounding pretty good as I remembered in the film. Any JNH fans here, is he well respected as a composer?

He's written loads of great scores, but I think his output in the last 5 years or so has been very mixed.

Indeed he has written truly excellent scores, too numerous to list here, but I agree that the modern output of JNH has been a mixed bag at best. Most likely he has been as most others in the business at the mercy of the modern trends of film scoring that have affected his style quite audibly.

That said I cannot say anything about Hunger Games scores as I have yet to hear a single note of them.

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He will be replaced by Howard Shore for the third one.

That would be sweet. We get something back after losing his Kong.

The OST CD contains only JNH's music; The final film had many of his original cues replaced by ones written by T-Bone Burnett.

Is that a joke?

I'll echo Jason. Nope. Not at all.

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Nope.

I recognise many of the previews after the film. Are the cues that replace JNH of a similar sound? Is there a story to the replacement?

Wait a minute, what does "I recognise many of the previews after the film" mean? ???

For Hunger Games 2 Catching Fire, as far as I know JNH scored everything himself.

For Hunger Games 1, the first movie, yes, some of JNH's cues were replaced with T-Bone Burnett material. There's no story, the director, or the studio, just wanted different music in there.

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There are still people who like JNH. Although he went down hill after working with Zimmer in Batman Begins. He needs to return to his roots IE: Dinosaur and make great scores again and not simulate Zimmer.

On the contrary, Howard wrote some of his best music after working with Zimmer. The two weren't strangers before Batman Begins. If I remember correctly he was thanked in The Rock liner notes.

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That's not the point - I doubt ANYONE would argue that JNH wrote his best scores after 2005!

All his best stuff from in the mid 90s through early 00s, plus the Shyamalan stuff after that.

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.... but we weren't... you can just scroll up to read the convo...

nevermind, it's no big deal! Carry on!

And check out Waterworld!

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The problem with getting into film music is there's simply so many out there and there's hours and hours of cues.

That's a good problem to have :)

Check out the waterworld video I posted!

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To me it seems like most scores I listen to are just atmopheric and meander, unless it's JW or HS or the one track on the album that people buy. I'm pleasantly surprised by that track above.

good, gooood!


To me it seems like most scores I listen to are just atmopheric and meander, unless it's JW or HS

That's because you probably only listen to modern scores...

Yup! SUH, try listening to more scores from the late 70s to early 90s.

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That's not the point - I doubt ANYONE would argue that JNH wrote his best scores after 2005!

All his best stuff from in the mid 90s through early 00s, plus the Shyamalan stuff after that.

I said some of his best, not the best. King Kong, Michael Clayton, I Am Legend, The Water Horse, The Happening, Duplicity, The Last Airbender...

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Film scoring can only die when films do.


I tend to preview them and think if the previews are dull, imagine 70 minutes.

This is the worst way to go about things. Pick your favorite score and I'm sure I could find 30 seconds from each cue to make it seem like something dull.

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That's not the point - I doubt ANYONE would argue that JNH wrote his best scores after 2005!

All his best stuff from in the mid 90s through early 00s, plus the Shyamalan stuff after that.

I said some of his best, not the best. King Kong, Michael Clayton, I Am Legend, The Water Horse, The Happening, Duplicity, The Last Airbender...

The Water Horse was probably the last one he did before his action music became completely unremarkable. Parts of Snow White and Hunger Games I think are very good, and the beautiful Water For Elephants.

Unfortunately he then churned out the crap-tastic Bourne Legacy, a score which has no redeeming features for me whatsoever. When he's not drowning himself in synths (Green Lantern anyone? holy jeez), I find most of his incidental-dramatic stuff pretty boring.

Both this and After Earth I think have some interesting ideas, but most of those he doesn't keep going for more than 1 minute. Also, his 'friendship' theme ('Just Friends') reminds me of his theme from Charlie Wilson's War just a bit too much.

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Film scoring can only die when films do.

I tend to preview them and think if the previews are dull, imagine 70 minutes.

This is the worst way to go about things. Pick your favorite score and I'm sure I could find 30 seconds from each cue to make it seem like something dull.

Not from ROTK :D (at least not 90 second samples, I challenge anyone who thinks otherwise to try) I'm sure they pick previews that are some of the best parts, to try to make people buy the music.

That's not necessarily true. Quite often they're random. Take the DoS samples for instance, it's just the first 30 sec of each cue.

Using samples isn't really the best way to judge a whole film score.

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