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Regarding Man of Steel
"If you love these People" sounds like something from The Lion King, or definitely something from his earlier career. The coolest tracks are "Flight", "Look to The Stars" and "What are you going to do when this sentence gets to long and you still need to save the world?". The piano and electric guitar crescendo is loud but fun. All in between is rather uninteresting. Now onto that 28 minute Sketchbook of Zimmer's original ideas. Not sure if I'll finish it.

I love A Beautiful Mind as an album, not so much as a film score (the music was a bit too saccharine for the ending for me, even if it's just me).

I have a weird "relationship" with Horner's music, because as much as I love James Horner as a composer and I think he's the best purely symphonic writer working today (the way he develops his music and themes, he's very classical in very formal sense, his sense of structure, instrumentation, polyphony, just everything comes together so well) and usually I am very tolerant (moreso than with other composers, actually; For Greater Glory was a very rare exception) for his self-references, I have a certain issue with some of his works purely as film music.

I know that what I state is pretty controversial, but still, my problem with Horner as a film composer is that sometimes I wonder whether his priority isn't symphonic development (coming obviously from his education combined with the film images) at the cost of purely scoring to the picture, so while everything goes great and the guy has a great sense of the emotional content of the scene, sometimes he lets himself go off the tangent for the particular scene (not just going against the action on-screen, first, Horner can do very well with the editing nuances, second, if I hated movies being scored against the picture, I would be a lover of animation mickey-mousing - which I'm not - and I would hate, of all things, Hans Zimmer's The Thin Red Line among others) and overscore it in a purely emotional sense, with his love for all things sugary coming into the mix musically quite a lot.

There are brilliant notable exceptions and/or scores where this approach is utterly perfect for the movie. What the guy did in movies like Glory and Legends of the Fall (with all the similarities of probably excessive temp-track that was Dances with Wolves - it's just uncanny) is a masterful example of the latter (also Braveheart), Apollo 13 (a masterful example of percussion being used to work into the film interchanging locations between the Mission Control and the spaceship during the setpieces; Master Alarm and The Launch aside, these percussive nuances are my favourite parts of the masterful and insanely intelligent score, the proof being that my favourite tracks are Carbon Dioxide, Into the LEM and Four More Amps), House of Sand and Fog (a seriously underrated score that shows Horner's ability to cut down his love for all things sweet and go into respectful - and respectable - restraint not to overload the context) and Enemy at the Gates (a perfect sense of dreary and bleak atmosphere with brilliant usage of bits of classical, not just works, stylistic elements to push the atmospheric core of the film) being proof for the former.

I adore Horner's sense of melody, symphonic writing (which proves his musical intelligence and education) and, actually, his knack for dissonance (Aliens! Brainstorm! Apollo 13's Manual Burn!) like the next guy, but sometimes I am pretty doubtful about his sense of emotional intensity. Luckily, that has changed somehow, when he got more into ambient scoring back in the early 2000s (which actually might be seen as a return to his more restrained ideas from the 1980s, as proven by a score like In Country) and started to combine it with his more orchestral stuff. While I hated For Greater Glory for reasons I stated many times, I loved the sense of emotional development (and the theme) in Amazing Spider-Man, which is no Avatar, but still quite a great score.

Now bash me at will

NP: CONTAGION (Cliff Martinez)

Cool, albeit downbeat.

It's mostly due to the almost unbearably bad sound quality of the leaked release, but after listening to Man of Steel, Doyle's relatively boring Impressions of America is a huge breath of fresh air...

I can't really decide what I think of Man of Steel until I hear it in a way that doesn't sound like its coming from a boombox inside a cardboard box... (then again maybe it was supposed to sound that way ) I really liked the drums and the ridiculously cool synths, but it seemed to be missing some important elements like a memorable theme...

I'm finding it very difficult to listen to the score objectively. I think it's impossible for me not to approach this score as a Zimmer creation. If the exact same thing were written by someone unaffiliated with Remote Control I think I might be a little more open-minded. Maybe not.

I think I'm giving up on Zimmer's blockbuster scoring. I think he can write things that are genuinely heartfelt and/or classy, but most of those scores have been to smaller-scale films. He's done pretty much the same thing for all of his big blockbuster scores lately and it doesn't do anything for me. Not in Ron Howard's Dan Brown films, not in his Batman scores, not in Inception, not in Superman. It just seems to me like he's trying so hard to inject these films with a sense of grand import, adding synthetic layers to orchestra in a way that a lot of people these days seem to find "epic." It just doesn't work for me. The third Pirates film was the last big Zimmer score that I really liked. It was also a lot less digitally manipulated than all his blockbuster scores since then, at least that's the impression I get.

There's not much to dislike in MAN OF STEEL, that's I've found. It's fine to have on in the background if you don't care about listening to something enjoyable. I'd say it's about as enjoyable as having nothing on in the background. There's also not much to like in the score. I'm not entirely finished up yet, but so far I haven't heard anything that I would like to return to and listen to again.

That "Man of Steel" track is a real slog. This is apparently all Hans. No orchestra - just him and his computers. It's his "experiments" that eventually led to the finished score. I've listened to the first six minutes or so and am not compelled to keep going. It's really long (nearly half an hour). Why would you put this on the album? Why would I ever listen to this whole thing?

Interestingly, it doesn't sound very different than when Hans uses musicians to perform his music. That says something about how processed his scores are by the time he's through with them.

I actually hate Alexander, so I wouldn't want that.

It is part of the 2nd disc of the regular and Deluxe edition, because it is a bonus. I enjoyed it because it really shows thorough Zimmer usually is with the demos They're mostly used in the initial temp score, like how Christopher Nolan uses it. Most of the time, the finished score really is an extrapolated, extended version of the demos, FWIW.

Has anyone received the release in the mail yet? I bought the Deluxe version using Amazon Prime and it ought to arrive today. Or that's what I expect from Prime.

OS* : SUPERMAN - John Williams


* On Standby


NP : MAN OF STEEL - Hans Zimmer

It might be country-restricted after all?

At least by releasing it in dribs-and-drabs it's helping reduce piracy.

NP: After Earth - James Newton Howard

It makes me sad that this may very well be the last Shyamalan feature film. I love both the score and the film, of course. I think its my 2nd favorite score of the year so far after Velazquez' The Last Days. As always with this collaboration, Howard's music fits the film like a glove and perfectly compliments the film's emotions, being neither overstated nor too subtle.

NP: STARGATE (David Arnold)

His best score? Unashamedly lush. This is the original album, of course, which balances nicely between the bombastic and the romantic.

Well, I'm really enjoying Sarah Class AFRICA so it's no great loss.