[Closed] Now Playing XXXIX

NP: Saving Private Ryan - John Williams

I already liked it on the JW concert album and in the movie, but now listening to it as a whole album, I really love it
Hymn To The Fallen is of course fantastic (I love the sound of glockenspiel*), but other tracks such as Omaha Beach and Finding Private Ryan are also beautiful.

(*thanks Pawel for telling me what the "sparkling sounds" is )

L'ennemi intime - Alexandre Desplat

Have to be in the right mood for this one - lots of murky stuff - but it's pretty rewarding.

Peter

Short album with a lot of substance to the score.

I like the album. I just wish Martin Scorsese ( yeah, I know I've slightly gone off on a tangent ) would get over his love affair with The Rolling Stones, enough already!

I'm revisiting my favorite score of the year...

THE GREAT MIRACLE / EL GRAN MILAGRO - Mark McKenzie

It's been a couple months, probably, since I played this last. What a wonderful score! This is not just one of my favorite scores from this year, but of the last decade. So gorgeous!

NP: The Last Mimzy (Howard Shore)

For reasons I only partly understand, I can't stand this.
Off it goes.

NP: Clockers (Terence Blanchard)

Well, we know from scores like Christmas Carol that he hasn't lost his melodic touch, so I don't know what these action film directores that are hiring him are smoking...

I probably won't get to it for a few weeks...does it have a theme? Is there any classic Silvestri or is it another rendition of the GI Joe / A-Team stuff?

If it is not too much trouble I would great prefer hearing about it rather than actually listening to it as I do not have any room in my listening schedule for it until the end of next week at the earliest...thanks though...

The best rendition of the Captain America theme is in a track that is only available at present as a bonus track at the US iTunes.

But with a little hunt on YouTube and some audio capture that is now sorted.

Ummm.... oooookay!

Silvestri wrote a new theme. The Captain America Theme and it's best rendition is in march form only heard on the iTunes exclusive track which you can hear on my radio show.

But if you would rather read about then actually hear it then here is my review.

In my opinion, Silvestri's score doesn't work... at least on CD! I don't like the theme at all (this was before I heard the March!) I can understand creating a patriotic theme for a character named named Captain AMERICA but this one is cringe-worthy! It's goofy, it doesn't really go anywhere and doesn't get much development throughout the rest of the album.

The theme to me sounds like a fragment of something bigger! It's basically this fanfare and then a low brass melody with a basic rhythmic underneath that should be part of a B theme that should eventually move onto something more triumphant... But it doesn't. Then I heard the March. But when it's not in march form it's a pretty bland theme.

The album itself isn't very well produced. It takes a good 7-8 tracks for this thing to get going. The bulk of the action cues are relegated to the end of the album but once you get though them all they all start to sound the same. The score is basically bits and pieces from every Silvestri score you've ever heard... unfortunately Silvestri chose to use all the uninteresting bits and pieces. I felt like I was listening to the scraps from Predator, Eraser, Judge Dredd.

The music isn't challenging, it's hardly triumphant, and worst of all it's not heroic... it really isn't any better than G.I. Joe or The A-Team. There's more excitement and heroics in Stuart Little and Mouse Hunt than Captain America... which means, at least to this listener, that Silvestri found more inspiration from a couple of mice then one of America's greatest super-heroes.

However, in saying that, and having listened to the album a few more times there are a small handful of highlights... "Training The Supersoldier" is a one minute cue that blows pretty much everything else in this score out of the water! There's a great motive in this cue that deserved more development through the score. And there really is only one action cue that stands out amongst the rest of the bland action cues - the rightfully praised "Motorcycle Mayhem." But once you get through the final playing of the 71 minute album (26 tracks) all the action cues sounds the same and the theme seems out of the place with the tone of the rest of the score.

By now I'm sure most of you have heard a 10 minute sample here and a 15 minute sample there. Trust me, you've already heard all the best bits.

I'm probably in the minority here but I expected more... and maybe that was my problem. My expectations from the composer of Back To The Future was set way too high!

-Erik-

Wow, thanks, I thought you were just going to tell me to get lost.

Sounds like pretty much what I would have expected after GI Joe and A-Team. Maybe all our remaining great symphonic composers should move to Japan where they're actually allowed to score the way they want to. There's a serious problem when the only decent traditional multi-line theme I can remember being written for a blockbuster film this spring/summer is composed by Hans Zimmer for a film about a talking lizard.

Sounds like Martijn to me

Great score, the last Silvestri score I really really enjoyed.