[Closed] Now Playing XLVI

NP: QB VII - Jerry Goldsmith

I have played this many times since its release a few months back.
What a staggering work it is too!
I finished watching the DVDs (5 hours worth) and despite it's flaws, think it was quite a good show.
I have a friend who is more a classical music fan but has fallen in love with Goldsmiths QB VII and can't stop playing it! He has fine taste!

Indeed! It sure does stick in your head! I was actually whistling it today at work.

NP: AFTER EARTH (James Newton Howard)

Giving this another spin in hope that it will grow on me.

<-wiping sweaty forehead in relief

Most of it is indeed mediocre, but IT'S highlights are incredible I'd say. The final cue is one of my favourites from last year.

Hamlet - Patrick Doyle

I don't know what it is about that main theme, but something about it just clicks with me. Such a gorgeous, noble melody, and the big anthemic statements in "My Thoughts Be Bloody" and "Go Bid the Soldiers Shoot" give me goosebumps! But it's very cleverly worked into the rest of the score as well, with lots of variations (even the "Fanfare" that opens the score portion of the album is based on it). The secondary material is good too, especially that creepy impressionistic string quartet motif for Claudius in "The Ghost" and "Now Could I Drink Hot Blood". It's a fairly understated score but never dull for a moment, even on such a lengthy album. Excellent stuff! Much better than Morricone's.

The Adventures of Tintin John Williams

Best score of 2011. (Of what I heard anyway.)

You can hear some more awesome 2011 scores HERE! McKenzie's THE GREATEST MIRACLE was my favourite that year... if you care.

-Erik-

I haven't heard it yet!

NP: BATMAN LIVE (James Seymour Brett)

This is excellent. There are Elfman elements, but it's far more in the Williams/Horner style, really. More neoclassical. The only downside is that it's a bit long at 72 minutes.

NP: The Amazing Spiiiiiider Guy 2 - Hanzi

Okay, I surrender...it's a good score and it's written by Zimmer (at least somewhat lol). The Electro material is just too darn addictive. I could do without the chanting but maybe I can fake my brain into thinking it's not English. My girlfriend loves the Electro stuff and anything that gets her to listen to film music is a good thing in my book And it turns out the main theme gets such a varied and creative workout that what I originally thought was sparse use is actually just varied and surprising use that is a lot of fun to discover!

The synth parts are a fun listen as well...Pawel unlocked the key to their enjoyment, for me, when he mentioned being reminded of the Krypton theme from Man of Steel. Thanks Pawel Now that I am listening to those parts in that light, they're a lot more entertaining. During my first few listens I was so jarred by the drastic tonal shift between the Electro material and the Spidey material that it was hard for me to really digest the latter. Now that I am understanding it, it's actually really awesome. I'm so used to Zimmer scores being tonally consistent from beginning to end, that I got confused when this was so varied. But I'm slowly being bent at the knees until I am soon going to be bowing to its greatness

Also love how the heroic Spidey stuff is played directly against the Electro stuff to create this weird and disturbing musical conflict. Originally I thought it felt disjointed and mickey-mouse-ish when it did that, but now I think I understand that's exactly what Zimmer wanted, to have the music reflect the conflict by having the two musical landscapes fight with each other.

Steven Price - Gravity

I never said a word about this score on this board, which is quite weird, but I really, really appreciate and love what Price did with the score. It's not just about redefining certain borders of music making to fit (brilliantly) the picture. It's also one of the best structured scores to appear in the radar in recent times. Yes, there is an anthem, but it has to be looked at the perspective of the whole story AND score, to be assessed correctly.

Price admitted that he started from the ending of the film and built his score from there, which in terms of the themes of the film (it's a survival film, but a survival film dealing with self-redemption in some way; many people say that the film's ending wouldn't be exactly realistic, but if we look at that, the film's premise isn't exactly realistic - she wouldn't have been accepted to go to space with the strict tests NASA makes; a different ending to the movie would be a thematic betrayal of what the film is all about).

What Price is doing is making the anthem at the end count. I don't want to talk about the brilliant idea of blurring the line between sound effects and music, which he achieved both synthetically and organically, I want to talk of structure. I'll aso try to forget about the scoring process, so I assess the score "as is". The fact that the release is almost, if not, fully the complete score, released chronologically, helps with that.

Ryan's theme appears throughout the picture and is a theme of redemption for her. It's important, because we have the germs of the theme appearing throughout the score in a quite almost religious way (a solo vocal feebly delivering the theme over all the electronic mayhem or in a soothing soundscape). These arrangements, to me, harken at Brian Eno and his own Apollo stuff. It slowly gains momentum.

There is a danger theme, related to the debris attacks, but what really creates the heartbeat of the score is the constant development of very carefully included Ryan Stone's redemption theme. Then it suddenly gains an ostinato, the drive of the score (from "I just drive" to, "time to stop driving, time to go home", I love the verbal ambiguity of the word "drive", both literally as "just going somewhere" and as the reason to live). This is why it leads to the anthem the way it does. A great piece of musical narrative, making the film that much more philosophically clearer.

I love this.

It misses a main theme, a hook. But yes it's got a gold old 80's vibe, which I was quite surprised with