I really liked that Man from UNCLE track you posted Monty, but who the fuck even bothers to go see Man from UNCLE to find out the soundtrack is good?

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...fuck you, JFelix, fuck you into the ground. - Ericubus

I like Guy Ritchie, and I like retro-60's stuff. I've never watched the show.

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...it was a Guy Richie movie? That fact wasn't even on my radar.

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...fuck you, JFelix, fuck you into the ground. - Ericubus

Yeah, he and Matthew Vaughn have been taking turns showing Sam Mendes how to make spy movies.

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In space, nobody can hear you ride breakfast goat

2015: The year of retro/throwback spy movies.

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Monty, for you:

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultur ... l_facebook

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"Hitler had a pretty good idea there." - Eric

"fair amount of fresh material."

This writer needs to be taken out back and shot.

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In space, nobody can hear you ride breakfast goat

Monty, I name-dropped you tonight. Two caveats:

1) I did not call you Monty, I called you by your real name (not in full, though!)

2) I don't know if it will make the final cut of the video

We were recording for Youtube, and during one segment the dude was like, "Who the hell is Jerry Goldsmith?"

I was all flabbergasted and immediately thought of you.

'Cause, you know, Jerry freakin' Goldsmith.

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"Hitler had a pretty good idea there." - Eric

Monty, any love for the Zimmerman Man of Steel music? I love the theme to death. I never thought I'd hear a non-Williams Superman piece and think "this is my jam," but here we are.

It sucks balls. Say what you will about Superman Returns, but at least it had the proper John Williams music.

Last new film score that really kicked my ass and made me want to buy the soundtrack album before the movie was half-over was The Man From U.N.C.L.E..

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Wiggle your big toe.

I'll have to check out that U.N.C.L.E score (should probably watch the film as well, I guess). I actually like the Man Of Steel theme, because it fits the context of the film. But that's all there is to the score. Where's a theme for Lois, or Zod? If it exists, I can't recall any of it.

Contemporary Hollywood scores, based entirely on Zimmer's disciples, focus on events and locations in films, not characters. As such, the music is occasionally thematic, but otherwise incidental. Compare the first three Harry Potter scores to everything that came after. Williams writes music about the characters in scenes (the theme that everyone hums is about an owl), and it's what sets his music apart from every current composer. Nobody can hum a theme from Goblet of Fire or Order Of The Phoenix. Modern film scores miss the boat on subjectivity, so it's hard place a piece of music when you hear it. Compare that to any three notes from any piece of music from the 1978 Superman score - you hear those, and it immediately recalls the character's emotional response and/or actions, when those notes happen - which allows you to recall not only the scene, but how you felt when you watched it. Very few composers ever nailed that ability, and - apart from Williams - they are all dead. After listening to the Force Awakens score, I'm not so sure he's actually still alive.

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In space, nobody can hear you ride breakfast goat

This is why film music has devolved into the WORST-EVER over the last fifteen years, as all of the "Silver Age" greats (Goldsmith, John Barry, James Horner, Basil Poledouris, etc.) have died off one by one, with no one who actually write music to replace them. Zimmer and his acolytes don't write music, they improvise it on a keyboard as the film plays, and this today's film music is basically "left hand, right hand, left hand" power chords, that obnoxious Inception "BWAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHH" horn thing, Moaning Woman for any vaguely Middle-Eastern/"ethnic" setting, and lots and lots of pounding drums. Long gone are the days when you'd have developed, long-lined themes and melodies that would connect you to the characters and settings, or even specific scenes. You could take any random thirty-second chunk of music from Man Of Steel, plop it into any other segment of the movie, and it wouldn't matter, because it all sounds exactly the same...all you'd need to change would be the timings. Try doing that with, say, Raiders Of The Lost Ark...every scene had its own self-contained piece of music that was like a stand-alone concert piece that still managed to form into a cohesive whole over the course of the movie. The pizzicato "Basket Chase" music certainly wouldn't fit during the "Desert Chase" scene later in the movie. When James Horner was killed in a plane crash last summer, it left me feeling totally gutted, as he was one of the last major composers left who could still write good old-fashioned MOVIE music (it pleased me to see his name on the recent Magnificent Seven remake one last time). It sucks, because 90% of movies released now are superhero movies that are just ACHING for some thematic, bold symphonic scores, and all we get for them is interchangeable mush.

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It's no secret that I'm a big, big fan of the Marvel movies. Big fan.

But this criticism is dead on. Some 14 movies or so and counting, and there is nary a memorable musical theme or moment in any of it. I vaguely remember the Avengers main theme, but that's it. Every bit of music you remember from the movies is pop music. The scores are aural wallpaper, nothing more.

That's a big failing on many levels, not the least of which is that it's a missed opportunity to tie these movies together in a way that is more subtle and more effective than Easter Eggs; to link them on that subconscious only music can provide.

Too bad.

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"Hitler had a pretty good idea there." - Eric

We have a 1/52 chance of agreeing on things.

Look at the X-Men movies...we'll be getting the tenth one (Logan) next year, and to date, the only composer to write a theme that has carried over into multiple movies has been John Ottman. EVERY OTHER MOVIE in the series has had a completely different composer with his own set of "themes" (if you can call them that). Imagine if Star Wars had the familiar John Williams score we all know and love...but The Empire Strikes Back was scored by, say, Jerry Goldsmith, with a totally different set of character themes. And then Return Of The Jedi was scored by Elmer Bernstein with yet another set of themes. I'm sure that Goldsmith and Bernstein could have written terrific, stand-alone scores, but you would have lost the subtle interplay of how the character themes intertwined and matured over the three films as scored by Williams.

The closest to what Williams achieved in the Star Wars OT within the last fifteen years was Howard Shore's music to the Lord Of The Rings trilogy, where every single character and/or Middle Earth setting had their own unique theme or motif, to the point where you could listen to the soundtracks with your eyes closed -- not even perusing the track titles or liner notes -- and still know exactly where in each film you were, and which character was at the fore. Say what you will about the Hobbit movies, but just hearing the lilting strains of the Shire theme at the beginning of An Unexpected Journey made me smile...it felt like coming home, or visiting old friends you haven't seen in a long time, and that was before a single line of dialogue was uttered. You'd think that, with Hollywood's obsession with "branding" everything, that a bold, immediately-recognizable piece of music would be an EXCELLENT marketing tool. I mean, for those who came of age in the 70's or 80's, all you have to do is hum the "Raiders March", or the Star Wars main title, or the Superman theme, and people will know EXACTLY what you're referring to. That's the kind of advertising that pays for itself ten times over, so it continues to baffle me why every superhero, action and horror movie has the EXACT SAME SCORE these days. Hell, even the Harry Potter movies, which started off with John Williams, barely used his familiar themes by the last few movies, with maybe a token, morose arrangement of "Hedwig's Theme" over the opening credits and nothing else. It's like Hollywood is SCARED of having music in movies that you can actually recognize. Titanic's score might have been turned into mall muzak torture, but imagine how many times people went back to the theater because the heard That Song on the radio, and went, "Hey, let's see Titanic again!" It makes no sense to me at all.

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Maybe composers are just bored, not afraid.

Maybe they just fucking suck these days. Maybe studios force them to suck (look at Patrick Doyle's Thor...his 90's scores were great, but I couldn't believe how forgettable and bland that was). I just don't get it.

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Except you don't have to imagine it. Jerry Goldsmith and James Horner both produced unique and memorable scores to Star Trek, each with a nod to Alexander Courage's work from the original series.

There are contemporaries to Williams, Horner and Goldsmith (Jeremy Soule, for instance), but they don't get Hollywood work.

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In space, nobody can hear you ride breakfast goat

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In space, nobody can hear you ride breakfast goat

LEFT HAND

RIGHT HAND

LEFT HAND

CLASS DISMISSED!

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Is ... is that satire?

Seriously, I mean, is IS satire, right?

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"Hitler had a pretty good idea there." - Eric

I think the scores fit the cinematography.

Edit - Which is to say the visual look of most of the Marvel films. Love 'em or hate 'em, they're pretty forgettable visually.

Not necessarily a film score but...

The soundtrack to the Marvel Netflix show Luke Cage is amazing. I'm not someone who generally buys soundtracks or scores. I bought this one. The first five cuts are songs from artists used in the series. The rest is the score and it's tremendously good, recalling great 70's blaxpoitation classics while not aping them. It's been in regular rotation on my iPod for a couple of weeks now.

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"Watch my stuff." - Monterey Jack

Yeah, the Luke Cage soundtrack was pretty cool, and thankfully distinct from the usual "power chords and Zimmer BWAMS" Marvel style. I just wish it were mixed a bit louder...as someone on another forum said, it often sounded like a film score being played softly on a radio in the other room, even during the biggest action scenes. David Arnold's score to the 2000 Sam Jackson Shaft remake is another stylish throwback to 70's film scoring techniques.

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STILL hurts knowing Horner's gone. It pleased me to hear his music one last time in The Magnificent Seven recently.

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When watching Westworld, the wife and I both noticed the similarity of the theme music to the theme music in Game Of Thrones. Checked on IMDB, and yup, it's the same guy, Ramin Djawadi.

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I'm going to wait until you're sitting next to Ericubus and then I'll ask how you're feeling. - caryc

I think the Wonder Woman music from Batman vs. Superman is likely very underrated.

The discord and whack of it is actually very cool and amazing.

I've listened to it several times now and been enjoying toying through Junkie XL's repertoire.

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Pender will beat off to anything....

Was hoping the video would be something like this:

Without Williams

Jerry Goldsmith just got a star on the Hollywood walk of fame.

http://variety.com/2017/music/spotlight ... 202421229/

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I'm sure he'll enjoy it.

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In space, nobody can hear you ride breakfast goat

Isn't he dead?

He passed away thirteen(!) years ago, but it's still pleasing to see him honored by his friends and peers.

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All deaded film composers come back as Jedi ghosts. Unfortunately, they can't physically interact with us - otherwise they would have ganged up on Hans Zimmer and thrown him off a bridge by now.

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In space, nobody can hear you ride breakfast goat

I think we can all agree that Hans Zimmer is cool and good though.

Zimmer has talent, but his OVERALL effect on the state of film music since the year 2000 has been nothing less than ruinous. Nowadays you don't have to have any actual musical training, all you need to be is someone's "assistant" and fetch him an especially good cup of coffee, and suddenly you're scoring a $200 million dollar movie. Sick to DEATH of every third movie score these days featuring the same simplistic power chords, chugga-chugga-chugga string/synth ostinatos and blaring Inception horns. What I wouldn't give to hear a Goldsmith-style score in a contemporary movie. That's why I liked The Man From U.N.C.L.E. so much...it was a pleasant shock to hear good music mixed over the sound effects in a movie again.

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Wiggle your big toe.