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Clips from the Varese album:
http://www.varesesarabande.com/details.asp?pid=vsd-302-067-010-2
Sounds awesome! Feb 23 couldn’t come soon enough.
That clip from “Traveling Montage” is interesting; it’s got the theme from 9 in there.
Holy crap, that was great!
Wolf Suite sounds amazing, I’m hoping for a credits sequence where we get to hear this in all its glory.
A very “classical” side of Elfman I’ve never really heard before. Definitely has the flavor of Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
From “Shock Till You Drop”:
Do you mind talking about the back and forth about the score? Elfman is back and I thought that worked out for the best.
Johnston:
It does. Danny had to score a film that was half an hour longer [than what the film is now]. And he had to score it very early. It was last summer, I think. He said, “This has happened to me before, and I know it’s going to happen now. You’re going to re-cut the film and my score isn’t going to work.” We re-cut the film, we put his score in. And what happened is he had themes he had spaced out and it worked great in his cut. When we took out that half hour, his themes were closer together. So things get familiar and you go, “Wait, I just heard that.” We previewed the film, we all recognized it didn’t work. But there was a reaction from someone high up at NBC/Universal, because a new trailer had been cut with the electronic score, someone said, “Hey, let’s do the whole film that way!” It was something I reacted to pretty violently. That’s the wrong idea, guys. They said they were going to try it. I had been so worn down, I said, “Okay, let’s try it.” They hired a guy who is a talented composer in his own right. They assigned him something that was almost impossible to do. When we put his music to the picture, even though the music was working, it was so out of context with what you were seeing. You can do anything in a trailer, put any music in and the audience doesn’t see that trailer and go to the movie expecting that music. So the studio, to their credit, after they heard the new score, recognized Danny had a better score that matched the film. We then went back in to record about 15 minutes of new material.I’m loving what I’ve heard from those clips. It’s got that dark, rich “Sleepy Hollow” quality that sounds just amazing.
Oh, cool. I guess Danny and Joe don’t hate each other. Maybe Danny will score Captain America. Let’s keep our fingers crossed.
Dude… Seriously that would be sweet! I would love to see what Danny would do with Captain America Material!
On the other hand, Wolfman has been getting some good reviews.. this movie might actually be good… Lets just hope!
…
The album is up on iTunes. Sounds great!
I hear quite a bit of Sleepy Hollow and that is a good thing.Here’s a bit more from Johnston on the score:
Listened to it a few times now. I’m going to say this is my favorite Elfman score since Sleepy Hollow. So it’s my favorite Elfman score in over 10 years. I CAN NOT BELIEVE IT WAS ALMOST REJECTED.
It’s a type of old-fashioned composing he hasn’t exhibited in a while. Black Beauty and Sleepy Hollow were grand examples. Hellboy 2 sort of harkened back to his old style… BUT THIS…
It’s definitely in the style of Kilar and even reminds me a bit of the music for The Happening, which had great music but sucked as a movie.
That is the Elfman I grew up listening to… I knew he’d come back.
NOTE: Favorite parts…
– Wolf Suite #1: All of it…
– Wake Up, Lawrence: Check out the modern harmonies at around 3:49 on. Elfman has DEFINITELY matured as a composer.
– Bad Moon Rising: Like with Batman, we only need the beat to allude to the theme. When the melody comes it’s EVEN BETTER. Best string writing I’ve heard from him since Dolores Claiborne.
– The Healing Montage: The chorus takes on a prominant role. This reminds me of the “Sick” motifs from Black Beauty. The violin adds alot to that, as do the Herrmann-esque harmonies.
– Traveling Montage: Big, epic, Kilar-inspired Eastern European music.As to the tone, that’s the main reason I believe this is the best score he’s written in years. It’s close to his concert work in a way, but more in tune with Bartok, Prokofiev and Kilar than ANY of his previous works I think. Definitely the best string work he’s done since Dolores Claiborne. The harmony alone warrents recognition. He weaves a dreamscape with it. Also, the most prominent use of violin since Black Beauty.
Amazing.
We continued to cut the movie though. When we put Danny’s music with the shorter cut, the themes were much closer together and it started to feel repetitive.
Wow. I wonder if he feels the same way about Elfman’s Batman, or the original Star Wars, or Raiders of the Lost Ark? And he must’ve hated Up.
Saw a midnight screening of the movie. Here are my opinions…
As I imagined, we have a quasi-Spider-Man 2 type situation in the final film. The original score is basically cut and spliced around in areas where you know, from the tracklist of the album, it shouldn’t be. The Prologue is gone (a scene you can tell was supposed to be much longer than it ended up being). The Suites are used as transitional pieces alot. The mixing wasn’t too great. I think the Travel Montage was lifted and placed in two different places. All in all, I have a feeling Elfman is pissed about the way the music is used in the final cut.
The movie itself, I can, tell was intended to be at a much, much slower pace but Universal, wanting to go for the more youthful audience, cut scenes down to quicken the pace. The result? You have no pacing what-so-ever. No Main Titles. No nothing. It cuts directly to the main point. Talbot is back home a few moments after the titlecard investigating the werewolf.
The music apart from the film is amazing. I’ve never been as excited about something Elfman’s written, post-listening-experience, since Sleepy Hollow. Sadly, the studio destroyed the integrity of the script and mood, if there was a little bit in there, with the post-production gang bang that ensued.
If anything good came out of this mess, it was the Elfman CD, which I’d be brash enough to say is Oscar worthy.
Though we all know that will never happen. Not for THIS movie…
***SPOILERS AHEAD***
You can tell this was probably offered to Tim Burton. Hell, the Sleepy Hollow screenwriter even writes this in a similar way (same brutal opening, heavy gore, same father-issues, same science-in-olden-times approach, same final battle, same nightmares). The production design is via Rick Heinrichs, as was Hollow’s, and is great. You can even imagine that the intended version, if paced slower and less reliant on flashy effects, might have looked better on paper. It’s not scary. It could have been alright in the Hammer Horror fashion though.
Universal tried to turn this into Underworld. Tried to modernize it. The electronic score may have been too much, but traces of the Underworld-thinking remain. Example: watch the scene, which is also in the trailers, using the whole slow/fast zoom from 300 and Underworld. The addition of that into the movie seems like a horrible afterthought. The super-fast CG wolfman which runs like an ape on crack is also something that Rick Baker was apparently unhappy with. I can see why.
The director mentioned releasing the first cut at some point in the future, which I hope he does, if anything to see the intended version of Elfman’s work.
Maybe it will seem less… I don’t know… stupid.
Then again… I read two reviews that compared the final werewolf battle to two wookies in a WWF arena, which pretty much sums it up. I don’t think editing can really fix that.
But Elfman has transcended this, once again, with something better than I could have imagined.
Yeah, the movie was pretty stupid. You can tell the music was hacked to sh*t and thrown together pretty shoddily, too. Very disappointed.
Yes, the movie was a mess. I curious about the directors cut. I read that that version is not so bad. Oh well. At least we got a longer album out of it. If the score had stayed in the movie, Danny wouldn’t have put together a long album. We probably would have only got a 45- 50 minute album like Alice in Wonderland.
I’m fairly certain the album would be exactly the same, as Elfman actually produced the album back in November – exact same contents.
I haven’t seen the movie yet, so I don’t know how badly butchered the score is but I’ve heard a lot of people praise the music in the movie. I find that funny since “Spider-Man 2” got the opposite reaction. And in “Terminator Salvation” where his score is over-shadowed by the sound effects, people couldn’t even remember the music. So, this is the first time since like “Charlie and the Chooclate Factory” where I’ve heard people enjoy his music.
Yeah.. The movie wasn’t great. I enjoyed parts of it… and there were parts that scared the shit out of me.. I had to close my ears at one part… But in the end it was pretty cheesy. The acting at the end sucked.. and I got tired of how fake the whole thing got.
And of course everyone is right. The music was all over the place.
I would see it just to see where the music goes… and if you do see it, look for a part near the end where it says “10 Miles” to the village. It was pretty funny to see a Mile Marker in England.
Yeah that does seem ridiculous as the British began using imperial measurements some 60+ years prior, but perhaps filmmakers did this so not to confuse the hundreds of millions of American moviegoers without passports.
He, he. It’s the like Roy Rogers Old West with electricity and cars. Or the Wolfgang Petersen Ancient Greece with catapults.
This was posted on Chud.com and contains some of Paul Haslinger’s rejected score. In a nutshell, thank GOD the Universal execs stopped smoking crack and kept Elfman! I know I would say that even if this stuff was really good…not to say this is bad music; it would work for a lot of movies, just not Wolfman. So, take a listen at what we were almost left with.
http://chud.com/articles/articles/22588/1/THE-WOLFMAN-SCORE-THAT-WASN039T/Page1.html
Lucius
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