Forum Replies Created
- Posts
Also, the Wallace & Gromit short films on Blu Ray, including a new one: “A Matter Of Loaf And Death”
A lot of the Beck score is still in the movie.
I think the freakout happened at the studio level, and Elfman was brought in. Much of Elfman’s MX wasn’t used in favor of Beck’s music and temp score (Andrew Gross’s 8 HEADS IN A DUFFLEBAG in a few key scenes).
I’m in the minority on Giacchino: I think his music is dull as hell and mostly just serviceable. I liked RATATOUILLE quite a bit, but his other scores have mostly been duds for me outside of their pictures. I just don’t hear any magic in his music the way that most people seem to.
I think Debbie Lurie does a fine job pinch hitting for Elfman when need be. I’ve enjoyed when Steve Bartek has gotten to do an original score of his own every now and again too, and I’m sorry that that doesn’t happen more.
I’ve been pretty underwhelmed by John Debney’s collaborations with him… HEARTBREAKERS and SPY KIDS both didn’t leave much of an impression.
Hot to Trot is an amazing score! I saw the movie more times than I care to admit when I was a kid, and always thought the music was fantastic. It much more related to PEE WEE’S BIG ADVENTURE than any other score he’s done in that era.
Warner Bros. doesn’t even think enough of the movie to release it on DVD, however, so a soundtrack company hoping to release it may have some trouble.
Wow, it’s people like sunnyville_77, who either do it because they think it’s funny or out of spite, who make me not want to read these boards anymore.
Incidentally, other web sites, say that it’s 15 tracks:
1. Opening
2. All is Lost
3. Broadcast
4. The Harvester Returns
5. Fireside
6. No Plan
7. Reveal/ The Escape
8. Hydrobot Attack
9. Farewell
10. Marcus Enters Skynet
11. A Solution
12. Serena
13. Final Confrontation
14. Salvation
15. Rooster – Alice In ChainsI have mixed feelings. I think Clooney might have been an okay Batman if the tone of the film had been way different. He was probably directed to bring his fun swagger and natural charisma to the performance, which of course he did.
Kilmer, though, was sort of a blank for me. His portrayal of Batman was dark, certainly, but as Bruce Wayne he was really a cypher. Like Clooney, I think he could have had a better performance in him as well, but I somewhat blame the uneven tone of the movie. On one hand, they wanted to keep a little of the dark edge the previous two movies had under Tim Burton, but on the other, they let the Jim Carrey component kind of bulldoze everything else in the second half.
I think Bale is a fine Batman, if not a muted one. He’s still not the best. I think you’ve got to give that to Adam West! But I think he gets the character and is able to make it believable. Of course, he’s got an excellent director and some good script material to work with too.
Well, I think it may have been the other way around. Getting someone of Jackman’s status to agree to star in the musical pretty much ensures that it will get made.
The Spider-Man series was abnormal because instead of the director earning more control as the sequels went on, word is they actually micromanaged Raimi more closely with each successive movie. I think he was allowed to put his directorial stamp on certain parts of 2 more than part 1, but clearly he was forced to include story elements he wasn’t entirely comfortable with in part 3.
Well, your sequence of events isn’t entirely correct.
-Raimi did want Elfman to come back for part 3, but he declined to do so.
-Grant Curtis said in a blog post that it was the producers hope that Elfman and Young would collaborate together on the score. A buddy of mine heard Chris Young give a seminar where he confirmed that that’s what the producers were trying to do, but it wound up not happening.
-Elfman did, however, write some thematic material (in part to keep his relationship good with Sony, who was nervous about switching composers). Raimi didn’t have any input on that, and understandably decided to let Young come up with his own themes which he could collaborate with him on instead.
-In an interview, Young said that he would be keeping the main Spider-Man theme, obviously, and also the “responsibility” theme (or whatever you want to call it) and the Goblin theme. He specifically said that he would _not_ be keeping the love theme.
-Every once in a while, Elfman would get a call from Sony or Young asking for his input on adapting certain musical ideas. Such as, “if there were a heroic version of the Goblin theme, what would it sound like?” Elfman would briefly sketch that out and send it over to them, but it wouldn’t be much more than a few lines.
-Young started to record his music. The executives really liked it, but were a little concerned that it didn’t sound like Elfman. There was particular concern over Young’s new love theme, which is more lush and theatrical than the earlier theme.
-The decision was made to insert Elfman’s love theme from the first two pictures into score. Young was busy finishing the remainder of the score, so John Debney and Debra Lurie were hired to do their own adaptations of the Elfman material. Lurie, of course, had served a similar function on previous Elfman projects, working with him more or less directly, and probably was working on the movie with his blessing, if not supervision. There’s no official word on that, however.
-At later recording sessions, Young would record his cues for a certain scene in the morning, and then Debney and Lurie would come in and record their own cues for the same scenes in the afternoon, meaning that there were several versions to choose from in the mix.
-In the end Young’s love theme was left out of the SM3 mix completely, replaced by Lurie and Debney cues as well as material tracked in from the first two pictures. Pretty much all of Young’s action material made it, though.
-Elfman later commented that it was crazy because there was a lot of concern over the love theme on the first movie too, and he had to record a ton of extra variations on it then. When part 2 rolled around, however, they loved the theme, and tracked it in all over the place, even where it didn’t make sense to hear it. Have a look at the “Aunt May Packs” cue, which is on the OST but not in the movie. There are great variations on the sadness theme and the “responsibility” theme as May gives him a pep talk. In the movie, though, it’s the love theme. Oh well.
Anyway, my guess is that Young got a few extra shout-outs on the SM3 commentary because Raimi knew he put him through hell, and in spite of that, Young stuck it out. Elfman had said that he mostly walked from part 2 out of frustration: In several cases, they were basically asking him to recreate what he had done for part 1 (in other words, not allowing him to change or expand on material), and he could not get Raimi to come to the scoring stage and listen to particular cues as they were being recorded (especially the Train cue, which there had been a lot of back and forth on). He eventually had enough and did what he had to do.
Personally, I think SM2 is one of Elfman’s very best scores, written during a period when he was really at the top of his game. When you listen to the cues that are on the CD, but not in the movie, I think it’s insane that the people involved allowed the situation to go down the way that it did. Do they really prefer the hacked together temp at the end of the train scene to the last two minutes of Elfman’s “Train / Appreciation” cue?
Elfman didn’t deserve what happened to his music on that picture, and I doubt Young’s music deserved what happened to it on SM3 either.
I’ll assume that that’s one of Danny’s daughters with him and Bridget. Man… lots of highly attractive women in this guy’s life.
I’ll assume that that’s one of Danny’s daughters with him and Bridget. Hot damn… lots of highly attractive women in this guy’s life.
I haven’t seen the movie or heard the music, but Elfman ain’t cheap. (or available… he did four movies last year, and will do four this year).
What the hell, sure.
I honestly wasn’t that taken with HELLBOY 2 when I first heard it, but it eventually grew into my favorite score Elfman did in 2008. I was initially disappointed that the thematic writing isn’t as clear or as strong as that of WANTED or STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE, but upon close examination, I think the writing in HELLBOY 2 is much richer. The main misstep, I think, is that Hellboy himself has a very muted three- note motif where something a little more distinctive could have maybe been used. There’s a big-big statement of the theme that sounds like it was recorded with no particular scene in mind, and used wherever the filmmakers thought it was needed in the mix (in particular the first time we see the adult Hellboy, after Abe and Jeffrey Tambor walk through the monster hallway toward the beginning the flick.
I love the Golden Army theme itself, and am a little sad that it doesn’t get more of a work-out in the score. The various other motifs are really complicated and rewarding once you get to know them.
Favorite tracks are:
Father And Son (amazing!)
A Troll Market
and In The Army ChamberWell, the directors of TERMINATOR 3 and HELLBOY were both after Elfman to score those films initially, and Beltrami got the run-off work when he passed.
Sort of like how John Ottman has gotten a lot of gigs that Elfman has turned down over the years too.
>>By the way, isn’t it funny that Elfman has worked with both McG and Brett Ratner?<< You’re forgetting Jon Turteltaub (INSTINCT), who was sort of the proto-Ratner for a while there.
In a recent interview, he said that he always wanted to work in this genre, actually.
He also said that they only recorded for 1.5 days. There could, of course, be a lot of material he wrote that doesn’t require an orchestra, but that seems to indicate that there’s not a lot of score in the film.
Yeah, I happened to talk with Randy Newman summer of 2000, over a year before MONSTERS INC., and he said he’d be doing the next picture and Tom would be doing the one after. I didn’t even see that confirmed anywhere for at least until MONSTERS came out.
Albert Brooks replaced William H. Macy as the voice of Marlon early on… maybe somehow the lines got massively crossed on this one?
Yeah, that’s what I thought too since Elfman’s gone out of his way to credit his additionals in the past. Nevertheless that’s what the guy I talked to claims, and he usually knows what he’s talking about on these matters.
Something I _do_ know to be true, however, is that Elfman has hired people to write additional cues in some situations but then those cues ultimately didn’t wind up in the film, and those composers accordingly were not given any kind of acknowledgment in the credits. I know this happened in HULK, for example… but don’t know why those additional cues didn’t make the final mix.
Maybe something similar could be what happened on HBII?
