rate the last movie you saw

[mkaroly]

GOLDENEYE - 6/10. I have not seen this film in quite some time; the first thing that jumped out at me immediately was how fluid Brosnan's movements were; unlike Moore and Dalton, Brosnan moved with incredible dexterity and sharpness. I liked that a great deal. Brosnan seemed to me to combine all the elements of all the previous Bond interpretations. He had the smart-ass/smarmy Moore Bond in him; he could fight well and was tough like Connery and Lazenby Bond, and he had an edge to him like Dalton Bond. Admittedly, after the seriousness of LTK I enjoyed the humor in GOLDENEYE, and I really enjoyed Robbie Coltraine's moment in the film. I liked that they kept the story tied to Russian villains, though the film does seem dated to me with the references to sexual harassment and the changing world at that time. The music was not as bad as I remember it, but the end title song is an awful piece of dreck that belongs with the worst all time songs composed and performed for a Bond film. I was surprised at my reaction to seeing Judi Dench's M - I felt a wave of poignancy that was never there before. I think it has a lot to do with seeing her in several Bond films, culminating in SKYFALL and SPECTRE (the latter of which has Bond being loyal to her last order), and reflecting on how much she really meant to Bond especially in light of SKYFALL (even though the time line doesn't exactly work). I think it says a lot about how much Judi Dench brought to the role of M. All in all, it wasn't a bad first outing for Brosnan.

X-3:THE LAST STAND - 8/10. Visually I liked this film more than the other two, and I had forgotten all the twists and turns in it (Charles dying, Magneto losing his powers momentarily, Rogue giving up her powers by getting the Mutant antidote, and the post-credits epilogue). I did feel it could have used a longer running time to give us a little more context on Jimmy and maybe to spend a little more time dialoguing between characters. The score was not very good and was perhaps the least memorable of the series so far, and I personally did not care for Rogue giving up her mutant powers; I wished she would have kept them but in all honesty I am not sure why...lol...I also thought that Halle Berry's Storm was somewhat of a confusing character. She did stuff, confronted Logan, delivered the eulogy, but really didn't have a center in the film at all. I am not sure how to explain it; it's like Storm is a bit schizophrenic and unstable because I know nothing about her. Despite some issues listed above it is still an entertaining film and worth watching.

[BobaMike]

X-3:THE LAST STAND - 8/10. . The score was not very good and was perhaps the least memorable of the series so far.

I'm shocked at your dislike of John Powell's score. In my opinion it's the only good score in all the X-Men films! The ending cue is great, almost Barry-like.

Kamen's score was average ( I remember being disapointed the great music in the trailer wasn't from the film- turned out to be from Dark City by Trevor Jones), Ottman's are unmemorable, and the less said about the others the better...

[mkaroly]

To be honest I was not really impressed with any of the music from the films. I know there were themes in all of them but for the life of me I cannot remember any of them, even after watching the films and all the supplementals that used the scores. They don't stick with me. Maybe it would have been better to say that of all the films I noticed the music in X-3 the least.

[Paul MacLean]

To be honest I was not really impressed with any of the music from the films. I know there were themes in all of them but for the life of me I cannot remember any of them, even after watching the films and all the supplementals that used the scores. They don't stick with me. Maybe it would have been better to say that of all the films I noticed the music in X-3 the least.

I thought Michael Kamen's score was the most dramatically effective, but for the most part it was bereft of anything melodic for the ear to latch onto -- until the climax, when he unleashed that gorgeous cue for Logan and Rogue. That cue was the "old Kamen", and recalled the melodic richness that turned me on to his early work. When I saw X-Men I thought this cue might be the beginning of a kind of "renaissance" for him, but alas...

[Monterey Jack]

The X-Men movies are a great example of what differentiates modern-day franchise filmmaking to that of yesteryear...back in the day, there'd be a specific "sound" that represented a film franchise. Even if there were multiple composers, they'd usually retain whatever primary theme the composer on the first film came up with, or at least write music in a similar idiom. Nowadays, you can have a film franchise that spawns seven movies over the course of fifteen years, and only two of those films have the same composer (John Ottman on X2 and Days Of Future Past), and there will be no musical continuity whatsoever. Imagine if Star Wars had the familiar John Williams score we all know and love...but Empire Strikes Back had a score by Jerry Goldsmith with a totally new array of themes, and Return Of The Jedi had a score by James Horner with another set of themes. Yeah, Goldsmith and Horner probably would have come up with fine scores in their own right, but there'd be no cumulative effect of the various themes penned by Williams evolving over the course of the three films. To this day, you can hum the Star Wars theme, and people know exactly what you're referring to, but try humming the "X-Men theme"...there IS none, except for that stuttering horn fanfare that Ottman used for his two entries (cleverly folded into the 20th Century Fox fanfare in DOFP), and that's not a theme so much as a recurring motif. I've enjoyed portions of John Powell's X-Men 3 and Marco Beltrami's The Wolverine, but every other X-Men score has been total ASS. How I wish that Ottman had gotten to score (and edit) the first movie...he could have refined and expanded on his work in X2 (the only X-Men score I own on CD) and capped it off with the third movie, provided that Bryan Singer were allowed to make it. Twilight also comes to mind...five movies (really four, with the last cut in half, but I digress), with three composers spread across them. All good composers, for a change (Carter Burwell, Alexandre Desplat, Howard Shore), and yet there's zero thematic development connecting any of these scores. Then again, the audience for these films probably only cared about the pop-song montages anyways, but it's endemic of what's wrong with film music today. You'd think a catchy, memorable piece of theme music for a film would be an EXCELLENT marketing tool, and yet movie studios seem TERRIFIED to have music that's anything more than overpowering sludge that's barely different from the sound design. You can have a trailer for a new Star Wars or Indiana Jones movie, play the Williams music, and audiences immediately get excited, but thirty years from now when they remake Twilight or whatever, could they play ANY of the music from those films, and will anyone remember, or respond to it?

[Eric Paddon]

Imagine if Star Wars had the familiar John Williams score we all know and love...but Empire Strikes Back had a score by Jerry Goldsmith with a totally new array of themes, and Return Of The Jedi had a score by James Horner with another set of themes. Yeah, Goldsmith and Horner probably would have come up with fine scores in their own right, but there'd be no cumulative effect of the various themes penned by Williams evolving over the course of the three films.

This is exactly why on a musical level, the replacement of Horner with Rosenmann and not at least keeping Horner's main theme never sits well with me regarding Trek II-III-IV.

[AndyDursin]

Imagine if Star Wars had the familiar John Williams score we all know and love...but Empire Strikes Back had a score by Jerry Goldsmith with a totally new array of themes, and Return Of The Jedi had a score by James Horner with another set of themes. Yeah, Goldsmith and Horner probably would have come up with fine scores in their own right, but there'd be no cumulative effect of the various themes penned by Williams evolving over the course of the three films.

This is exactly why on a musical level, the replacement of Horner with Rosenmann and not at least keeping Horner's main theme never sits well with me regarding Trek II-III-IV.

For me they definitely made the right choice -- different movie, different tone, different sound. Absolutely the right place to make a change. And saddling Rosenman with Horner's theme would have resulted in an utterly unfathomable clash of styles, which would have been far worse than Horner just scoring the film himself. That IMO would have been the worst idea of all.

[Paul MacLean]

A composer being retained for an entire franchise -- i.e. Star Wars and Indiana Jones -- is of course the exception rather than the norm.

I don't mind different composers being brought in as long as long as the new composer retains the established tone and style of the previous scores (and is of equal talent to the composer he is replacing). An earlier example of this is Lalo Schifrin's The Four Musketeers, which retains the same lighthearted but stalwart flavor of Michel Legrand's music for the first film.

But usually it is a step (or more) down. Ken Thorne is a good composer, but he's no John Williams. His "score" (i.e. adaptation of Williams' music using a smaller orchestra) for Superman II is one of the reasons I have trouble enjoying that film. And the composers who did the Harry Potter sequels were so far beneath Williams' abilities, I remain baffled as to how they got hired.

Likewise, the Bond producers rarely selected composers who "got" the tone of the films. Why Martin, Conti and Serra scored Bond films, and not people like Mancini, Bernstein or Schifrin never made any sense to me.

Sometimes a sequel is so far removed in style from the previous film, there is no need to retain the same musical voice (as in Star Trek II, and Mad Mad Beyond Thunderdome).

And bringing in the same composer for a sequel is no guarantee of a great score either. Star Trek III is not nearly as good as Star Trek II, nor Nemesis on the same level as Star Trek: The Motion Picture or Star Trek V (or even First Contact or Generations).

[AndyDursin]

Star Trek III is not nearly as good as Star Trek II,

Absolutely agreed. By comparison with II, III is an inferior rehash IMO and doesn't have nearly the energy or inspiration behind it that Horner displayed in II. It's an okay score, it's fine in the movie, but it's not nearly on the level of what Horner wrote for KHAN. One other reason they likely changed gears.

Horner did not really handle sequels the way Williams did, with a few notable exceptions (like CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER), he usually just reprieved thematic content whenever he scored a sequel.

[Eric Paddon]

I guess in some respects the familiarity is something that doesn't bother me. Granted, I marvel at when the same composer will then make it different but with the same sound (like Williams with "Jaws 2") but I think Horner in III helped make it at the time a comfortable viewing experience. If I see III building off II in a storyline, then musical consistency IMO helps. If IV were a stand-alone unconnected with what became a serialized storyline then a new score would have made more sense or been more acceptable to me.

I'm not sure Horner's theme would have been out of place for the End Credits in IV frankly. Maybe it would have been just another reprise in the way it is in the end credits of III but it would have given a greater sense of a "wrap-up" to me. Maybe in the end if that had been the *only* concession to Horner that would have been fine by me.

[Paul MacLean]

I'm not sure Horner's theme would have been out of place for the End Credits in IV frankly. Maybe it would have been just another reprise in the way it is in the end credits of III but it would have given a greater sense of a "wrap-up" to me. Maybe in the end if that had been the *only* concession to Horner that would have been fine by me.

While I felt Horner's score for Star Trek III was a come down from Star Trek II, I agree the Horner style was important to (and made a difference in) III, since it was directly tied to the events in seen in II. But IV was such a departure from the previous films, that a new "voice" didn't feel out-of-place -- to me anyway. At the same time, I'm sure Horner would have provided a fine score for IV.

[AndyDursin]

Following through on what Paul just wrote, I just look at II and III as being much more "connected" than they are to IV. III really doesn't exist in my mind as a standalone movie -- it doesn't work unless you know what happened in II, which is also part of its problem. With that said, III reaches a conclusion of sorts and I'm glad Horner's music was there to back it up, but at the end of III, we've reached the end of that story with a few dangling loose ends (with some minor "Spock-ian mind" issues that's used more for comedic than dramatic purposes in IV).

IV isn't burdened with tying up as many loose end as III was. After dumping Saavik off on Vulcan, IV is full speed ahead in its own storyline (except for clearing up the rest of the III issues at the very very end), and you needn't have seen the previous films to enjoy it. That was the whole point of it, and why it had the enormous success that it did.

[Monterey Jack]

IV isn't burdened with tying up as many loose end as III was. After dumping Saavik off on Vulcan, IV is full speed ahead in its own storyline (except for clearing up the rest of the III issues at the very very end), and you needn't have seen the previous films to enjoy it. That was the whole point of it, and why it had the enormous success that it did.

Exactly...it's akin to if Empire Strikes Back had defeated the Emperor and brought an end to the galactic conflict, and Return Of The Jedi had spent ten minutes at the beginning wrapping up a handful of dangling thread before going off on a totally unrelated adventure.

Come to think of it, that's EXACTLY what Back To The Future III did. For a "trilogy", it's like all of the mad scrambling through time was confined only to the middle installment, and the first and third movies are almost self-contained in one time period. Odd.

[Eric Paddon]

In most respects it was because IV dispensed so much with III and went off in the comedic tangent that turned me off to the film as a story (not to mention its cavalier disregard for matters of continuity with the Trek universe regarding time travel and how all of a sudden we get this "we don't use money" claptrap that contradicts everything established before) and also as I've said before marked the end of my interest in all things Trek from that point forward. In that respect because I disliked IV so intensely *because* of its story, I honestly might have forgiven it a little if it had given me that one small bit of musical continuity that I felt Horner had established in the previous two films.

I mean I admit, I'm saying this as someone who when I grew up would never watch the last season of "Get Smart" because they changed the arrangement of the theme music! I'm too used to the idea of music providing me with a comfort zone to weather some changes.

[Paul MacLean]

In most respects it was because IV dispensed so much with III and went off in the comedic tangent that turned me off to the film as a story (not to mention its cavalier disregard for matters of continuity with the Trek universe regarding time travel and how all of a sudden we get this "we don't use money" claptrap that contradicts everything established before) and also as I've said before marked the end of my interest in all things Trek from that point forward.

Some would say you didn't miss much by skipping Star Trek V, a film that was derided by many (and unquestionably silly at times), tho I enjoyed it myself (Jerry Goldsmith's score -- his second-best for the ST movies -- being a reason why). I do recommend Star Trek VI however, which had a strong script (and was directed by Nicholas Meyer) and provided a nice closure to the movies featuring the original series cast.

I'm too used to the idea of music providing me with a comfort zone to weather some changes.

I think we can all sympathize to some extent with that!