Exciting indeed!

On the other hand, his personal connection with the material, Lucas, Kathleen Kennedy, etc. -- the sheer fact he's the only composer the series has ever had -- makes Star Wars one of his lifetime accomplishments, and he probably feels a responsibility to keep it going (and maybe he just likes working on it too?). STAR WARS isn't Star Wars without his music, and it should always remain that way.

It is unquestionably one of his lifetime accomplishments -- and one of cultural significance -- but I think think everything that made the originals special will be missing from these films. The prequels (though at times awkward) offered an appealing blend of nostalgia and freshness, but Lucas isn't really involved in these new pictures, Disney is mostly about merchandising.

And I'm much more excited about this than the prospects of him scoring another LINCOLN, or a flatline "interior dramatic" picture with a score I'd never want to listen to apart from the film.

Well I'm sure it will be a better score than Lincoln! Still, I'd like to see him work with other directors, and score more substantial pictures (which aren't 90% CGI effects!).

I thought LINCOLN was an extremely melodic and good score...it's one of my favorites of his from his "new millennium" works. The scores I most listen to from his late period (post 90s) are AI, AZKABAN, THE TERMINAL, STAR WARS III, GEISHA, WARHORSE, and LINCOLN. Love THE PATRIOT theme but I don't listen to the score as a whole much. CRYSTAL SKULL, TINTIN, and WAR OF THE WORLDS are among those that don't get play very often at all...maybe throw MUNICH in there too (have to be in the mood for it). I liked that in the 90s he wasn't always "locked in" to the "big name" movies, but at this point in his career, based on the film scoring climate and possibly his salary, who wants him/can afford him aside from the "old guard"? It is a shame his name isn't on more stuff; scary to think his stuff might be rejected by newer people as James Horner's stuff has been!

I just hope Williams is up to the rigors of the job...the man is eighty-one years old right now, and will pushing towards ninety by the time he's finished with this new trilogy.

I just pray that he lives to do them-the only other composers I would even begin to think of taking these over would be Howard Shore or James Newton Howard. There is no one else-I repeat, NO ONE ELSE-whom I could even consider coming close to Williams for these films. With Goldsmith and Bernstein gone, and Danny Elfman too quirky for these, one hopes that Williams can do one more hat trick.

Monterey Jack wrote:I just hope Williams is up to the rigors of the job...the man is eighty-one years old right now, and will pushing towards ninety by the time he's finished with this new trilogy.

I'd argue though that he's writing music, it's not like running a marathon. So long as the creative juices are flowing, he can still write. One can always get another conductor involved to assist if he physically can't handle that aspect. Being 80 isn't like having a death sentence these days too.

Still, I'd like to see him work with other directors,

Sadly there are very few directors in 2013 who embrace the kind of film scoring Williams and his contemporaries wrote. We know film music isn't what it was two decades ago, it's less music and just ambient noise running under the film. Plus, I think Williams doesn't have the interest now in working with anyone other than Spielberg or a situation like this where he knows who he's working for and what the picture is.

Some director would have to approach him with a film and a concept that would absolutely embrace his music. I guess it could happen...but when was the last time you sat through a movie and the music knocked you out? I haven't had that sensation in years myself.

Williams still has the ability to write great music, provided he gets inspired by what he sees. It's JJ Abrams that I wonder about here. Does Abrams have the ability to make a compelling movie? If he does, I'm sure that Williams will give that movie a solid score.

I hear you guys about the Rick Bermanization of the score landscape... The latest example of this to me was Oblivion, where the score felt like a warmed-over Hans Zimmer atmosphere laid into the background.

Now, I have actually had scores in the recent past that were interesting to me and which impressed me even on first listen:

Hans Zimmer/James Newton Howard - The Dark Knight (Yes, I realize Zimmer isn't popular, but I did appreciate the places this score went, and the double CD holds up for me)

Marc Streitenfeld - The Grey (interesting and quiet score, punctuated by an effective use of Jamin Winans' "The City Surf" from "Ink")

Thomas Newman - The Debt (Precursor score to Skyfall, with some great tension cues)

Ramin Djawadi - Game of Thrones (Best TV score since Lost. Djawadi has regularly created and developed motifs for all the disparate characters and stories of this show, and it's a pleasure to listen to his work. There's a real personality to the work that starts the moment that the opening titles crash onto the screen.)

It's JJ Abrams that I wonder about here. Does Abrams have the ability to make a compelling movie? If he does, I'm sure that Williams will give that movie a solid score.

I suppose the one reason I'm less concerned with Abrams here is because he's walking into this project more as a hired hand than someone guiding the project from its original genesis. He doesn't have his guys writing the script -- I'm guessing it was pretty much finished when he was signed -- Kathleen Kennedy and Disney are going to be hands-on producing, so it's a collaborative process and not just Abrams and his minions running the show a la "Star Trek". That can only be a good thing.

Ramin Djawadi - Game of Thrones (Best TV score since Lost. Djawadi has regularly created and developed motifs for all the disparate characters and stories of this show, and it's a pleasure to listen to his work. There's a real personality to the work that starts the moment that the opening titles crash onto the screen.)

I'm not a Game of Thrones fan so I haven't, admittedly, paid much attention to his music on that series. His film music, on the other hand, has been almost uniformly atrocious and some of the worst I've heard over the last few years (which says something). "Personality" is probably the last word I'd ever use to describe some of the scores he's written -- like "Iron Man" or "Clash of the Titans"...bleeeeech. Keep him FAR away from any project requiring a romantic orchestral sensibility!

I watched the AMAZING SPIDERMAN again earlier today, Andy, and since you had praised Horner's score so highly last year I thought I would pay closer attention to it this time around and I heartily agree with you about how good it is, and probably the best work I have heard from him since MASK OF ZORRO. If Williams does not get to complete this trilogy, perhaps Horner could step in, but I really hope and pray that Williams gets his creative juices roiling and does the best work of his career (I loved his LINCOLN score, along with the rest of the film, BTW).

Jedbu wrote:I watched the AMAZING SPIDERMAN again earlier today, Andy, and since you had praised Horner's score so highly last year I thought I would pay closer attention to it this time around and I heartily agree with you about how good it is, and probably the best work I have heard from him since MASK OF ZORRO. If Williams does not get to complete this trilogy, perhaps Horner could step in, but I really hope and pray that Williams gets his creative juices roiling and does the best work of his career (I loved his LINCOLN score, along with the rest of the film, BTW).

I agree John on Horner. But what a shame this year has been for him...his music for the upcoming ROMEO & JULIET thrown away. He leaves ENDER'S GAME (not sure he wrote anything) and then the news Zimmer has REPLACED him on AMAZING SPIDER-MAN 2....to me it's like the death knell of the kind of film music I like. Certainly it's the biggest punch in the gut Horner has ever sustained...the current state of studio filmmaking has no place for the kinds of scores we've enjoyed for many years. I wonder if he'll even want to keep going, given how put off he's been over the years by the industry.

AndyDursin wrote:I'm not a Game of Thrones fan so I haven't, admittedly, paid much attention to his music on that series. His film music, on the other hand, has been almost uniformly atrocious and some of the worst I've heard over the last few years (which says something).

I gave up on Game of Thrones. I found it a dour, boring soap opera, with contrived nude scenes that served no purpose except to entice horny adolescents. More "sword and sorcery" pabulum from people whose understanding of the genre doesn't stretch beyond D&D and the LOTR movies. I'm afraid I'm not a fan of Ramin Djawadi either.

Paul MacLean wrote:

AndyDursin wrote:I'm not a Game of Thrones fan so I haven't, admittedly, paid much attention to his music on that series. His film music, on the other hand, has been almost uniformly atrocious and some of the worst I've heard over the last few years (which says something).

I gave up on Game of Thrones. I found it a dour, boring soap opera, with contrived nude scenes that served no purpose except to entice horny adolescents. More "sword and sorcery" pabulum from people whose understanding of the genre doesn't stretch beyond D&D and the LOTR movies. I'm afraid I'm not a fan of Ramin Djawadi either.

I gave up on it after the first episode. Didn't engage me at all. Then again I find most HBO series hugely overrated (True Blood, Rome, Boardwalk Empire) so it could just be me. lol.

I guess it falls to me to defend Game of Thrones. I do enjoy the series very much. I agree that it could do without the nude scenes that HBO tends to indulge in whenever it can. (OTOH it's not the only offender - cough, Lifeforce, cough...) But I don't think that George Martin or his fans would agree that his books are just "sword and sorcery pablum" or that he somehow doesn't understand anything more than Dungeons and Dragons. That diminishes the work he's done - his books combine a lot of material, including many historical events, to create a pretty wide tapestry for either a novel series or a television series. I found the show a little slow at first, but within the first three episodes, as the characters established themselves, there was enough material roiling to keep me fascinated. I also appreciate that this is a TV series that's following the novels in a manner that isn't too reverential or too dismissive. The guys producing this show really liked the books and their enthusiasm shows. And there's the fact that Martin writes one episode a season himself. I realize that it can come across as a dour soap opera at times, but there have been plenty of rewards along the way. I'll take the inventiveness I've seen on it over CSI or the new Hawaii Five-O any day of the week.

Andy, I would add that if you gave up on the show after the pilot, there's a lot of good stuff afterward I think you would honestly have enjoyed. I found the pilot a little slow due to all the characters they were introducing, but intriguing nonetheless. It was after another couple of episodes that things got a LOT more interesting. I'd encourage you to give it another try, but I understand if it's not something you have time for. (I figure with the number of titles you're reviewing, that doesn't leave much leftover, does it?)

Regarding Ramin Djawadi, I honestly hadn't paid any attention to his scores before this series. I didn't realize he had done the Iron Man score, although I didn't mind it. The reason I cited his work on this series was due to his regular use of leitmotif - something I've rarely seen on TV in the past decade. Of the TV scores I've noticed (the ones that weren't just "needle drop" song selections), only Lost and the reboot of Battlestar Galactica understood the value of character-centric music. It's becoming a lost art and I appreciate any composer who still understands it.

Regarding James Horner, I've certainly enjoyed many of his scores over the years. But I've never been able to put him in the same classification as John Williams or Jerry Goldsmith. I like his music but I've found him to be extremely self-derivative. Too many of his scores in the 80s and 90s were filled with complete lifts from other works of his. And I haven't heard a genuinely interesting score from him in years. I frankly wasn't a big fan of his score for Avatar, but that may have been due to my not being a fan of that movie anyway. (I think I appreciated it a lot more when I saw it the first time, in 1990 with Kevin Costner...)

Getting back to the thread at hand, I have a feeling that, like the earlier Star Wars movies, the script hasn't been finished or presented to JJ Abrams as a done deal. And I'm honestly not a fan of Michael Arndt, although he did do good work on Toy Story 3. Little Miss Sunshine was essentially a shaggy dog story with a fairly cruel ending. Oblivion was an okay script that cribbed from multiple sources (including Moon and Frank Miller's Ronin) without understanding the point of those plot elements. I'm concerned about JJ Abrams' input here, although I think Andy's right that this will be more of a collaborative process than his usual Bad Robot projects. I think my problem here is that Abrams has never demonstrated an ability to do anything more than make an interesting network TV show. His pilot for Lost was a great piece of work - for TV. His feature films, unfortunately, have all been overblown and frankly, very badly directed. I'm happy to see that they're retaining John Williams, but even Williams can only do so much. If he's presented with a typical JJ Abrams shakey cam incoherency, I'm not sure what he'll be able to do with it. I hope for the best, but the track record with Abrams is not encouraging for me.

AndyDursin wrote:I'm not a Game of Thrones fan so I haven't, admittedly, paid much attention to his music on that series. His film music, on the other hand, has been almost uniformly atrocious and some of the worst I've heard over the last few years (which says something). "Personality" is probably the last word I'd ever use to describe some of the scores he's written -- like "Iron Man" or "Clash of the Titans"...bleeeeech. Keep him FAR away from any project requiring a romantic orchestral sensibility!

Yep...Ramen Noodles really scrapes the bottom of the Zimmer Clone barrel, and that's pretty damn low. What kills me was his scoring Pacific Rim, considering that Guillermo Del Toro generally has good taste when it comes to good, melodic film scores, both for his films and the ones he produces (Mama had an excellent score earlier this year). I assume that it was the studio that insisted on a punishing Zimmer "power chord" style, due to the considerable budget.

Interesting rumors, for what they're worth...

http://badassdigest.com/2013/08/02/new- ... um=twitter

What we did hear was a series of reassurances from producer Kathleen Kennedy that boiled down to one thing: this won’t be the Prequels again. ‘We have an amazing team at ILM, who can create fantastic effects, but if we don’t have a great story and characters, the effects mean nothing,’ Kennedy said. Of course story and characters weren’t exactly the problem with the Prequels - the movies were loaded with (bad) story and (boring) characters. But still, many point to the film’s reliance on green screens and CG characters as indicative of what went wrong with Star Wars. And Kennedy is definitely nodding to those people.

‘Looking at all the Star Wars movies and getting a feel for what even some of the early films did, combining real locations and special effects – that’s something we’re looking very seriously at... ‘It’s using model makers; it’s using real droids; it’s taking advantage of artwork that you actually can touch and feel,’ she said. ‘And we want to do that in combination with CG effects. We figure that’s what will make it real.’

....and:

I’ve heard that Abrams is doing tests to try and recapture the exact grain of the film in the original trilogy, to make his movie aesthetically in line with those. That’s impressive, but like the return of models and locations it doesn’t make Star Wars. It’ll make something that looks a lot like the classic Star Wars we all grew up on, but warmed over visuals weren’t what smashed into the pop culture landscape like an asteroid in 1977. Hopefully Abrams and Lucasfilm are spending just as much time trying to make something fresh and new as they are trying to recapture the look of something old.