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Posted: |
May 31, 2015 - 12:03 PM
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By: |
Hurdy Gurdy
(Member)
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Posted: May 14, 2015 - 1:14 PM Report Abuse Reply to Post
By: Spymaster (Member)
"Funny, isn't it? So Goldsmith lost it during the 90s did he? I guess that would be true if you didn't count The Ghost And The Darkness along with...
Total Recall, Gremlins 2, The Russia House, Sleeping With The Enemy, Basic Instinct, Medicine Man,
Forever Young, Bad Girls, Matinee, Dennis The Menace, Rudy, The River Wild, The Shadow, First Knight, Congo, Powder, Chain Reaction, Star Trek: First Contact, Deep Rising, Air Force One, The Edge, L.A. Confidential, Mulan, Small Soldiers, Star Trek: Insurrection, The 13th Warrior, The Mummy, The Haunting.
All of which are now hailed by many as classics and have either received the expanded treatment or are on many people's grails list.
Just goes to show! :-)"....
-------------------------------
Not wanting to derail the expanded Ghost & the Darkness thread, I thought I would start a new thread, based on something my mate John said (above) in it.
I get that he's showing a list of titles from 15 years and beyond ago that were met with some derision AT THE TIME (and still, in some circles) and showing how time can change things.
BUT!!!
While some of those 90's scores listed DO sound a bit (lot?) better when compared to film music we've heard over the last 15 years and many are pretty solid in the first place, if I place ANY of those scores against ANY SCORE he wrote from say...1964 to 1984, I don't think there are many (if one) that comes anywhere near comparison in terms of brilliance, innovation, orchestration or quality.
I fully admit I grew cold towards many Goldsmith scores after Total Recall, while other fans just felt it was another stage in his evolution. He still wrote a lot of stuff that I love(d) during the 90's and 2000, but he was never better than during his Golden Years. I hear The Swarm (a lame, B-movie monster flick) and listen in awe and wonder...I hear Deep Rising (a lame, B-movie monster flick) and grow bored and disinterested.
Let's hear ya!!
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Is it okay that I never even cared for Total Recall? It works wonderfully in the film, but leaves me cold as an album experience.
But then, I pull out Deep Rising much more often. What that says about me, I'm not sure I want to know.
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I'm a huge fan of all Goldsmith's work from the 50s on (and I love scores from the Golden Age and before, if that matters).
In my opinion, Goldsmith continued writing masterpieces with the same creativity and energy up until his last score, Looney Tunes: Back in Action (admittedly this was not my initial opinion of the score apart from the western bits).
What changed in the 90s was that the percentage of those kinds of scores waned greatly, and he was on "autopilot" a lot more often (and yes, Jerry on autopilot is still more awesome than the majority of composers can ever hope to be). Sometimes there would be only *sections* of scores that reached the awesome heights of previous scores. Example: I understand the disappointment in regards to Bad Girls, seeing how awesome his western scores were in the 60s and 70s. It's got some rather underwhelming "Jerry 90s music" to be sure, but then it has action cues like Ambush which in fact easily surpass some of his 'nice' past western scores (ie. Stagecoach) and reach 100 Rifles levels of compositional intensity.
I do agree that The Swarm > Deep Rising (and for that matter his 90s Treks weren't on the same level as his first two) of course, and I think Spymaster's list, while all being 'good' scores, and certainly not all on the level of great established by Goldsmith before the 90s. But some are; it just needs to be more selective and I think the point stands that Jerry was just as great at composing film music as he ever was:
Stuff like The Shadow, the Mummy, Mulan, The Edge, The Ghost and the Darkness, First Knight, Medicine Man, The Russia House, and of course the aforementioned Looney Tunes. And many "lesser scores" (which have often been getting reappraised in complete form) like The Sum of All Fears have at the very least sections which are up there with his greatest compositions.
Yavar
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Is it okay that I never even cared for Total Recall? It works wonderfully in the film, but leaves me cold as an album experience.
But then, I pull out Deep Rising much more often. What that says about me, I'm not sure I want to know.
You aren't alone. I can recognize its excellence compositionally, but Total Recall leaves me cold too and I hardly ever listen to it (about as often as Deep Rising though I guess), even though so many claim it was his last great score! With The Mummy following it by almost a decade I think they're nuts.
I guess I have unusual tastes though. Two of my Goldsmith favorites are High Velocity and Breakout, and it's not even like real Goldsmith nuts talk those up much. But I'd rather listen to them than many of his greatest masterpieces as deemed by others...
Yavar
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I'm with Mr. Bond - I think of Total Recall as Goldsmith's "Ninth Symphony" in terms of summing up everything he did so well in that kind of broad-scope action/adventure/sci-fi canvas.
But I'm really here to chime in on Breakout - I too find myself returning to that score time and again. (High Velocity not so much.) Doug Fake wrote a wonderful note on Intrada about the first cue when it was released, about the mid-section with the striking vibraphone-plus effect, and it's a track I love to come back to from time to time.
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Is it okay that I never even cared for Total Recall? It works wonderfully in the film, but leaves me cold as an album experience.
I had the same feeling until I heard the expanded album. Still not my favorite, but a much better experience with the expanded album.
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I should clarify I have no problems with others disagreeing with me on Total Recall, but I doubt my opinion will change and I wanted to back the other guy up. Breakout is all kinds of awesome, and I would think that if you like it you also like High Velocity, aside from perhaps the first half of the main title which isn't in the same mold at all. But man do I dig that balding Hispanic Jerry brass, no to mention the kick ass cymbalom and use of tympani melodically.
Yavar
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But man do I dig that balding Hispanic Jerry brass, no to mention the kick ass cymbalom and use of tympani melodically.
Balding? Wait, are you saying the ponytail is a hairpiece?
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Typing on my phone and it stupidly autocorrected "blaring" to "balding" sorry. 
And yes, for all its action I find Total Recall of all things strangely boring. I dunno...maybe a remix would make a difference? I've only ever heard the expanded album anyway, so that's not it. I want to like it, I really do. The best parts for me are the mysterious sci fi ones, not the action.
Yavar
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It's (mostly) one largely undifferentiated action cue following another....
I defer to no one in my ability to respect vastly different opinions on anything, and I completely understand that it can feel like an onslaught.
But it's just wrong to say that Total Recall's action cues are undifferentiated. In terms of motifs, pacing, tempo, time-signature, you name it, the range of choices in the action cues is enormously, even unwarrantedly complex - as if Jerry kept trying to come up with a different way to score each subsequent scene.
There are many examples of scores today and over the decades that really are a collection of undifferentiated action cues, but Total Recall is not one of them.
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Yeah I recognize all that and they're good points. I have trouble putting my finger on what leaves me so cold about the score when it's so beloved and I love practically eveything the man wrote.
Yavar
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I don't think it's much of a secret that I really don't care for about 90% of what he wrote after 1990. I find it all bombastic and by rote and with a sound I just don't care for. He began being sought after by a certain kind of director who wanted that big, bombastic Jerry. And, for me, it all sounded the same. I always saw the films or got the albums and it was always one listen and then bye. After everyone kept telling me I was crazy and that First Knight was a masterpiece, I listened again and then again. Well, I just don't like it or its brethren, I'm afraid.
I discovered Jerry in film when I saw the original release of The List of Adrian Messenger, which is pretty early in his film game. I'd loved his Twilight Zone scores but hadn't really noticed they were by him. And the following year to Adrian Messenger, he became one of my favorites, thanks to The Prize. After that, I literally would go see any film for which he was the composer. I loved everything he did back then - every score was fresh, adventurous, and DIFFERENT. Just when you thought you had him pegged with the sublime A Patch of Blue, you'd get a Planet of the Apes. And so it went, all through the 70s - he'd discover a new style, then you'd get that for a while, then it would be something completely different - in the 1980s it was less frequent, but there were still some amazing scores. And then with Rudy and stuff like that I began to get very bored and then into the 1990s it was just one score after another that I didn't care for and towards the end I really began to not want to see films scored by him because I knew exactly what I was in for. Now, to be fair, the films themselves were often mediocre, so there's that.
Others who came of age with the later Jerry of course love that period. It's typical for that to happen. But musically speaking, for ME, it's the late 1950s through the mid-1980s that's pretty much prime Jerry for me. There was simply no one like him. Yes, there are a handful of scores post 1990 that I can listen to, but that's a HANDFUL as in one hand.
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If you actually assessed each of his 90s-on scores one by one and just gave them a thumbs up or a thumbs down, I'd be amazed if only 5 of them (or 10%) were thumbs up, Bruce. We already know The Haunting was one you liked. What are the four others that make the cut?
I think big bombastic Jerry was only half the decade -- at most!
Yavar
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Posted: |
May 31, 2015 - 3:00 PM
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By: |
McD
(Member)
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It was a fairly undignified run of terrible films for the most part. And, truth be told, I could live without the majority of the scores. If it wasn't Goldsmith, I think a lot of fans could too.
On a positive note, the much derided Malice is, IMHO, better than almost everything else on that list.
On a negative note, the only acclaimed film in late Goldsmith's career, L.A. Confidential, has only one thing in it that hurts the film. The score. It just didn't need the Rambo theme showing up constantly in a film like that, and took me out of the picture at the time. I know many fans think it's some kinda great return to Chinatown, etc, but I wish it had been thrown out.
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As to history, I was a child of the 70's Goldsmith, thriller Goldsmith - The Omen, Coma, Capricorn One, Damien Omen II, Wind and the Lion, Great Train Robbery, Alien, and Star Trek TMP were my first purchases. But I knew about him back to Planet of the Apes and Flint and Patton, and saw Messenger about 1979 or so and fell in love with that as well. And I've collected just about everything people can name.
I completely understand what folks who don't care much for the 90's output are talking about, but for me I never got tired of his changes, even as he was indeed sort of checking into "give-em-what-they-want-is-good-enough" territory later on. I do return to earlier scores though much more often than later scores - though I love Bad Girls and The Mummy.
I don't go back to Total Recall much anymore either, but that's because I know it by heart!
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Posted: |
May 31, 2015 - 3:11 PM
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By: |
DavidCorkum
(Member)
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Two of my Goldsmith favorites are High Velocity and Breakout, and it's not even like real Goldsmith nuts talk those up much. But I'd rather listen to them than many of his greatest masterpieces as deemed by others...
That's weird, I was just listening to Breakout again last night! It's always been a favorite, and is kind of representative of the difference between older and later Goldsmith. He wrote then in such an economical style for a smallish orchestra, which showcased his gift for pure composition. Every little sound just seemed perfectly chosen. Starting with Boys from Brazil he entered a much larger symphonic style, which masks that quality to some extent, and just seems less inventive. Not that his list of great scores stopped then, of course, but I think his smaller scale writing was a little stronger. That perception will be different with everyone. Goldsmith was the polar opposite of John Williams, where the bigger the orchestra the better.
I only liked the more Hispanic bits of High Velocity for a long time, until it occurred to me that he wrote it around the same time as Chinatown. Now all those long passages for trudging through the jungle to me share the same abstract quality as Chinatown, which makes it a little more interesting.
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