transformers/ratatouille/harry potter
"This is one hundred times better than Armageddon!" *insert the sound of an entire theater of filmgoers writhing and groaning simultaneously*
No, Michael Bay, Armageddon was better.
You fool.
:: B-
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Toys, bugs, monsters, fish, superheros, cars, rats, and next year...a cute little robot. How much you want to bet the dutiful, simple, little robot Wall-e will put Michael Bay's erratic, dyslexic, complicated, and comical (they crack jokes you know...) robots to shame?
I loved Ratatouille. It was awesome.
:: A+
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I just broke one of my own rules and listened to the soundtrack for Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix before seeing the movie, and sadly I have to give it a huge thumbs down. Besides the first two tracks ("Fireworks" and "Professor Umbridge"), the rest of the album is muddled and hinged on reactionary cues, where the composer seemingly takes 10 seconds of film, scores it, and then goes on to the next 10 seconds, and scores it. The result is a literal musical translation of the film like that of the literal film translation of the first two books by Chris Columbus. It sounds like an hour of filler.
Of course, I am saying all of this without seeing the film, but from what I've heard on the soundtrack, the film is probably going to be held back by this rather unimpressive score. I love John Williams and I think Patrick Doyle did a superb job in the fourth film, but Nicholas Hooper had better brace himself. With the huge shoes he had to fill he was certainly going to be criticized by fans no matter how good a job he did, but now he is most definitely going to get venomously raked over the coals. And the venom will be all that much stronger considering he will probably be back to score the 6th film if his directing partner David Yates has anything to say about it (we don't want the breaking of a friendship, now do we?).
Bleh. Why can't they just make things simple and bring back successful directors (Cuaron) and composers (Williams) and stop making all of these huge quality risks on film-making and film-scoring newbies? It pains me to think of what the score would have been like with a composer like James Newton Howard, the recently successful John Powell, or the even the spunky, experimental Michael Giacchino. Heck, a generic and regurgitated James Horner rendition would have been more interesting than Hooper's utterly failed attempt at being interesting...
...here's to hoping I have spoken two days too soon, and that the score (still mediocre on disc) fits an excellent film like a glove...
4 comments:
I am very excited about Yates' direction because I've seen some of his British productions (particularly "The Girl in the Cafe" with Bill Nighy). After hearing you talk about the ST and reading the Soundtrack.net review...
("while Hooper strives to achieve thematic and stylistic congruence with the palette that Williams had created, the end result is mixed, with the effort being noteworthy, but the album ultimately leaving the listener unsatisfied.")
...I'm sorta nervous.
Oh well. After A.O. Scott's NY Times Review, I'm very excited for the whole movie in general. It seems like the film fits the cast and crew very well.
That was a good review. I need to read Scott more often.
I think the saving grace of these films is the British cast, something we can thank J.K. Rowling for...
It's unfortunate though that we'll never see a Speilberg rendition of these movies...if only he could have gotten over his Haley Osment obsession and just agreed to a British cast...dern him.
I really don't think Spielberg would do a Potter film well at this point in his life. I heard him say a while ago that he was done with "childish fantasy" films like E.T., among others.
I'm really curious as to what the tone of Indy4 is going to be. Will it be the serious Spielberg of "Munich", or a return to the fun-loving Spielberg of the past Indy flicks? Let's just hope its not the dark and depressing tone of "War of the Worlds."
Ah, I stand corrected. Speilberg would be a very bad choice right now as he seems a bit on the un-inspiring side lately.
War of the Worlds was one of the worst movies I had seen in a long time.
Oh where, oh where has our inspiring Spielberg gone?
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