From the pure American Way of Life praising ("The Patriot", "Sleeping Prive Ryan", "Amistad") to the highly pretentious self indulgent ones ("Angela's Ashes", "Seven Centuries in Tibet", "Nixon", "Sleepers") he keeps making we wonder what happened to the furious Williams which gave us with masterpieces as "Star Wars Trilogy + 1", "Superman", "The Fury", "Jaws", etc, etc...

The answer is simple:
These are all B movies - budget or quality are not the subject here, but genre.
They all come from cheesy sci-fi/fantasy movies and from "supernatural" suspenses which, obviously, set the composer's mind free to create, inovate and perpetrate great movie music (something that doesn't seems to work in Danny Elfman's case, since he can't compose good music for fantasy movies).

That's why Jerry Goldsmiht keeps surprising us all (well... count the MV fanboys out of this). I preffer he scoring a ridiculous movie as "The Mummy" 100 times instead of doing something like... lets see... "City Hall"!

Nothing wrong with mr. Williams scoring all these boring Imperialist movies, but maybe one of two "B" movies per year would be nice too to wake us up...

Feel free to disagree with me. Can even call me names. I won't take it personaly...

I gotta get off now....up early and all that, see you monday folks.....I'm off to a wedding....and NO its not mine

CHARLIES ANGELS!!!

I think that any of the above reasons would be legitimate. I don't agree, however, that his most recent film scores are "arrogant," in Andre's words. Serious, yes, a tad earnest, maybe, but not really pretentious. In any case, among the recent output, only Saving Private Ryan, Amistad and The Patriot could possibly be called "imperialist" or--by a stretch--"conservative American propaganda films." (Well, the Patriot is a little stultifying in that way.)

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Originally posted by Lancelot:
I wouldn't say that most people *do* know what it means to be American. (Therefore, John Williams should keep right on doing what he's doing.)

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Well I am an AMERICAN too (Brasil IS located on the American continent - like if he would ever know that!!)
Therefore, I must know what it is to be one...

LOL!!!

And I insist: John, go back to the good old goofy B movies of the past...

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Originally posted by JClark:
[B]Who knows why Williams seems to have stopped scoring Andre's "B" movies? Maybe it has something to do with the evolution of Steven Spielberg's directorial tastes in the direction of more earnestness.

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Or maybe he's too expensive for a "B" movie?

As for Spielberg's "self-proclaimed" evolution... Well, I preffer to call it:

"I NEED TO WIN RECOGNITION WITH LOTS OF OSCARS AND THEREFORE NEED TO PRAISE THE AMERICAN WAY OF LIFE AND THE JEWISH COMMUNITY, WHICH RULES OVER HOLLYWOOD, BY MAKING SELF-INDULGENT "ADULT" MOVIES, FULL WITH THE MIDDLE-CLASS' PCNESS CRAP"...

Very sad!

P.S.: Nothing personal against the Jewish community, being myself a jew's relative.

Ah, yes I forgot: don't mess with Stefen Spielberg, my sacred hero...
This is what I call complex of "Peter Pan".

Well, feel free to disagree with me and say whatever you want, Thorzinho.
I never cared with your biased opinions anyway. I am sure you'll find someone around who cares.

Cheers!

You do this all the time, whether the topic is Elfman, Zimmer or Spielberg. That really provokes me (and lot of other guys in here, I'm sure). You seem completely unable to back up these prejudiced views with solid arguments, which makes you pathetic.

And when people criticize this side of you (like I just did), you refer to the lowest common denominator: You call people names. Incredibly childish. You need to show more respect for other people's opinions, Andre, before I can respect YOU as a humanbeing.

I'm sure more people agree with me here, although they are perhaps not as forthright about it as I am. But I always like to be honest, even at the possible expense of a few friends here.

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Originally posted by Thor:
No, prejudice is to put forward opinions as if they were undisputed facts. Prejudice is when you have decided in advance what you're gonna think of someone or something.

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Tsk, tsk. No Thor. Prejudice is to make judgment of something you don't know anything about. You know: PRE (before) JUDGE. You need to do your homeworking pal.
You may not agree with my opinions towards your sacred heros, but I know their works deeply enough not to like it. You'll have to live with that boy.

quote:

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And when people criticize this side of you (like I just did), you refer to the lowest common denominator: You call people names. Incredibly childish. You need to show more respect for other people's opinions, Andre, before I can respect YOU as a humanbeing.

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Did I call you names?? Hahahaha... how funny. I can't find it on any of my posts to you!
And I don't give a rat's ass about what you think about me dude.
Grow up Thor and learn to live in a world which Danny Elfman isn't considered a GOD by just everybody.

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I'm sure more people agree with me here, although they are perhaps not as forthright about it as I am. But I always like to be honest, even at the possible expense of a few friends here.

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Oh, good one Thor. Trying to throw everybody against me... Dying to start a little lynch aren't you?? How pathetic!

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So there. This is longest reply I have submitted to you in a long while (I generally ignore you, to avoid heated flame wars), so I don't expect to go much deeper into this.

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Good. What's keeping you down here? You're so superior... I feel proud to get so much attention from such a great person as you!!!

Tchau!

N.P.: "MISSION TO MARS" by Ennio Moronicone (as a ignorant biased fellow once called him) *****/*****

.

On the contrary. I just love a heated debate!

What I find amusing is when people like Thor pops in and start to give free MORALITY LESSONS loaded with PCness crap, with nothing to do with the discussed topic.
These angry fanboys can't agree with my opinions about some of their sacred heroes and them get personal, trying to throw everybody against me like a bunch of crying babies.

THAT is what I find pathetic.

But enough of this nonsense!
I'm glad to notice that almost everyone agreed with me about Willams' need to go back scoring "B" movies...

Cheers to you fellas!!

Still, I get the gist of what Andre is saying about Williams' scores of the past several years. I have had a hard time putting a finger on it but what it seems to be coming down to is that Williams' music has become so well-mannered and refined that it has also become stuffy. The Patriot is the latest example of a Williams score that is impeccably crafted and handsomely dressed but remains, for all intents and purposes, somewhat stilted.

I saw The Cowboys this past weekend and couldn't help but feel a certain regret that The Patriot didn't have some of the same youthful brashness. Nevermind the fact that they are two different movies... I'm talking about the joyful edge which that score had that has been polished off of many of JW's latest scores.

I often feel that John is so intent on his scores having an afterlife as concert music that he scores with that in mind from the start. Consequently we get what Andre is talking about and what I have sensed... a certain "musical seriousness" that plays nice in concert but which is less than satisfying film musically.

It just may have something to do with the films he consistently scores now, most of which have been mentioned, and which have an often ultra-serious historical tone.

I don't know if a goofy B movie is the thing that will bring back the innocence and, for lack of a better word, fun that drew us to his music initially. Phantom Menace for all it's complexity and musical eloquence seems afflicted with a similar concert focus that presents a score of great orchestral set pieces but which fail to add up to a cohesive and powerful sum as film score.

Williams' contemporary, the more and more controversial Jerry Goldsmith, may represent an inverse career direction
(Goldsmith started his career in a more wild and experimental direction but has become more and more traditional and straight forward) to Williams but there's still something of an edge to his music and his film scores always work as film scores.

He (JG) appears to score with the view that this music must, first and foremost, operate as film music... if it can do as a concert piece fine, if not also fine.

As a musican John Williams may well be the among the best composers of music there ever was but I feel that his exposure in the concert environment has robbed him of something.

No, I do not appreciate Mr. Lux's presence on this board, but (luckily for him, perhaps) there is nothing I can do about it. That's up to PeterK, and I know he won't do anything either. So I guess the board "is big enough for the both of us", but I can guarantee you that we will be staying in different corners of the room...

But I did shell out for Images and all the other early scores, and agree with Luscious that there are gold mines out there just waiting to be transferred to CD--if only so the younger set can hear them. I only think that Jaws was a change for the better, not for the worse.

Andre's brave attempts at iconoclasm bounce off rather lightly; my only "sacred heroes" are heroes who were, well, actually sacred.

I mean, goodness, what if every score Williams had written had had the style of JAWS. (WOW!!!)

I agree with HAL; Williams, musically, is almost always fine at least. But he is stuffy. I can understand, but, if I liked concert hall music, I'd listen to it.

HAL 2000, indeed you translated well what I was trying to say on my original post, before all the personal bash from Torh started.

Why? Because I hated the music? Not at all. Because the film became available on video and I immediately noticed just how much music had been omitted or, even worse, altered for the sake of making everything into a concert piece. The original "Jedi" album is one of the worst ever. There's almost nothing holding the pieces together, as almost every piece is an extended version of one of the film's major themes. The greatest travesty on the album is "Rebel Briefing," which eliminates Luke's reflective moment in front of Vader's funeral pyre in favor of a bombastic rendition of the Force theme that has absolutely no emotional impact whatsoever.

However, I'm still humble enough to admit my lack of superiority in the face of most people. And I'm always open to a possible change of opinion on various matters, unlike you.

THE PATRIOT seems to be an example of Williams actually doing something just for the fun of it. There's nothing in it he hasn't done before, but it sounds like he had a good time with the project.

Maybe, if in the same way Taxi Driver or Ran are pretentious, conservative and patriotic. SPR is actually less deeply flawed than some people seem to want to admit. Mr. Williams, what he does is his business. Patriot is an idiotic Z movie that got the handsomely redundant score it didn't even deserve. I wonder what would ever please fan people in terms of movie scores, maybe just some old material from 1977 that would just get buried under the 5.1 sound mixes. The obstacles to creative work are manifest before anything in the technical straightjacket imposed by the bass heavy soundmixes (c.f., Goldsmith's comments on The Mummy) and current aesthetic of wallpapering movies with music-- everything turns into sonic fuselage. Then there is the quality of the products to begin with, whether there is any content. Williams has that kind of classicised sound the last two scores. To me it's sort of detached and rhetorical. You have to ask whether its an issue of exhausting most of the possibilities of dramatic writing, to the point where in order to satisfy fans you have to do McNeely/Horner pastiches, or do the after-burner minimalist tack used in Phantom Menace where the classic style is done in an elegant shorthand while making a new longform structure; does one go for advanced theory or a repeat of an old style, redundant writing (which anyway would still not please people who collect soundtracks because it isn't the same person writing in 2000 as in 1977)? Personally I hate doing work over again when it was right the first time. Creative people have to know whether their obligation is to pandering or to themselves, however they choose to balance it out (someone on top of the food chain of course has this luxury.

CHAOS (the English translation of RAN) is massively flawed as well (although I'm looking forward to the theatrical reissue). I personally think Kurosawa had a hard time regrouping for about twenty years. In the same way that Spielberg had a hard time figuring out what he NEEDED to be doing, rather than what he felt he OUGHT to be doing. Artists have this problem all the time, and Spielberg is every bit as much an artist as the late Mr. K.

Altought it's obvious that Spielberg is a great craftsman, he doesn't even come close to true artists as Kurosawa.
And this abyss gets even bigger when you consider how manipulative, shallow, simpleton, and "Black-White/Good-Bad" Spielberg's movies tend to be - something that gets even more outrageous on his pretentious "serious" movies.

A thought about comparing Spielberg and Kurosawa, Andre: they both had utterly different lives. The self-effacing Kurosawa might have disagreed, but there's no question Spielberg had the luckier and easier life, and that DOES show in many of his films -- but that also comprises one thing that I admire about him, he is constantly TRYING to imagine what a life he never knew COULD be like. An artist must do that. I'll be fascinated to see him tackle MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA.

I wonder if the film of Kurosawa's final screenplay will be shown in the United States.

P.S. Mr. Ware, I haven't seen WILLOW since it first was shown, and can't remember if I noticed the SHADOW WARRIOR thefts you mention -- but I sure as hell noticed them throughout BRAM STOKER'S DRACULA! Directed by one of THE SHADOW WARRIOR's producers, some guy named Coppola.

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Originally posted by H Rocco:
...but there's no question Spielberg had the luckier and easier life, and that DOES show in many of his films --

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You know, I have a lucky and easy life (thanks God!) but still I don't share this Spielbergian vision of life, where mankind can be clearly divided in "black/white", "good/bad" categories...

Now that's the part of my post no one will read:
Of course, I'm not defending the Nazy/Fascist ideology. Far from it. But to simplify all the conflict by reducing all german soldiers as "evil" is something else. Most of those soldiers were just common men following absurd orders.

As for "Schindler's List" it's based on a true story and there's no americans directly involved. But them again, Spielberg almost ruin it with that cheesy and redundant speach from Schindler at the end of the movie. Just like the pathetic old man's "AM I A GOOD MAN?" speach at the end of SPR...

I believe the point of the knife fight scene was to point out a double tragedy:

1. that the Jewish-American soldier is dying solely because he is a Jew (remember the German lets Davies' character live on the staircase?)

2. that Davies' character could have done something to help out and refused because he suffered from cowardice of the highest order, and someone had to die on account of that. Only when the tables were turned afterwards did he kill the German (out of guilt I suspect).

to me, SPR simply points out the facts of the circumstances of that war (that's why you get to call a movie like this and The Patriot "historical fiction").
MANY Americans were killed on that beach. That's not saying anything about the Germans. It's a simple fact that American bombers missed their targets beforehand. It's a simple fact that 5,000 men were gunned down.
It's a simple fact that the world would be speaking German right now if it wasn't for the American Army in both World Wars.

I also don't like the opening and closing of SPR. too sappy, I think.

Everyone, if you get a chance, I HIGHLY suggest you watch a new movie called Nuremberg, and watch the 5-minute film they played in front of Goehring at the trials.
Shocking, to say the least. Personally, I have NEVER seen anything so ghastly in my life until then. you know, fake movie stuff like what you see in Se7en or Silence of the Lambs is one thing, but the sight of those REAL people, having suffered those REAL atrocities disturbed me.