Sublime film scores

They have the motorcycle used in that movie at the Museum of Transport here in St. Louis, Missouri. Other cool things as well. Gooney bird on the way in to the parking lot.
 
This is great, it is not on the level of the others musically but in terms of feeling, Harry running through the streets and over roof tops. The music could not be any better, any cooler.

 
Pinball1970 said:
I watched it recently and enjoyed it. I was little when I saw it and I found the first part very confusing. Richard Dreyfus was exceptional in the film, falling apart in front of his family.
The film is about alien visitation so the science is pretty much out of the window (it is fiction after all)

One thing I do remember is the mother ship returning the flight 19 pilots and one of the techs said.

"Einstein was right, they haven't aged at all."

I remember thinking, "What the hell does that mean!?"

We did not cover time dilation in "o" level physics!
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I was brought up on hard sci-fi, in which authors take the trouble to make the technology hang together in a rational manner and take some pleasure in explaining it. I also don't buy the notion that an alien visitation would be hushed up by the authorities - it would never work, because the scientists involved in the discovery would never agree. So I thought the approach of "Let's bedazzle the audience with mystery and special effects and to hell with the plot" was patronising and hogwash.
 
exchemist said:
So I thought the approach of "Let's bedazzle the audience with mystery and special effects and to hell with the plot" was patronising and hogwash.
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I am not a huge sci fi fan and I did not regard it as particularly sci fi.
I suppose if the movie is rubbish the music does not matter.
I hated Star Wars, just thought it was boring.
Love star Trek.
Perhaps you could start a thread?
I'm not knowledgeable enough and you seem quite passionate about it!
 
Sarkus said:
Someone offered up Ennio Morricone - quite a substantial body of work that's good - his Westerns scores especially - but these two non-Western maybe lesser-well-known ones get me every time:

On Earth as it is in Heaven, from The Mission

Chi Mai, the version from The Life & Times of David Lloyd George
(ignore the images: someone has used stills from "The Day of the Jackal", it seems, but it's the only version I could find that had the version of the score that I remember most fondly)

Hans Zimmer - what's not to love, especially The Battle from Gladiator


And this is before wandering down the John Williams or Jerry Goldsmith rabbit holes.

As for John Barry... I do find that most of his scores sound, in some way, too similar, but this one always makes me smile, although I think that's just a guilty-pleasure from the nostalgia that is... The Black Hole
(but even with this it too easily wanders in my head to the themes he's used in his Bond scores. Ah, well. ;) )


And then, unrelated to what has previously been suggested, there's this - obviously not written for the film, but, heck, it was perfect.
Platoon - Barber's Adagio for Strings
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You have all the big hitters although I would put John Carpenter in there. Simple themes but so effective.

Adagio was used prior to platoon in "Gallipoli." I did not like the way they used it, they just kept playing the same bit here and there.
It is more effective (for me) when used sparingly like Beethoven's 7th second movement in "The knowing," Also "Clair de lune," in "Ocean's 11."
 
exchemist said:
I was brought up on hard sci-fi, in which authors take the trouble to make the technology hang together in a rational manner and take some pleasure in explaining it. I also don't buy the notion that an alien visitation would be hushed up by the authorities - it would never work, because the scientists involved in the discovery would never agree. So I thought the approach of "Let's bedazzle the audience with mystery and special effects and to hell with the plot" was patronising and hogwash.
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Heinlein, Clark, Niven, Pournelle, what has happened to scifi since then. Joh Scalzi, of course, but otherwise...
 
Pinball1970 said:
You have all the big hitters although I would put John Carpenter in there. Simple themes but so effective.
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He's one I would happily exclude. His scores fit the films they're in, but I'd hardly call them sublime. They don't, for me at least, particularly elevate the films. They don't detract, and they do fit the aesthetic, but I'm not sure I could pick any out and say which film it's from. I'd almost put his scores down as just being entirely incidental music... even the main themes. ;)
 
Pinball1970 said:
I am not a huge sci fi fan and I did not regard it as particularly sci fi.
I suppose if the movie is rubbish the music does not matter.
I hated Star Wars, just thought it was boring.
Love star Trek.
Perhaps you could start a thread?
I'm not knowledgeable enough and you seem quite passionate about it!
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I also disliked Star Wars and liked at least some of the first series of Star Trek (apart from the annoying soft focus treatment of women who one was supposed to find glamorous. They were all far too American to appeal to a Brit's sense of female attractiveness.) The Doomsday Machine was the best episode.

But I have never been a connoisseur of sci-fi films. I used to read some: Arthur C Clarke, Asimov, Heinlein, Hal Clement (Mission of Gravity was probably the best of all of them). Fred Hoyle's Black Cloud was good too.
 
Sarkus said:
He's one I would happily exclude. His scores fit the films they're in, but I'd hardly call them sublime. They don't, for me at least, particularly elevate the films. They don't detract, and they do fit the aesthetic, but I'm not sure I could pick any out and say which film it's from. I'd almost put his scores down as just being entirely incidental music... even the main themes. ;)
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In that case may I present JC, composer of this interesting theme, in 5/4, melodically tense chromatic and atmospheric. Oh yes he was quite a good director too!

 
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