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bUt ThEeRe ArE nO mElOdIeS!!!111
Hardly a problem. Non-melodic music (half of Zimmer's TDK score and his Dunkirk score), dissonant music (Don Davis' THE MATRIX) of just sound effects (THE FORBIDDEN PLANET) can all serve a film well. Serra's score may be musical horror to some, but I can't think of better music for GE. Same with SP. Barry's scores were collections of nothing but heavenly melodies, and I simply adore them, but there are alternatives and they are not necessarily bad.
David Arnold is absolutely passionate of and committed to the entire Bond genre and has a deep knowledge on all aspects of the movies and books; I've had the pleasure of hearing him in person at concerts and talks discussing these things; it is nothing short of a tragedy that such knowledge and passion will be wasted.
really disappointed. I hope this guy does take this as an opportunity to take whatever skills he has up to a true fully orchestral composition level. Please for gods sake, make a Bond movie just damn well sound like one.
Romer will use strings and give the film a Bondian sound. He isn't nearly as respected or revered as Thomas Newman. Romer is a young composer looking for a breakout chance. This is his opportunity to have a 'moment' akin to what happened with Ludwig Gorransson last year with 'Black Panther'. Get this right and you're on the composer A-list.
Also, whilst some of the SP soundtrack was a retread of SF (it baffles me why they used the same track from the Shanghai scene for the Rome funeral?!?!? WHY!?).
I do love the score int he third act of SP though.
The Brave New World track was only used to transition from London to Rome, just like it had been used to transition from London to Shangai.
i don't know the names of the tracks but the score used for this beat has a weird techno feel. It doesn't fit the more elegant classical Roman setting. It works for Shanghai but not Rome and is jarring with the rest of the score composed for the Rome segments:
However, the score used during this exact beat is fucking terrific:
It's also not true in the slightest that SF and SP's scores contain no melodies. I suggest anyone who believes that needs to listen to them again and note the recurring, erm, melodies. ;)
And with that we have summed up about 75 % of all film scores composed these days.
Unfortunately very true.
What have you done @DarthDimi .... You spoke the truth out which most people won't like X_X
Motifs and melodies are not the same. SF and SP do have their fair share of motifs, however. And motifs can be memorable in their own right, so you're correct about that.
However, you go on to mention the Louis Armstrong song from OHMSS but it was purely an artistic one and decidedly uncommercial as it didn't chart at all!! Of course, I'm not talking about the 1994 advertising Guinness campaign that used it for their TV commercial and which gave it a belated UK spot in the charts. Not that the likes of Thomas Newman could ever score a decent song to start with that could be re-released 24 years later and be a huge hit. That accolade belongs only to Barry. Fortunately, Barry steered clear of the Hippy sound in the late Sixties, too, which I notice you mention but don't give any reasons to how juxtaposed Louis Armstrong's song actually was to what was happening around it. In other words, it sounded rather antiquated at the time.
You then mention George Martin, who wasn't such a leftfield choice as you make him out to be. I can distinctly remember thinking at the time, if it ain't Barry then George Martin's a good alternative as his "Theme One" score for Radio One demonstrates a Barry-esque sound. I think Martin even mentioned as much himself. I'd even go so far as to say Martin is really the only other Bond composer to deliver something fresh but at the same time sounding very Bondian out of all the non-Barry Bond composers. We've also had disco Bond music (Hamlisch and Conti) even Barry had a go himself with the end titles of MR but was sensible enough not to include it in his actual score.
As for the TV talent show winner Sheena Easton, blah. She was just a performer, not an actual composer, and a last-minute replacement for Blondie to boot. "Different is never the same as wrong" doesn't mean that the end results can be underwhelming or poor. Neither does being different equate to being good, either. "This Bond film will have a younger zeal to it - for many reasons" but not for its lead star though, I might add. AVTAK also had a younger zeal about it, but look how that one turned out. A right old stinker in all but its title song performed by Duran Duran.
The other thing I take exception to, not from you @CatchingBullets, but from those that witter on about change being good and moving forwards means making big changes in order to be successful, is that there's no proof to back it up. Outside of Bond, a lot of creative changes to franchises have had a detrimental effect on their box office results. Let's not forget that we've had big changes in the past on Bond, also. I'd counter that Moore going all slapstick in his later days was a big step-away from the more successful down-to-earth Connery Bond's. I'm sure some will try to brush that under the carpet and blame it on the changing taste of audiences in the Eighties, but it'll be a lie as the audience had some carryover from the Seventies. Without going into too much detail and writing a long thesis, people will make excuses where it suits them to backup their own claims and personal tastes.
However, you can't deny there's a distinct "Bond Sound" that exists in the majority of the franchises DNA. Even when it isn't a Bond film, there's probably thousands of examples on Youtube where people comment on how Bondlike something sounds which isn't actually composed by Barry himself. Why is that? Maybe because it embraces Barry’s unique mix of jazz, rock, pop and traditional orchestral writing, or maybe whoever composed it understood what gave it that Barry sound and are trying to pay homage to it. But to say we need to move away from what Cubby claimed was “ultimately very important to the whole cinematic history of Bond” for something that is flavourless and tonally generic, doesn't make a whole lot of creative sense to me.
Will Dan Romer be another vapid Thomas Newman clone, or will he at least try to understand the Bond sound and deliver something half-resembling one, I'm afraid remains to be heard? Of course, I'm hoping for the latter, but I won't hold my breath.
Scores have to suit a film. A melodic score wouldn't have served The Texas Chain Saw Massacre very well. A melodic score might have been utterly wrong for Inception. Bernard Herrmann knew that for some scenes, you want anything but melody. Kubrick toyed with melodic and non-melodic extremes in his films. We can count the melodies in Johansson's collaborations with Villeneuve on one hand. Are these scores "bad", "of a lower quality" or "unworthy" simply because they lack hummable melodies? If that were the case, film scores no longer have to work in a film but rather, they should work as standalone compositions. I find that somewhat paradoxical to be honest.
Granted, some Bond music has a rich melodic tradition, even if almost everything Monty Norman threw in between the Bond Theme and Underneath The Mango Tree was about as melodic as the sound my refrigerator makes. Barry was the king of beautiful melody, but many of the others struggled with delivering memorable melodies overall. Did Hamlish give us great melody apart from the theme song, a poor attempt at musical comedy and mostly unused music on the soundtrack album? He too went for a few simple motifs and cues and little else. Bond 77? Hardly "his" music, and the bits he added to that had zero melody. How about Kamen, Martin, ...?
Serra went for a few melodic tracks, but most here reject his GE score. As for Arnold, he gave us the "Surrender" track, Vesper's theme and a couple more, but other than that, most of his scores were filled with "just sounds", not with melodies.
Bond music, overall, isn't so rich in melody after all, or so it seems. If it weren't for Barry, the count would be incredibly low. Compare this to Williams' scores for Star Wars, in which he gave almost every single character his own theme! And even he hasn't been too keen on composing that many big themes in the last couple of Star Wars films anymore.
If "melody", per this strange dogma, is some sort of conditio sine qua non, I'm afraid dark clouds throw large shadows over the Bond music.
You mention Kubrick, but he famously jettisoned Alex North's score for 2001: A Space Odyssey in favour of the classical temporary placement tracks he'd already cut the movie to. Would a present day Bond producer have the cajones to discard a Bond score if they didn't think it suitable for their movie? I think you know the answer.
Fortunately, Star Wars, still has John Williams composing its main scores, apart from Michael Giacchino and John Powell who stayed within the same musical landscape set out by Williams when composing their spin-offs. I wonder how audiences will react when we finally get an ambient, synth score with no orchestra for a future Star Wars movie in the name of progress?
I don't agree with this at all, I'm afraid. Martin's score is chock full of lovely melodies, both based on the song and not (just listen to something like "Boat Chase", before the title song kicks in at the end) I would agree with Hamlisch and Kamen, the former's score never striking a chord with me beyond its title song and the latter being mostly a muscular American action score with latin flavour to spice it up. But, Conti's score, as much as I dislike its dated disco influence, also has some great melodies. And you're right about Serra - I'm not keen on his action music for reasons many already echo, but his softer, romantic cues are lush and work well both on their own and in the film. As for Arnold, well....if you remove the oft-denounced techno there is plenty there to chew on. Whether its memorable or not is down to individual taste, but I personally can repeat/hum most of his efforts. There are a few bum notes in the collection (mostly during DAD) but mostly they are quite strong.
So I certainly feel different in that I think it is most rather than some. Newman had them too, whether people like it or not, there are some really good pieces of music in both films (mostly, again, the romance cues).
I don't find scores bad because they are written to suit a film, by any means. Zimmer is a favourite of mine, and his scores are almost always built on a "hook" or motif, usually an initial 2 or 3 notes, that are repeated and bolstered by his atmospheric/electronic work so that it is easily manipulated to fit the action on screen. There's a big reason why a huge chunk of Zimmer scores (especially in the late 90s) were released and presented on album as four or five 10+ minute suites of ideas from the film rather than strict chronological cues. And some of those scores are among my favourites - I particularly adore Broken Arrow, Crimson Tide and The Peacemaker.
So while I do see where you're coming from, and I agree there is a place for both (and that one isn't always superior to the other), I do find Bond music to be extremely special in this regard.
+1!!!
This is a valid point, but it's also one of the reasons why I'd love to see Bond find a composer willing to not embrace that trend.
And yes, you're absolutely right, the likelihood is that despite this wish we'll continue to sound like croaky, groany old men longing for the glory days for some time to come. But hey, I'm game if you are!
*blares You Only Live Twice on the car stereo*
The genre is irrelevant. I think the point that @DarthDimi was making, was that a melodic score wouldn't work for a TCM film. Much the same was as lets say.... a goth rock score wouldn't work for Bond. That is how I read the post.