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When i first heard the score it just evoked 60's Bond perfectly!
Great film too.
Enigma was Barry's last I think. So he quit the game about 3 years before The Incredibles.
Also, with due respect, I think that Barry's style of music had run its course. I like the Enigma soundtrack very much, as its own thing, but Barry's magic felt rather out of place in some of the movies he graced with his music rather late in his career. Take Mercury Rising for example, a film that was sold to us as a hard-boiled thriller but was also softened by Barry's emotional yet ethereal and powerless, albeit very beautiful, music. I worship John Barry so please don't mistake my words for negative criticism; I merely think he was becoming a Mozart in a Death Metal concert.
I believe his experience with A-ha was not a positive one. According to Jon Burlingame's book, Barry said it was the end of the line, and that the process had lost its natural energy and began to be formula. The spontaneity and excitement had disappeared, he said, after introducing his 4th Bond actor to the role.
He appeared on film at the end of TLD for the first time (when Kara gives her concert in Austria, he is the conductor) and actually put out a full page ad in Variety to salute 25 yrs of Bond in the cinema: "Congratulations Cubby. It's been a great 25 years. Your friend, John Barry"
Did he get in a lot of fights with A-ha over writing the songs?
They released their version of the track too, which is quite different to the one appearing in the film and the film soundtrack. Their version is much worse.
Ha ha lol ...nice.
Bird wanted a classic Barry/Bond score. The two of us nerded out imagining how cool it would be if Barry wanted to really tap back into that side of himself.
We talked about tracking down the same mics, amps and guitars Barry had used back in the 60s.
Barry and Bird hit it off and John was onboard for a huge Pixar animated film.
John and I flew to San Francisco for his first presentation of themes. I begged to hear them. John pulled out his Walkman and hit play.
It was one slow, melancholy piece after another.
"Where's the Bond action music?"
Barry said he could write that in his sleep, that the real nut to crack was capturing the midlife angst of the superhero dad.
I wasn't too convinced.
The next day I got the call from Brad Bird.
"Well, that was interesting. But I sure would like to hear some action music."
To encourage that he sent Barry a storyboarded sequence of the the character of Dash being frantically chased.
Barry had never worked in animation. He was accustomed to working on final footage, not pencil tests and CGI roughs. The process grew frustrating for him and he wanted to quit the film. I begged him not to.
Brad was determined to make the best of the situation.
He suggested using Barry just to write some key themes and he would hire this young kid Michael Giacchino to adapt them into a score.
I negotiated a new deal, and Barry turned in a new batch of themes... all of them slow and none of them Bondian.
I was sure Bird was going to fire him. But Brad desperately wanted John to succeed and so did I. We were two fanboys who wanted our hero to soar again.
So we brainstormed and hatched a plan.
Brad had temp tracked the teaser for THE INCREDIBLES using Barry's score to ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE. We approached John to score the trailer knowing it was less abstract since it contained finalized footage. And the music was pure Bond.
John reluctantly played me his demo.
It was really good!
My only comment was that for about four measures it veered off into something that somehow sounded like it was from some Western. An easy fix.
John sent it off as it was.
Brad Bird called me all excited. We were finally getting somewhere.
He called John to rave and to give him a single note, to change a few seconds that sounded like cowboy music.
With that, John quit the film.
I don't think Barry could have done it. He had lost that "action" side of him a long time before. Take The Specialist (1994) for example, or Mercury Rising (1998). There's great jazz and powerful melodies everywhere, but action? Barely a few seconds. When people were screaming for Barry to take over from Arnold after TND, I always thought, "you want the 60s - 80s Barry but that artist is trapped in time."
Sounds like Giacchino would be a worthy composer for the next Bond film. Newman has been underwhelming and Arnold lacked Barry's eclectic powers of invention.
Michael Giacchino actually scored the third and fourth Mission: Impossible films. They are both worth checking out. The third has more of a raw, stripped-down quality that really allows the classic Schifrin theme to shine, and the fourth has more of a lush, sweeping, at times tongue-in-cheek, at times almost jazzy or cocktail-loungy feel to it. Personally I prefer the latter of his two M:I scores. I could see Giacchino really thriving with a big, classic, fun, comedic, winking at the audience kind of James Bond film.
(All that said, I do actually prefer Joe Kraemer's score for the latest M:I film, Rogue Nation, which is truly fantastic; and for Bond, I still prefer David Arnold above anyone else—Quantum of Solace being his best James Bond score since Tomorrow Never Dies IMHO.)
A) change his name to something pronounceable ;-)
B) score a Bond film
@Some_Kind_Of_Hero, I agree about QOS being Arnold's best score since Tomorrow Ne- well in fact, his best Bond score to date IMO. No shrieking sounds any more, no weird experiments with electronics, ... Finally, he was in command of his orchestra and, like Barry, had the good intention of scoring separate pieces for isolated scenes, rather than repeating the same stuff throughout the film. My ranking as far as Arnold Bond scores:
1) QOS
2) CR
3) TND
4) DAD
5) TWINE
My favourite Giacchino scores in no order:
His Star Trek stuff
His M:I stuff
The Incredibles
but most of all
Jupiter Ascending: poor film, great score!
I believe it's pronounced "Gia" as in "Ch-ch-ch-chia" and "chino" as in the pants—only singular. ;)
On Arnold: I'm not sure that I do necessarily like Tomorrow Never Dies better than Quantum of Solace. They're both different approaches to scoring Bond and it's difficult for me to place one above the other. QoS is just pure class all around, a very rich and sophisticated score. Then again, Tomorrow Never Dies has so many powerhouse tracks from "White Knight" to "Company Car" to "Backseat Driver" to "All in a Day's Work" as well as the 90s techo-cool of "Hamburg Break In" and "Dial-3-Send" and the beauty of "Paris and Bond" and "Kowloon Bay." They're both top-notch scores in my book.
I'd rank TWINE next, which follows closely in the pattern of TND with fantastic action tracks (highlights for me being "Going Down - The Bunker," "Pipeline," "Caviar Factory," and "Submarine") and much beauty (as in "Welcome to Baku," "Snow Business," and "Elektra's Theme"). Another very cool 90s score that doesn't quite live up to the smashing success of TND, but that doesn't exactly need to as far as I'm concerned for all it does right.
Then Casino Royale, which has two very strong themes in the tragic love theme that appears in "Vesper" and "City of Lovers" and the arguably underused "You Know My Name" theme that pops up most notably in "Blunt Instrument." "The Name's Bond...James Bond" is definitely a highlight capping off the score, but apart from select highlights I find Casino Royale to be overall a somewhat wanting, stripped-down approach that Arnold would turn around and get 100% right in QoS.
Lastly for me is Die Another Day, a score I still like very much but which perhaps goes overboard with the techno in areas. Arnold introduced a great new action theme and there really is a lot of interest throughout. I wouldn't go so far as to call Die Another Day a misfire musically (Madonna's contribution aside), but even if one were to, surely it must be granted that there is still a lot of great material from Arnold throughout: "Kiss of Life," "Wheelchair Access," "Jinx, James & Genes," "Whiteout," *ahem* "Some Kind of Hero?"
Back to Giacchino: I dig all the scores you've mentioned there. He certainly is at home with the big action blockbusters. (Haven't heard Jupiter Ascending yet, though. Sounds like I'll have to check it out!)
The Jupiter Ascending score, if you can track down the extended two-disc edition, is more than worth your time, I promise. Forget about the film if you don't want to watch it (though it's not THAT baaaad, it's just 4 films worth of world building, rules and myth crammed into one, full of clichés from the cross section between Star Wars and Harry Potter and with more questions asked than answered and a lot of WTF moments), just listen to the score as I have multiple times before finally seeing the film. It's the only epic element of the movie that truly stands out. There's an amazing love theme, glueing the whole thing together, some nice action pieces and a lot of dreamy moments. It's more Star Trek than Incredibles, it brings choirs and traditional orchestration, but wow, is he in command of his stuff or what?
On www.filmtracks.com, it was written that,
"While Jupiter Ascending isn't a prototypical "classic" score and has some slow portions, it's difficult to imagine what more Giacchino could have done with it. For this magnificent treatment of an undeserving picture, the composer finally achieves the highest rating. *****"
This track from the film is very 90's John Barry in style:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=M_QZw4mPx0A
To contrast his romantic side - I like some of his Jurassic World work also. You can practically hear the unveiling of a "super weapon" in Bond during the last 30 seconds of this cue:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=VifLQemd5Ek&list=PL2o_A-4R0CUTiplzSWIm4PmXmpM303Ml9
That's some high praise indeed. I listened to just the opening couple tracks on youtube and it does sound great. The softer parts remind me of Giacchino's Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, which is another score of his I really like.