Well, talking about recicling, I come to the point of this thread: WHAT'S WRONG WITH HORNER?

I just couldn't believe that he was using AGAIN the main theme from SNEAKERS - just to quote one...

Saw ENEMY OF THE GATES some weeks before and can say the same thing. This one was even worst, since he "cloned" William's theme from SCHINDLER'S LIST, note by note!

I know this are not news of any kind, but this completely ruin the movie experience for me, since I stop paying attention to the movie while trying to identify from where nasty Jimmy has stolen the next cue...

How does this guy keep getting jobs (when Philippe Sarde doesn't)? And when is the little kid gonna show and say "James Horner isn't wearing any clothes."

Oh, and Lux, you're so right, A Beautiful Mind is the biggest piece of nonsense to come down the pike in a while. I don't understand how people can be fooled and get so emotional over it. And come Sunday it's going to win Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Director, Best Supporting Actress, all undeservedly.

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Originally posted by Lou Goldberg:

How does this guy keep getting jobs (when Philippe Sarde doesn't)? And when is the little kid gonna show and say "James Horner isn't wearing any clothes."

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I believe the answer is on "Peter Cris" message above: the common people just LOVE to be manipulated with cheap and banal emotions - and we must admit, Horner is the king on doing this, followed close by S. Spielberg...

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Originally posted by Lou Goldberg:

Oh, and Lux, you're so right, A Beautiful Mind is the biggest piece of nonsense to come down the pike in a while. I don't understand how people can be fooled and get so emotional over it.

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Lou, do you think if I start to point some stars with my fingers will make me get Jennifer Connelly too??

I never tought it was so simple...

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Originally posted by Lou Goldberg:
When I heard the minimalism cue I thought, why didn't they just hire Glass.

[Message edited by Lou Goldberg on 03-19-2002]

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Excellent Idea!

K

YEP!
K

I LOVED THIS SCORE!

I know, hear, and see that all the usual criticisums levelled at it are valid, I'm not blind or deaf! But as a stand alone album this plays wonderfully. Perhaps the fact that I don't buy many of his albums has made me immune to his constant self borrowing?!

As for the film, I have no intention of seeing it!

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Originally posted by André Lux:

I can't even believe I am going to say this, but even HANZIMMER would be better than Horner these days!!

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Wow! Me and Andre are agreeing on something!!

Heh heh.

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Originally posted by lars b:
EXCEPT FOR THE FEMALE VOICE, THIS IS THE EXACT SAME OPENING CUE FROM 'BICENTENNIAL MAN'

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Which is, in the first place, the same theme from SNEAKERS...

I wonder how Phil Alden Robinson feels about echos of Sneakers appearing in subsequent Horner scores?

I'm wondering if Alden Robinson is actually well aware of Horner's excessive cloning work since the mid-90s. I mean, Horner did a great job scoring Field of Dreams and Sneakers for him in my opinion, but now you see Alden Robinson doing the new Jack Ryan picture (the last two of which Horner scored) to find a score by the great Goldsmith.

Dan

They don't care as long as what he "writes" for them works in their movies. They also don’t care about how it sounds away from the film. Remember, directors usually fall in love with a temp track and WANT composers to write derivative, sound alike cues. Also, most directors have tin ears and music is not something they really hear anyway.

Please note that not all directors are like this, some have a fine sense of music but even this type of director is susceptible to the dreaded temp track syndrome.

My brain kept hearing this theme we know from Schindlers List, but infact I was listening to an "original" composition and watching the movie Enemy at the Gates. Very poor and very sad. It annoyed me throughout the entire film.

The first track sounds like Sneakers...and it sounds like Bicentennial Man...but they aren't the same notes. Its a matter of style and orchestration...which is...yes...lazy.

But saying that it is a copy fest would be the same as saying the theme from Air Force Once is the same at the theme from Star Trek: First Contact...they are pretty damn close...but in structure only.

Furthermore, André and Lou, what is wrong with movies which offer STRONG EMOTIONS ? Every single movie and piece of art manipulates its audience, so please don't claim that these positively emotion-packed movies are the only guilty ones. Please remember that some people, like myself, don't have as exciting lives as you two seem to have - my kind of people WANT to FEEL EMOTIONS and thrust themselves into a more exciting world of fiction. But, yes, unfortunately this kind of "feeling the emotion" needs quite an extensive imagination.

André, if you claim A BEAUTIFUL MIND offers "cheap and banal emotions", I truly believe you hate every single movie coming from Hollywood. For me such as "cheap and banal emotions" mean movies like THE MUMMY RETURNS where the writers and the director were guilty of some major "audience manipulation" - which turned out to be embarrassingly cheap and banal.

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Originally posted by Ken S:
André, if you claim A BEAUTIFUL MIND offers "cheap and banal emotions", I truly believe you hate every single movie coming from Hollywood. For me such as "cheap and banal emotions" mean movies like THE MUMMY RETURNS where the writers and the director were guilty of some major "audience manipulation" - which turned out to be embarrassingly cheap and banal.
KEN

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Yes, you are right. I really despise this kind of manipulative movies, that thinks all the audience is formed by a bunch of fools and naive folks and therefore must "pull all the strings" for them to know exactly what to feel and when.

I don't like to be insulted and I like to think by myself. Is it because I have an "exciting" (sic) life? I doubt. More like I've grown up and don't need narrow minded people such as Ron Howard or James Horner telling me how I shall feel about a tale - specially when there's nothing important to feel at all...

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Originally posted by Kyriacos S:
[B]"Is James Horner TOTALLY incapable of writing anything slightly original?"

YEP!
K

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Well, I'm waiting patiently for you to tell us which scores of his are original?

My two cents: Aliens doesn't sound like anything he wrote before that (though he has used bits from that in lots of later films). Other than that, it all sounds eerily familiar.

Every damned track is lifted from something!

You hear Goldsmith's Capricorn One in there, Alien, Outland, some Holst, Wolfen/Star Trek II/Everything else pre-Aliens, that damed Gayane Ballet.........it's a crockpot of garbage (though amazingly, I still think it's Horner's only ass-kicker of a score).

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Originally posted by André Lux:

Well, talking about recicling, I come to the point of this thread: WHAT'S WRONG WITH HORNER?

I just couldn't believe that he was using AGAIN the main theme from SNEAKERS - just to quote one...

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Hey Andre! Guess what? It got nominated for an academy award over The Mummy Returns, Atlantis, & Final Fantasy.

Say what I'll say about Horner's output post 1995 when he really started to bug me, I continue to think many of his themes since are rather nice. I like Mask of Zorro and Mighty Joe Young for instance, not truly great scores but the themes are nice enough.

My personal favorites of his remain Sneakers and Field of Dreams.

Dan

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Originally posted by John Prytz:
Say what you will, pro-Horner or con-Horner, but at the end of the day he's laughing all the way to the bank! Me-thinks he must be doing something right!

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Well, me thinks we can say the same about Britney Spears and Jon Bon Jovi... but it doesn't make me feel better.

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Originally posted by Ken S:
It's somewhat bizarre that although I also like to think by myself (and that I do have a very strong but extremely open philosophy of my own), I'm still capable of enjoying this kind of manipulative entertainment.

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Please, don't take me wrong Ken.
I also am capable of being taken by manipulative movies - but only when there are at least a minimal truth on it.

What I can't swallow anymore is these pathetic movies which try to manipulate you for no especific reason, except to make you sympathize with it and increase their profits (not to mention the chances of winning Oscars).

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Originally posted by Chris Kinsinger:
The reader was horrified to learn that John Nash was a radical antisemite, among other dark attributes, and that these truths were conveniently ignored in telling the "true" story of Nash.

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This is exactly the kind of manipulative crap I was talking about...
They want you to love their movie, therefore will cut anything from the person's life that could raise any controversy or antipathy against it.

It's difficult for me to understand how and why Spielberg, Katzenberg and Geffen, all Jews, would ever have given a green light to this one.
You can't hide anything these days, but these guys must have thought that they could.

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Originally posted by André Lux:

Please, don't take me wrong Ken.
I also am capable of being taken by manipulative movies - but only when there are at least a minimal truth on it.

What I can't swallow anymore is these pathetic movies which try to manipulate you for no especific reason, except to make you sympathize with it and increase their profits (not to mention the chances of winning Oscars).

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Like the ridiculous ending to MISSION TO MARS with that most horrible CGI alien (yes, worse than Jar Jar) ever created emitting a single tear down his cheek as we watches the fate of the world? And Gary Sinise speeding off to live with them ever more?

I'll take Spielberg and Dryfus any day compared to that crap!!!!

Hell, I'll even take Russell Crowe, all of his bad makeup and his stars over the ending to that mishap!!!

But the whole issue of who Nash is in real life has little to do with the movie really. The movie says it's based on a true story but nearly every film that says that is followed by 2 hours of less than factual filmmaking.

Newsweek had a piece on Denzel Washington that suggested he lost an Oscar because one of the roles he played as a true story came under fire for its inaccuracy. Now Will Smith's film Ali is being accused of the same and both actors want to see if similar claims will keep Crowe from the Oscar. It probably won't, which will have the black film community calling foul, saying that the excuse which cost them Oscars just hid a more racist agenda. But this too is part of the same side issue.

All films, even documentaries, bend the truth a little. What matters is whether the film itself works on its own regardless of how it relates to facts it was based on. Most filmmakers try to make the true story support a wider theme of some kind and consider their film a success not based on how close things came to reality (unless they're really obsessive) but whether that theme got across to the audience.

That said, I was a little bothered that A Beautiful Mind white-washed Nash's life but only because that lie was used to promote the bigger lie which was the film's theme--that love and family and willpower and perserverence and living with all the middle-class values Ron Howard thinks we should live by will get you over the most severe handicaps to a place of personal happiness and social recognition. Howard may believe all that crap since he grew up with a charmed life, and he's been in Hollywood long enough to know people want to hear that message, but he's not down here working in the trenches like I am where I know better. His film is a house of cards rather than a pillar of granite. The fact that Nash isn't so noble in real life is only a part of the point, the whole point is that nobody is so noble (or should I say Nobel). If you shed tears in this film I think you bought into a fantasy you should know better than to fall for, and not a very-well crafted fantasy at that. And I feel that personally because I didn't cry myself. It's twisted logic, but since I respond to really beautiful and loving sentiments between people that I see in films, if I don't cry, it's because the film is in some way BS.

Dan--How do directors feel to hear their music re-used? They probably are too busy making films to watch anyone elses. Ron Howard has used Horner on a lot of pictures. Whatever Horner is doing Howard likes it. And not just Howard. I'm sure it's no secret in Hollywood that Horner is a thief--Hell, he comes out in newspaper interviews and SAYS he borrows stuff he likes. I asked earlier why he keeps getting jobs but I already know why--it's because he can rip off Enya and make a Gold record and get away with it. We're the only people who are likely to catch all his cribs, not the average audience. Although you can only do this so far: a lot of critics caught the Schindler's List crib in Enemy At The Gates and brought it up in their newspaper reviews (Hooray for them too!).

Ken--I'm not against manipulation in film the way some people guard against it (see the IFC Rant topic). I just insist that the films I watch make sense, that they aren't full of plot-holes or involve behaviors that people would never do, etc. If films try for a strong emotional response from me, they can get it provided they EARN it through work, charm, intelligence, surprises, etc. Trickery, formula, and cheap sentimentality don't cut it. I see through it and can't "let myself go anyway" any more than I can lower my IQ level. Howard L told me he thought I was being resistant and cheating myself out of a good time at the movies, that I'd rather feel smarter than, disdainful towards, and be "above the film" rather than just enjoy it. Utter nonsense. I can enjoy lots of cultures: high, low, and in-between, but one distinction I can't abandon is between I like it and I don't, between it's good IMHO or it sucks IMHO. The specific things I have against A Beautiful Mind I've already talked about in the Just Movies section of the Message Board under the What Have You Seen in February topic, go there, read what I have to say, agree, disagree, and return here and we'll talk about it, if you'd like.

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Originally posted by filmusicbuff:
The guy has become a hack! Talent sacrificed on the altar of popularity and expediency! Nuff said.

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That's just the way it is sometimes, like it or not. Popularity and expediency pay the bills, and film composers, like us other mortals, have to make a living and please those who hire them.

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Originally posted by André Lux:

Saw ENEMY OF THE GATES some weeks before and can say the same thing. This one was even worst, since he "cloned" William's theme from SCHINDLER'S LIST, note by note!

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If this is true (and I'd have to relisten to both scores to verify that) then why hasn't Williams sued Horner for plagiarism? I mean I keep reading on message boards how Horner steals/clones/borrows this and Horner steals/clones/borrows that, from all and sundry composers, yet the all and sundry in question aren't reacting or taking legal action. Perhaps its because the plagiarism isn't anywhere near as blatant as some film music fans are making it out to be.

The Catman