For a few days now I've been listening to the scores I own of John Ottman. Admittedly this isn't a large collection and consists of Halloween: H20 (well, his rejected score), Superman Returns, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, and X2: X-Men United. For four years I've wanted to love his Superman Returns score. I just can't bring myself to love it. I love that he wove John Williams' original themes into his own. This is always a dangerous proposition (Just check out Don Davis' somewhat more successful take on it for Jurassic Park III) as those themes are almost always so strong that they're going to overwhelm any new material by a different composer (Christopher Young was moderately successful in the otherwise messy Spider-Man 3). I love John Williams' Superman music. It's what I grew up on. It - not Star Wars - is the reason that I'm a musician at all. My very first memory of a live orchestral performance is hearing the Superman March performed live when I was 6 or 7 years old. I wore out the first six minutes of a videotape I had of Superman: The Movie when I was a little older. All this to say that, basically, I had High Hopes. His music is nice enough but it doesn't really do anything out of the ordinary.
Anyway, this post was originally going to be about how I've really wanted to like Ottman's music in general and his Superman Returns score specifically. But I soon realized while thinking about it that there are a number of composers over the years that I've had high hopes for only to see them not pan out to much worth speaking about. Younger and older alike, there are several that - for me - fall into this category. Brian Tyler, Klaus Badelt, John Ottman, Steve Jablonsky are those who have partial memberships in my collection who I feel haven't "fulfilled" some kind of arbitrary "potential." This isn't to say that each of these composers hasn't had great moments or even great scores. It's just that none of them seems to have developed a "sound."
But, Herr...film scoring is about being a chameleon!
Rubbish.
Film scoring isn't about being a chameleon. It's about being flexible. That doesn't mean you can't have your own sound. Personally I think that film scoring is more akin to speaking multiple languages. You can speak them, but it's okay if you have an accent. Jerry Goldsmith had a sound. John Williams, James Horner and Hans Zimmer all have a sound. Even Alan Silvestri has a sound, for crying out loud!
What's the point? The point is that - to my ears - none of these have fulfilled the promise of their early days. These guys - and so many others - keep getting work because the people that hire them know what to expect from them (that they're probably not going to do anything unexpected). To be fair, this is to a certain degree the reason any composer gets hired in Hollywood. No one hires Elliot Goldenthal without expecting that you're probably going to get the unexpected. But he has a sound, too, and his music has a certain sense of theatricality and play to it that few others have.
As I was once told by a man who was a Hollywood music insider for a very long time: "In Hollywood, familiarity breeds content."
11 comments:
I agree about the fact that there are definitely some composers whose sound is very predictable.
Brian Tyler was like that for sure. I remember hearing his score for Timeline and being into that. Every score I got of his after that was a lot more of the same.
Now, out of the 10 albums of his I have, I could own Children of Dune and be completely fine with none of his others.
Of course, every score may have a couple of cues that are pretty awesome, no album is worth its own weight in time.
As for Ottman, have you heard AstroBoy? Its pretty awesome!
As for Jablonsky, my first experience with his was The Island. I loved the score. And his score for Transformers was pretty cool, even though it could be generated by any Remote Control/Media Ventures Alumn. I was really disappointed with his score to Gears of War 2 (I think Reipl, the original composer, should have been allowed to do the sequel).
I've heard chunks of AstroBoy online and it sounds pretty nice. I think part of my problem with his music is that he seems to try a little too hard to hit all the action in a scene rather than try to write an overall piece that captures both the action and the mood. A prime example of this would be his scoring of the Big Damn Rescue of the airplane in Superman Returns. I realize that John Williams' Big Damn Copter Rescue in Superman: The Movie does a lot of the same kinds of things, but it's also good composition. It doesn't go slogging through idea after unrelated idea without really grabbing onto one.
It's good to be able to do both, and rarely do you get/need to write exclusively one or the other, but I think Ottman tends to lean on the Mickey-Mouse Button a little too much.
I thought Ramin Djawadi did the original Modern Warfare? I know it was produced by Harry Gregson-Williams...
John Debney is a fantastic chameleon but almost too unpredictable for his own good.
Alan Silvestri has a "sound" because, I suspect, he's too technically limited to be deviant.
I thought The Island was a delicious spectacle for the ear, and that Transformers was a step up in that it presented bold thematic material that was conspicuously absent from the entirely of The Island. Transformers took the sleekness of The Island's top-shelf quality of mixing and combined it with the solid melodic writing of Armageddon, with subtle touches of Batman Begins and King Arthur, resulting in a fine action score. Unique? Perhaps not, but a milestone in the evolution of the group sound.
Sometimes I wonder if my music has a "sound" or if I'm too eclectic for it. It's something to seriously ponder, for all of us...
HA! Silvestri's sound: CHUG, CHUG, CHUG, THWAP, TRI-PL-ET TRI-PL-ET TRI-PL-ET, SMASH!
I love his action scoring. I can't stand his sappy, sickly-sweet romantic/comedy scoring.
wv: dialema
As an aside, if you look up Brian Tyler on YouTube you can find videos of him conducting some of his scores in session. You discover something very quickly about him: he's an absolutely wretched, horrid, terrible conductor.
It's actually pretty entertaining watching him try to remember (and watch his facial expression when he blows it) how to conduct a 7/8 pattern in his Dragonball Evolution score.
But this isn't about conducting. That's another post.
Reed, I think my first experience with Jablonsky's music was also The Island. It served the film really well, but it didn't do anything to blow me away. Then again, being the composer on a Michael Bay film can be kind of a thankless job. I know that the Bard has always been pretty high on it, but it doesn't do anything for me. The Bard's observation on his Transformers score, on the other hand, are quite astute. I think it's some of the boldest thematic writing to come out of a Remote Control production since it ceased to be Media Ventures. Maybe not the most original, but it certainly synthesizes everything that's great about that style of scoring and combines them into one score. Like you, I'm disappointed in his Gears of War 2 score (I think it sounds like leftover music from his Transformers 2 score) but I think his Steamboy score is really terrific.
Look, you shouldn't capitalize "Bard" unless you're talking about Shakespeare. I'm just the bard.
Actually, Brad, I think your first encounter with Jablonsky was the BMW short films, the Driver series, with Clive Owen. Alfredo put all the videos up on the hard drive in the composer studio so I could practice action scoring of my own. I believe Steve Jablonsky did the music for the one directed by John Woo, which I tried to rescore with Digital Performer. That was before Steve Jablonsky was known.
I still have to listen to the Steamboy score. It's just sitting there. In iTunes... waiting.
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