> The Little Prince / Le Petit Prince (2015) - ***½
> Hans Zimmer & Richard Harvey; add’l music by Ed Buller, Dominic
> Lewis, Nathan Stornetta,
> Czarina Russell & Benjamin Wallfisch; add’l programming by Dave
> Fleming; orchestrated by Harvey,
> Adam Langston, Philip Klein, Stephen Coleman & Andrew Kinney;
> conducted by Thomas Bowes;
> digital instrument design Mark Wherry; songs by Zimmer, Stornetta, Camille
> & Clément Ducol;
> music consultant Nick Glennie-Smith; accordion Graham Preskett; ‘Suis-moi’
> acoustic guitar Heitor Pereira;
> woodwind solos Richard Harvey; music wrangler Bob Badami; Cynthia Park as
> Zimmer’s assistant
> This feature film adaptation of the famous novella had a troubled release
> history, namely getting its U.S. theatrical release abruptly cancelled
> owing to financial disagreements between American and European producers
> and resulting in the film getting dumped on Netflix over a year after it
> came out in France - though the turbulence did nothing to dent the largely
> stellar reception it received from critics. With its director having
> previously overseen Kung Fu Panda, there was little surprise that
> composer Hans Zimmer would be along for the ride, though in this case he
> would give a co-composition credit to his old friend, sometime
> contributor, former provider of free studio space, and occasional supplier
> of MV/RC talent Richard Harvey.
> “Hans had a good experience with John Powell on the Panda
> movies. John, like me, comes from a classical background, and Hans felt it
> was time to collaborate with someone else, but not someone who was
> completely new. And we’ve always said we don’t work together enough. He
> said to Nick Glennie-Smith, ‘Why don’t we work on this,’ and Nick said,
> ‘Why don’t you get Richard involved,’ and in the end Nick quietly backed
> out and just left us to get on with it, which was incredibly
> selfless.”
> The work would end up feeling like two halves sewn together, with one part
> featuring charming songs by Zimmer and the French singer Camille Dalmais
> (all could’ve fit comfortably in any of Zimmer’s easy-going aughts
> comedies) and the other part closer to the whimsical fantasy sounds of
> James Newton Howard or Patrick Doyle. “They wanted a different approach
> that felt like art acceptable to France and Germany and Canada (where
> there’s a strong affiliation with the book) and fit with the magical
> realism. The original discussions involved French classical music, and
> even French film music. It’s like I was brought in as the classical
> specialist, and Hans looked after the songs.” The two moods never
> quite congealed, but they made for a wholly pleasant hour of music with a
> few standout passages. It was about as far from the bustling Dreamworks
> “house style” of music as you could get.
> “Bob Badami is the greatest little referee. Anyone with talent can
> produce a minute of great music, but to create a score that takes time
> standing back from it. You may think you wrote the best theme of your
> life. ‘Hey buddy, save it for your next movie.’ Bob watches the whole film
> twice a day, he tries things, he moves things around. He’s gotta be the
> best score wrangler in town.”
> Fun fact: Zimmer’s co-composer on 1995’s Something To Talk About
> played the accordion here.
So, do we know if Zimmer contributed anything at all to the score, or was that side all Harvey?
>
>
> Monkey Kingdom (2015) - ****
> Harry Gregson-Williams; orchestrated by Ladd McIntosh; score arranger
> Stephanie
> Economou; cello & electric cello by Martin Tillman; electric violin by
> Hugh Marsh
> This entry in Disney’s ongoing April-released series of nature
> documentaries focused on monkeys (duh) in Sri Lanka. Harry
> Gregson-Williams was a surprise composer choice, though he relished the
> chance to score a film that his kids could watch (it’s unlikely family
> movie night at Harry’s household would include Domino). It gave him
> the opportunity to do his own spin on the South Asian/orchestral fusion
> sound that Thomas Newman had been doing a few years prior in The Best
> Exotic Marigold Hotel, mixed in with some of the playfulness from his
> children’s scores of the aughts as well as his established affinity for
> woodwind solos. The resulting score was a serene joy, and an intriguing
> adaptation of Gregson-Williams’ style to a new genre.
> This would be the first credited compositional appearance of
> Gregson-Williams’ then-assistant and future Assassin's Creed
> Valhalla expansion releases composer Stephanie Economou, whom Harry
> met at a performance he did at UCLA.
I’ll need to check this out; Polar Bear was good.
>
>
> The Martian (2015) - ****
> Harry Gregson-Williams; also orchestrated by Alastair King & David
> Butterworth;
> possible uncredited add’l arrangements by Anthony Willis & Stephanie
> Economou
> Easily the best film Ridley Scott had directed in at least a decade, this
> adaptation of Andy Weir’s novel about an astronaut using his ingenuity to
> escape being stranded on Mars was a smash critical and commercial success.
> After using Harry Gregson-Williams for some last minute clean-up duties on
> both Prometheus and Exodus: Gods and Kings, Scott would
> finally ask the composer to write him a full score again (the two had last
> collaborated in full on Kingdom of Heaven, one of the finest scores
> of the prior decade even with Scott somewhat mangling its application in
> his theatrical and director’s cuts). “He did not spell out in musical
> terms where he wanted me to go. But he knows what he wants from his film.
> So if I were to write something that was too active, he would jump on
> that. He talks in terms of tone, shade, color. We didn’t need a darkness
> to Mars. That was counterproductive. It’s clear that if he puts a foot
> wrong it’ll kill him. Not to say that we didn’t make [the music] austere
> and threatening in places, but ‘majesty’ and ‘mystery’ are the adjectives
> Ridley used.”
> Large stretches of what Gregson-Williams wrote for The Martian are
> close to the sound palette that Harry often provided for the films of
> Ridley’s brother Tony, albeit without the aggressive tone and wilder
> experimentalism that often defined those works. It’s a smaller-scale mix
> of acoustic and electronic sounds at times, but it’s extremely appropriate
> in context, reflecting how intimate and human-centric the film often is,
> and also subtly aligning with all the science stuff going on. The richly
> textured environment (far beyond standard loops and thumps) was also
> fairly engaging on the corresponding album; for lack of a better term, it
> just sounded cool. The main theme proves extraordinarily versatile,
> and Gregson-Williams takes it through darn near every instrumental section
> by the end of the film. And the few moments that the score goes big and
> unleashes a more symphonic backing are astoundingly effective.
> A somewhat daunting element was the vast number of preexisting songs
> deployed in the film, a function of the script more than anything else.
> “The commander left behind her laptop, on which [our protagonist Mark]
> finds a bunch of music. He’s quite happy until he finds out it’s a bunch
> of 70’s music which he can’t stand. It wasn’t specified in the script that
> ‘this will be a David Bowie song’ or whatever. Ridley, the film editor,
> myself, and producers from Fox said ‘let’s try this or let’s try that’.
> There are many scenes in this movie that are quite bleak but the music
> could be quite bleak and it could work. Some moments were up for
> interpretation. There’s a great moment in the film where there’s a Bowie
> song playing out of which I needed to seamlessly come out of source music
> into score. My music cue had a very different purpose than what we just
> heard, but I needed to be in the right key and the right tempo and then we
> could leave it behind us.”
> The strong score was a testament to the value of Gregson-Williams taking
> that year-long sabbatical, and it was a genuine surprise that the film’s
> success didn’t lead to greater awards consideration for Harry’s music.
This one has been rapidly growing on me.
>
>
> 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi (2016) - **½
> Lorne Balfe; technical score engineers Max Aruj & Steffen Thum;
> electronic music programming
> Clay Duncan, Kevin Lamb & Michael Tuller; digital instrument design;
> Mark Wherry; orchestrated by
> Oscar Senén & Joan Martorell; conducted by Robert Ziegler; score
> technical assistants Joseph Cho &
> Sydney Harrison; electric cello Peter Gregson; score production
> coordinator Kelly Johnson; executive
> music production & synth programming by Hans Zimmer; Cynthia Park as
> Zimmer’s assistant
> TBTF discovery #25.
> “Movies that I would sit as a young teenager and look at were films
> like Bad Boys or The Rock. Sometimes I wish I could be
> telling you that it's a black and white Italian movie but it's not. Con
> Air and all these movies were what made me want to get into film and
> if Crimson Tide is on the television, that's me for the next two
> hours. I'm not leaving.”
> After nearly a decade of largely focusing on effects-heavy blockbusters,
> director Michael Bay would decide that Pearl Harbor wasn’t enough
> and opt for doing another adaptation of military history. But whereas that
> prior film was a romanticized period piece, 13 Hours would be a
> guy-heavy depiction of modern warfare, specifically the events surrounding
> a recent attack on the American embassy in Libya. Surprisingly, Bay’s
> longtime composer Steve Jablonsky wasn’t along for the ride, the why not
> being particularly clear (though with Jablonsky having several films come
> out in late 2015 and the first half of 2016 the issue could have just been
> availability). Balfe would claim he got the job after Hans recommended him
> when talking to Bay about ideas, and he was possibly a known commodity
> already given his additional music contributions to other instances of
> Bayhem.
> Balfe’s score has the requisite hybrid acoustic/electronic action -
> thumps, repeated string rhythms, and whatnot - but there’s a surprising
> amount of music that feels more textural, closer to early-stage Djawadi
> works or possibly a more abstract take on parts of Black Hawk Down.
> “The music needed to reflect the complex feelings the guys were dealing
> with. We stuck with more simple electronic soundscapes. Peter Gregson
> brought his electric cello and we created the feelings of isolation and
> abandonment that the men had to deal with.” It didn’t make for the
> most distinctive music, but it was a step up from the sometimes
> hysterically derivative material that Bay had usually demanded of
> Jablonsky to support Autobots and Decepticons.
Less derivative yes, IMO far less listenable. God, I hated this score.
>
>
> Kung Fu Panda 3 (2016) - ****
> Hans Zimmer; score production and new Father & Son theme by Lorne
> Balfe;
> ‘I’m So Sorry’ by Imagine Dragons; add’l music by Paul Mounsey; add’l
> arrangements by
> Stephen Hilton & Nathan Wang; score technical engineers Chuck Choi,
> Stephanie McNally,
> Max Aruj & Steffen Thum; orchestrated by Oscar Senén & Joan
> Martorell; orchestra conducted
> by Gavin Greenaway; London choir conducted by Matt Dunkley; China choir
> conducted by Eric Whitacre;
> piano solos by Lang Lang; Cynthia Park as Zimmer’s assistant, thank you to
> Germaine Franco & Kelly Johnson
> Kung Fu Panda was covered here:
> https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=111559
> Kung Fu Panda 2 was covered here:
> https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=113009
> Zimmer: “The Dark Knight movies took 10 years. That’s a chunky
> part of life. It’s the same for the Panda movies. I need to treat
> each one as autonomous. On this one I had free reign to call up Chinese
> musicians and just experiment.”
> The third time wasn’t quite the charm for the longstanding franchise, with
> this entry doing decent but unexceptional business in early 2016 and
> essentially ending Dreamworks’ grand plans for six movies (six!), though
> that didn’t stop the company from cranking out three subsequent seasons of
> related content on Netflix. Hans Zimmer was tagged as the sole composer,
> with co-composer of the previous entries John Powell no longer involved
> (its production may have overlapped with his second sabbatical, though
> rumors persisted that he didn’t have the best time on Kung Fu Panda
> 2). But while Zimmer did have a hand in a few pieces of music and was
> filmed interacting with several of the film’s instrumental soloists it is
> probably more appropriate to characterize Kung Fu Panda 3 like
> Madagascar 3 since the bulk of it was done by Lorne Balfe and his
> team (note the music credits being dominated by Balfe’s usual assistants
> and orchestrators). Ultimately it didn’t impact how consistent the music
> was with the sonic world established by the first two films, not only
> because Balfe had written a significant amount of music for Kung Fu
> Panda 2 but also because Powell team members Paul Mounsey and Germaine
> Franco helped.
> Balfe: “I remember the first time I worked on Kung Fu Panda just
> being always in awe of the music of John Powell. I felt so intimidated,
> and I just felt there’s no way I can get through this.”
> The legacy themes and whiz-bang action returned, and a new family theme
> penned by Balfe (somewhat replacing the exquisite theme for the panda
> village from the end of Kung Fu Panda 2 which Balfe claimed
> “didn’t work” when they tried using it here) was quite nice. But
> some of the new components were puzzling. The theme for the new villain
> Kai was derived from an Imagine Dragons song released in the middle of the
> prior year; maybe Zimmer thought up the idea while they were in his studio
> working on Transformers: Age of Extinction. Odder still was the
> presence of famed pianist Lang Lang in the credits, who only seemed to be
> deployed in a few places and for parts that didn’t seem to demand much
> technical skill, arguably making it seem like a marketing gimmick on part
> with Joshua Bell’s appearance on Zimmer’s Angels & Demons
> album. In theory, using the melody from Kung Fu Fighting (Celebration
> Time) as a secondary theme for chi was a bit on the nose, though in
> practice the applications of that idea were actually quite tasteful and
> made for some of the album’s more serene passages. These quibbles aside,
> the score was a reliably entertaining extension of the franchise’s sound,
> even if it fell a bit short of greatness.
> Zimmer: “Kids hate when you try to write funny [music]. You have to
> approach it as genuinely as you would any storytelling.”
Now this I loved. Strong themes, excellent action, tolerable comedy, and effective drama. Second favourite of the trilogy.
>
>
> Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016) - *½
> Hans Zimmer & Tom Holkenborg; add’l music by Steve Mazzaro, Andrew
> Kawczynski & Benjamin Wallfisch; orchestrated by
> B&W Fowler/Moriarty, Carl Rydlund & Kevin Kaska; conducted by
> Holkenborg & Nick Glennie-Smith; choir orchestrated by
> Eric Whitacre & Gavin Greenaway and conducted by Greenaway; technical
> score engineers Chuck Choi & Stephanie McNally;
> digital instrument design Mark Wherry; electric cello Tina Guo; drum
> orchestra including Satnam Ramgotra; vocalists including
> Dominic Lewis; technical assistants Jacqueline Friedberg, Julian
> Pastorelli, Max Sandler, Lauren Bousfield, Stephen Perone,
> Emad Borjian & Aljoscha Christenhuss; Cynthia Park as Zimmer’s
> assistant; score wrangler Bob Badami
> Man of Steel was covered here:
> https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=116951
> Zimmer: “After 11 years, here I sit again. The perception is that I
> know what I’m doing. But it’s not a repetitive job; you have to come up
> with something new. It’s very good to have somebody who in the privacy of
> your own paranoia you can go to and say ‘is this shit?’ Batman and
> Superman, they might be that strong, but one wrong note can really hurt
> them.”
> Batman v Superman is generally seen today as a huge failure, though
> director Zach Snyder’s army of ardent fans would of course argue
> otherwise. It dragged Bruce Wayne into Snyder’s grim, slow-mo Man of
> Steel aesthetic, with its sole innovation for the character seeming to
> be “hey, we had Superman kill last time, let’s have Batman kill too.” It
> represented a clumsy attempt by Warner Bros. to build a shared universe
> like Marvel’s less than two years after Sony’s similarly pained efforts to
> set up the Sinister Six in The Amazing Spider-Man 2. It produced
> probably the most righteously mocked line of dialogue in cinema history.
> It called itself Batman v Superman and had that fight be less than
> 10 minutes of a nearly 3-hour runtime more focused on a lot of dull plot
> and then on a big fight with a rubbery orc-like thing. And it made
> boatloads of money but not Avengers-level cash, catalyzing more
> corporate and creative anxieties that made the development of Snyder’s
> follow-up Justice League film a nightmare for almost all involved.
> Hans Zimmer & team’s music for Man of Steel had been perhaps
> the most divisive film score of the modern age, hated by most film score
> critics and more “traditionalist” film score listeners but aggressively
> adored by fans of the Snyderverse and/or of Zimmer. It was no surprise
> that he returned to score the sequel, though it was perhaps a surprise to
> see Tom Holkenborg (not yet shedding his Junkie XL moniker) elevated from
> contributor to co-composer status. Holkenborg had played a significant
> part in the development of Man of Steel without getting on the
> front cover of its album, and it’s possible that his more prominent
> placement here reflected his new standing as a more “known” composer in
> the wake of the commercial success of Mad Max: Fury Road. But
> Zimmer would say he originally wanted to handle the Superman parts and
> leave “my friend Tom” to write the Batman material, perhaps showing
> some initial reticence about having to reinvent his own musical
> reinvention of the character only a decade or so after Batman
> Begins. The division of responsibilities ended up being a bit muddled,
> as Zimmer would say he “couldn’t entirely let it go”, it being the
> brooding, minor key world of the Batman, while Holkenborg would say Zimmer
> focused on the emotional parts while he worked on “the action
> language.”
> Regardless of who owned what part, what ended up being the thing Zimmer
> most frequently mentioned in promotional interviews was fatigue.
> BvS was one of the last works he did before going on his first
> European concert tour, which he seemed more excited about than anything
> having to do with the film. He would infamously claim that he had
> “officially retired from the superhero business.” And he would be
> very transparent about how he “really struggled for eight weeks moving
> two chords around” trying to find a new vocabulary for Bruce Wayne
> that didn’t “betray” what he had done for the recent Nolan trilogy
> of films. Sure, one could argue that this wasn’t the first time Zimmer had
> given insight into months-long ideation periods (Pirates of the
> Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, for example), and sometimes what he
> described as challenging compositional periods ended up resulting in some
> stellar material (such as his admitted struggles with whether to lean more
> Western or more Japanese with The Last Samurai). But here the pain
> came off more like writer’s block, especially when you look at the end
> product, a work so multivariate in its flaws that one struggles to think
> of where to begin.
> - There are the new “darker, more ambiguous” Batman themes. One is
> the same note hammered over and over again, funny not only because it was
> a predictable Zimmer technique at this point but also because Holkenborg
> did something similar in Mad Max AND because it was a reduction of
> Zimmer’s two-note Batman Begins motif - how about just one pitch
> now?
> - Ideas and sounds from the prior film are marginalized. Somewhat of that
> is undoubtedly a function of Zimmer trying to treat sequels as
> “autonomous” entries so he doesn’t repeat himself. One could also
> argue this is the inevitable result of Zimmer originally planning to cede
> control of the Batman material but then taking his eye off the ball. Bits
> and pieces of Man of Steel do pop up, including in some odd places
> - some Zod-related action material in the titular fight scene, for example
> - but the one great theme from the 2013 film barely appears at all, and
> nothing approaches the wow factor of that idea’s ultra-cool usage in
> Flight, which was the track that even those who didn’t like
> Man of Steel’s music would point to and say “THAT was good.” Funny
> enough, this does help to make this score’s flop status distinct from
> Zimmer’s two comparable creative failures of the prior era (Modern
> Warfare 2 and On Stranger Tides) since those works were largely
> undone by how derivative they were.
> - A LOT of the score is murky sound design or standard action/thriller
> fare, and not even the kind where you could at least find an intellectual
> purpose for it like the bat wing sounds Mel Wesson put in Batman
> Begins. If you played someone a track like Must There Be A
> Superman? there was a nonzero chance they couldn’t say what movie it
> came from. This mostly sounded like everything else - Remote Control
> library music, in a way - and even the sole scene that tends to get
> praised in the movie (the brawny Batman warehouse fight) is
> disappointingly accompanied by a typical array of drums, loops, and
> distortions.
> - There is yet another final battle finale that sounds like it was ripped
> from King Arthur, continuing a trend of that perhaps being the only
> unsuccessful film whose music kept informing future Zimmer works - and a
> dozen years later, no less!
> I could go on, though there was one moment of exquisite inspiration: a war
> cry for Gal Godot’s Wonder Woman given an edgy fury by the electric cello
> playing of Zimmer’s occasional collaborator Tina Guo in probably her most
> notable appearance since she started working with him on Sherlock
> Holmes. It was a true team effort: Zimmer crafted the theme but
> credited Holkenborg for cracking the code on how to work it into the
> movie, and add’l music composer Steve Mazzaro would later talk about the
> work he did to triple-track Guo’s recordings to get them to sound “like
> a group of banshees.” The idea would make it into both Wonder
> Woman films, and it’s the only thing salvaging this snooze-inducing
> slugfest from a lower rating.
> Unlike the Dark Knight trilogy, Zimmer didn’t put much on the
> record about his opinion of this film, outside of some statements about
> how cool the shots in a promotional sizzle reel looked. It’s almost like
> Zimmer knew the film was an outright turkey, though the days where he
> would slag a film he worked on for not being any good (like Broken
> Arrow) were very much in the rearview mirror. His various “it was
> hard” comments were perhaps an acknowledgement that the music might’ve
> been a turkey too, and one gets the sense that many of his most ardent
> fans did as well. Whereas Man of Steel led to a whole bunch of
> online hullabaloo, there was minimal fuss about BvS. We all quietly
> acknowledged the music sucked and moved on.
This… was actually a teenage favourite, and I’m still fond of it.
> And it wasn’t even the only “superhero vs. superhero” movie that year
> scored by someone from this musical lineage!
> -----------------------
> Next time: that other “supe vs. supe” score.
Ah, Civil War. I used that one in an RPG game.
