>
>
> K-19: The Widowmaker (2002) - ****
> Klaus Badelt; add’l arrangements by Geoff Zanelli & Ramin Djawadi;
> orchestrated by KB, Robert Elhai & Brad Warnaar;
> ‘Suite for Orchestra’ and maybe more conducted by Valery Gergiev; ‘Voices
> of Light’ “arranged” by Walter Murch;
> add’l conducting, orchestrations, arrangement of ‘L’Internationale’, and
> help with ‘Reunion’ by Blake Neely;
> thank you’s to Henning Lohner & Hans Zimmer

> It’s also the first credited MV appearance of Blake Neely, a former
> orchestrator for film composer Michael Kamen and future maestro of the
> CW’s superhero TV series empire. “I was in Paris, Texas, with no
> connection to Hollywood or film making. (And don’t forget: no internet!) I
> majored in Linguistics with two minors in Russian and Japanese. At the
> time, my very supportive parents told me to choose a major that I could
> fall back on if music didn’t work out for me. When I told them I’d chosen
> Linguistics, my father said, ‘That’s not a fallback!’ And I said, ‘I know.
> Now I really have to make music work out!’

> Through a long and diverse set of circumstances, I made it to Los Angeles
> in 1991. In 2004, I finally saw my name on a movie poster for the first
> time. Hilariously, on my first poster, they misspelled my name as Neeley.
> But my first actual composer credit came 2 years earlier on the television
> series Everwood. Thankfully, they got my name right there.

> The first CD I ever bought was a Hans Zimmer CD, and to work with him so
> closely and now call him a friend doesn’t even feel real sometimes. I
> actually find myself wanting to work with other artists, [which] comes
> from working with Michael Kamen, because he had such success working with
> artists like David Bowie, Pink Floyd, Eric Clapton, and others.”

My little sister is a HUGE Neely fan a la his music for Riverdale and she loved hearing all of this.

>
>
> The Bourne Identity (2002) - ***
> John Powell; add’l music by James McKee Smith;
> orchestrated by B Fowler/Moriarty; guitars featuring George Doering;
> piano and ProTools operating by TJ Lindgren;
> Joel Richard assisted with programming; Daniel Lerner compiled the
> album

> Overall, this was definitely not as frustrating a standalone listen as I
> remembered.

> The second adaptation of Robert Ludlum’s spy movie (following a 1988 TV
> movie that aired in two parts and hewed more closely to its source novel),
> The Bourne Identity was plagued by studio mandated rewrites and
> reshoots, went over its budget, and had its release delayed by almost a
> year - yet it turned out to be a winner that would spawn multiple sequels
> and turn drama darling Matt Damon into an action hero. A more
> traditionally orchestral score by Carter Burwell (best known then and now
> for his work on films directed by the Coen Brothers) was ultimately
> tossed, though it is unclear if Burwell wanted to do a rescore or was even
> available. Powell was brought in and initially conceived of a mostly
> electronic score that would help keep costs down, though eventually
> strings would be added to lend more of a cinematic feel (trumpets were
> contemplated at one point by Powell but was “chastised by [director]
> Doug Liman if I sounded remotely Bond-ish.” Funny enough, its
> constantly churning string pattern might be the most recognized music from
> the picture (it’s either that or the drums, or maybe the Moby song
> Extreme Ways that’s consistently used in the series’ end credits).

> JP: “I had to sort of leave, fly the coop, and do Bourne Identity to
> make sure that Hollywood knew me as being something that was different
> from everybody else. The Bourne Identity was me reacting and doing the
> opposite of everything I was required to do when I was at Media
> Ventures.”

> Powell’s propulsive work was unintentionally innovative. It was a clear
> rejection of the larger-than-life, rock/orchestra/choir mash-ups and power
> chords that had been coming from Media Ventures, including his own
> earlier, admittedly derivative work on Face/Off. But it also wasn’t
> a throwback to the more muscular orchestral action classics of the 80s
> either; there’s not a trace of, say, Jerry Goldsmith’s Rambo or
> Basil Poledouris’ Robocop to be found. It was different - stripped
> down, agitated & nervy, unresolved. The percussion didn’t sound like
> anything else used in films at the time. There’s a catchy kind of cool to
> a lot of the proceedings, with electronics that feel nearly omnipresent
> but are rarely obnoxious (save maybe for the loop-dominated The
> Apartment), but Powell wasn’t using the 80s and 90s way of generating
> coolness by letting a guitar rip. The score gave the film a sense of
> unease, momentum, and occasionally heart, and it was seen as a key part of
> the film’s success.

> The score has been shown up on various online lists from time to time as
> “one of the greatest scores ever”, but it’s perhaps more fair to say it is
> an extremely consequential score rather than an overly compelling one. It
> feels like an embryonic, somewhat unrefined presentation of ideas that all
> would be better explored in the subsequent film in the series, although
> that score would lose a bit of this work’s edginess. Its themes and motifs
> are functional but not overly memorable, and the work is more focused on
> atmosphere and style (which works great for some listeners, but doesn’t
> for me). It perhaps represents an inflection point with action movie music
> where scores would start to become vastly more effective on film than they
> would be engaging as standalone album listens, something that would become
> more prominent over the next two decades.

> I do mean consequential though, and not just because Powell would write
> music for four future films by Doug Liman. This score would revolutionize
> the action genre for the next decade or so, with a host of films rushing
> to not just have a Bourne feel to their story and visual aesthetic
> (especially the quick-cutting, shaky camera work of the sequel), but also
> to have the Bourne sound. Powell would experience this firsthand by
> hearing his own music in the temp on a host of later projects but also
> encounter it in plenty of movies he had nothing to do with. A dozen years
> later he would say “it’s got to the point where I can barely watch
> television because everything sounds like that. I can even tell which
> piece they’ve been [referencing].” Powell was largely sick of scoring
> action films when he said that, though he would produce perhaps his finest
> score for that genre only a year after he did this one.

> The last four tracks on the commercially released album are not actually
> part of the film but are instead some of Powell’s conceptual demo suites
> that got him the gig. “Doug hired me not even knowing I’d been
> connected with Hans. He heard a demo that he liked, then he brought me in
> and I did some demos for him. He liked them and just from the
> conversations I had I knew he wanted something different.” While they
> are close to the final ideas used in the film, they are decidedly more
> aggressive and challenging to listen to; many listeners will probably want
> to skip these. The score received a very negative review from this site
> when it came out, and it seems these played a big part in that, though I
> don’t see the need to punish this score for what are basically bonus
> tracks showing the composer’s working process.

Nice to finally see some love for this score, Supremacy will forever be my favourite Bourne score, but I do have a soft spot for the first one and I thought it was a trailblazing action score. I always felt so sorry for John that his awesome score for The Bourne Ultimatum was so butchered by Greengrass when it was a perfect evolution of his Bourne sound, because the Identity is very stripped back, then on Supremacy the orchestra got a little bigger and more refined, then on Ultimatum (at least what you hear on the album) its a huge wall of sound and the (intended) finale was perfect. Greengrass is an idiot.

> Some comedy - According to Powell, Doug Liman took a dare to put Icy Hot
> (or something like it) on his balls if the film, then seen as doomed, made
> over $100m. “Six weeks later I got to watch him do that and run to a
> bucket of ice.” Also, Powell would show a hilarious alternate
> arrangement of this score at a later SAG/AFTRA event:
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s75JGNwf4Ps
>
>

That was hilarious, I'll never hear that theme the same way again.

Great job, my favourite so far.