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Zimmer & friends pt 8i - TBTF 2013-16: Ramin’s 2016, Moana, Inferno [EDITED TWICE]

Zimmer & friends pt 8i - TBTF 2013-16: Ramin’s 2016, Moana, Inferno [EDITED TWICE]
JBlough
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Friday, December 23, 2022 (4:49 a.m.) 

This is part of a series.
- Here’s the last post on Civil War, Planet Earth 2, etc. - https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=117577
- If you want the full set of links covering the Too Big To Fail era or earlier, click on my profile.

-----------------------

Game of Thrones Season 6 (2016) - ****
Ramin Djawadi; orchestrated by Stephen Coleman; technical score advisors William Marriott & Omer Benyamin

Season 1 was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=112891
Season 2 was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=113090
Season 3 was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=117113
Season 4 was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=117220
Season 5 was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=117381

'The Stark theme is associated with goodbyes; it's very emotional. When we first started meeting for season six, we decided Jon Snow would definitely have his own theme this season. At the Battle of the Bastards, we used Jon's theme a lot because it was all about him and his mistakes and thinking it was over. That was not really an overall Stark moment — it was really personal.”

The sixth season of HBO’s hit series spent its first half duplicating the narrative wheel-spinning of its fifth season, but the back half of the season - and especially the standout sequences of its last two episodes - would redeem the show and create tons of optimism for the final two seasons (little of which would be satisfied). Much of Djawadi’s score would be an expansion of what already worked (as the music of the last several seasons had been), though this time realized on a more “epic” scale, and there was additional structural sophistication at times that was incredibly satisfying, including a final track that intertwined the Greyjoy and Dany themes. But what really made this the show’s strongest season of music was the season finale’s trial sequence.

The show’s music had tended to play a background role on the dialogue-heavy show (“very rarely do we have long pieces”), but here we had a 10-minute piece with a lot of new sounds: organ, boy choristers, piano. ”It needed to be new. Any theme could tip the audience. Miguel, the director, said, ‘what about piano?’ Why not? We experimented with the harp, but the harp was not as haunting. It was very fun to build. The big orchestra, the strings, don’t even come in until the very last minute or so.” The piece, Light of the Seven, lent a layer of tension, ambiguity, momentum, and eventually explosive power to elevate a strong series of scenes into something special. Its swift appearance in the upper echelons of Spotify’s global streaming rankings (an astonishing accomplishment for TV music, given how the genre had historically been viewed as second-tier scoring) was proof not just of Djawadi’s remarkable achievement but also of the show’s expanding dominion over the pop culture landscape.

Thrones wasn’t the only evidence that year that Djawadi had matured as a composer. It wasn’t even the only one from TV!


Westworld Season 1 (2016) - ****
Ramin Djawadi; orchestrated by Stephen Coleman & Andrew Kinney;
technical score advisors William Marriott & Omer Benyamin

Sure, Westworld may have gone off the rails narratively in later seasons, but don’t let that diminish how superb the HBO show’s first season was, or how overachieving Djawadi’s music from the first 10 episodes turned out to be. He would get the gig thanks to his relationship with showrunner Jonah Nolan; the two worked together on the CBS series Person of Interest for years. Perhaps taking a cue from the well-known Vitamin String Quartet arrangements of pop songs (a few of which showed up in the series), Nolan would suggest Djawadi incorporate the songs of Radiohead, Soundgarden, and others into the show’s aesthetic. Some were arranged to sound like they were coming from the honky tonk pianos in the theme park. Others received more expansive arrangements, a notable highlight being the Rolling Stones’ Paint It Black redone as orchestral action music. “I’m happy he’s picking these songs. It’s reminding the audience that: ‘Wait, this is a theme park, you’re not really back in time’. Something is not right here. It’s all fake.”

While those arrangements got the lion’s share of media attention, Djawadi’s score was equally impressive. One could have expected with all the tech on screen and typical TV music budgets for Ramin to produce something close to the sound design scores of his early days. But Djawadi had evolved from the guy who did, say, Prison Break - and clearly had that sweet, sweet HBO cash supporting a bigger budget. His music straddled the line between traditional Western and creeping technothriller without going too far in either direction, and his wide array of ambiguous melodies were often intoxicating (the drifting Dr. Ford perhaps the best), almost going into Thomas Newman territory at times instead of typical Remote Control vibes.


Warcraft (2016) - ****
Ramin Djawadi; add’l music by Brandon Campbell; orchestrated by Stephen Coleman, Andrew Kinney, Tony Blondal &
Matt Dunkley; percussion orchestrators Henri Wilkinson & Edward Trybek; conducted by Gavin Greenaway; technical score
advisor William Marriott; assistant score engineers Laurence Anslow & Adam Miller; thank you to Hans Zimmer

Another year, another failed video game movie, this one a long-gestating film adaptation of the smash success massively multiplayer online role-playing game series that managed to outearn all previous video game adaptations at the box office and still lost money for its studio, though the only consequence of this seemed to be crippling the once-promising directing career of David Bowie’s son Doug Jones. Ramin Djawadi’s assignment made sense since he was the preeminent writer of fantasy adaptation music at the time, but while there are several similarities between this and what he’d been churning out for Thrones (world music winds, a reliance on low strings, and even a recycled secondary theme), the music of Warcraft is a brawny affair that has more in common with the churning rhythms and domineering brass of Pacific Rim and very much wears its emotions on its sleeve at times. Sure, one could argue that these stylistic constructs had been done to death by others at this point, though that would overlook the sheer energy overflowing from the performing ensemble as well as some unnecessary touches (throat singing!) and a deep bench of above-average themes.

It was the guilty pleasure score of the year - unless you felt even more guilty about liking Djawadi’s superior action/fantasy work from later in the year.


The Great Wall (2016) - ****½
Ramin Djawadi; add’l music by Brandon Campbell; orchestrated by Stephen Coleman & Andrew Kinney; conducted by
Gavin Greenaway; technical score advisors William Marriott & Omer Benjamin; assistant / add’l score engineers
Laurence Anslow, Alex Ferguson, Tom Bailey & Olga Fitzroy; thank you to Hans Zimmer

Sure, today The Great Wall plays more like a shrug-inducing blockbuster than an outright fiasco, with a few scenes that display the visual flair of Zhang Yimou’s more famed wuxia films Hero and House of Flying Daggers. But even after the recent turmoil in the cryptocurrency industry and the online mockery over his recent crypto.com commercial appearance, actor Matt Damon would probably be fine with you remembering his appearance in that spot if it meant you forgot his appearance in this U.S./Chinese fantasy co-production that starred him as a longhaired Irishman (yes, really) fighting monsters alongside Chinese warriors in colorful armor. LIke the aforementioned Hacksaw Ridge, this was another project James Horner was tagged to before his untimely demise. It’s unclear if a composer of Horner’s stature could have salvaged the film, but Ramin Djawadi gave it a go anyway and produced probably his most accomplished score to date, one that took his jagged Clash of the Titans rhythmic style and bolstered it with an array of Eastern inflections, vocals, and specialty instruments, not to mention several themes that are just dang catchy. It’s an energetic delight, basically the Too Big To Fail era equivalent of Klaus Badelt’s The Promise. And like John Powell’s Pan, it almost tricks you into thinking you’re watching a better film at times.


Moana (2016) - ****
Mark Mancina; songs by Lin-Manuel Miranda, Opetaia Foa'i & Mancina; songs & score orchestrated &
arranged by Dave Metzger; vocal arrangements by Foa'i & Metzger; conducted by Don Harper

TBTF discovery #29.

Return to Paradise was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=107875
Tarzan was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=108037
Brother Bear was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=108458

Miranda: “When Sebastian began singing a Caribbean calypso number [when I was nine], my life [was] never the same.”

Foa’i: “I have dedicated 20 years of my life to telling the stories of my ancestors onstage. We know if something's fabricated.”

Metzger: “We would write English phrases on what we’d just seen, about 20 like that for different parts. Opetaia would translate into Tanganese, and we would have him speak and write our vocal parts from that so what you hear is not just aaas and ooos.”

Mancina: “I had no idea Hamilton would be the biggest thing. [Lin-Manuel said he was writing it and] I said, ‘that’s cool.’ He went from somewhat unknown to people calling me saying, ‘How’d you get that chance?’”

When Moana was released around Thanksgiving 2016, the appearance of Lin-Manual Miranda, the creative force behind the Hamilton rap musical that had taken Broadway by storm a year before, seemed like coattail-riding on Disney’s part, but Miranda had actually been tagged to the film since 2013, back when he was was more known for his 2005 musical In the Heights. Disney wanted a film that blended South Pacific culture with Broadway sensibilities and paired him with Opetaia Foa’i, the Samoan frontman behind the Oceanic music group Ta Vaka. Along for the ride was composer Mark Mancina, who had an history with Disney’s song heavy animated films from arranging for The Lion King and scoring Tarzan and Brother Bear, plus Disney’s animation boss John Lasseter loved his last-minute replacement score for Planes - saying it featured the best theme ever written for one of his movies - and had vowed to keep using him.

A tour of a New Zealand dance festival for the three of them helped get the creative juices flowing, leading to the first song being written in December 2013, though work became a bit challenging later on according to Mancina. “Lin-Maneul’s very spontaneous. He just comes up with lyric ideas. The one thing that was a drag was when [he] became the most famous man in the world, it was just hard to schedule being together, so we ended up working by video conference. That worked, but I had so much fun with them in the studio working together. We could have written this movie 10 times over if we had been together.”

The songs were all adequate - only How Far I’ll Go was a true knockout - but on the flipside they were more consistent than those of Disney’s recent Frozen which had the world-dominating Let It Go but also the clunker Fixer Upper. Also helping was the level of coherence between the songs and the score, supported both by Mancina’s involvement in their creation and by Mancina’s usual orchestrator Dave Metzger doing many of the song arrangements. Metzger would later detail how this worked for You’re Welcome, Dwayne Johnson’s big song. “Lin provided a basic vocal track, kind of a drum machine groove and chord changes. My job was to expand it out into the complete rhythm section, all the horn and string parts. I came up as a jazz musician when I was young [and] was Maynard Ferguson’s main arranger for a couple of years, so I immediately went there to capture Maui’s bravado. Mark [had] recorded Opetaia’s ensemble [playing] percussion and fit them into the song.”

Mancina’s score is never less than capable and is occasionally quite strong, and the composer should be commended for incorporating the song melodies throughout, but on the whole it does seem to take more of a complementary role relative to the songs, at least until the big finale. Still, longtime listeners may recall Mancina’s commitment to integrating regional components and recording things live instead of using samples on earlier works like Return to Paradise, and those attitudes were also very much present in this score, considering the frequent use of Polyneisian vocals, traditional war chants, bamboo woodwinds, and hide-covered drums. “We didn’t want it to sound like a Polynesian documentary, [but] we wanted to salute their culture.” The relentless percussive intensity at times recalls the pounding fun of the composer’s underrated music for Speed 2: Cruise Control. And, whereas Mancina’s earlier work on Disney musicals had been unfortunately linked to album releases that barely featured any of his music in favor of the songs, here darn near every note he wrote was commercially released.

Mancina: “[It’s] disappointing La La Land won everything we were up for. I didn’t like La La Land. I just thought Moana was such a strong statement.”

Alas, Mancina’s rotten luck with collaborators continued. Two decades after the directing career of Mancina’s chief “patron” Jan de Bont was wrecked by Speed 2: Cruise Control, Lasseter was deposed in the wake of assorted #MeToo revelations about workplace misconduct and how uncomfortable he’d made female coworkers over the years. Mancina would get a handful of scoring gigs in subsequent years (including another aquatic animated film), but none approached the stature of Moana.

Mancina: “[In a lot of Europe] it’s called Vaiana because Moana is a porn star in Italy.”


Hidden Figures (2016) - ***½
Hans Zimmer, Pharrell Williams & Benjamin Wallfisch; orchestrated by David Krystal, Edward Trybek,
Henri Wilkinson, Kory McMaster & Sean Barrett; conducted by Timothy Williams; add’l choir arrangements
Kirk Franklin; technical score engineers Chuck Choi & Stephanie McNally; score technical assistant
Max Sandler; solo piano Herbie Hancock; Cynthia Park as Zimmer’s assistant

TBTF discovery #29.

Pharrell: “One of the things I learned from [Hans] about scoring is objectivity asking, ‘This may sound good, but what does it do? What does it mean?’ The music always needs to be supporting the story.”

This dramatic telling of the largely forgotten contributions of African American mathematicians at NASA during the 1960s Space Race emerged to strong reviews, a very profitable performance at the box office, and major awards attention. Pharrell Williams saw the script before a director was even attached and got involved as a producer. The singer-songwriter had an established friendship with Hans Zimmer - he’s the guy who successfully goaded Zimmer into doing a concert tour - so it made sense that the two would collaborate on the score. It was no surprise that Zimmer, Mr. “don’t do the expected”, wanted to avoid the standard music of space astronaut movies; heck, quite recently he had deliberately avoided Copland-like Americana on Interstellar. But it was a surprise that Benjamin Wallfisch moved from the behind-the-scenes role he’d had on projects over the last few years to having a prominent co-composer credit on the album cover. Pharrell would describe the collaboration by saying “Hans likes to find the poetry in a script and then parallel it with the score, Ben is a seeker of tenderness, and I stoke fires.”

The team would operate within the conventions of drama movie scoring, with themes that are perhaps a tad elusive, but there was still a commendable effort to give the score some of the flavor of African American music, leading to lots of little touches that help make the work feel more distinctive: blues rhythms, jazz trumpet, keyboards, and solo gospel vocals. One could speculate that the latter was perhaps due to Zimmer’s urging, as his obsession with the female voice had been a constant throughout most of his career, if not most of his life considering how often he credits hearing Edda Dell'Orso’s singing in Once Upon A Time In The West as the foundation of his film music interest.

Pharrell loved the experience. “Most scores, the progressions and the melodic direction [have] a Euro or Anglo basis. Our challenge was to have something more reflective of how Katherine, Dorothy and Mary must have been feeling.” If there was any disappointment for listeners, it was that there wasn’t any obvious cohesion between the score and the songs Pharrell also wrote.


Inferno (2016) - **
Hans Zimmer; add’l music by Steve Mazzaro, Andrew Kawczynski, Richard Harvey, Michael Tuller & Paul Mounsey;
technical score engineers Chuck Choi & Stephanie McNally; orchestrated by Oscar Senén & Joan Martorell;
conducted by Johannes Vogel; digital instrument design Mark Wherry; technical assistants Jacqueline Friedberg,
Julian Pastorelli & Lauren Bousfield; Cynthia Park as ZImmer’s assistant; score wrangler Bob Badami

TBTF discovery #30.

The Da Vinci Code was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=109244
Angels and Demons was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=111761

“There are certain films which are more personal; Lion King was written for my daughter. [But for Inferno], Ron said ‘hey, you wanna do another Langdon movie?’”

A decade after The Da Vinci Code was a big hit and seven years after Angels and Demons slightly underperformed at the worldwide box office, Tom Hanks and Ron Howard would reunite for another adaptation of Dan Brown’s novels about symbology professor Robert Langdon. Coming well after enthusiasm for the initial entry had dried up and presenting a very different type of story (Langdon rushing to stop a bioweapon instead of solving religious mysteries), the film would be the worst-reviewed and lowest-earning of the series. Zimmer had headlined the previous two scores, but although his name was on the front of the album Inferno feels like one of those scores where he played the role of a supervisory producer (if even that), considering his usual orchestrators weren’t involved, nearly all cue sheet credits mention his assistants Steve Mazzaro and Andrew Kawczynski, and he was touring Europe that summer. But Zimmer clearly informed the work somehow as it took two of his long-standing principles (don’t do the expected and treat sequels as autonomous entities) to their extremes.

Gone for the most part are any of the religious or operatic overtones that informed the earlier Langdon scores. In their place are a host of abrasive electronics. Zimmer would refer to the retro nastiness of it all as “reckless experimentation”, but that would imply we hadn’t heard all of the contained action / suspense techniques done to death in other MV / RC scores over the last 20+ years. Even the skittering off-tune piano from the 1990s reappears! Instead of closing out this scoring trilogy with a bang and with some coherence, Zimmer and team basically gave us CHAPPiE 2, but without the unbridled lunacy that made the actual music for CHAPPiE hold up in spite of its flaws. It is tempting to just say, quite simply, “fuck this score.”

But the score did take its legacy themes, including the franchise identify from the first film’s Chevaliers de Sangreal and the second film’s Science & Religion idea, in intriguing directions in a few tracks, and that fealty to what came before ultimately salvaged the work from a lower rating. It’s not all bad. But, as with Batman v Superman, there’s a curious air of indifference that hangs over the material. No wonder Zimmer took a break from film scores to go on that concert tour.

-----------------------

Next time: Oh, right…the concert tour!


(Message edited on Friday, December 23, 2022, at 4:50 a.m. and Saturday, December 24, 2022, at 7:23 a.m.)


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Re: Zimmer & friends pt 8i - TBTF 2013-16: Ramin’s 2016, Moana, Inferno
jjstarA113
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Friday, December 23, 2022 (6:15 a.m.) 

> Mancina: “[It’s] disappointing La La Land won everything we were
> up for. I didn’t like La La Land. I just thought Moana was
> such a strong statement.”

Okay, I GOTTA know where that quote of Mark Mancina talking shit about La La Land comes from! 😂


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Re: Zimmer & friends pt 8i - TBTF 2013-16: Ramin’s 2016, Moana, Inferno
JBlough
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Friday, December 23, 2022 (7:14 a.m.) 

> Okay, I GOTTA know where that quote of Mark Mancina talking shit about La La Land comes from! 😂

He said this in an interview last year with the YouTube channel VHS Podcast which touched on all his Disney contributions.


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Re: Zimmer & friends pt 8i - TBTF 2013-16: Ramin’s 2016, Moana, Inferno
Riley KZ
(ip-104-224-113-101.xplore.ca)
Profile Picture
Friday, December 23, 2022 (7:34 a.m.) 

> This is part of a series.
> - Here’s the last post on Civil War, Planet Earth 2, etc. -
> https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=117577
> - If you want the full set of links covering the Too Big To Fail era or
> earlier, click on my profile.

> -----------------------

> Game of Thrones Season 6 (2016) - ****
> Ramin Djawadi; orchestrated by Stephen Coleman; technical score
> advisors William Marriott & Omer Benyamin

> Season 1 was covered here:
> https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=112891
> Season 2 was covered here:
> https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=113090
> Season 3 was covered here:
> https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=117113
> Season 4 was covered here:
> https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=117220
> Season 5 was covered here:
> https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=117381

> 'The Stark theme is associated with goodbyes; it's very emotional. When
> we first started meeting for season six, we decided Jon Snow would
> definitely have his own theme this season. At the Battle of the Bastards,
> we used Jon's theme a lot because it was all about him and his mistakes
> and thinking it was over. That was not really an overall Stark moment — it
> was really personal.”

> The sixth season of HBO’s hit series spent its first half duplicating the
> narrative wheel-spinning of its fifth season, but the back half of the
> season - and especially the standout sequences of its last two episodes -
> would redeem the show and create tons of optimism for the final two
> seasons (little of which would be satisfied). Much of Djawadi’s score
> would be an expansion of what already worked (as the music of the last
> several seasons had been), though this time realized on a more “epic”
> scale, and there was additional structural sophistication at times that
> was incredibly satisfying, including a final track that intertwined the
> Greyjoy and Dany themes. But what really made this the show’s strongest
> season of music was the season finale’s trial sequence.

> The show’s music had tended to play a background role on the
> dialogue-heavy show (“very rarely do we have long pieces”), but
> here we had a 10-minute piece with a lot of new sounds: organ, boy
> choristers, piano. ”It needed to be new. Any theme could tip the
> audience. Miguel, the director, said, ‘what about piano?’ Why not? We
> experimented with the harp, but the harp was not as haunting. It was very
> fun to build. The big orchestra, the strings, don’t even come in until the
> very last minute or so.”
The piece, Light of the Seven, lent a
> layer of tension, ambiguity, momentum, and eventually explosive power to
> elevate a strong series of scenes into something special. Its swift
> appearance in the upper echelons of Spotify’s global streaming rankings
> (an astonishing accomplishment for TV music, given how the genre
> had historically been viewed as second-tier scoring) was proof not just of
> Djawadi’s remarkable achievement but also of the show’s expanding dominion
> over the pop culture landscape.

> Thrones wasn’t the only evidence that year that Djawadi had matured
> as a composer. It wasn’t even the only one from TV!
>
>

> Westworld Season 1 (2016) - ****
> Ramin Djawadi; orchestrated by Stephen Coleman & Andrew Kinney;
> technical score advisors William Marriott & Omer Benyamin

> Sure, Westworld may have gone off the rails narratively in later
> seasons, but don’t let that diminish how superb the HBO show’s first
> season was, or how overachieving Djawadi’s music from the first 10
> episodes turned out to be. He would get the gig thanks to his relationship
> with showrunner Jonah Nolan; the two worked together on the CBS series
> Person of Interest for years. Perhaps taking a cue from the
> well-known Vitamin String Quartet arrangements of pop songs (a few of
> which showed up in the series), Nolan would suggest Djawadi incorporate
> the songs of Radiohead, Soundgarden, and others into the show’s aesthetic.
> Some were arranged to sound like they were coming from the honky tonk
> pianos in the theme park. Others received more expansive arrangements, a
> notable highlight being the Rolling Stones’ Paint It Black redone
> as orchestral action music. “I’m happy he’s picking these songs. It’s
> reminding the audience that: ‘Wait, this is a theme park, you’re not
> really back in time’. Something is not right here. It’s all fake.”

> While those arrangements got the lion’s share of media attention,
> Djawadi’s score was equally impressive. One could have expected with all
> the tech on screen and typical TV music budgets for Ramin to produce
> something close to the sound design scores of his early days. But Djawadi
> had evolved from the guy who did, say, Prison Break - and clearly
> had that sweet, sweet HBO cash supporting a bigger budget. His music
> straddled the line between traditional Western and creeping technothriller
> without going too far in either direction, and his wide array of ambiguous
> melodies were often intoxicating (the drifting Dr. Ford perhaps the
> best), almost going into Thomas Newman territory at times instead of
> typical Remote Control vibes.

Still haven't listened to any GoT albums nor Westworld. Wanted to, got good advice on which albums/playlists to start with, just...didn't have the time.

>
>

> Warcraft (2016) - ****
> Ramin Djawadi; add’l music by Brandon Campbell; orchestrated by Stephen
> Coleman, Andrew Kinney, Tony Blondal &
> Matt Dunkley; percussion orchestrators Henri Wilkinson & Edward
> Trybek; conducted by Gavin Greenaway; technical score
> advisor William Marriott; assistant score engineers Laurence Anslow &
> Adam Miller; thank you to Hans Zimmer

> Another year, another failed video game movie, this one a long-gestating
> film adaptation of the smash success massively multiplayer online
> role-playing game series that managed to outearn all previous video game
> adaptations at the box office and still lost money for its studio, though
> the only consequence of this seemed to be crippling the once-promising
> directing career of David Bowie’s son Doug Jones. Ramin Djawadi’s
> assignment made sense since he was the preeminent writer of fantasy
> adaptation music at the time, but while there are several similarities
> between this and what he’d been churning out for Thrones (world
> music winds, a reliance on low strings, and even a recycled secondary
> theme), the music of Warcraft is a brawny affair that has more in
> common with the churning rhythms and domineering brass of Pacific
> Rim
and very much wears its emotions on its sleeve at times. Sure, one
> could argue that these stylistic constructs had been done to death by
> others at this point, though that would overlook the sheer energy
> overflowing from the performing ensemble as well as some unnecessary
> touches (throat singing!) and a deep bench of above-average themes.

> It was the guilty pleasure score of the year - unless you felt even more
> guilty about liking Djawadi’s superior action/fantasy work from later in
> the year.

Fun score.

>
>

> The Great Wall (2016) - ****½
> Ramin Djawadi; add’l music by Brandon Campbell; orchestrated by Stephen
> Coleman & Andrew Kinney; conducted by
> Gavin Greenaway; technical score advisors William Marriott & Omer
> Benjamin; assistant / add’l score engineers
> Laurence Anslow, Alex Ferguson, Tom Bailey & Olga Fitzroy; thank you
> to Hans Zimmer

> Sure, today The Great Wall plays more like a shrug-inducing
> blockbuster than an outright fiasco, with a few scenes that display the
> visual flair of Zhang Yimou’s more famed wuxia films Hero
> and House of Flying Daggers. But even after the recent turmoil in
> the cryptocurrency industry and the online mockery over his recent
> crypto.com commercial appearance, actor Matt Damon would probably be fine
> with you remembering his appearance in that spot if it meant you forgot
> his appearance in this U.S./Chinese fantasy co-production that starred him
> as a longhaired Irishman (yes, really) fighting monsters alongside Chinese
> warriors in colorful armor. LIke the aforementioned Hacksaw Ridge,
> this was another project James Horner was tagged to before his untimely
> demise. It’s unclear if a composer of Horner’s stature could have salvaged
> the film, but Ramin Djawadi gave it a go anyway and produced probably his
> most accomplished score to date, one that took his jagged Clash of the
> Titans
rhythmic style and bolstered it with an array of Eastern
> inflections, vocals, and specialty instruments, not to mention several
> themes that are just dang catchy. It’s an energetic delight, basically the
> Too Big To Fail era equivalent of Klaus Badelt’s The Promise. And
> like John Powell’s Pan, it almost tricks you into thinking you’re
> watching a better film at times.

LOVE this score, still one of my favourites of the century. And you're right, it's so much fun that it actually makes the film seem better than it probably is (I am a bit of a stickler for it though -- would probably still give it 3.5/5. A guilty pleasure that didn't deserve all the flak it got).

Man, how did I not nominate Djwadi as COTY that year?! I think I gave it to Horner of all people haha.

>
>

> Moana (2016) - ****
> Mark Mancina; songs by Lin-Manuel Miranda, Opetaia Foa'i & Mancina;
> songs & score orchestrated &
> arranged by Dave Metzger; vocal arrangements by Foa'i & Metzger;
> conducted by Don Harper

> TBTF discovery #29.

> Return to Paradise was covered here:
> https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=107875
> Tarzan was covered here:
> https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=108037
> Brother Bear was covered here:
> https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=108458

> Miranda: “When Sebastian began singing a Caribbean calypso number [when
> I was nine], my life [was] never the same.”

> Foa’i: “I have dedicated 20 years of my life to telling the stories of
> my ancestors onstage. We know if something's fabricated.”

> Metzger: “We would write English phrases on what we’d just seen, about
> 20 like that for different parts. Opetaia would translate into Tanganese,
> and we would have him speak and write our vocal parts from that so what
> you hear is not just aaas and ooos.”

> Mancina: “I had no idea Hamilton would be the biggest thing.
> [Lin-Manuel said he was writing it and] I said, ‘that’s cool.’ He went
> from somewhat unknown to people calling me saying, ‘How’d you get that
> chance?’”

> When Moana was released around Thanksgiving 2016, the appearance of
> Lin-Manual Miranda, the creative force behind the Hamilton rap
> musical that had taken Broadway by storm a year before, seemed like
> coattail-riding on Disney’s part, but Miranda had actually been tagged to
> the film since 2013, back when he was was more known for his 2005 musical
> In the Heights. Disney wanted a film that blended South Pacific
> culture with Broadway sensibilities and paired him with Opetaia Foa’i, the
> Samoan frontman behind the Oceanic music group Ta Vaka. Along for the ride
> was composer Mark Mancina, who had an history with Disney’s song heavy
> animated films from arranging for The Lion King and scoring
> Tarzan and Brother Bear, plus Disney’s animation boss John
> Lasseter loved his last-minute replacement score for Planes -
> saying it featured the best theme ever written for one of his movies - and
> had vowed to keep using him.

> A tour of a New Zealand dance festival for the three of them helped get
> the creative juices flowing, leading to the first song being written in
> December 2013, though work became a bit challenging later on according to
> Mancina. “Lin-Maneul’s very spontaneous. He just comes up with lyric
> ideas. The one thing that was a drag was when [he] became the most famous
> man in the world, it was just hard to schedule being together, so we ended
> up working by video conference. That worked, but I had so much fun with
> them in the studio working together. We could have written this movie 10
> times over if we had been together.”

> The songs were all adequate - only How Far I’ll Go was a true
> knockout - but on the flipside they were more consistent than those of
> Disney’s recent Frozen which had the world-dominating Let It
> Go
but also the clunker Fixer Upper. Also helping was the level
> of coherence between the songs and the score, supported both by Mancina’s
> involvement in their creation and by Mancina’s usual orchestrator Dave
> Metzger doing many of the song arrangements. Metzger would later detail
> how this worked for You’re Welcome, Dwayne Johnson’s big song.
> “Lin provided a basic vocal track, kind of a drum machine groove and
> chord changes. My job was to expand it out into the complete rhythm
> section, all the horn and string parts. I came up as a jazz musician when
> I was young [and] was Maynard Ferguson’s main arranger for a couple of
> years, so I immediately went there to capture Maui’s bravado. Mark [had]
> recorded Opetaia’s ensemble [playing] percussion and fit them into the
> song.”

> Mancina’s score is never less than capable and is occasionally quite
> strong, and the composer should be commended for incorporating the song
> melodies throughout, but on the whole it does seem to take more of a
> complementary role relative to the songs, at least until the big finale.
> Still, longtime listeners may recall Mancina’s commitment to integrating
> regional components and recording things live instead of using samples on
> earlier works like Return to Paradise, and those attitudes were
> also very much present in this score, considering the frequent use of
> Polyneisian vocals, traditional war chants, bamboo woodwinds, and
> hide-covered drums. “We didn’t want it to sound like a Polynesian
> documentary, [but] we wanted to salute their culture.”
The relentless
> percussive intensity at times recalls the pounding fun of the composer’s
> underrated music for Speed 2: Cruise Control. And, whereas
> Mancina’s earlier work on Disney musicals had been unfortunately linked to
> album releases that barely featured any of his music in favor of the
> songs, here darn near every note he wrote was commercially released.

> Mancina: “[It’s] disappointing La La Land won everything we were
> up for. I didn’t like La La Land. I just thought Moana was
> such a strong statement.”

> Alas, Mancina’s rotten luck with collaborators continued. A decade after
> the directing career of Mancina’s chief “patron” Jan de Bont was wrecked
> by Speed 2: Cruise Control, Lasseter was deposed in the wake of
> assorted #MeToo revelations about workplace misconduct and how
> uncomfortable he’d made female coworkers over the years. Mancina would get
> a handful of scoring gigs in subsequent years (including another aquatic
> animated film), but none approached the stature of Moana.

> Mancina: “[In a lot of Europe] it’s called Vaiana because Moana is a
> porn star in Italy.”

That's funny :P and yeah, very solid score for a very solid movie. Dunno if I've returned to it since that year though...

>
>

> Hidden Figures (2016) - ***½
> Hans Zimmer, Pharrell Williams & Benjamin Wallfisch; orchestrated
> by David Krystal, Edward Trybek,
> Henri Wilkinson, Kory McMaster & Sean Barrett; conducted by Timothy
> Williams; add’l choir arrangements
> Kirk Franklin; technical score engineers Chuck Choi & Stephanie
> McNally; score technical assistant
> Max Sandler; solo piano Herbie Hancock; Cynthia Park as Zimmer’s
> assistant

> TBTF discovery #29.

> Pharrell: “One of the things I learned from [Hans] about scoring is
> objectivity asking, ‘This may sound good, but what does it do? What does
> it mean?’ The music always needs to be supporting the story.”

> This dramatic telling of the largely forgotten contributions of African
> American mathematicians at NASA during the 1960s Space Race emerged to
> strong reviews, a very profitable performance at the box office, and major
> awards attention. Pharrell Williams saw the script before a director was
> even attached and got involved as a producer. The singer-songwriter had an
> established friendship with Hans Zimmer - he’s the guy who successfully
> goaded Zimmer into doing a concert tour - so it made sense that the two
> would collaborate on the score. It was no surprise that Zimmer, Mr. “don’t
> do the expected”, wanted to avoid the standard music of space astronaut
> movies; heck, quite recently he had deliberately avoided Copland-like
> Americana on Interstellar. But it was a surprise that Benjamin
> Wallfisch moved from the behind-the-scenes role he’d had on projects over
> the last few years to having a prominent co-composer credit on the album
> cover. Pharrell would describe the collaboration by saying “Hans likes
> to find the poetry in a script and then parallel it with the score, Ben is
> a seeker of tenderness, and I stoke fires.”

> The team would operate within the conventions of drama movie scoring, with
> themes that are perhaps a tad elusive, but there was still a commendable
> effort to give the score some of the flavor of African American music,
> leading to lots of little touches that help make the work feel more
> distinctive: blues rhythms, jazz trumpet, keyboards, and solo gospel
> vocals. One could speculate that the latter was perhaps due to Zimmer’s
> urging, as his obsession with the female voice had been a constant
> throughout most of his career, if not most of his life considering how
> often he credits hearing Edda Dell'Orso’s singing in Once Upon A Time
> In The West
as the foundation of his film music interest.

> Pharrell loved the experience. “Most scores, the progressions and the
> melodic direction [have] a Euro or Anglo basis. Our challenge was to have
> something more reflective of how Katherine, Dorothy and Mary must have
> been feeling.”
If there was any disappointment for listeners, it was
> that there wasn’t any obvious cohesion between the score and the songs
> Pharrell also wrote.

Really liked this one, probably would give it a similar rating.

>
>

> Inferno (2016) - **
> Hans Zimmer; add’l music by Steve Mazzaro, Andrew Kawczynski, Richard
> Harvey, Michael Tuller & Paul Mounsey;
> technical score engineers Chuck Choi & Stephanie McNally; orchestrated
> by Oscar Senén & Joan Martorell;
> conducted by Johannes Vogel; digital instrument design Mark Wherry;
> technical assistants Jacqueline Friedberg,
> Julian Pastorelli & Lauren Bousfield; Cynthia Park as ZImmer’s
> assistant; score wrangler Bob Badami

> TBTF discovery #30.

> The Da Vinci Code was covered here:
> https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=109244
> Angels and Demons was covered here:
> https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=111761

> “There are certain films which are more personal; Lion King was
> written for my daughter. [But for Inferno], Ron said ‘hey, you
> wanna do another Langdon movie?’”

> A decade after The Da Vinci Code was a big hit and seven years
> after Angels and Demons slightly underperformed at the worldwide
> box office, Tom Hanks and Ron Howard would reunite for another adaptation
> of Dan Brown’s novels about symbology professor Robert Langdon. Coming
> well after enthusiasm for the initial entry had dried up and presenting a
> very different type of story (Langdon rushing to stop a bioweapon instead
> of solving religious mysteries), the film would be the worst-reviewed and
> lowest-earning of the series. Zimmer had headlined the previous two
> scores, but although his name was on the front of the album Inferno
> feels like one of those scores where he played the role of a supervisory
> producer (if even that), considering his usual orchestrators weren’t
> involved, nearly all cue sheet credits mention his assistants Steve
> Mazzaro and Andrew Kawczynski, and he was touring Europe that summer. But
> Zimmer clearly informed the work somehow as it took two of his
> long-standing principles (don’t do the expected and treat sequels as
> autonomous entities) to their extremes.

> Gone for the most part are any of the religious or operatic overtones that
> informed the earlier Langdon scores. In their place are a host of abrasive
> electronics. Zimmer would refer to the retro nastiness of it all as
> “reckless experimentation”, but that would imply we hadn’t heard
> all of the contained action / suspense techniques done to death in other
> MV / RC scores over the last 20+ years. Even the skittering off-tune piano
> from the 1990s reappears! Instead of closing out this scoring trilogy with
> a bang and with some coherence, Zimmer and team basically gave us
> CHAPPiE 2, but without the unbridled lunacy that made the actual
> music for CHAPPiE hold up in spite of its flaws. It is tempting to
> just say, quite simply, “fuck this score.”

> But the score did take its legacy themes, including the franchise identify
> from the first film’s Chevaliers de Sangreal and the second film’s
> Science & Religion idea, in intriguing directions in a few
> tracks, and that fealty to what came before ultimately salvaged the work
> from a lower rating. It’s not all bad. But, as with Batman v
> Superman
, there’s a curious air of indifference that hangs over the
> material. No wonder Zimmer took a break from film scores to go on that
> concert tour.

Yeah, well said. Some of his best recent cues mixed in with some of his worst. Very annoying album.

> -----------------------

> Next time: Oh, right…the concert tour!

Great write up as always!


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Re: Zimmer & friends pt 8i - TBTF 2013-16: Ramin’s 2016, Moana, Inferno
JBlough
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Friday, December 23, 2022 (8:03 a.m.) 

> And you're right, it's so much fun that it actually makes the film seem better than it probably is (I am a bit of a stickler for it though -- would probably still give it 3.5/5. A guilty pleasure that didn't deserve all the flak it got).

I remember seeing it in a fairly empty theater in early 2017 and thinking 'that wasn't bad.' As Zhang Yimou films go, it's no Hero, but it's better than that opulent snoozefest Curse of the Golden Flower.

> Man, how did I not nominate Djwadi as COTY that year?! I think I gave it to Horner of all people haha.

Now I'd put him as the second runner-up after Wintory & Giacchino. But I too omitted him 6 years ago, though I think that was a function of three of these scores getting lower ratings from me back then.

> Great write up as always!

Thanks!



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Re: Zimmer & friends pt 8i - TBTF 2013-16: Ramin’s 2016, Moana, Inferno [EDITED]
Jonesy
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Friday, December 23, 2022 (8:27 a.m.) 

> This is part of a series.
> - Here’s the last post on Civil War, Planet Earth 2, etc. -
> https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=117577
> - If you want the full set of links covering the Too Big To Fail era or
> earlier, click on my profile.

> -----------------------

> Game of Thrones Season 6 (2016) - ****

Indeed, this is the point that the albums went from 'pretty good with enjoyable highlights' to consistently fun, amusingly as the show started to wane. The Light of the Nine is a stunning cue, among the best of the series. I need a re-listen!

> Westworld Season 1 (2016) - ****

I heard this when it came out and greatly enjoyed it, but haven't relistened to it since. Need to fix that! I remember being struck by the song arrangements, especially the O SHIT when I recognized Paint It Black lol

> Warcraft (2016) - ****

You liked this more than I expected! Which makes me glad, it's like another King Arthur, with simple but brawny themes and lots of rip-snorting spirit. Great one to put on when you want some free adrenaline!

> The Great Wall (2016) - ****½

Man, Damon and crypto... That was cringey even before the crash lol. While this is yet another that I would have loved to hear what Horner would have wrote, Djawadi made it difficult to imagine surpassing his work. What a score! The Promise of the 2010s indeed. I need to re-listen! (And maybe see the film too, sounds bonkers lol)

> Moana (2016) - ****

I liked the songs a lot more than you, but I'm also a big Hamilton fan, so bias alert lol. That the songs and score are intertwined make a huge difference to me, as shockingly few Disney musicals make more than a token effort. I wasn't aware of the cultural efforts put into the score, that is so cool. It definitely made a difference, as Mancina's score stands as his best for a mainline Disney film. Yet again I lament that he's not working more.

Never occurred to me that Mancina's lack of Disney work since this is attributable to Lasseter's ouster. Yeah, I don't buy that Lasseter didn't know how uncomfortable he made women, even if we grant he may not have been strictly a sexual harasser.

EDIT: Oh, and I love the beef with La La Land lol. I disliked the movie (imagine a white guy telling black musicians how to save jazz...), but man, the songs and score earned the hype.

> Hidden Figures (2016) - ***½

Wonderful film and a fun, touching score. These three made quite a team, and it's neat to read about Zimmer and Williams' friendship. It's impressive how these three invoked the wonder of space while avoiding some of the typical tones, and while invoking an authentic spirit of the characters. A respectful and engaging score, great reading music.

I still remember the Oscar slip where it was called Hidden Fences. Sounds like a fun movie! wink

> Inferno (2016) - **

Dead-on rating. Some of the electronics have some gritty appeal, but for the most part it is bitter to see the choral and classical atmosphere of the predecessors ejected. The new arrangements of past themes has some great appearances (including the stunner Life Must Have Its Mysteries) but for the most part, bleh, Reinvention can be bad sometimes.


(Message edited on Friday, December 23, 2022, at 8:31 a.m.)


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Re: Zimmer & friends pt 8i - TBTF 2013-16: Ramin’s 2016, Moana, Inferno
Mephariel
(64.147.63.6)
Friday, December 23, 2022 (9:03 a.m.) 

Hidden Figures is one of my favorites from Zimmer and Wallfisch. I think it is a highly underrated score and and one of the most distinctive and lovely scores of 2010s.


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Re: Zimmer & friends pt 8i - TBTF 2013-16: Ramin’s 2016, Moana, Inferno [EDITED]
Lonestarr
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Friday, December 23, 2022 (9:29 a.m.) 

'The songs were all adequate...'

I'll have you know that I sing 'Shiny' at least once a week, so clearly it made an impression. Jemaine Clement making a meal of every lyric didn't hurt, either.

Also, I thought The Great Wall was perfectly fine, but for the thin characters. And Djawadi's music was properly thrilling.


(Message edited on Friday, December 23, 2022, at 9:31 a.m.)


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Re: Zimmer & friends pt 8i - TBTF 2013-16: Ramin’s 2016, Moana, Inferno
Mephariel
(64.147.63.6)
Friday, December 23, 2022 (2:09 p.m.) 

I also want to add that Westworld, especially the first 2 seasons have some of the best music in television. They both got overshadowed by GOT, but the music in Westworld is more thoughtful imo. The main title theme deserves some praise as well. Incredible.


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