Posts Tagged ‘music’
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The 30th Anniversary of ‘Empire Strikes Back’ and My Disillusionment with the Star Wars Franchise
June 26th, 2010 |Posted In: 3
In light of the 30th anniversary of Empire Strikes Back I just want to register some comments about the franchise, if for no other reason than to organize my thoughts as to what has happened in this train-wreck of a series. Empire remains one of my favorite films ever, even though I’ve grown to totally hate verything about the STar Wars franchise over the last decade or so. I really did no like the prequels, and I have no idea what the Clone Wars cartoon (or film) was even about. All I know is: the original trilogy, untouched with CGI “enhancements” remains as something so important and iconic to me, and as far as cannonicity goes, that’s it: those three films. I enjoyed the ‘Dark Forces’ PC games, and I thought that throughout the prequels there were a few enjoyable moments, but otherwise, its those original three films, and primarily Empire, that stand out to me as what Star Wars is all about. Good acting, tremendous music and convincing special effects (I buy a puppet over CGI any day of the week, but more on that shortly.)
Above and beyond the acting and story, there are two elements that to me looking back stand out as the most critical as to why Empire Strikes Back stands out as such a good movie, and why the prequels were such dismal failures to me. First, so much of what made the visual quality of the original trilogy so magnificint, particuarly Empire, was the unbelievable artwork of Ralph MacQuarre. I’ve seen a number of books that show his behind the scenes illustration for the series, and his material just blows me away. I’ve been rereading a book on the art of Empire, and the sheer volume of quality that McQuarre put into his conceptual artwork and matt paintings is just unbelievable. This artistic vision was totally LACKING from the prequels, and while landscapes like Hoth and Bespin stand out in my mind so vividly, I really can’t remember much of the scenery of the prequel films (big green plant? Ocean planet with a lot of rain? etc.)
McQuarrie’s artwork has that Normal Rockwell element in that you can see some of his artwork and just marvel at the meticulous details (particularly some of the Bespin paintings.) His ability to capture an impossible scale to futuristic structures, all while maintaining a convincing believability (to something like an enormous city floating in the sky) is a testament to his abilities as an artist. Legendary, and Empire would not have been nearly the film it was without his contributions. I think his name should have been listed higher in the credits. More about Ralph McQuarrie and his artwokr here.
And of course, I’m always ranting about the music of John Williams (I’d link to Williams’ site, but the “official” site for Williams, http://www.johnwilliamscomposer.com, always seems to throw a “Could not connect: Unknown MySQL server host ‘webpmc03.sonyment.com’ (1)” error whenever I attempt to connect to it. Software Quality Assurance, Sony?)
Without question, Williams’ music to Empire has always been to me the highest pinacle of his musical accomplishments. I’ve listened to and enjoyed a great number of his musical works over the years, and the way it seems to me, there’s a steadily-rising gradation from the late 70′s into the early 80′s, with a number of good works before and after, but that particular range, with the Star Wars music, ‘Superman’, ‘Raiders’, ‘Jaws’, etc, is just so fantastic. Later scores such as the Harry Potter works, while enjoyable, just never had quite the impact for me (especially not the prequel films, when Lucas started resorting to cut-n-paste musical tastics. How many times in the prequels, I wonder, do we hear a recap of that “Phantom Menace: the ship leaving the JarJar Planet” music, used over and over again? I just heard it again in a trailer for the Old Republic computer game. LucasCo gets a LOT of milage out of reusaing that music. )
Anyhow, Williams’ Empire music remains one of those scores I could listen to endlessly (in fact, I think I have. I remember year ago, back in the early 80′s, borrowing the 2-recond vinyl soundtract to ESB from the Montgomery Couty Public Library outside of Philadelphia and listening to those records over and over again, marveling at the music. Cues like the “Asteroid Theme” just have a timeless quality that, no matter how many times I listen to it, I’m still amazed. Empire’s music is so jammed packed with themes: Luke, Vader, Boba, Yoda… they’ve all got themes so wonderfully expressed throughout this soundtrack. Williams outdid himself, and I don’t think that even the music of ‘Return of the Jedi’ came anywhere near as close in quality to Empire, and of course the prequel film music was nowhere near the same league as Empire (maybe Lucas realized that, and that’s why he shamelessly imported a cue from the Bespin lightsaber music into “Revenge of the Sith”? I wonder…)
Well, regardless, it’s the visual artistry of McQuarrie and the musical artistry of Williams that, in looking back, make Empire so memorable to me. Another element I alluded to earlier was CGI – or in the case of Empire Strikes Back, the complete lack thereof. There is virtually NO CG to Empire, and yet the special effects are just so remarkable to me. The imperial walkers, the asteroid chase scene, the Falcon traveling through those orange and red clouds on the way to Bespin: there’s no computer cheating at play there, just good, genuine special effect work. Maybe that’s part of why I enjoy this one so much?
CG has no soul or real presence to me, expecially in regards to computer-generated characters in film. I HATED the CG Yoda and thought this completely flattened him into little more than a video game cutscene character. The puppet Yoda occupied the same tangible reality and physical presence on the set and in the scene that Mark Hammil did. The Yoda puppet seemed so much more real and convincing to me: for instance, the X-wing takes off, and there’s Yoda puppet in the fading spotlight – contrasted this with the goofy, blurry and unconvincing CG Yoda lightsaber-fighting in ‘Revenge of the Sith’. Terrible. Fake.
I just realized I’m stuck with the “enhanced” version of Empire on DVD, and I regret that I didn’t pick up the uncut/unruined version pre-1997, but there’s no way, if I can help it, that I will give any more money to the Lucas Empire for another film, if I can help it. Don’t know any other way to really summarize it: I think I’ve really become mortified by the entire Star Wars series based on the offerings of the last decade. Empire and the original series remain some great films to me, but as far as I’m concerned, there’s nothing beyond those three films in their pre-1997 editions.
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I’m a big fan of internet radio stations that let you endlessly stream, and rate, music. I usually listen to this when I’m working on Photoshop or something on the computer and I’d like something to listen to. I’ve used LastFm and Pandora a great deal, so I was curious to try out Jango when I found out about it. It’s a decent system – not perfect, as I’ll get to – but I think its a nice compliment to sites like LastFm and I’m curious to work with it for awhile.
Similar to those other two, the music keeps streaming based on your tastes. I started with John Williams, and I received a stream of other film composers. Eventually it branched into other electronic artists, and I’ve gradually been selecting artists and songs that I enjoy.
Anyhow, as far as the player goes, one of the nice features is a PAUSE button, that LastFm doesn’t have. Perish the thought someone should get a phone call, or need to use the bathroom, during a song. So with LastFm, you either wait for a song you like to end, or just stop it and hope that the random generator spinning songs revisits that same song again. 
And like the others, you have the ability rate songs, but with a fairly limited option system of ‘frowny face’, ‘smiley face’, and ‘BIG smiley face’(?) Well, its a step above Pandora with a yes/no boolean, but all the same, I miss Launchcast where you had a 5 star scale, AND a ban option. Additionally, if I hear a track and I want to “frowny face” it and never hear it again, hitting that button should immediately skip to the next track, shouldn’t it? I mean, is the logic that, “Ok, you don’t like it, but keep listening anyhow and MAYBE you’ll change your mind?” Well, that might work for some music, but while I do personally enjoy a lot of Jerry Goldsmith music, his Omen music definitely does NOT work for me, so if I hit “frowny”, I want the next song.
Otherwise, the system is a good one, and there’s been a decent amount of music played. Another interesting feature is that you will periodically receive a track by a random unknown artist and you can give them an approval or skip and move on. I like that, and I don’t mind the break in film music for something like this.
Back before I started dscomic, I had a sloppy google site at decembersuncomic.blogspot.com. I recently went through and cleaned this up and scrapped a lot of the posts (most of the semi-relevant ones I just moved over here to dscomic) and I converted this old blog into one devoted only to music and songs that I like. Many of the posts are YouTube links, but there are also some comments about songs and various tracks and artists. I enjoy a lot of music and could easily tie up a lot of space here with commentary about music, so instead I decided to just move most of the music chatter over there.
I’m still divided on which of the two, Pandora or LastFm, I prefer more. I listen to a LOT of streaming internet radio, and I love both of these stations in terms of the volume of music offered, in addition to the ability to rate music, so that (supposedly) future musical suggestions will match up with my tastes and preferences (again, supposedly.)
LastFm had a number of pros and cons. Pro is that you can endlessly skip tracks if you want (unlike Pandora). Another pro is the comprehensive system of tags, so that you can scale down your search to the most obscure genre of sound. I like that because, depending on my mood, I might be interested in R&B one day, classical another, film music another, etc.
Negatives of LastFm would be the obnoxious ad that starts up each time I use it (generally featuring some actor guy selling phone service.) Another negative would be the fact that the LastFm player, being a flash-based app, doesn’t always start up on my old Sony Vaio machine. I find a number of times the player just hangs, unable to connect or do anything, and I need to go back to the root LastFm directory and start it again. One other thing would be a poor rating system: raunchy music lyrics should be filtered if that’s what the user doesn’t want to hear, but I don’t see how and where that configuration could be made. It baffles me how I could get profanity-laced songs randomly appearing when a majority of my listening trends are either John Williams scores or electronic music.
Pandora is nice in that it starts very fast and the genome music thing is fairly close to finding matching music. Negatives include all of the awful ads that pop (far more than LastFm) and the fact that you can’t skip songs (a work-around, sort of, is the fact that you can create a bunch of stations and, when you can’t skip a track, you just change stations. Sometimes this works, and sometimes it’s just too frustrating to bother with doing.) Pandora rarely hangs like LastFm does, but something must be different with the way in which Pandora operates because when each song starts (particularly when played on my old computer) the tracks will get scratchy and jumpy for a few seconds before the song starts. Once past that, though, the song sounds fine. An interesting observation is that Pandora lets you pause songs and LastFm does not. Of all things, that has to be one of the most obnoxious features of LastFm (especially if you’re enjoying a song and, perish the thought, you need to take a call, or use the bathroom, etc.)
So of the two, LastFm wins out for now. Fewer ads, endless music, and I’ll deal with no pause feature for now. One of the interesting things about LastFm is the “neighborhood” feature, which can stream in a strange and interesting collection of songs that are, I think, vaguely related to tastes of people similar to you (I think. I’m still not clear on exactly how that works.) So using ‘Neighborhood’ can stream in anything from bizarre ambient, to Glen Miller, to Anne Murphy, to Megadeth, etc. It can be a fun experiment – if you’re in the mood for that sort of thing.
Superman III Clark & Lana Reunion | Heavily-edited video that I uploaded to YouTube
November 13th, 2009 |Posted In: 3
Here are my comments for the video that I posted on YouTube yesterday, with some more details:
Basically, here’s my heavily-edited remix of Clark meeting Lana again in Superman III, an absolutely dreadful movie, and quite possibly the worst of the Superman series (although still better than ‘Superman Returns’). There were two defining moments in Superman III for me: the “Evil Superman vs. Clark” sequence, which was just the greatest, and the sub-plot of Clark meeting Lana again. The rest of the film, featuring Robert Vaughn and Richard Pryor, was just terrible. In this clip, I’ve removed all of the extraneous characters such as Brad and Ricky, and instead presented this reunion the way I would have liked to have seen it, but no matter how I rework this, the ending was still horrible and nothing could really be done about it.
The Clark/Lana meeting could have been done so much better, as this was such a genuine reunion of two characters with a wonderful chemistry together (more so than Clark and Lois). I can only go so far with the material because the picnic sequence had a terrible ending in the film, so I just crop the video with some comments and music at that point. Ken Thorne did a great job with the music for these scenes, particularly the picnic.
I really could not stand characters like Brad, the unlikable drunk, who occupied far too much of this film, so I completely wiped him out of this clip. The fact that he was in Smallville, entrusted to guard some insanely powerful computer system, is totally beyond reason, and how/why does he show up again at the end of the film? (in Metropolis?)
Likewise, I felt that the Ricky character was just another unlikable character basically added to the script for young viewers to “identify” with, but ultimately he served no real purpose other than to be irritating.
Superman III suffered from a LOT of problems above and beyond just the writing. There was far too much profanity, adult content, and lack of it’s consistency. But at the core of it, here was a genuine reunion of two characters, Clark and Lana, that really had a lot of potential, but was never really developed as well as it could have been. After the picnic, and the downhill slope of the film, Clark gives Lana a new ring, but any any all romantic element seems to have vanished between the two. The ring is little more than a nice gesture from an old friend.
Interesting too was how Lois was completely diminished in this film. I did NOT care for her character in the first place, so this wasn’t much of a negative, but I find it curious how quick Clark was to dismiss Lois during the Reunion cleanup sequence with Lana. I did not like the “romantic” sub-plot of Superman I or II (it made me uncomfortable more than anything. Margot Kidder sounds like she’s smoked a pack of cigarettes prior to any dialog she delivers… what is the attraction here?) Likewise the woman from Superman IV – I can’t even remember her name, but there was no real chemistry there between her and Clark, and again, it’s curious that Lois was just a background character in that film as well. Superman III was the only film in which the romantic sub-plot seemed at all genuine, and it figures, it was ruined in the film.
Wow, I’ve wasted too much time on this. I need to get back to drawing. I had an idea for a longer remix, featuring sequences taken from all 4 films. The story would be that General Zod and crew defeat Superman (I would have used the scenes of Zod and friends blowing away the helicopters, etc, but cut in Superman) and, once defeated, Superman would shake his head tearfully doing the “no…no…” thing. They’d all travel to the Fortress, and Superman would have his powers removed and bow to Zod. The story would then pick up with Clark re-meeting Lana (similar to how it happens in this clip) and then a news article would describe a kryptonite meteorite landing on Zod and friends, wiping them all out ironically. Yeah, now that I write out the idea, that sounds really lame and I’m glad I never bothered with it.
I just listed my last vinyl record on Ebay. It’s the soundtrack to the film “The Accidental Tourist” by composer John Williams. The film was awful, but the music is some of the most incredible material Williams has ever written. I own it in a digital format (and curiously, I originally owned it on cassette too, another dead medium) so I really don’t need the vinyl version, hence off it goes on Ebay.
I used to own stacks of records, and I remember well these massive, bulky things taking up tons of space with bulky, papery jackets, with black disks wrapped up in plastic packaging. I even remember those little b-side albums, that required the funny little plastic adapter in the center in order to play on the turn-table. All of these are long gone: I either donated them to Goodwill or sold them at garage sales (or lost them. Over all my moves over the years, I’ve managed to lose a lot of books and music for some mysterious reason. I can’t help but wonder if there’s a dusty box sitting in the crawlspace of my old house in Illinois.)
Anyhow, It’s strange thinking that vinyl albums used to be THE format for all music. I remember being at the mall and going to the “record store” and flipping through the stacks of records. The last time I can clearly remember looking at anything vinyl would be a record store near Florida State in Tallahassee (I attended FSA for two years but hated the impersonal size of the state-school classes.) The record place was called “Vinyl Fever”, and considering this was about 20 years ago, I have no idea if the place is even still around or not.
Now, it’s starting to feel like CD’s are more and more irrelevant. Most music I listen to now is either streaming internet radio, or tracks I’ve downloaded (iTunes, etc) and a majority of my listening is MP3-based on my Phillips GoGear (the current replacement of my recently-deceased Coby MP3 player). I have to wonder what the next format will be: audio just streamed directly into the brain by broadband waves?
I get a kick out of Lastfm, and I’m blabbed on about it a lot here. I can deal with their intro advertisements (for now) for hydrogenated breakfast pastries, because, to me, it remains one of the best, and fastest, online radio systems. Having the ability to limitlessly (and quickly) skip tracks is a definite plus, and their databank of albums and tracks is pretty comprehensive, with the occasional oddity by a group appearing and surprising me, such as a B-side track of some band.
It’s not perfect, though, and I’ve found far too many mislabeled or miscategorized tracks (this happens a lot with John Williams and Jerry Goldsmith scores, for some odd reason.) Even with Michael Jackson, they still have him listed as on tour? What?
I have had occasional issues with startup. I don’t know if it’s a Firefox issue or what it is (actually, it’s crashed in Chrome, too, now that I think of it) but the radio will just stop working, and the only loophole around this, to get it started again, is to just bounce back to the root last.com url and fire it off again. That usually does the trick, but there is clearly something wrong with the flash application that runs this thing (speaking as a full-time software QA, it’s endlessly frustrating when you end up unearthing bugs, particularly when it’s a site that SHOULD have been thoroughly debugged by this point, considering that lastfm probably has millions of users daily!)
One other gripe would be that Lastfm, much like YouTube, does an awful job screening out profanity in the user comments. A profanity filter should be a feature of user accounts, but apparently it isn’t. Same for inappropriate user icons. But this is a minor gripe, as I usually just pay attention to the music, and not really the songs.
Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” 25th anniversary disk with not-so-thrilling extra tracks ruined by other artists
August 20th, 2009 |Posted In: 3
I wanted to write about some of Michael Jackson’s music here, because I have enjoyed a lot of his music from the Jackson 5 days and earlier solo years (back before Jackson turned weirder.) I think the threshold for me was the “Thriller” album. Lots of great material on this album with some very creative videos to go with it, such as “Billie Jean” and “Beat it”. Beyond the “Thriller” album, I have no interest in anything Jackson did musically (plus his personal life details were really strange and awful beyond that point). “Thriller” to me is like “The Joshua Tree” by U2 in that it’s the pinnacle, and I really don’t enjoy anything chronologically beyond that. That was the top, and nothing past that has really had the same appeal.
Anyhow, I’ve been listening to Jackson’s “Thriller” album lately, courtesy of the public library (I couldn’t justify buying it) and I find that it’s Jackson’s lesser-known (but still big) tracks that I really enjoy the most, such as “The Girl is Mine” and “Lady in my Life”. He has some great vocals on all of these songs, combined with some excellent production by Quincy Jones. This CD also includes some new “remixes” of his old songs that are, frankly, awful. I think these were put together in 2008, and feature various rap artists and what not, and they basically take these good Jackson songs and ruin them. This was just a bad decision: I would have, instead, liked to have heard more rarities, like the unreleased “For all time”, that was included on this disk (unreleased, because it’s so saccharine, but still worth checking out,) I wish they had added more unreleased material, and not included the lousy rap remix stuff.
The Thriller disk also includes a couple videos. “Billy Jean” is creative but also staggeringly cheesy. I remember as a little guy how amazing this video seemed at the time, and now it just looks like lip-syncing on a tremendously cheap set. The “Beat it” video is nicely done, but it’s not without it’s corniness, such as the tough gang members doing their knife dance and then, at the insistence of Michael Jackson, breaking into a dance routine. I didn’t even bother with “Thriller”… I don’t like this song, and I thought the video with the dancing zombies was just silly.
Jackson’s life to me is just a tragic one. He was initially a very talented singer and performer, but I can’t think of any other performer who’s career and personal life was more of a down slide. And what a tragic end, following years of surgery and modification to ultimately die from quackery and pharmaceuticals: souped up on western meds. Great musician and performer but an unfortunate direction and end to his life.
(George Lucas, having finished driving the final nail into the Star Wars franchise with “Revenge of the Sith”, and currently further squeezing the life out of this rapidly-diminishing legacy with “The Clone Wars”, decides that it’s time to branch into something new, and, while surfing the web one day using the key words of “december”,”sun”, “comic”,and “elk” [this actually works in google, btw] stumbles across my webcomic. After overcoming the poor navigation and really bad site layout, he finally manages to read through issues #1-3 and decides that he wants to contact me to make an insanely lucrative offer. What follows is the completely fictitious and nonsensical conversation that takes place…)
George: “Rob, I’ve read your comic, and noticed that there really isn’t anything strikingly original about this comic, much like the Star Wars series. I’d like to offer you a gazillion dollars so that Lucasfilm can own the rights to your character.”
Rob: “I’m shameless enough to consider your offer. Tell me more please.”
George: “Here’s what I’m thinking: I’ll buy the rights to your character and turn it into a movie. You’ll never see another penny. My plan is that 98% of the film will be rendered with a computer, and the other 2% will feature a lead who’s a horrific actor… but this principle character will occupy the majority of the film. The bad acting will be augmented with a wacky and very uncomfortable computer-animated cartoon character with a high-pitched squeeky voice”
Rob: “Huh”
George: “Wait, there’s more. I’ll basically take your storyline, and completely rewrite it to have even LESS logic than before, and I’ll ruin the character by making his power little more than a strange micro-organism in his blood. I’ll also tell the story as a PREQUEL to issue #1 of December Sun, and I will make sure that there are glaring plot-holes and inconsistencies that don’t make any logical sense in the books continuity (granted, Rob, you’re already doing a good enough job at that yourself, but I’ll make it even worse.”
Rob: Well…
George: Oh, and in addition to the bad action, bad script, and copious CG, I’m going to have John Williams score this film!
Rob: Hey, that’s great…
George: Actually, John Williams will write 20% of the music for this film, and the other 80% will be lifted by my sound editors from other films, similar to what we did with “Attack of the Clones”, “Revenge of the Sith”, and even “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull”. I’m actually thinking of dubbing in cues from other John Williams films like “Empire of the Son”, or maybe even “Stepmom”. I might actually borrow a few cues from some Jerry Goldsmith scores…
Rob: Uh, well, I don’t…
George: Oh, and as far as marketing goes, you won’t see a cent. I will take EVERY SINGLE CHARACTER from December Sun continuity, cannon or otherwise, and market it as a toy. This will include characters from the as-of-yet unwritten novelizations that have nothing to do with your comic, alternate universe toys, and Cartoon Channel spin-off series loosely based on the comic. Plus there will be a series of video games having virtually nothing to do with the character, but that will basically just milk the character to death slowly. So what, do you think?
Rob: (thinking…) Sure, sign me up!
(Cue “Imperial March”…)
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