(no subject)

[ivyfic]

I'm a John Williams fan, as many of you know, but I've been rather disappointed with his stuff of late. Other than "Duel of the Fates," the scores to the Star Wars prequels have been entirely uninteresting to me, and I felt such antipathy towards the Harry Potter scores that I didn't bother to get the third one. For all the gushing people do over the magical "Hedwig's theme," I've owned the Hook soundtrack for almost a decade and it's the same damn thing. There were parts of Prisoner of Azkaban that I thought Williams seriously miscued, to the point of throwing me out of the action while I was in the theater.

So I was surprised when watching Goblet of Fire last night to find that I really enjoyed the score. Today I went to amazon to take a closer look and it's not John Williams. They replaced him with Patrick Doyle! Let me take a moment to express what a shocker this is. I have a few Doyle scores, but I never listen to them. They've been functional at best, and really not worth examining closely. So it's quite a shock to find that I not only didn't recognize that it wasn't a Williams score but was actually impressed by something Patrick Doyle wrote. In my defense, he was using the Williams-written themes, so maybe all Doyle really needed was good thematic material to work with.

Comments

[dotsomething.livejournal.com]

You are so right about John Williams. I'm a big fan of his work but he does recycle. He's a genius but sometimes it seems like he sort of phones it in.

I noticed Patrick Doyle listed as the composer on this as well (haven't seen the film yet, though) and thought that was promising since JW didn't seem to have his heart in the other scores so what they needed was a different composer.

I like Doye, he did nice work on Henry V and Dead Again.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

I have "Much Ado About Nothing" and "Frankenstein", neither of which are very good.

[(Anonymous)]

dude! i LOVE patrick doyle! have you HEARD the sense and sensibility soundtrack?! it is GORGEOUS. anyhoo, that's my two-cents worth. :-P
-mithras

[bigscary.livejournal.com]

John Williams needs a sabbatical -- the HP main theme is quite nice but everything else? Workmanlike, at best.

Nobody can keep turning out definitional theme music year after year. There's no shame in the man having a couple of off-years. I do hope he'll be back, though -- one only needs to see the new Superman trailer, or watch ANY Smallville where they use one of the Superman Movie motifs, to remember exactly how iconic a good score can become.