a little short on the updates this time around...
alluvial
floss [but only when used as a noun, such as "fairy floss" (the initial name for cotton candy] or used as another word for embroidery thread)
interrobang
skein
Thursday, December 27, 2007
Monday, December 3, 2007
In a darkened movie theater...
In a darkened movie theater, you can't see the little sooty cloud of grumpy that hangs over my head during some trailers. But it's there. Oh, it's there.
One thing that really irks me about movie trailers: the use of scores from other movies to underpin film snippets in said trailers. Given that scores can't be completely finished until the film itself is basically in the can, I understand that the score from the new movie is probably not yet entirely complete at the time when trailers are produced and distributed. But, honestly, I don't care.
Maybe I'm extra irritated by this practice because it seems that trailers most frequently borrow from the Gladiator soundtrack - which means that a) I'm really familiar with the music so my ears pick it out very quickly and b) I smirk that another movie is trying to ride on the emotion-manipulating success of this particular score. Yes, the first time around, this score *was* pretty or rousing, depending on which of the two standard 10-second musical quotes the studio's trailer producers always seem to go for. (The pretty/ethereal/haunting themes would be drawn from either "The Wheat" near the beginning of Gladiator or "Now We Are Free," both sung by Lisa Gerrard. The rousing theme is usually extracted from "The Battle" that supports the opening Roman v. German battle-in-the-snow sequence.) I really liked this score for Gladiator (as did the Academy, not that it matters), but get over it and create some new music already. Curious what spawned this diatribe? I just saw the trailer for The Golden Compass and it includes the (you guessed it) ethereal music from "Now We Are Free" towards the end of the trailer.
Another while-I'm-on-the-subject annoyance is when a film's actual score sounds like a cheap imitation of the Gladiator score (see Kingdom of Heaven and Troy for this infraction). My irritability-meter tends to start rattling when I feel that the "Lisa Gerrard-esque vocals + action sequence = we've got the audience's emotions in a vice grip" equation got run through the take-something-kinda-cool-and-fresh-and-run-it-into-the-ground grist mill, followed swiftly by several-too-many trips around the if-it's-not-broken-don't-fix-it machine*. Blargh.
*Don't ask me what one of these looks like, although I'm curious what other people's visual would be on this.
One thing that really irks me about movie trailers: the use of scores from other movies to underpin film snippets in said trailers. Given that scores can't be completely finished until the film itself is basically in the can, I understand that the score from the new movie is probably not yet entirely complete at the time when trailers are produced and distributed. But, honestly, I don't care.
Maybe I'm extra irritated by this practice because it seems that trailers most frequently borrow from the Gladiator soundtrack - which means that a) I'm really familiar with the music so my ears pick it out very quickly and b) I smirk that another movie is trying to ride on the emotion-manipulating success of this particular score. Yes, the first time around, this score *was* pretty or rousing, depending on which of the two standard 10-second musical quotes the studio's trailer producers always seem to go for. (The pretty/ethereal/haunting themes would be drawn from either "The Wheat" near the beginning of Gladiator or "Now We Are Free," both sung by Lisa Gerrard. The rousing theme is usually extracted from "The Battle" that supports the opening Roman v. German battle-in-the-snow sequence.) I really liked this score for Gladiator (as did the Academy, not that it matters), but get over it and create some new music already. Curious what spawned this diatribe? I just saw the trailer for The Golden Compass and it includes the (you guessed it) ethereal music from "Now We Are Free" towards the end of the trailer.
Another while-I'm-on-the-subject annoyance is when a film's actual score sounds like a cheap imitation of the Gladiator score (see Kingdom of Heaven and Troy for this infraction). My irritability-meter tends to start rattling when I feel that the "Lisa Gerrard-esque vocals + action sequence = we've got the audience's emotions in a vice grip" equation got run through the take-something-kinda-cool-and-fresh-and-run-it-into-the-ground grist mill, followed swiftly by several-too-many trips around the if-it's-not-broken-don't-fix-it machine*. Blargh.
*Don't ask me what one of these looks like, although I'm curious what other people's visual would be on this.
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