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I hope so for you

NP: Alien Invasion: Space and Beyond II

Quite possibly the best re-recorded Sci-Fi compilation ever.

NP: MAX & ME (Mark McKenzie)

It's all lovely and pretty, no doubt, but like with all other McKenzie scores I've heard, it's all very "on-the-nose" and literal, like the music you sometimes hear in those huge, American prayer meetings (I have the same issue with a great deal of Michael J. Lewis' stuff too). Undermines some of the music's effect for a reserved Norwegian. I can understand why certain types of fans go apeshit over this, but to me, it's always with a bit of aftertaste. I doubt it's going to be a Top 10 contender.

NP: SHUFFLE (Kurt Kuenne)

When I encounter this in my iTunes collection, I always ask myself: Why do I have this? But then I start listening, and remember how good it was -- even if it's a bit too eclectic in styles.

Harry Gregson-Williams - Deja Vu

Some of my favorite HGW thematic material here, the love theme (Dazzle Me and Tell Me the Truth) is beautiful and there's another theme (most prominently in Claire's Apartment and Humvee Chase, a misnomer with the previous track). The terrorist motif is a chilling trumpet motif that very well informs Jim Caviezel's terrifyingly understated villain.

I also quite like the film. Sure, the time travel moments make little sense and, it seems, the physical complexities of the idea were completely shunned by Tony Scott in favor of spectacle, though he is still able to milk the concept out for its entertainment value. I really like how understated Denzel Washington was in his films (he gets back to that in The Equalizer, which plays out like a bastard child of Man on Fire anyway) and, actually, in his dialogue scene with Denzel it's the chilly Caviezel that steals the show.

Perhaps I'm the only fan of this director out here, but there's much more to Tony Scott than meets the eye. And while some of Hans' best early work is for his films and Crimson Tide is one of the film score masterpieces in my opinion, Gregson-Williams perfectly addressed the paradoxes of his post-The Fan work.

Not even Spy Game has interesting action cues for you? I can imagine you not liking Enemy of the State though, which is about rehashing a single idea about all the time and a weird collaborative process where each composer credits the other one for doing more.

The drumloops issue underscores, really, the specifics of Tony Scott's cinema. What I like about these action cues, myself, is how he injects subtle dramatic strings into that, mostly adding a sense of desperation. If you know what Scott aimed for in at least Man on Fire and Domino, the whole craziness is explained by the characters' mindset, which is exactly what the director aimed for. Man on Fire is about one man's quest for revenge informed by his descent into darkness and madness and was designed as a subjective narrative, Domino's style was defined by Scott's research on bounty hunters and their addiction to cocaine.

It's a bit of the same problem people like Clemmensen (and to an extent you, though I don't think you are completely cold in at least every case) have with the Zimmer/Nolan collaboration: while Zimmer's score are about driving the narrative forward by precisely maintaining internal coherence (with all the parallel editing going on in Nolan's films and their elaborate play with whatever aspect of time we are dealing with), Gregson-Williams addresses an interesting paradox of Tony Scott's style in the final period of his career:

Crazy camera work is largely offset by very low-key performances by both heroes and villains with the exception of John Travolta in Taking of Pelham 1-2-3 who... is as John Travolta as it gets. The subdued moments working their way into the crazy action stuff by, as I said above, injecting desperate string bits (HGW's singular string expression only helps here), are offset by drumloops and whatever layer works the momentum created by the high-octane camera work and the kinetic, choppy editing ("Tony doesn't like to hit synchronization points subtly" - something like that was said by HGW in a post-Man on Fire interview). And that is, by extension, but a plausible one, the paradox of Tony Scott's characters.

NP: A Theory of Everything (2014) - Jóhann Jóhannsson

As Aidabaida said in the RIP thread. The music harkens back stylistically to the music Phil Glass wrote for "A Short History of Time", which might not be a coincidence.

Volker

Actually, the first Bourne score and Italian Job do have moments that very much remind of what Gregson-Williams did in Spy Game and later expanded on in his own action style. I could say the same thing for Klaus Badelt's The Recruit.

Powell redefined the game with The Bourne Supremacy, but it has to be said that in his earlier electronica scores HGW was making an impact with his own hybrid electronics/orchestra work since Spy Game.

It can't be blamed though that Tony Scott wanted to follow up on what essentially was an expansion (indeed!) of The Fan, where Scott also experimented (and failed for many reasons) with the same subjective approach that would later inform Man on Fire and Domino in particular. Interestingly another staple of his style, using multiple point of views/sources (TV, CCTV, satellite imagery, TV cameras in Domino, webcam in Taking of Pelham 1-2-3) would first appear in Enemy of the State, but that's another story.

However, it has to be said that on a purely musical/rhythmic level, Deja Vu (and, to an extent, Unstoppable) is the most streamlined score of them all.

NP: SUNSET BOULEVARD (Franz Waxman)

The album is too long, but the score is obviously great (ol' Waxie is my favourite Golden Ager). This is the Varese rerecording with McNeely and the RSNO.

Viceroy's House - A.R. Rahman

Very beautiful.

Pacific Rim - Ramin Djawadi

I love this score, and I am so afraid of the new one. If "The Revenge" is the highlight of that score, my fears will come true.

yes, yes, this score is amazing.

Max and Me - Mark McKenzie

It is is a pretty good saccharine traditional score, but it isn't anything special at all.

It almost strikes me as a poor man's Horner score in this mode, but Horner's scores usually had at least one good theme, this is forgettable in comparision. I would be shocked in a negative way if it was still in my top 10 of the year by the end of the year - it is too lite and too heavy-handed for my taste too. Not a fan of the clichés here either, the wordless choir (even if I am thankful that he added words to at least one of the cues) and the wailing. It isn't doing anything for me i'm afraid.

I can think of dozens of better film scores than this from the last few years.

Come again?