#alan silvestri

[doyoulikethissong-poll]

Alan Silvestri - Back to the Future 1985

Back to the Future is an American science fiction franchise created by Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale. The franchise follows the adventures of a high school student, Marty McFly, and an eccentric scientist, Dr. Emmett "Doc" Brown, as they use a DeLorean time machine to time travel to different periods in the history of the fictional town of Hill Valley, California. The first Back to the Future film was the highest-grossing film of 1985 and became an international phenomenon, leading to the second and third films, which were back-to-back film productions, released in 1989 and 1990, respectively.

In composing the score, the only direction Zemeckis gave Alan Silvestri was "it's got to be big". Silvestri used an orchestral score to create a sound that contrasted with the small-town setting and the significant time-changing events occurring within it, and developed a heroic theme that was designed to be instantly recognizable in just a few notes.

"Back to the Future" received a total of 86,9% yes votes! Previous Alan Silvestri polls: #484 "The Avengers".

[mikyapixie]

First poster for the 20th anniversary of The Polar Express!!!🤩🤩🤩🤩🤩

[doyouknowthismusical]

[katoninefandoms]

Listening to Captain America soundtracks at work, so have some thoughts:

The First Avenger's soundtrack is how nostalgia feels to me. So triumphant and hopeful and beautiful. It feels like classic trumpet-focused triumphant war-overlay, the Captain America March (not on the official soundtrack, boo) is a pretty classic march. But there’s grandeur to everything that gives it that little puash into superhero territory, and then it tends to fade into a more humble phrase, reminding of the gentle man underneath the hero. Alan Silvestri is my favoritest.

I forgot how stupid and campy "Star Spangled Man with a Plan" is, and omfg of COURSE people thought it was so goddamn silly that Captain America showed up to a HYDRA base and kicked ass.

The Winter Soldier is SUCH a tone shift from the first film. Henry Jackman made this incredible, ultra-modern set for this film. It's very good spy/superhero music, but it also does a lot of fantastic work showing how far Steve is thrust out of his element and into modern society and warfare.

And then, his softer themes, echoes of Silvestri's march, are not an exact sampling, and have a more... tinny? nature to them. Like a distorted memory; a distant past that one cannot return to. And having that during the museum scene is absolutely brilliant.

The Bucky scream. At this point, I feel like a lot of fans are aware, but I'll say it anyway. There is a modulated sound in this track, an "aaaa" that starts high, and dips lower until it almost, barely sounds like a voice.* That is Sebastian Stan's scream when Bucky fell from the train. It's worked beautifully into the music. It's haunting and startling on its own, but when you Know... ugh. Chills every time.

There are also other nonconventional sounds thrown in. Like a chime that sounds like a railroad crossing, other scream-like synth sounds. It's so damn spooky. If you haven't listened to the track "The Winter Soldier" you should. It is so, so good. Lots of radio crunch, metallic pounding sounds, and distorted electronic voices in it that are so tasty in context. There are boot-up sounds. Its chilling. (*It also begins with 3 Bucky screams, if you want a good example.)

"An Old Friend" is the track that plays during Steve's visit to Peggy, and it has an interesting theme in it. The first instance is at 0:07. Sound familiar? Try again, 1:32 - 1:48. If you are also a need and like Alan Silvestri and have been listening to another of his compositions on repeat because it's Amazing, then you maybe noticed it sounds like the opening phrase of "Portals", from Avengers: Endgame.

^I cannot be certain this is on purpose. But I love it anyway. Peggy is Steve's old, long lost friend, and she's there for him as he's floundering to find his place. And then in Endgame, he stands alone before Thanos, ready to face trouble head on, alone. And that phrase plays, opening portals to allow in armies of friends and allies, there to support the last man standing; Steve's new "old friends" who have been missing for 5 years. And the theme is stronger! Steve's support network has grown exponentially. I love the poetry of it. I love returning musical themes.

There are my Captain America music thoughts, at least for TFA and TWS. Maybe I'll listen to the Captain America: Civil War soundtrack next and reblog with those thoughts.

[masonskaya]

[bastionofbibliophiles]

Today In "Unreasonably Good Soundtracks"

The Source: "The Polar Express" (2004)

The Song: "Seeing is Believing"

The Composer: Alan Silvestri

[swedebeast]

There's no stopping what can't be stopped, no killing what can't be killed.

[ivovynckier]

Film composer Alan Silvestri, Robert Zemeckis' house composer, made a contribution to Christmas movies.

[doyoulikethissong-poll]

Alan Silvestri - The Avengers 2012

The Avengers is a 2012 American superhero film based on the Marvel Comics superhero team of the same name. In the film, Nick Fury and the spy agency S.H.I.E.L.D. recruit Tony Stark, Steve Rogers, Bruce Banner, Thor, Natasha Romanoff, and Clint Barton to form a team capable of stopping Loki from subjugating Earth, (and making my tumblr mutuals far too generously spam my dashboard with glorious gifs).

The film score was composed and conducted by Alan Silvestri. He stated, "This is actually a very unique experience for me. I've worked on films where there have been a number of stars and certainly worked on films where there have been characters of equal weight in terms of their level of importance and profile in the film, but this one is somewhat extreme in that regard because each of these characters has their own world and it's a very different situation. It's very challenging to look for a way to give everyone the weight and consideration they need, but at the same time the film is really about the coming together of these characters, which implies that there is this entity called the Avengers, which really has to be representative of all of them together."

"The Avengers" received a total of 88,2% yes votes!

[holy-shit-comics]

[mikyapixie]

20 years ago today The Polar Express released in theaters!!!

This is one of the best Christmas movies!!!

[moorheadthanyoucanhandle]

EVERYTHING EVERY TIME ALL IN ONE PLACE

Playing wide in the multiplexes right now:

Here--A spot in a living room in an upscale eastern Pennsylvania suburb--that's the title locale of this latest from Robert Zemeckis. It's our static vantage point for, essentially, the whole movie, looking across the room through a picture window that offers a view of the big brick colonial-era house across the street. 

We see the view there before it was a living room--long, long before. As in, we see it during the extinction event that ended the Cretaceous Period, sixty million years ago. We see it as a woodland make-out spot for indigenous lovers (Dannie McCallum and Joel Oulette), and as a burial site. We see it as part of a dirt road leading up to the aforementioned historic manse, which once was occupied by William Franklin (Daniel Betts), estranged Loyalist son of Benjamin (Keith Bartlett).

After the house is built, we get glimpses of the lives of its early 20th-Century inhabitants, like an enthusiastic aviator (Gwilym Lee) whose wife (Michelle Dockery) frets about his flying. They're followed by a whimsical inventor (David Fynn) and his sexy flapper wife (Ophelia Lovibond). This guy is trying to perfect a reclining chair; his working title for it is "Relax-y-Boy." And we see the house's early 21st-Century occupants, an African-American family; Nicholas Pinnock and Nikki Amuka-Bird are the parents, and Anya Marco-Harris is the beloved housekeeper.

But the movie's main focus is the midcentury family that takes the place over after WWII: Dad (Paul Bettany), a combat veteran and a seething, disappointed functional alcoholic, his sweet, quietly unfulfilled wife (Kelly Reilly), and his oldest son (Tom Hanks), an aspiring artist. The son gets his beautiful girlfriend (Robin Wright) pregnant, so there goes both art school and her college dreams. They move in with the parents, and stay for decades.

So the movie packs in a lot of history (and prehistory), a lot of longings fulfilled and unfulfilled, and cultural references ranging from the Spanish flu to the Spanish Inquistion sketch from Monty Python. But I'll admit that when I realized we were going to be parked in one place for the whole thing--I went in not knowing this--I panicked for a moment.

I needn't have worried. Zemeckis has always been a skillful showman, and while the audacious experiment of Here is by no means an unqualified success, it certainly never bored me. The script, by Eric Roth and Zemeckis, is based on a 2014 graphic novel by Richard McGuire, and Zemeckis employs comic-book techniques like overlapping inset panels to interweave the various timelines and bounce them off each other thematically. It's an impressive and confident exercise in narrative, and it does carry a cumulative emotional punch.

There are downsides, however. The fixed point of view means that the actors tend to seem a bit far away from us a lot of the time, and when they are brought up into the foreground it somehow feels forced. Zemeckis may have been worried about this distancing too; Alan Silvestri's music, though pretty, is ladled on a bit thicker than it should be, as if to telegraph what we're supposed to be feeling.  

Much more jarringly, though, the people in Here often have an ersatz, CGI "Uncanny Valley" look to them. The leads were taken all the way back to teenaged through some sort of real-time computer tech, and while the results are tolerable, they aren't perfected in realistic terms.

It must be admitted, however, that Hanks and Wright transcend this limitation, especially Hanks. The other actors sometimes feel like cyber-phantoms, but Hanks is so vibrant that he can project his humanity right through the program. And after Apollo 13, Castaway, Captain Phillips and Sully, it's also a relief to see the poor guy stay put.

[demonsee2]

The Image Quartet

[myvinylplaylist]

Judge Dredd Original Motion Picture Soundtrack (1995)

Epic Records