It's a Christmas tradition in geek culture as ingrained as Magic: the Gathering booster pack stocking stuffers: making fun of the Star Wars Holiday Special. And well we should: It has definitely not aged well, to damn it the faintest. Reviewing it is a guaranteed hit on YouTube, so every major reviewer has a shot at it. Let's get a few out of the way: The Nostalgia Critic has the funniest review, hands-down: The Cinema Snob has a great runner-up: Dark Corners has a shorter, sweeter review: Even geek-culture webcomic classic XKCD just had to take a swipe at it. The Star Wars Holiday Special is the very definition of "low-hanging fruit." Yeah, and you know what? YOU'VE ALL GOT IT WRONG! You young Millennial whipper-snapper Star Wars fans, I'm sorry, but you can take the next Star Tours shuttle express to planet Get Off My Lawn! There are a whole four decades of cultural and historical context you're all ignoring. What else do you do, break into Egyptian pyramids and graffiti critiques next…
It’s been just over two years since Rogue One was released, and it is one of the best regarded Star Wars movies of the Disney era. Yet despite its success, it has one major flaw. The title sequence music. Though Michael Giacchino did an excellent job to differentiate this Star Wars spinoff’s music from the other scores, the way he redoes the Main Theme in this title sequence makes the music not “Star Wars”. Furthermore, there is a particular reason why I say that. Because while he only makes a couple of seemingly minor edits, those edits completely change the fundamental nature of this theme. Now before I get too far, I just want to point out that I think Michael Giacchino did a great job with this score. He is one of my favorite film composers alive and did an outstanding job with the very limited timeframe he was given. He literally only had a month to write, record, and edit the entire score. Most composers get two or three times that time. Moreover, so while I don’t think he sought out…
As the number 2 film composer of all time, what makes John Williams so great? One word: EMOTION. His music is filled with emotion, and this is an exploration into why his music carries so much feeling. In Part 1, we looked at how he Mickey Mouses emotion by carefully timing the emotional content of the music with the film. And in Part 2, we saw how he uses leitmotifs to reveal characters’ emotions and how his emotional content is character driven. His isn’t trying to make the audience feel emotion but instead shows how the characters are thinking and feeling. But this still leaves us with one last question: How does his musical content elicit emotion? We looked at how he enhances emotion through leitmotifs and Mickey Mousing emotion, but neither technique inherently gives emotion to a cue. So that’s what we are going to explore today. And we are going to start exploring someone completely different. Michael Giacchino and “The Chord” Michael Giacchino points out many of the ideas we’ve been…
How I Came To This Crazy Conclusion... The freelance writing business takes you on some unexpected adventures. Over the holidays I was doing research work for this one client regarding the political leanings of corporations, which included punching the names of lots of companies into the site Open Secrets. It's a strange world there. In the first place, there's some debate as to whether corporations should be meddling in politics on the financial level at all. But beyond that, the logic behind corporate political donations is baffling. Many of them donate near equally to both Democrat and Republican parties, basically saying "We don't care who wins, we just want to make sure we have a friend when they get in."
Wal-Mart - Lately donates to both parties with a pronounced Republican lean, but during the Bush, Jr. administration went all in for Rs.
Target - Went all in for Republicans during the Bush years and well into Obama's first term, now leans slightly Democrat since Trump took…
Score: 1.66
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