Comments on: Dream's Ransom: Steven Spielberg's Empire of the Sun

By: ?

Sun, 14 Aug 2011 03:54:16 +0000

Tiger, what does China now have anything to do with this movie set in WW2? Make sense at least. The movie does have some scenes where there’s some overacting, and a poor choice of music, but it’s an undeniably strong film, especially considering it’s told through Bale’s childlike point of view until the last 20 minutes or so.

And Williams has done plenty of “experimenting” this past decade. It’s been his most varied work in years.

By: tiger tim

tiger tim — Wed, 19 May 2010 08:32:14 +0000

In some ways impressive but done in by sappy, over-stated climaxes
–and a typically faceless and mawkish John Williams score. We sure
missed David Lean, Alex North and Bernard Hermann on this one.

BTW —made as a pean to all things Chinese and Asian at a time
when Hollywood’s fanchise slum enabling of history’s –MOST–
awesomely genocidal regime was well underway —and scarcely
a year before the Tiennamen Massacre.

Since, it’s come to light that that same regime( -which NOW underwrites
our entire bankrupt economy )—exterminated 70 million of its people
decades AFTER WWII –in ‘peacetime’.

Hollywood, PC or otherwise, has yet to say anything about it
—even as millions continue to suffer and die FOR REAL on this,
the once again ‘mysteriously overlooked’ 60th Anniversary of
the epically, staggeringly relevant —STILL unfolding —-KOREAN WAR…

—Getting the picture?

-Good- —now pass it on.

-AMEN-

By: Ballardian: the World of J.G. Ballard » Cousin Silas: Another Flask of Ballard

Tue, 02 Oct 2007 22:15:50 +0000

[...] of the Sun, which put Ballard firmly in the ‘general’ public arena, especially after the film arrived, his short stories seem to have been somewhat ignored. Plus, his actual output of short [...]

By: Simon Sellars

Simon Sellars — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 00:27:23 +0000

Funnily enough, for me ‘Pheasant Hunt’ is the most listenable piece — at least it’s somewhat abstract, a blank enough slate on which can be projected at least some semblance of psychological gravitas. The rest is purely Williams telling us how to feel.

Imagine if Spielberg had continued to mine the Duel/Sugarland Express vein.

By: Pedro Groppo

Pedro Groppo — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 02:05:01 +0000

You have a point there, Simon. I don’t think Williams’ music completely undermines the visuals. There are sequences it works extremely well, I’d say. The main themes, present in “Cadillac in the Skies” and “Toy Planes, Home, and Hearth” (as on the CD) heighten the mood in an E.T. flying over the moon or the final scene in Close Encounters of the Third Kind sort of way — it does add to the majestic feeling of spectacle in an old-fashioned way, seeing that Williams’ models himself after guys like Max Steiner and Alfred Newman.

But it does come dangerously close to doing too much and telling us how to feel. There are even a couple of scenes that it can seriously get in the way – like the “Pheasant Hunt” sequence, full of clichéd “Asianesque” instruments or when Jim is being chased in Shanghai by the homeless boy. I think the music does betray in a way Spielberg’s uncertainty towards the material, and by choosing to do the music in the most conventional way possible, he does get rather generic, and brings the film down with it. It betrays the fact that deep down, Spielberg wants this film to please everybody. And that’s something he has always done. He is at his best when he does not pamper to our expectations and actually teaches us what to like. He did that brilliantly in Jaws and Close Encounters, not surprisingly two of John Williams’ most “experimental” scores.

It’s rather an unfortunate choice. I think Spielberg has come to rely a bit too much on Williams. He does not even consider doing a movie with another composer, which is odd. (The Color Purple was scored by Quincy Jones but he was also the producer) It’s like he takes that aspect of the movie for granted even.

David Cronenberg, on the other hand, always gets Howard Shore to score his movies, but not only is Shore much more versatile than Williams, he also knows he has to abandon a certain style of music making in order to accommodate a film — he even collaborated with Ornette Coleman in Naked Lunch. Spielberg and Williams are far from that, and would always rather play it safe.

By: Simon Sellars

Simon Sellars — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 01:37:52 +0000

For me, sound design and music are major elements of the filmgoing experience. And unfortunately John Williams’ score completely undermines whatever point the visuals may have been striving for. His bombastic orchestration renders this film with the same generic, perceptual afterglow as any other Spielberg blockbuster.

Any thoughts on that, Pedro?

By: Pippa Tandy

Pippa Tandy — Sat, 29 Sep 2007 12:21:28 +0000

Thanks Pedro for an excellent account of Spielberg’s Empire. I have to say I am not that keen on Spelberg’s movies, but he is master of the mise-en-scene and I love the big scenes in this film such as the air-raid and the early sequences you discuss. That is interesting about Lean. I always thought that Oliver Twist was (partly) a movie about WWII and displaced children. (Probably because I first saw it in the 50s with my father who had been a London evacuee.) So there is a nice pattern there. I will also look more sympathetically at Spielberg’s ending of Empire having read your comments!