Saturday, November 30, 2013

Epic Movie Soundtracks

I feel like so many things started with the movie Gladiator. It was the beginning of the trend of making epic historical movies (with Alexander, Troy, and Kingdom of Heaven following) and the beginning of amazing epic movie soundtracks!!! That I obsess over!!! I LOVED the Gladiator soundtrack, the first soundtrack I bought that was a score and not a collection of songs. And the part I loved to death, that to this day is still the fucking best soundtrack snippet EVER, is the one at the 5:50 mark of ‘The Battle’ track. It’s that first battle scene of the movie where they’re fighting the Gauls, and Maximus and the others descend on them from behind!! Fuckin’ amazing!! SO rousing!! And of course on that soundtrack the haunting ‘Elysium’ track was mesmerizing and I loved that one to death too. Always made me picture his hands caressing the wheat fields. sigh. :) May it be noted that Gladiator is one of my all-time favourite movies! I’ve watched it sooo many times!

Now what other soundtracks have rocked my world? LOTR had a pale version of Gladiator’s ‘The Battle’ at the beginning of ‘The Uruk-Hai’ in the Two Towers soundtrack. Also found in a few other tracks. It was rousing but not nearly as much. Well fuck LOTR wasn’t nearly as rousing or exciting altogether in my opinion. :/ So much so that I still haven’t seen any of The Hobbit movies yet. And me a self-professed fantasy buff. sigh. That’s how unexciting they are! The identically-named ‘The Battle’ track on the Chronicles of Narnia soundtrack (1st movie) is also awesomely exciting!

Another favourite historical soundtrack that is amazing in every single track is the King Arthur one! With ‘Budget Meeting’ being my favourite! And with a name like that I can’t help think someone was joking around naming it! I keep picturing a corporate meeting gone awry! haha! And similarly awesome is the Last of the Mohicans soundtrack. With ‘Promontory’ always eliciting images of that tragic scene near the end. :((((

Then all these awesome soundtracks have led me to finding other awesome ones in non-epic historical movies! Most recently the new Tron: Legacy soundtrack blew me away!! That soundtrack rocks! And I like Daft Punk well enough but didn’t know they could make such a perfectly epic soundtrack! So many faves on that one! I guess ‘Overture’ and ‘The Grid’ come to mind, but then also ‘Disc Wars’ and ‘Finale’, and so many others!! Then the first Transformers movie soundtrack was absolutely amazing too! ‘The All Spark’ is amazing but so many other tracks as well!! Totally listened to that soundtrack on “repeat” a shitload!! :P

Then Buffy season finales for seasons 5 and 7 are absolutely, absolutely awesome!! Especially the season 7 series finale, where the spell finally made all the slayerettes real slayers and they just take down vamp after vamp after vamp!!! I can watch that scene over and over again that’s for sure!! :P

Then there’s some awesome main title music for a few TV shows that I listen to like crazy!! Main ones being Firefly, Battlestar Galactica and right now I CANNOT get enough of the Game of Thrones main title music!!! Gaaawwwrrrr!! It’s killing me how much I love it!! Another TV show that had awesome soundtrack was Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles! Awesome theme music!! And I also love the ‘Samson and Delilah’ song and could not get the ‘Donald, Where’s Your Trousers’ duet sung by the actors out of my head!!! That song is soooo good!!

Honourable mentions of soundtracks I’m not quite obsessed with (possibly coz I haven’t listened enough to them... obsession takes time you know!! haha!) are Pirates of the Caribbean, Inception, The Eagle, and Eragon. I also love the music from Blizzard’s Starcraft game... might be coz I’m obsessed with the game!! ;) And the soundtrack to the French movie Les Choristes (The Chorus) is totally amazing too. It’s about a boys choir and the songs they sing evoke all the images of the film which was so so so amazing!!

If anyone wants to share their fave instrumental soundtracks, please do!!! I’m always dying to find more!!

Wednesday, May 22, 2013

Female character stereotypes


I've just read a most amazing article called ‘We Have Always Fought’: Challenging the ‘Women, Cattle and Slaves’ Narrative by Kameron Hurley!!!! Primarily about the stereotypes female characters have become and why we need to challenge them!! Go read it!! Absolutely fascinating and such great points!! I just wanted to share the article and some of the comments I posted on it and use this as an impetus to finally get back to writing here on my oh-so-lonely blog that I've neglected for faaaarrr toooooo long!! I'm sorry bloggie. haha! :P ... Ok so here are my miscellaneous generated by the essay and comments! :)

- omg where to start! seeing in your bio about learning to box (i’m “pretending” to learn too! haha! ie. i only spar etc “recreationally”) … it brings to mind this awesome book and one of the above comments about women need to be seen as abusers sometimes reminded me too coz the book made a good point that we need to see them that way for the sake of their victims… the book is called Kill The Body The Head Will Fall by Rene Denfeld (see my post) and she discusses female agression partly through boxing which she was doing at the time. and she makes some amazing AMAZING points along the lines of the discussion above!

- other mini-topic… i lent an old Mercedes Lackey book to a younger friend who was a bit put off by the sword ‘Need’ that only helped women etc… and i realized as i was talking to her about it, in the 80s was kinda the early stages of female fantasy writers and female warrior heroines and i would say coz of the stereotypes mentioned above female warriors often had to have become that coz of rape or some other horror coz we couldnt have them just wanting to fight right!?

- LOVE the joss whedon Equality Now speech mentioned above!! such a succint point of whats wrong!

- also all of this reminds of the Bechdel Test! a good ‘test’ of whether something (usually movies) has good female characters!

- i’m also a ‘self aware misogynist’ ! haha good term! but i think we cant help but be having grown up in our society? coz i like your point about ‘female soldiers’ vs. just soldier for women… coz guess what i call myself?! Lady Knight! instead of just knight. sigh.

- and a friend was making a *fantasy* movie… and all the soldiers were men except an ‘elite’ group of scantily clad female warriors. its fantasy you can do whatever! make women soldiers! and from what i’m grateful to learn above, even in reality there was a good many women soldiers! good to know!

- i really dont think Game of Thrones is a good example of strong female characters. not many of them are seen in a totally positive light and very few warriors. I’m loving Steven Erikson’s books in comparison coz female fighters are the norm, every army and group has some. Versus Martin who’s only female characters that carry a sword are a little girl and a woman who was only introduced in the 3rd book and had a noose around her neck in the 4th book. (i’m refusing to read the 5th) (see my post comparing them ;)