Saturday, April 9, 2011

Hans Zimmer is My Hero.


I might could have saved this for my 'Z' post, but... meh.  We'll go with 'H' for Hans.

A while back, I wrote this post about the approximate number of movies I've seen in my life. (Answer: give or take roughly 3,000 titles.)

The reason I even explored that question was to write about the music of those movies.  Film scores are a huge part of my life.  We played them in band.  They run through my head at random on a daily basis, depending on what I'm doing.  If my life had a soundtrack... oh, wait, it DOES!  Usually if I have my Mac or iPod anywhere available while I'm working or doing stuff at home, the odds are pretty high that I'll be playing the soundtrack/complete orchestral score from some movie or other.

I even have a quirky gift of being able to hear a piece of music from a film and match it up action for action or line for line and tell you what's happening in the movie at that moment.  Not watching the screen.  It's a pretty useless gift, but some of my friends who can't do it find it pretty cool.
Marilyn: (listening to the soundtrack from the first Narnia film, The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe.) "Ok, what's happening now??"
Me: "The CGI map has given way to a live shot of the battlefield.  Peter and Edmund are watching the White Witch and her army advance. Orius is about to say "Numbers do not win a battle." Peter will reply "No, but I bet they help."
Marilyn: (Puts in the movie, selects the scene, presses play and all plays out (including the music) just as I said.) "How do you do that?!"

Movie music is meant to make you feel.  It punctuates the motion on screen to evoke pity or joy or sadness or fear or love or confusion or any of another thousand emotions that need to be gotten across to you, the viewer, to make a connection with a character/characters or situation.  The music that's playing in the background is every bit as important- maybe more so- as the lines the characters say.

Having seen nearly 3,000 movies in my life, each with their own unique score and orchestrations, that's a LOT of music swirling around in my brain.  Yet out of ALL of those, there is one soundtrack that always rises to the top.  One that is always on my playlist.  One that I love the MOST.

That film is the 3rd installment of the Pirates of the Caribbean series, At World's End.  Maybe it's because it's the end of a trilogy and climaxes all of the action into one epic piece.  Whatever it is, I love it.

Hans Zimmer is the man who wrote the score.  He. is. amazing.
He's written over 100 movie scores in his illustrious career, including (but certainly not limited to)
Rain Man
The Lion King
The Prince of Egypt
Black Hawk Down
Gladiator
Pearl Harbor


Teaming up with Jerry Bruckheimer (a genius in his own right), Zimmer composed the themes for the Pirates franchise.  And I am in complete musical heaven. :)

I told my husband that the end all, be all of anniversary/birthday/Christmas gifts for the rest of my life would be if he could contact Mr. Zimmer and get him to write a theme/score for my life.  I'm not holding my breath for DH to come through on that one.  But it would be awesome!

Here are 3 of my favorite pieces from the 3rd Pirates film.  Enjoy.





5 comments:

  1. I love Hans Zimmer's music! But then, I'm very keen on movie scores too - I love some of the stuff Jerry Goldsmith and John Barry did!

    SueH

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  2. hi Jenny:)

    just passin` thru and visiting blogs in the challenge. love the photos AND Fabulous Frank, especially! we "had" bear until one of our kids (four legged) got even with him.... payback for leaving him behind, i guess. one of my favorite camping spots in Georgia was Edisto Beach State Park. i often wonder if it's still there or if it's gotton washed away in a hurricane. i have a cousin that lives there and now you wouldn't that she was born a yankee.

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  3. Sue- I love 007 and Somewhere in Time! John Williams used to be a huge favorite with me (I saw Jurassic Park 6 times in the theater) and we did a lot of his stuff in HS Band. There is also Howard Shore of LOTR fame. I got to see him guest conduct a concert of the LOTR score with the Atlanta Symphony. It was VERY cool. But even with these, Hans and Pirates 3 still holds my heart. :)

    Sojourner- Welcome! Thanks for stopping by! Sorry to hear about Bear. :) I will be posting more on Frank soon. Edisto Beach SP is still around, but I've never been. It's about 300 miles from Atlanta, just over the SC border. Maybe we'll check it out sometime. :)

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  4. Zimmer is amazing! I think he's tied with John Williams (science-fiction nerd that I am) in my book... ::thinks:: No, I think Williams gets the cake simply because of the soundtrack to Revenge of the Sith (specifically 'Padme's Reumifications' and 'Obi-Wan vs Anakin'). I can't do what you do to ANY movie, but quiz me sometime on Star Wars music and I bet you'd be surprised! (Or, since you know me, perhaps not...) My husband and I play Star Wars Trivial Pursuit whenever we want to make each other mad and we play by what we call "dark side rules" (since it's WAY too easy for us going by the regular rules: you have to not only give the correct answer, but voice dialouge from the scene and tell the title to the score playing at that moment). Want to play? :}

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