"Music By John Williams" Review

 There are few things pretty much all movie fans will agree on, but this is one of them: John Williams is the GOAT (Greatest of All Time) of movie score composers. Sure, there may be a few who disagree, but they're morons & probably Commie alien robots.

 With 54 Oscar nominations (only Walt Disney has more) and five wins (ONLY FIVE?!?) and a legacy including nine Star Wars, five Indiana Jones, three Harry Potter and so many more memorable scores - Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Jurassic Park, Superman (admit it, you were humming the themes from everything I've listed) - there is no one who has cast such a transformative shadow across music for films. He is a rock star in what was a staid and underappreciated field. Film maven Robert Meyer Burnett said that if you only looked at the 29(!) scores he's composed for Steven Spielberg alone he would be the GOAT.

 So is the premise of Music by John Williams, a fascinating and informative documentary which is unfortunately on the godforsaken Mouse+ hellhole service. (There are ways around this, ahem.) Director Laurent Bouzereau - who if you've even watched the making-of behind-the-scenes supplements on a major film's DVD/Blu-ray probably directed it - pays loving tribute to the long and surprisingly varied career of Williams.

Beginning life as the son of a jazz drummer who played with Benny Goodman and others before moving the family to Hollywood where he played in studio orchestras on films you've heard of, Williams was destined for a life in music, but he thought he'd just be a pianist. Beginning in high school through his service in the Air Force, he stumbled into opportunities to learn skills in arranging and composing which led to his own career playing on scores, ultimately beginning to score countless television shows of many genres, further expanding his versatility.

Spielberg had become smitten with Williams work after hearing his score for The Reivers, swearing that if he would ever get to make a feature he'd have Williams do the music. Soon he was meeting with Williams to discuss scoring 1974's The Sugarland Express and their collaboration has continued through current times when Williams became the oldest Oscar nominee ever in 2022 at age 91 for his score to The Fabelmans. It was Spielberg who pitched George Lucas on using Williams after Jaws, when Lucas just knew him as a jazz artist.

Which is where Music by John Williams really steps up to touch upon his career before becoming Mr. Blockbuster Movie Score Guy to Gen X as a musician on scores to movies you've heard of to his personal classical compositions for various instruments which attracted some of the greatest players in the field. 

 Interestingly, he has never adopted technology in his process, still scoring by hand with pencil and paper vs. computerized methods where what you play gets automatically converted into notation. He also remains steadfast in using full orchestras to record his scores rather than using synthesizers/samplers like many do as a cost saving or speed method. (Looking at you, Hans Zimmer.) While he has brought in synths as augments (e.g. Munich) and I remember when I realized there was electric guitar during the assassin droid chase scene from Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones, he has remained a Luddite in those regards, though he admits auto-transcription would be useful for faster complicated passages.

One of the wildest factoids was delivered by his daughter who mentioned her brother was the singer of Toto (in their post Toto IV phase in the 1980s for a few years). Oddly, his sons don't appear.

I've seen some grousing that this is more of a tribute than a documentary because it doesn't compare him to other contemporary composers, but so what? This is picky nattering like a theologian whining that a documentary about God doesn't talk about Apollo, Zeus & Vishnu half the time. It's not about the others, it's about John Williams. While Coldplay's Chris Martin speaks on how Williams' scores evoke emotions and Branford Marsalis notes how the cantina band number in Star Wars and the score to Catch Me If You Can prove Williams' jazz legitimacy, no other film composers are featured, just his film & classical collaborators.

 Williams will be turning 93 in a month and sadly no one lives forever, so there will eventually be a time when we won't be blessed with the new music of John Williams. But we will always have the millions of notes he has composed to not only be the soundtrack of the movies, but the soundtrack of our lives. Anyone interested in music or movies (which is why you're here, right?) should make a point of watching Music by John Williams.

Score: 8.5/10. Catch it on Disney+ (or your favorite black flag high seas method).

"Juror #2" Review

 It's a new year, but tonight's first movie of the new year is a throwback to a time when mature filmmakers made well-acted, small-scale tales which didn't involve the fate of the Universe as much as the fate of a few people's souls and moral compasses. Such as it is with Juror #2, a film unfairly burdened with historical importance due to it possibly being the last film by 94-year-old Clint Eastwood.

The titular juror is Justin (Nicholas Hoult), a writer in Georgia who has been called for jury duty in late-October 2022. He tries to beg off because his wife, Allison (Zoey Deutch), is nearly due with a high-risk pregnancy, but is denied and made to sit for the trial of James Sythe (Gabriel Basso, who played incoming Vice President JD Vance in the film adaptation of Hillbilly Elegy) who is accused of murdering his girlfriend, Kendall (Francesca Eastwood, one guess as to who dad is), and throwing her body into a creek.

Immediately as the trial begins, Justin realizes that the night of alleged murder and location of her body coincided with the night he thought he had hit a deer on that dark and stormy night. He realizes he was at the bar the couple were at where they'd publicly spatted. Did he hit Kendall?

Justin goes to his AA sponsor, Larry (Kiefer Sutherland), and pays him a dollar (for attorney-client confidentiality) for advice for what to do about his situation and possible involvement. Larry points out that with his record of drunk driving and presence in a bar before the accident, no one will believe he wasn't drunk even though Justin swears he didn't drink the drink he'd ordered. To come forward to save an innocent man with a troubled past would likely destroy his family.

When the trial goes into deliberations, Justin is horrified that everyone just wants to convict James and get back to their lives. They aren't happy with this holdout and his vague comments about needing to look at the evidence, but soon he has an ally in former homicide detective, Harold (J.K. Simmons), who initially believes James should've taken the plea, but begins to agree that something seems off about the case and James doesn't seem like the killer type.

When Harold's attempt to investigate things puts him afoul of the rules, he is dismissed from the jury, but approaches the assistant DA conducting the trial, Faith Killebrew (Toni Collette), and puts the bug in her ear that perhaps the case wasn't properly investigated by the police who had immediately set their sights on the victim's boyfriend and built the case around nailing him to the exclusion of other possibilities.

Where Juror #2 steps up is in the above-average script by first-time screenwriter Jonathan A. Abrams which takes the time to set up the characters to give them understandable, if sometimes unreasonable, motivations. Eastwood's spare direction also relies on viewers to notice crucial details with minimal reiteration like what the date in question meant which would trigger Justin to have a crisis of sobriety.

Abrams script also avoid the lazy tropes of too many movies. Killebrew is running for District Attorney and to win a conviction in this notorious trial would definitely help her, but she's not railroading a man who knows she's innocent. After Harold suggests the investigation may've been myopic, she actually does the work of running down the angle Harold dug up.

The 12 Annoyed Diverse Jurors are eventually willing to consider the thinness of the circumstantial evidence though one juror (Cedric Yarbrough) has an axe to grind against past behavior of the defendant that he'll never change his vote. Another (Chikako Fukuyama) notices a detail that really should've been caught by both the medical examiner and the public defender, Resnick (Chris Messina), so when the verdict is abruptly rendered, we're left wondering what had changed.

Which leads to the least satisfying and sketchiest part, the film's coda where Justin and Killebrew have an oblique conversation where they convey they know what actually happened, but he tells her to deliver actual justice would be too devastating to them. This seems out of character with what he'd tried to do during deliberations, though the final moment may imply both are about to reverse course. It feels like Abrams didn't quite know how to explicate things better and just called it close enough for government work.

Eastwood, for all his notable films in a directorial career spanning over 50 years back to 1971's Play Misty For Me, has never really been a flashy director, focusing more on straightforward storytelling without visual flourishes, and he doesn't start cribbing from Michael Bay here. But across the board the performances are solid, even with tertiary roles. (As an actor, he knows how to direct actors and famously doesn't like to shoot a lot of takes, unlike those like David Fincher who will shoot 100 takes as if anyone would know the difference if he stopped after 50.)

The controversy over Juror #2 is whether a legendary director like Eastwood's potential final film should've been dumped to streaming and denied a theatrical release, but it was always intended to be a Max Original. Frankly, how much of an audience for a quiet legal drama is going to want to schlep to the theater to see a movie like this regardless of quality? Maybe in 1998 we would've, but now any movies that don't beg for BIG SCREEN VIEWING beyond what our nice home theater delivers get caught when they're streaming. We would never have gone out now to see Juror #2, but definitely would've watched it later. So should you.

Score: 7/10. Catch it on cable/streaming. (Currently on MAX.)