Fran Magazine: Sunday Dispatch, Sept. 8-14

Speak No Evil x2, is A Bigger Splash good?, two major Elden Ring announcements, and a tale of seeing live music

This is the Fran Magazine Sunday Dispatch, a weekly culture diary for paid subscribers only. The Sunday Dispatch details what I’ve been watching, reading, playing, and listening to over the past week. Paid subscriptions help stabilize my writing career, but all readers — paid & not — are appreciated. You can also follow me on Instagram or Letterboxd (for free!). Thanks for reading!

I saw Hans Zimmer at the Garden

If you go see Hans Zimmer live in concert, be ready for him to spend a not insignificant amount of time sitting on the stage like this.

I was sort of disappointed there wasn’t even a brief mention of “Video Killed The Radio Star”

On Thursday night, Rebecca and I went to go see Hans Zimmer play at Madison Square Garden, a bizarre experience I’d been eager to have since I missed Zimmer’s 2017 (? maybe 2016) tour to go on a weekend trip to Wisconsin with friends. This was not long after his Coachella set when the coolest thing anyone could imagine was hearing the music from Pirates of the Caribbean so loud while being on drugs. We did not do drugs to see Hans Zimmer at the Garden; I for one did “Diet Pepsi” with no ice¹ and chicken tenders with a spicy mustard that was spicier than intended.²

Here was the big question of seeing Hans Zimmer live: Did he have any good music after the year 2017? Okay, here’s the other question: Is the Dunkirk score good? I felt like yes at the time… but is anyone still really listening to that? There has been one significant contribution to the Zimmer canon since the “vibe shift,” or whatever, and it is the Dune score, which he knows, because he played music from it about 2.7 different times throughout the show, whereas all the other films got 8-10 minute montages of themes and that was it. Zimmer plays with a small orchestra and a smattering of rock musicians; mostly he is doing “rock adaptations” of otherwise classical (and sometimes rock-ish) scoring. You can really tell from what his live performances are like that his music is far more inspired by pop and rock song construction than classical or romantic music. His rock musicians — especially the people who play the electronic strings — are all sexy ladies which is lmao, to me at least. Imagine being one of the great electric cellists and you are wearing, like, tights and a leather bikini as you play the Pirates theme? Probably one of the best jobs you could have. What was fun to hear live? Well, Dune, obviously, and Pirates, duh, but Interstellar — a movie that I’m never sure if I like or not — and Gladiator for sure. Batman was more striking than I remembered. His contributions to the DC universe otherwise… far less so.

I was curious to see what the demographic would be like for such an event — I don’t know why I thought it would be a lot of kids (?) but it was mostly couples dressed like they were going to the symphony.³ I realized with some skepticism that this probably is going to the symphony for many people, something I haven’t otherwise thought about minus the time where someone tweeted, “why are philharmonics still playing stravinsky when they could be playing john williams?”⁴ I thought a lot about concert-going and nationalism (lol) in that Zimmer frequently made reference to film score writing as traveling around the world… funny to consider in reference to the classical/romantic canon which was about establishing a national sound. Good thing I am not trying to write a book about all this kind of stuff… or else I would be… thinking about too much stuff… rather than saying, like, “Now I need to go see Danny Elfman on tour.”