Well said, Alex. I don't mean to over-reach and write off minimalism in scores, as I truly do like all kinds. John Carpenter is one of my favorite composers, and he's all about coming up with iconic simple riffs that permeate the entire runtime of his movies. I think it's just something specifically to do with the way action music gets written nowadays, where it just feels like driving background noise and nothing more than that, and it really bugs me lately. I think Zimmer's been guilty of it on several movies, though as you rightfully point out, his imitators are more to blame than the man himself.

There's a whole argument to be had about whether scores should be able to stand alone, or just need to complement the movie in the moment, but just personally, I believe the truly great scores are all able to stand alone. Whether it's orchestral, like Conan the Barbarian, or more minimalist modern like the Social Network, I think you can put those on in the background and appreciate and enjoy them completely removed from their original context. Ultimately though, when it comes to Zimmer, I don't ever go "Man, I feel like listening to the Dark Knight Rises score", or the "man of steel score". I throw on Broken Arrow, or Pirates, or Rango.

WELL I DONT LIKE HIS FACE

I enjoyed both Battleship and Battle Los Angeles immensely (the latter a bit more so). I'd love to see a supercut of these two spliced together.

The thing with Battleship is that the last 30 minutes is actually super awesome, it's just too little, and way too damn late. That's the annoying mis-calculation the movie makes. Old war veterans having to power up an old battleship and battle aliens because it's the only functioning piece of technology left is an Excellent premise for an Independence Day-style goofy fun blockbuster, I wish someone would make a movie about that. As it is, it's like you're watching this really shitty Michael Bay wannabe for 2 hours, and then suddenly a completely different, actual good movie comes on for half an hour.

I'll throw mine out there... it's basically a rehash of from the Unpopular Opinions thread

* I think Matthew McConaughey is not a bad actor (But I'll admitt he has made his share of stinkers). I like Nick Cage for that matter too.
* The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles were not nearly as bad as people pretend them to be. I've had amazing talks about history with my boy after showing the series to him.
* I like the Tales of the Gold Monkey.
* My favourite vfx commentary to a movie is the Volker Engel commentary to ID4.
* I liked both the Lost and BSG endings.

My controversial opinion is that Plinkett's SW reviews hardly contain any valid arguments at all, and the general opinion that they represent is as much of a cult as the worst fanboyism to be found on TFN.

For some interesting reason, opinions got "radicalized" since '99-'05, and the reasonable viewpoint represented by the balanced, mixed critical reviews from that time was pushed into the background - certainly in the whole area of internet critics and online debates.

However, I'm not sure how much interest there still is in that topic compared to 3-4 years ago, so I just thought I'd throw it out there...

By "worst fanboyism on TFN", I obviously meant irrational pro-PT attitudes that the board is kinda known for - the opinions there range all the way from that to levelheaded/balanced and even slightly negative (and that's just on the PT forum), but I'm particularly referring to the "apologists" that other people kinda scoff at.

Problem is, critics like RLM are every bit as unreasonable themselves, just in the other direction.

Not on most other movies I'd say - Plinkett's Titanic, KotCS and ST'09 are solid pieces of nuanced pro and contra analysis, not perfect but solid.
With SW, however, the bias hijacked their critical faculties, and out came pretty much nonsense - not just "hyperbole", but genuinely invalid criticism that seems to have swayed many.

Although I found the RLM reviews to be very entertaining and thought they made some good points, I do agree that some of their points are a bit hyperbolic.

One of the points I disagree with RLM on is the "describe Qui-gon without using his appearance or profession". All they could come up with the in the review was "stoic", which I don't think is true. I would personally describe Qui-gon as someone who has strong & passionate beliefs to the point of being stubborn and getting tunnel-vision. I think he was probably the strongest character in The Phantom Menace. That's one that I remember off the top of my head, but I'm sure there are other exaggerated points as well.