European cinema can be as good or as bad as anything else. But I must say I have a great fondness of French cinema in particular because as I mentioned maybe before they don't really pander that much to other people's cultures. They make French films for French people and if anyone else on the planet likes it too, then that's bonus. They are very cultured as a nation and have, like the Italians, a great sense of art and style. And their music in their films is as good as anything else out there as far as I can tell.
What they don't have and the same with the other Euro nations excluding Great Britain, is the very large production values that Hollywood is known for. Ironically to me, Hollywood was at its best when it was making film noir and just about anything from 1930 to 1965. That's just an opinion of course. British, or so-called British films have traditionally been made on an Anglo/American basis, with a mixture of American and British actors and mostly American money. An honest British film is generally very low budget and a lot of the time, but not always, fucking crap these days. British TV is usually better, but the BBC for example are unable to make much these days because most of the taxpayers money goes to paying the communist fucks that work there, their salaries.
When you talk about filmscore music, as far as I can tell, it's all to do with the time and the place. Let's face it, Bernard Herrmann isn't coming back.....ever!
If you take quite few films from around the mid/late 60's into the 80's, you will have maybe noticed a lot of the scoring was done with Fender Rhodes pianos and various stages of development synthesizers - right from the very first modular Moogs and Arps etc right onto digital synthesizers. Then came the Fairlight and Synclaviers. Most of these scores, and some of them very good naturally, usually had a beat, either real or imagined.
So when you think about it, the appearance of firms like VSL who specialize in orchestral instruments, allowed old and new synth rockers to simply get hold of this and just use the sounds as you would use say, patch 74 on a Roland Jupiter 8. Ususally without any knowledge of scoring and how an orchestra works. Hence the really big growth in orchestrators. So what you get a lot of nowadays, is orchrestral sounds - with a beat. So blame VSL. it's all their fault.
How bad are things here right now? In Budleigh Salterton??? Things are great and the golf course looks really good right now. Thanks for asking.