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Under discussion:

Mostly Martha  (2001)

The Devil Wears Prada  (2006)

Jeff Wells is caterwauling about the trailer for No Reservations, a remake of the German drama Mostly Martha that Warner Brothers has configured as a star vehicle for Catherine Zeta-Jones. Specifically, he's upset about the music, "that rancid cotton-candy Aguilera or Spears-like pop song playing all through," which is actually a 2005 track by none other than sometime indie rock icon Liz Phair. "Just one listen and I hated it," Wells whines. "Screechy and alley-catty with a piercing helium wail."

Wells notes that the No Reservations website is toned with an entirely different tune--he theorizes it might be by Philip Glass, who's on the books as having composed the Reservations score. Regardless, Wells sees the discrepancy as a sign of behind-the-scenes trouble. "[W]hen a movie sends out radically conflicting musical messages in one medium as opposed to another, there's some kind of conflict going on between the filmmakers and the marketers."

I have a couple of thoughts.

1) No one who is too young to get the jokes in The Devil Wears Prada is going to go see a movie just because there's a Liz Phair song in the trailer. I turn 27 tomorrow (yeah yeah, happy birthday to me), and I was too old to get half the jokes in Prada, and no one younger than me has any idea who Liz Phair is. In fact, I don't think Liz Phair even makes music for actual people to listen to anymore; I'm pretty sure she writes songs for the sole purpose of selling them to the marketing companies, for use in chick flick trailers and commercials for enriched water products. And I'm not even knocking her--if I had peaked in 1995 but I still had mouths to feed, I'd go the same route.

2) The Phair song is not playing "all through" the trailer at all; it kicks in about half way through, after about a minute and a half of a score that sounds a lot like it could have been composed by Philip Glass. The two "radically conflicting musical messages" are being juxtaposed in the same vehicle, not across two different marketing mediums, as Wells suggests. The last thing I want to do is apologize for the marketing of a movie that looks wretchedly bad, but Wells's entire argument that the movie must be in trouble because the music in the trailer is different from the music on the website is based on his inaccurate recollection of the trailer. Whoops.

3) Did anybody ask Anthony Bourdain before they made a milquetoast romantic dramedy with the same name as his Travel Channel show? You know, the one on which he travels the world, eating snake venom and binge drinking fermented semen, and generally being too punk rock for the Food Network? He sometimes blogs at Ruhlman, so I'm linking there in hopes he'll pay attention. Whether or not Bourdain got paid, I can't imagine that No Reservations will top Ratatouille, which, in his estimation, is "the best food movie ever made."

Under discussion:

Spider-Man 2  (2004)

Transformers  (2007)

Let's start with the facts: Transformers, which opened on Monday night, made $152.5 million domestically over its week-long opening weekend. That's enough to give Michael Bay's Ford commercial-with-kissing the record for the best opening week for a non-sequel EVAR; it was not, however, enough to break Spider-man 2's record for the best July 4th opening weekend gross.

Now on to the spin: At MTV, Transformers "conquered"; at the LA Times and NY Times, it "dominated". But Canada's Globe and Mail holds Michael Bay's film responsible for not being able to halt "the overall domestic box office plunge." Yes, receipts were down 23 percent from the same weekend last year. Entertainment Weekly calls the fall "inevitable:, but I don't know where you find inevitability in the statistics. Last year, the second Pirates of the Caribbean film grossed in five days about what it took Transformers seven days to produce. Are we to believe that the two mega-tentapoles were somehow playing on unequal fields?

Meanwhile, Variety called the Transformers bow a "boffo perf" --which is, according to the "slanguage" dictionary, the second-highest praise allowed. Pamela McClintock also notes that while Paramount Vantage's bizarrely-spun A Mighty Heart screen slash didn't much help that film, Harvey Weinstein's slow-and-steady Sicko push is paying off. If Box Office Mojo's breakdowns are to be believed, Michael Moore's film is averaging about ten times Heart's take on about the same number of screens.

Speaking of Box Office Mojo, the data kings are less back-handed than Variety in their assessment of Transformers' debut. Their generous writeup notes that the Bay flick "handily scored two minor records: biggest Tuesday daily gross with its $27.9 million opening day and top July 4th gross with Wednesday's $29.1 million." The always-thoughtful Brandon Gray pegged Transformers' success to a long lineage of disaster-themed July 4 hits.

In recent years, the industry has frequently and successfully associated Independence Day with disaster-themed spectacles from Terminator 2: Judgment Day to Armageddon to War of the Worlds, and Transformers fits that bill...DreamWorks and Paramount took a property of limited cinematic appeal—Transformers: The Movie was a theatrical bust in 1986—and sold it as another end-of-the-world event, bolstered by the visceral wonderment of seeing robots morph in live action settings.

Nikki Finke's inside sources peg the success to Transformers' ability to transverse cultural barriers. "The studio says that what is making the big box office difference is African Americans and Latinos flocking to see the film. But especially Latino audiences." Dénos las robustezas del asesino!

Under discussion:

Village of the Damned  (1960)

Austin Powers [Film Series]  Production Year

Shaun of the Dead  (2004)

Variety had a blurb over the weekend about Trailers From Hell. The site, recently lauched by producer Elizabeth Stanley, invites genre directors (known on the site as "grindhouse gurus") to record commentary over trailers of their favorite B-movies of yore. The trailers can be watched with or without commentary, on the site or on the "Fun Little Movies" channel on Sprint cellphones and on the iPhone.

So far, the content on Trailers From Hell looks great. They're spectacular trailers, they're three-minute hyper-speed Hollywood history lessons, they're dish-fests. Mick Garris disses Robert Zemeckis for his over-indulgent shooting methods; Shaun of the Dead director Edgar Wright wonders how anyone could find "Austin Powers that funny when something like Danger: Diabolique is the real deal, and is for my money as funny as Austin Powers."

Five trailers are available on the site now, with five more in the works. I'll definitely check back to see what Mary Lambert has to say about Village of the Damned.