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."
Originally posted on:
SpoutBlog