What is that rancid cotton-candy Aguilera or Spears-like pop song playing all through the trailer for No Reservations (Warner Bros., 7.27). Turns out it’s a Liz Phair track called “Count On My Love.” Just one listen and I hated it. Screechy and alley-catty with a piercing helium wail.
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So now I’m asking myself why a film scored by the great Phillip Glass is sending an entirely different musical message than the one in the trailer? Is the clarinet solo music on the No Reservations website a Glass composition? It sends out a very soothing vibe and accomplishes the opposite effect of that godawful Liz Phair tune — it makes me want to see the movie.
Are Warner Bros. marketers trying to scare away the fans of Mostly Martha, the 2002 German film that No Reservations is a remake of, and attract the younger women who didn’t get all the jokes in The Devil Wears Prada? One thing’s for sure: when a movie sends out radically conflicting musical messages in different ad mediums, there’s some kind of conflict going on between the filmmakers and the marketers.
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I’m told that some LA screenings of No Reservations have been set up, but no one I know has been invited to any. I don’t know if the film is good or bad or so-so, but Warner Bros. has almost everyone convinced that there’s some kind of problem.
And if this is so, the feeling among the natives (i.e., myself and the people I talk to) is how could this have happened with such great source material to start with? Sandra Nettlebeck‘s Mostly Martha is one of the all-time best adult romances, best foodie movies and best mother-daughter stories all in one. And how could this have happened with the assistance of Scott Hicks, a once-promising director who delivered the very moving Shine not that many years ago?
This may or may not apply to No Reservations, so let’s make it rhetorical: why is it that when Americans remake European films they always feel the need to gloss things up…to make them much broader and dumber and more lower-com- mon-denominator than the original? Are American audiences simply thicker and shallower than European auds? Is the European need for sugar stimulation lower than that of Americans?
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