It’s strange, but there’s a bizarre scene in Nancy Meyers‘ The Holiday when Cameron Diaz punches her soon-to-be ex-boyfriend (played by Ed Burns) that almost works, and the same bit is shown in the Holiday trailer and it doesn’t work at all. The reason is that the sound of the punch is different in the feature (i.e., fake but not blatantly so) than in the trailer.
When Cameron decks Burns in the film, it sounds half-realistic in a typical bogus way — you hear that combination “thunk-kish” sound that foley techicians have been fond of for the last 50 or 60 years. But when she slugs him in the trailer, it sounds like ten Rocky Balboas slugging ten slabs of raw meat simultan- eously in a Philadelphia butcher shop, only amplified and turned up to 10.
What does this mean? That trailers are about the bullshit “sell” (even if hearing a ridiculously over-amped punch sends some of us running in the opposite direction) and are about their own jackoff standards and maneuvers, and movies are about trying to adhere to a kind of movie reality that’s supposed to be at least somewhat acquainted with the way people actually behave and the way things actually sound. Even if the film has been directed by Nancy Meyers.