Motion Picture Soundtrack: “All These Things That I’ve Done”
Tuesday, February 26th, 2008 by Zack Dennis
There’s a certain art to crafting a great movie trailer that is sort of a scale model of the art of crafting the advertised movie itself. Often a trailer contains dialogue that’s been edited together differently than what you eventually hear in the movie, scenes and jokes that are dropped by the final cut, and songs by Coldplay or Fatboy Slim that are completely absent from the film or its soundtrack album. The recent rash of recut, homemade trailers for imaginary films like “Shining” and “Must Love Jaws” have taught us that a clever and dedicated editor can completely redefine a movie simply by selecting fragments of it and piecing them together in a unique way.
Awards for the best trailers are handed out in June at the annual Golden Trailer Awards. Statuettes shaped like a gilded camper trailer are awarded to previews in just about every conceivable category — Best Documentary, Best Foreign Romance, even Best Video Game Trailer.
Personally, I think the greatest triumph in the art of making trailers is “the ugly duckling” — taking a terrible movie, distilling the finest two minutes of footage, choosing the perfect music, writing some good lines for voice-over god Don LaFontaine to intone with thunderous import, and stitching them all together to create an overwhelming rush of images and emotions that convince the viewer, all contradictory knowledge notwithstanding, that a movie like Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor (2001) is going to be great.
Some trailers have the opposite effect. I had to be dragged kicking and screaming to see There’s Something About Mary (1998), which turned out to be hilarious. The trailer for Go (1999) is another disaster, yet the movie is actually pretty good. I’d heard enough about the disastrous screening of Southland Tales at the Cannes film festival in 2006 to know that the film was going to be an overwrought mess. But when I watched its trailer I was pretty enticed by the use of the ponderous “UK Surf” version of the Pixies’ “Wave of Mutilation” in the first half. And given my limited knowledge of the movie’s plot, Elbow’s “Forget Myself” seemed like it would be used somewhere in the film’s final moments, or possibly over the end credits. To my dismay, it isn’t used in the film. At all.
The Film: Southland Tales
The Song: “All These Things That I’ve Done”
The Artist: The Killers
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