Use "Unchained Melody" in a love scene next. Please. It'll be great.

[mrissa]

markgritter and I watched Watchmen last night and today--it was the director's cut, so it was three full hours of Watchmen. If you were underwhelmed by the theatrical release, I can't honestly recommend the expanded version, although I've never seen the theatrical release, so maybe it was awful enough that this was a vast improvement. I don't know. Not thrilled, is the short version.

The thing that really annoyed me about it, though, was after starting with a fight scene set to Nat King Cole's "Unforgettable," which was awesome, the people who put together the soundtrack apparently said, "Right then. That's enough interesting use of music for us," and proceeded to phone it in with every single other musical selection for the rest of the movie. The 99 red balloons song? "Halleluia"? Really? "All Along the Watchtower"? Really? Memo to apparently everyone on the planet: there are songs in existence that are not, in fact, "All Along the Watchtower." You can use them in things. What are you people, 15? It's not that I have anything against 15-year-olds. I'm very fond of one. But the nature of being 15 means that she has not had enough time to read things and watch things and listen to things that she's always clear on what's an awesome new thing and what's the same "wouldn't it be awesome" idea that thousands upon thousands have had before her. This is not anything against this particular 15-year-old, who is wonderful and smart and very much loved. It's just that before I let her do the entire soundtrack to a major motion picture, I would have somebody who was not 15 look it over. Just in case they had a perspective on the utter original awesomeness of using "The Times, They Are A-Changin'" for a credits montage. (I hate to bag on the opening credits, because they belonged to a much better movie, one I am much more interested in watching. But seriously: in case we were wondering what the times, they were a-doin'? Was anybody unclear on that?)

For me the "I have used up my cell minutes for the month with all the phoning it in I am doing" moment came with the Wagner. It is not cool, it is not funny, it is not meta-funny. "The Ride of the Valkyries" was used for meta-funny in The Blues Brothers. Which came out in 1980 a few weeks before I turned 2, when Ronald Reagan had not yet been elected President. The meta-funny there: it is over. People who use "The Ride of the Valkyries" in soundtracks: you are like the guy who shouts, "Free Bird!" at rock shows. There is no way to make shouting, "Free BIRRRRD!" awesome at a rock show. Its awesomeness has been used up for several generations now. By the time it regains any awesomeness, it will be like shouting, "Twenty-three skiddoo!" at someone, which is I guess sort of the bee's knees, but for awhile there, not so much. "But I was referencing--" No. Just stop. Find another song. Do something else.

I have just been saying, over on sartorias's lj, how much more interesting it is what people like than what they dislike. But I am tired and unable to refrain from the snarking here, because this was just sloppy and pathetic.

Comments

[von-krag.livejournal.com]

I'll have to re-watch just for the tie-in. I don't think I noticed the music at all when I saw it. I guess Net-Flix will get me that cut but I'm not sure it will surpass the the version I saw on a ultra-screen.

[cattitude.livejournal.com]

The movie people get a pass on "All Along the Watchtower." Alan Moore used it in the comic book, so he gets the blame.

[reveritas.livejournal.com]

how much more interesting it is what people like than what they dislike.

I wish to hell you weren't in the tiniest minority here.

[zalena.livejournal.com]

you are like the guy who shouts, "Free Bird!" at rock shows.

Very funny post. Thanks for this. I haven't seen the movie and I probably won't.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Movie people feel free enough to change texts when it's convenient for them. I blame both.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

One thing I like about Mad Men is the musical choices. Wow, they played "Saiyuki", which I hadn't heard for over thirty years, but my childhood love came flooding back, and the poignancy of the choice . . . (the meta-subject was airline ads, and the singer died on flight 123 in the mid eighties.) Another is a soft version of "Miserlou" when the European drifters appear. Really nifty.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

I read the "Hallelujah" scene as a focused, sharp-edged, and spot-on parody of exactly the way in which that song is overused in movies, myself.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

I thought Ride of the Valkyries was hilarious in Apocalypse Now (1979, though I saw it later) which is probably exactly what made it meta-funny in Blues Brother. So yeah: thirty years later, seminal movies that probably most movie lovers have seen, all used up unless you have an actual reference to one of them.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I kept thinking that might be what they were trying for, but after the third or fourth song where I was thinking that, I just didn't care how clever they thought their parody was, I was still finding it cliched and boring.

[marydell.livejournal.com]

there are songs in existence that are not, in fact, "All Along the Watchtower." You can use them in things.

Laughing so hard at this.

[steve-dash-o.livejournal.com]

I took it like rysmiel, too. Watchmen is a weird story in many ways, but one of those ways is that it's both innovative and cliché /derivative. Many of its elements are simultaneously ironic and sincere. So... I don't mind the musical selections. I think they kind of fit that mold.

(Although personally I would have preferred 100% original music, except, I guess, "All Along the Watchtower" for the sake of matching the original text. But I also would have kept the alien squid corpse, which everybody tells me would have been a terrible idea.)

[papersky.livejournal.com]

And anyway, if that had been the only cliche piece of music you wouldn't be complaining.

[miz-hatbox.livejournal.com]

Does that mean the Watchmen are supposed to be Cylons?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Or their dead offspring in some half-explained spirit form, yah.

Also everything else in the history of movies since the early 1970s.

Wheee.