Mrs. F. and I were just watching As Good As It Gets, the film where Jack Nicholson plays an OCD sufferer.
At one point, Nicholson sits down at the piano, and plays and sings, “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life,” which threw me for a loop, since the other time I’d seen this song in a movie was at the end of Monty Python’s Life of Brian, where a bunch of crucified guys are singing and whistling the song.
And the song is played again during the closing credits of AGAIG, only this time with Art Garfunkel singing it, and the full whistling bit is in there too.
The hard part was, Mrs. F. has never seen Life of Brian, so she didn’t understand what I was laughing about, and it didn’t really lend itself to intelligible explanations.
I’ve never seen a song given such a prominent role in two such different movies. (AGAIG is basically a romance with complications.) Anyone else got any challengers on that score?
I found the use of Always Look on the Bright Side of Life just as strange as you did. The only other comparable case I can think of is the use of “Singing in the Rain” in Singing in the Rain and A Clockwork Orange
Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World” can only be played, apparently, over scenes of children playing and having a nice time or children playing and nuclear bombs going off.
When I heard the theme song from Requiem for a Dream’ used in The Two Towers trailers, I had to do a double take. I loved both movies, and the soundtrack to Requiem is excellent; I cannot imagine that P.Jackson wanted to associate TTT with Requiem whatsoever…
In all likelihood, Peter Jackson had no say in what music was used in the trailers for his films. It’s standard that a rough cut of the film (without any musical score) is given to the makers of the trailer for the film a couple of months before the film comes out. Sometimes the trailer is scored with music from other films. This is frequently done before the musical score has been recorded for the film, and sometimes it’s before the music has even been written. The people who make the trailers frequently have no relation to anyone else working on the film. Do a search on posts to the SDMB for the words “trailer” and “musical score,” since we’ve discussed this before in several threads.
“Lacrimosa…” from Mozart’s Requiem was used in the movie Amadeus and in a commercial about something like perfume or jewelry.
See? I didn’t even know what they were supposed to be advertising, just the fact that there were two people, man and woman, walking across a bridge on a rainy day. It seemed to be rather romantic. And what did they play on stringed instruments? [Hum the beginning of the Requiem]. Romance, to the tune of funeral music!
I like “Hoe Down” from Rodeo (Aaron Copland) on the commercial, “Beef. It’s what’s for dinner.” That fits.
I pulled a similar double take when I heard the remix of the Requiem theme on the LOTR trailer. I’m sure if one had never seen Requiem, the music would have been fitting, but given the nature of that masterpeice’s final scenes, it is hard to disassociate the music that went along with it.
