157 The Royal Tenenbaums

[PfR73]

Billion Dollar Brain used "A Hard Day's Night," right? That's why the DVD & Blu-Ray releases have always been cut?

[dustybooks]

Wes Anderson said around the time of release that the Beatles songs he wanted were not just difficult but "impossible" to get. This was around the time of George Harrison's death. It was very very rare to hear Beatles songs in films throughout the '90s and most of the 2000s, but it's started to happen more often since Social Network, Dinner for Schmucks, etc. I've long been curious about what changed exactly. Some of the changes at Apple, perhaps.

[djproject]

Considering it was late 2009 when the remastered catalogue was issued, I wonder if it was a question about ensuring a consistent fidelity if using the original recordings. After all, the covers were never blocked from use as long as Sony/ATV was notified (;)).

[swo17]

Ahem

[dustybooks]

Hmm. Maybe I should have said "unusual" rather than rare, although a lot of that stuff seems to be archive footage or specifically Beatles-related programming. It's certainly still more notable to hear a Beatles song in an unrelated movie than something by the Stones or the Beach Boys, say. When I saw Coming Home for the first time, it struck me as actually a bit jarring to hear their songs incorporated in that way. Veering off topic now though, sorry.

[whaleallright]

A lot of musicians and labels have turned to more aggressively licensing their music for TV, film, advertisements, etc. in recent years because album sales have plunged. It's a way of maintaining revenue streams. I doubt the Beatles are any exception, though as with many things--e.g. remastering their catalog--they were a little behind the curve, largely because they could afford to hold out.

[PfR73]

Thanks for everyone's positive comments about the video!

[flyonthewall2983]

I liked it. I have mixed emotions as to whether or not it would have been better than "Everyone" (a big reason I got into Van Morrison was first hearing it at the end of the movie), but the Beach Boys song feels more snug thematically with the scene.

Speaking of the music, I love this quote from Jackson Browne I found in the IMDB trivia page

"I forgot that I'd licensed them to use this song. And this is one of those things that comes to you in the mail and you don't know what they're talking about and you simply give them their permission. You're sitting in the movie theater and there's this great moment when Gwyneth Paltrow is coming out of a bus or something like that. I'm thinking to myself, I used to play the guitar just like that. And then the voice comes on and it's Nico singing "These Days", which I played on."

I'm one to definitely prefer the Gregg Allman version of "These Days" but the Nico version feels so much more appropriate to the film as a whole. Anderson's taste in music as far as what goes in his films, always feels right in a way you can't really imagine it being done any other way.

[flyonthewall2983]

Not sure if this is redundant but the scene where Royal tells Etheline he’s dying is maybe the closest I have ever seen my parents in a movie. I think the only way it would have been made more so is if Terri Garr played her.

[domino harvey]

The streaming copy of the film removes the stylized on screen text and replaces it with generic computer generated text instead

[ChunkyLover]

It’s not uncommon that licensors will send “textless” masters/variations of films/TV shows that have on-screen text.

[Blutarsky]

RedLetterMedia noted this in their review of Brain Candy about two years ago how some movies (like this or… National Lampoon’s Senior Trip) on streaming services are given versions without the optics added. I wonder how many other movies on streaming suffer this issue.

[colinr0380]

This was a big thing for Hollywood Stuido discs back in the late 90s/early 2000s years of Region 2 DVDs where, presumably because the discs were authored in one single batch to cover all the Region 2 territories of Europe (and discs often began with a generic opening menu asking the viewer to choose their language from a list of on screen choices, which would also influence the settings for subtitltes and even dub options if they were on there), they took away the English on-screen titles (such as location indicators) for anything outside of the opening and closing credits and replaced them instead with generic player-generated ones. I remember MGM being particularly notorious for this, and in fact The Silence of the Lambs losing its distinctive typewritten location titles on the initial UK DVD edition (such as the "Woods near Quantico, Va" one at the opening) was something that incensed me so much that it inspired me to import the Criterion edition of the film from the US as one of the earliest Criterions I ever bought!

In that case it could be argued that it is only a minor alteration as the titles rarely appear in that film (but I would argue back just as strongly that it ruins the aesthetic atmosphere being conjured up by the filmmakers, because it was a conscious choice to have the titles presented in that fashion), but with Wes Anderson that aesthetic control is so intrinsically a part of the experience of his films that it is even crazier to replace those titles. I would suspect it is being done for the same reason however, to make the single streaming edition of the film accessible to all, by having easily-swapped out at a flick of the remote titles.

(In the case of the convenience argument, I would also not want any non-English language film to have its on screen text scrubbed and replaced with generic English titles just for that reason, because it is also taking us another remove from how the filmmaker originally presented their film to their initial audience. Translate the film to me by all means by the usage of optional subtitles that I choose to have on through necessity, but don't ruin the basic elements of the release version of the film in order to do so)

[EddieLarkin]

It still happens today. The UK UHD release of Scarface is missing the opening text scrawl entirely (along with all location titles etc), instead you just get subtitles playing at the bottom (this version of the opening is actually up on Youtube).

Compare to how it should play.

I'm surprised it hasn't happened with Star Wars.