Stoo said:
Ex. The 1st trailer for "Empire Strikes Back" used music from "The Golden Voyage of Sinbad" and it took me over 15 years to figure that out all on my own! It's common practice for trailers to feature music/shots that aren't in the final product (which I'm sure you know). Those things don't really bother me.
Indeed, trailers are frequently assembled before their movies' scores have been recorded (or even composed), so often if the trailers are going to have music, there's no choice but to use something composed for something else. At least with something like an
Indy movie, they can always use recordings of the primary themes that were done for previous movies (the
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull trailers use music from the previous Indy adventures, naturally). That doesn't explain the use of the
Dune music, of course; I think the thing there is just that they wanted something totally different from the classic "Raiders March" to open the teaser, largely because approaches to film scoring have changed a lot over the years since '81, and the movie's marketers wanted to "transition" the audience from a more contemporary sound into the familiar Indy universe (also, they undoubtedly wanted to sync the opening of the theme with the shot of Indy getting his hat and putting it on, seen in shadow against the car, but they could presumably have used some other music from the original movies in the earlier part of the teaser if they'd wanted to).
A cool resource one can use to identify music used in trailers (since it's so frequently from something other than the movie the trailer is for) can be found
here at Soundtrack.Net.
Stoo said:
Having never really given my opnions on "Skull" before, I'll do it for you. The parts that I like far outweigh the ones I don't. In no particular order, what I really dislike:
-The treatment of Marion (especially her introduction at the camp)
-The sand-pit (For me, the most CRINGE-WORTHY scene in the entire film!
)
-Oxley
-
SEEING the living alien/inter-dimensional being (but I looooved the shot of the saucer!)
-The Cemetary Warriors
-The way the skull was found
Oh, unfortunate, but oh well. Your list of dislikes includes some of the things I actually quite enjoy (mainly Oxley and the sand pit). I really love Marion, though I do wish she'd gotten to do more. I'm not entirely crazy about the cemetery warriors, though; they're just too... undefined. Their presence does make for a fairly nifty few moments of action, but they otherwise seem to have no role in the story, and just raise questions about Indy's behavior that some less-muddy scriptwriting could've avoided. Ah, well.
Stoo said:
My biggest regret is reading too many spoilers because there were only 1 or 2 surprises in the film. I think it was
Crack that whip who started a thread about "What did you know before going in?". I knew too much and came out a tad disappointed.
However, a film-snob friend of mine said, "It was better than I thougt it would be" while a friend of my brother's (average Joe) walked out of the theatre and related, "I expected more from Lucas & Speilberg".
Do *I* like it? Hell, YEAH! If I can accept "Crusade", I can accept "Skull". It's all Indy.
Same here!
I did indeed start a thread asking how much people knew before going in. I tried to stay spoiler free, and came pretty close, though some spoilers spilled out into the spoiler-free sections here at the Raven, I'm mostly sorry to say. I did have some inkling about the A-bomb escape by fridge (which had been alluded to in discussion of scripts for years, of course), and I suspect my suspicion this scene would be in the movie may actually have made it easier for me to buy than it was for many of those who went into the movie with no idea and who were totally put off by "nuking the fridge."
One thing I'd come across inadvertently actually "de-spoiled" me, if I can say that. I did find out about the briefly posted, hastily withdrawn press release that (erroneously, as we now know) stated Ian McDiarmid would reprise his role of Professor Levi (!), and that Hurt's character was none other than Abner Ravenwood (!!), so I was actually surprised that wasn't the case.
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Anyway, I do have my issues with the movie, but they're not great enough to prevent me from enjoying the things I do like about it (some of them quite a great deal), and it's a major part of the Indy canon, so I'm very glad to have it.
