September is "Better Breakfast Month" so we're celebrating because we love food and movies
This post has been repurposed from the TFE vault... but for most of you it will be "new"
Seventeen years ago on this very day Jonathan Glazer's Birth premiered at the Venice Film Festival (where Elisa and I are right now!) and began its long journey from misunderstood/reviled oddity to cult-beloved arthouse classic. Far fewer people remember this but ten years ago, its score was repurposed in a Quaker Oats commercial called "Wake up America"! (Remember commercials? They were these interruptions to your binge-watch that you didn't cause with the pause button.) It was one of those commercials that would look right at home during the Olympics: pretty Americana, sunrise, sports, and other daily wholesome capitalistic endeavors like the building of skyscrapers. If I hadn't been looking away from the television when it aired ten years ago, I would probably have never made the connection that the commercial was the opening score to Birth. Alexandre Desplat is one of movie composers of all time so why shouldn't his scores live on past their movies and earn him yet more coin?
The commercial and its voiceover went like so...
Quaker Oats Wake Up from Soma Films on Vimeo.
Wake up America. It's morning and morning is amazing: it's when we charge into the future, when we blasted off for the moon, scaled the heighest peak, and flew for the very first time. Morning starts and changes everything. It's a clean slate, a fresh start.
So come dreamers and trailblazers, champions ...come builders. It's morning. Wake up and be amazing.
Does your breakfast make you amazing?
You know what's amazing, oatmeal-eaters of the world? Watching Nicole Kidman as Anna fall under the spell of a 10 year old boy who may or may not be her dead husband reincarnated. That's what's amazing. Though, I have to admit Anna's "trailblazing" does not exactly provide her with a clean slate or a fresh start.
And she does need to wake the hell up.
Wake up, Anna. Wake up!