Breakfast with... a repurposed "Birth" Score

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 (September 8th) 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...

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Thirteen days until the Oscars. Are you counting down? Does this insanely stacked list of presenters move your personal excitement needle? 

P.S. Isn't it weirdly embarrassing for the Academy to use a fake non-Oscar statue in an commercial for their own show? I get that they're protective of the statue as a copyright / trademark but this is a commercial for their own show. Why is the "awards show" statue some weird not-the-real-thing cross between an Emmy and an Oscar?

Showbiz History: Matt Dillon endures, Reality Bites opens, and Three Billboards peaks

6 random things that happened on this day, February 18th, in showbiz history...

1928 Sonja Henie wins her first of three consecutive gold medals in women's figure skating (a feat that's never been equalled in women's figure skating). Hollywood comes calling in the mid 30s (back when they used to make movie stars of famous athletes -- see also Buster Crabbe, Esther Williams, and Johnny Weismuller) and she headlines several hit films, starring with One in a Million in 1936...

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Peggy Link

• Movie City New Gurus of Gold latest predictions - i find it interesting that the ranking is all over the place with Promising Young Woman all the way from #1 to #10 (though it's on all the lists)
• IndieWire There was so much awards stuff happening this week that we never discusseed Todd Haynes planning a Peggy Lee biopic with Michelle Williams. Obviously I feel bad about this because we love all three people and that sounds amazing!
• Empire Got a spare 182 minutes? Directors Edgar Wright and Quentin Tarantino did a podcast together.

Steven Yeun, WandaVision, a messy Color Purple legal battle, a strange Nicole Kidman story, Edward Scissorhands at the Superbowl, and more after the jump...

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Showbiz History: Brooke's jeans, Cuckoo's statues, Aishwarya's crown

8 random things that happened on this day, November 19th, in showbiz history...

1916 Goldwyn Pictures Corporations was established in Hollywood by Samuel Goldwyn. It's actually here and not with MGM (Metro Goldwyn Mayer) that the 'Leo the Lion' trademark began... though of course in the silent films you didn't hear the lion's roar. The company was defunct by 1924 but it has lived on in many formed, merging with Metro to become MGM and the Goldwyn family is still in business with Samuel Goldwyn Films. They're next releases are the Andrea Riseborough indie Luxor and Denmark's Oscar submission Another Round starring Mads Mikkelsen. 

1975 One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is released. The following March it becomes only the second film in history to win the "Big Five" Oscar categories...

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