1. Simon & Garfunkel, The Graduate (1967)
Mike Nichols didn't invent the idea of using pop
songs in movies, but by scoring much of The Graduate to the songs of Simon
& Garfunkel, he redefined how pop music would be used from then on. Taking
cues from the yearning melancholy of "Sounds Of Silence," "Scarborough Fair,"
and "Mrs. Robinson," the latter of which was penned especially for the film,
Nichols let the music do the talking during long, otherwise wordless sequences,
reflecting the inner monologues of characters who didn't always know what they
wanted, only that they wanted more than they had.
2. Cat Stevens, Harold And Maude (1971)
At the beginning of Hal Ashby's cult classic, Bud
Cort (Harold) descends the creaky steps of an old manse with his brown boots
clicking morosely on the wood floor until he reaches an old Victrola and drops
the needle on Cat Stevens' "Don't Be Shy." Given that he closely follows that
action with one of his numerous staged "suicides," Stevens' hopeful folk
initially seems like an odd choice. Then Harold meets the 79-year-old Maude. As
the film transitions from sparse dialogue and the bleakness of Harold's house
out into the world and Maude's carpe diem tossed-off wisdom, the music begins to
weave into the story—Maude actually performs one of the tunes herself at
a player piano—and carries it along to its infamous finale. Only two of
the tracks were recorded specifically for the film, with "If You Want To Sing
Out, Sing Out" putting Maude's rosy worldview to music. Yet the previously
released "Trouble" also works perfectly, as Harold comes to terms with the
impossibility of their romance. Harold And Maude is a small story with only
a few characters, and Ashby's choice of a single songwriter to accompany their
tale has appropriately been deemed one of the hallmark marriages of music to
movie.
3. Aimee Mann, Magnolia (1999)
Three hours of raw nerves and frantic epiphanies,
P.T. Anderson's third feature could fairly be described as operatic emo,
transforming the nakedly personal into a resounding chorus of human misery. But
about two-thirds of the way through, Anderson suddenly slams on the brakes:
Relieved from their grief and heartache, his dozen or so major characters
quietly sing along, one at a time, to Aimee Mann's "Wise Up," one of a few
gorgeous songs that serve as the film's lifeblood. The chief lyric
("It's not going to stop until you wise up") speaks kindly but firmly to people
suspended in an endless cycle of guilt and dysfunction, with the younger
generation indelibly imprinted by their elders' misdeeds. It's the first break
in clouds that will open up later—first in a Biblical "rain of frogs,"
and then finally in a generous coda, set to Mann's "Save Me," that lets a
little sun shine through.
4. Leonard Cohen, McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971)
Robert Altman selected three tracks from Songs
Of Leonard Cohen—"Stranger
Song," "Sisters Of Mercy," and "Winter Lady"—to serve as pretty much the
entire score for his hazy revisionist Western, and over the years, even some
Altman fans have complained that the Cohen songs are too samey and mopey, and
that they date the film. Those nay-sayers are wrong, wrong, wrong. The way
Cohen's lyrics echo the plot are often too uncanny, from the prophetic introduction
of the gunslinger McCabe via the line "He was just some Joseph looking for a
manger" to the painful description of the title relationship with the phrase
"I'm just a station on your way, I know I'm not your lover." Mainly, Cohen's
songs reflect the windswept melancholy of McCabe & Mrs. Miller, and the sense of dreams
being built from the ground up, before getting crushed from above.
5. Eddie Vedder, Into The Wild (2007)
Much like Leonard Cohen's songs in McCabe &
Mrs. Miller,
the paeans to travel and freedom that Eddie Vedder wrote and recorded for Sean
Penn's Into The Wild have been criticized for being too on-the-nose and too drippy.
But that's precisely what makes them work. The actual life and death of driven
young nature-lover Christopher McCandless can be interpreted a number of
different ways—and was, in Jon Krakauer's more even-handed non-fiction
bestseller—but Penn focuses on McCandless' boyish spirit of rebellion and
restlessness, and his movie is a throwback to the sensual look and romantic
vibe of early-'70s youthsploitation. In that context, Vedder's earnestness fits
precisely, because Penn's Into The Wild puts its heart on its sleeve, and lets it
bleed.
6. Alan Price, O Lucky Man! (1973)
It's no insult to say that Lindsay Anderson's epic
follow-up to If….
flies off the rails early and often: What begins as an irreverent capitalist
satire springboards deliriously into every conceivable aspect of British life,
with each vignette more surreal than the last. Perhaps realizing that three
hours worth of detours, no matter how brilliant, would likely exhaust even the
most adventurous audience, Anderson commissioned Alan Price, formerly of The
Animals, to write songs for the film. What's more, the songs are included as
concert interludes within the movie, with Price and his bandmates knocking them
out in a studio. These sequences help tie the extremely loose-knit narrative
strands together, and are some of the film's most dynamic segments.
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7. Jonathan Richman, There's Something About
Mary
(1998)
The Farrelly brothers are regarded as pioneers of
the gross-out comedy, but the secret to their success—something that unsavory
facsimiles like Say It Isn't So and Tomcats never got—is that they're genuinely
good-natured and whimsical at heart. Still, the Farrellys pulled off a tough
balancing act with There's Something About Mary, which had to charm as a
romantic comedy while offering extended lowbrow setpieces on natural "hair gel"
and a guy getting his scrotum caught in a zipper. To that end, they did well to
bring in Modern Lovers' Jonathan Richman as a one-man Greek chorus who pops in occasionally
with his acoustic guitar to comment on the action. Typical of Richman, the
songs are tongue-in-cheek and frequently hilarious, but they have a tone that
gently serenades the romance, too, and makes the film's nastier bits go down
that much easier.
8. Seu Jorge, The Life Aquatic With Steve
Zissou
(2004)
Like Jonathan Richman in There's Something
About Mary,
Brazilian singer Seu Jorge drifts through Wes Anderson's tragicomic adventure
as a one-man Greek chorus. Rather than commenting directly on the action, Jorge
simply sings covers of David Bowie classics that don't really have anything to do with
what's happening onscreen, but fit well anyway. Sometimes Jorge's Portuguese
takes liberties with the lyrics: "Five Years" shifts from a tale of looming
apocalypse to a tale of romantic longing and transoceanic travel. But Bowie
didn't mind, telling cokemachineglow.com in 2006 that Jorge "paid equal tribute to both myself and [his] own formidable
abilities."
9. Metallica, Paradise Lost: The Child
Murders At Robin Hood Hills (1996)
As the music of Metallica plays throughout Joe
Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky's stunning true-crime documentary, it serves
multiple purposes, simultaneously setting an appropriately dark tone for its
examination of a triple homicide and its aftermath, and establishing the
culture clash that led to a shocking miscarriage of justice. After the gruesome
murder and mutilation of three 8-year-old boys in West Memphis, Arkansas, a
small community pinned the crime on a trio of teenage outcasts, alleging that
they were carrying out a Satanic ritual. Berlinger and Sinofsky
contend—here and in their follow-up, Paradise Lost 2: Revelations—that the "West
Memphis Three" were convenient targets, railroaded through the system on a
dubious confession coerced from a kid with a 74 IQ. Caught up in all the
hysteria, their supposed ringleader, Damien Echols, was damned simply for
standing out as a goth kid who dressed in black, wore his hair long, and
listened to Metallica. The band's ironic presence on the Paradise Lost soundtrack blackens the
mood and makes everyone culpable in this ongoing injustice.
10. Apocalyptica, Your Friends &
Neighbors
(1998)
The empty lives of bored intellectual elites
residing in the anonymous urban any-city of Neil LaBute's Your Friends &
Neighbors
are laid bare with practically zero music. The "soundtrack" here is mostly the
long silences of eventless days spent pining for another start, far away from
the friends and spouses who have stalled their long-ago dreams. But brief
spurts of Metallica, performed by cello quartet Apocalyptica, frame the big
picture. As the opening credits roll following a brief prologue, we hear the
lower register of "Enter Sandman" as it's bowed with vigorous menace, setting
the stage much like a pit orchestra would, announcing the approach of something
grim. The metal band's sitar-based slow-burner "Wherever I May Roam" gets the
cello treatment at the story's close, leaving the unraveled lives of the film's
characters with an appropriate coda. (There's also some sporadic use of their
version of "Welcome Home (Sanitarium).") Why Metallica in an understated talkie
about sparring couples? And why Metallica as played by cellists from Finland?
Maybe because beneath the thin veneer of social mores and our efforts to be
polite, we're just masking the monster within us all—like classical
battling with metal. Or maybe it just sounds cool.
11. AC/DC, Maximum Overdrive (1986)
Stephen King's lone directorial effort was never
meant to be more than a loud, dopey movie about trucks crashing into stuff, and
King underlined his intentions by filling the soundtrack with AC/DC's sublimely
crude hard rock. The Aussie boogie-metal legends provide a couple of
instrumental bridges and the thrilling new thudder "Who Made Who"—a song
about men and machines, inspired by King's story of sentient vehicles enslaving
their former masters—but most of King's AC/DC selections consist of
well-known anthems like "You Shook Me All Night Long," "Hells Bells," and "For
Those About To Rock." Because in the world of Maximum Overdrive, obviousness is a virtue.
12. Slayer, River's Edge (1986)
As if the image of a murdered teenage girl and her
indifferent stoner boyfriend/killer weren't unnerving enough—"She was
talking shit," the boyfriend helpfully explains—this grungy cult favorite
ups the menace level with a soundtrack culled from specialty label Metal Blade.
When a group of downscale suburban kids drive around and debate whether their
loyalty is to their friend or to some higher moral law, the speed-metal riffage
of Slayer blasts away on the car stereo, perhaps clouding their judgment. Or at
least making it harder to hear themselves think.
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13. Wang Chung, To Live And Die In L.A. (1985)
William Friedkin's Oscar-winning classic The
French Connection brought
documentary-style realism to the American crime-movie procedural, evoking the
gritty streets of New York City with handheld camerawork and authentically
unsavory characters on both sides of the law. For his unofficial sequel, To
Live And Die In L.A., Friedkin similarly captured a specific time and place by
embracing the glitz and artifice of Southern California with the same vigor he
brought to the sleaze and grime of early-'70s Brooklyn. Complementing the
film's air of misplaced morality and detached debauchery is the atmospherically
poppy score by Wang Chung, a synth group whose legacy will forever be tied to
that "Everybody Wang Chung tonight!" song. The songs today sound hopelessly
dated, but this actually plays to the film's benefit: To Live And Die In
L.A. is
unmistakably an '80s movie, with an insatiable need for "More! Now!" motivating
the villains as well as the heroes. And what's a better soundtrack for that
than a bunch of really catchy pop songs promising instant gratification?
14. Badly Drawn Boy, About A Boy (2002)
One of the knocks on Badly Drawn Boy (Damon Gough)
is that his albums are long on musical ideas and short on cohesion, which may
be why Gough's soundtrack for the Nick Hornby adaptation About A Boy ranks among his best
work. Given the assignment to write songs and instrumental bridges around a
single subject, Gough keyed into the mind of a sweet, precocious, outcast kid
with no friends, an overbearing mother, and a general obliviousness to the
things other teenagers find important. The result is bright and winning, from
the charmingly buoyant "Something To Talk About" to deeper tracks like "Silent
Sigh," which floats on a Peanuts-esque melancholy piano line, and "A Minor
Incident," a direct, moving appeal from a boy to his screwed-up mom. Like the
best entries on this list, the soundtrack is sewn into the movie's fabric, and it
tells a story in itself.
15. Elliott Smith, Good Will Hunting (1997)
Danny Elfman provides much of the background music
for Gus Van Sant's crossover hit (a.k.a. the film that launched Matt Damon and
Ben Affleck), but Van Sant's Portland pal Elliott Smith dominates the emotional
foreground. Key transitional scenes play to some of Smith's most resonant
songs: "No Name #3," "Angeles," and "Say Yes" are allowed to stretch out,
rather than be completely truncated. Then there's "Miss Misery," which netted
Smith an Oscar nomination for Best Original Song—it plays over the big
reveal and end credits, lending the whole enterprise an air of respectability.
As for the movie itself, sure, it's a little hokey and filled with Robin
Williams, but it's still a hundred times more resonant than Jersey Girl.
16. The Polyphonic Spree, Thumbsucker (2005)
When director Mike Mills wanted music for his
debut Thumbsucker,
he had two things in mind: Harold & Maude and Elliott Smith. Smith
was to be to Thumbsucker what Cat Stevens was to Harold & Maude: the sole songwriter to
propel the film forward with folk-based pop songs. Mills showed him an early
cut, and Smith began working on music, even covering Stevens' "Trouble." After
Smith's death in 2003, Mills ended up working with Tim DeLaughter and his band
The Polyphonic Spree. It isn't hard to imagine what a full soundtrack of Smith
tunes would have done to the mood of this film (Smith's version of "Trouble" is
prominently placed), but The Polyphonic Spree's choral pop works well with the
hazy malaise and suburban yearning of Mills' coming-of-age film. The Spree has
always carefully ridden that fine line between cheese and glee, with the adult
DeLaughter sometimes giving in too much to his inner child as a songwriter.
Considering Justin, played by Lou Pucci, is a senior in high school and can't
stop sucking his thumb, the two make a good match, in spite of the tragedy that
brought them together.
17. Tom Petty, She's The One (1996)
The one good decision writer-director-star Ed
Burns made regarding the follow-up to his overpraised debut The Brother
McMullen was
to ask Tom Petty—fresh off the great Wildflowers—to do the soundtrack. Now
if only Burns had found somebody more qualified to write, shoot, and star in
his magnum opus! As it is, Petty's soundtrack more than holds on its own as a
stand-alone album, offering more insight into romantic relationships on rough
and ragged pop songs like "Walls" and "Hope You Never" than Burns musters in 96
minutes of celluloid. On Petty's expert cover of Beck's "Asshole," he achieves
the tricky mix of humor and pathos Burns reaches for but doesn't have the depth
to realize. The movie that plays in your head while listening to Petty's She's
The One is
probably more resonant than the one that made it to the screen.
18. Spoon, Stranger Than Fiction (2006)
Although Britt Daniel of Spoon only provides one
new song, three old ones, and a few instrumental cues to director Marc Forster
and writer Zach Helm's postmodern comedy, his music threads throughout the film,
matched to a set of rhythmic new-wave classics. The movie takes a few too many
cutesy turns, but Daniel's peppy minimalism carries a lot of the sentiment and
drive that Forster and Helm fail to shoulder. Stranger Than Fiction is about uptight,
routine-bound people learning to reorder their lives, and Spoon's casual
fragmenting of rigid rock and soul song structures tells that story on its own.
19. Prince, Batman (1989)
It's safe to assume that the Batman soundtrack is nobody's favorite Prince album, but it nevertheless qualifies as one
of the more fascinating creative detours in a career full of them. The
infectious funk anthem "Partyman" adds an additional element of brash
braggadocio to the Joker gang's defilement of the Gotham City art museum, in
addition to serving as the perfect accompaniment to the self-parody stage of
Jack Nicholson's career. The first single, "Batdance," is one of the weirdest
singles ever to hit the pop charts, a funk-dance powered by an army of samples,
many of them soundbites from the film. The Batman soundtrack later found a strange pop-culture second life in Shaun Of The
Dead, when Simon Pegg and Nick Frost
decided to hurl it at zombies rather than waste Sign O' The Times or Purple Rain.