The soundtrack is a very very important part of a movie. Many directors are well known for their use of music, and in different ways - Scorsese for contemporary period pop music, Tarantino for eclectic and hip tunes, George Lucas for orchestral works, and the whole indie-but-mainstream genre of today (Garden State comes to mind) with its indie music. And everyone has a favorite soundtrack.
For me, it’d have to be the soundtrack to Me, Myself and Irene. Besides being a hilarious movie set in a very beautiful part of America, this movie has got to have one of the best soundtracks ever. Hem of your Garment by Cake, Can’t Find The Time To Tell You by Orpheus being covered by Darius Rucker of Hootie and the Blowfish, I’d Like That by XTC, a few really amazing Steely Dan covers (Razor Boy for one), many more. This soundtrack does such a good job of pulling you into that movie and corresponds so well with the various locations and situations. Really, if you haven’t seen that movie, you should see it just for the soundtrack. Really, really incredible.
I’m curious to hear from you all about what soundtracks you think are the best. Chime in, please!
My favorite soundtrack is The Glenn Miller Story. I saw this movie and we had the album many years before I heard any actual Glenn Miller music. When I heard the “real” versions, I remember being disappointed that they weren’t as good! I know that’s probably heresy, but if you know this movie, you know that they did a helluva job recreating the Miller sound with different players. I also learned that the charts were arranged by a very young Henry Mancini. Now, if I could only lay my hands on a copy of the soundtrack on CD. It’s very hard to find, and has been out of print for years.
I am somewhat timid to say this but one of my favorite soundtracks is The Bodyguard, whitney just owns the songs. I also love the Singles soundtrack, Lion King, Pretty in Pink Almost famous and I am Sam
Some of my favorites:
• Bernard Herrmann’s all-string score for Psycho. Herrmann found the bare sound of the strings to be the music equivalent of black and white.
• Elmer Bernstein’s score for To Kill a Mockingbird. The title theme goes from a simple, child-like melody, to a swell of remembered emotion, to a tender, serene conclusion.
• Nelson Riddle’s Oscar-winning score for The Great Gatsby, combining vintage 1920s pop music with a melancholy sense of loss.
• Gato Barbieri’s jazz score for Last Tango in Paris. It heats up the screen even when the sex doesn’t.
• Bernard Herrmann’s score for Taxi Driver. The jazz parts reflect harried Manhattan life, while the solemn, martial title theme is the sound of an army of one.
Instrumental - The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring
Vocals - Garden State. The strange thing about this one is that I’m not a huge fan of any of the songs in the movie individually but they work pretty darn well in the movie.
I love Bernard Hermann, and especially the music for The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad. I’ve got the soundtrack.
My all-time favorite opening is James Horner’s score for The Rocketeer (but only the opening and the score for the Rocketeeer’s “debut”). evidently Disney felt the same way – they recycled that score for a lot of other movie trailers.
In musicals, my favorite is 1776, with music (as from the Broadway play) by Sherman Edwards.
For some reason I really love the Dumb and Dumber soundtrack.
As far as scores go, there are way too many to list, but I always feel Jurassic Park was one of the most successful scores in evoking the size and feeling of its subject matter.
Back around 1971 there was this obscure little film called Zacariah. It was an “electric western,” a comedy set in the Old West, but featuring the likes of the James Gang, the New York Rock n’ Roll Ensemble, Doug Kershaw, and Country Joe and the Fish. It was partly written by the Firesign Theater, who later disowned the film–and for good reason. It wasn’t very good. The flick was meant to appeal to the counterculture crowd of the time–an interesting, but failed, experiment. Supposedly a re-telling of Hesse’s Siddhartha, It’s somewhat interesting as an artifact of the times, but not as a film.
The soundtrack, though, was first rate. Several tunes by the James Gang and Country Joe on that album simply weren’t available anywhere else for a very long time, and there was some very nice incidental music by Jimmie Haskell. The LP, long out of print and never released on CD (or even cassette IIRC) is still something of a collector’s item.
Long ago, I taped my scratchy, worn-out copy, and later lost the LP in an apartment fire. I now have a CD made from a cassette recorded on a cheap compact stereo using a scratchy, worn-out LP. And somehow this CD regularly turns up on my play list several times a year. It’s one of only two soundtracks that I own.
The other is Wendy Carlos’s versions of the *Clockwork Orange * soundtrack, featuring the unedited, uncut recordings of the music she wrote for the film. Same story here: CD made from cassete recorded on a cheap compact stereo from a scratchy, worn-out LP, original LP lost in the same apartment fire, and yet the CD keeps turning up on my stereo regularly.
On the Waterfront. Score by Leonard Bernstein, and one of the very few examples of music written for a movie that stands well on its own as a concert piece. This could be because it was in fact originally conceived as a concert piece …