I don’t know the chronology here - was that song already one of the biggest hits in history when the movie was made? And if so, was it in there just because it was so popular?
The song was written for the movie, and benefited from the movie publicity and won the Academy Award for Best Song. So it was the movie that publicized and “made” the song. That and incessant airplay on the radio. I was never a big fan of it, and I agree that it feels completely out of place in the movie.
I feel it works and the song from Judge Roy Bean https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ttt3GA9ovY0 because the movies arn’t quite rooted in reality. Especially Judge Roy Bean. They’re presented as if someone were spinning a tall tale.
Besides I love them.
I’d properly link that but my link button is being wonky.
That’s one of my favorite Bowie songs and it fit perfectly with Cat People but I agree it felt out of place.
Absence of Malice: the movie holds up well. Great performances and the Wilford Brimley scene is still a classic. What ruins it is the jarring 80s synthesizer score.
I’ve been having the same problem since last night; I started a thread in ATMB. I don’t have the problem in SD3.7.3. 
That’s a good example. I love John Williams, but the jubilant shark-hunting music has always seemed a little “off” to me.
Another one that’s always bothered me is in Spartacus, when Spartacus and his army are leaving camp to confront Glabrus’s forces. Alex North’s music for that scene is so upbeat and jazzy that it sounds like they’re heading off to a party.
I find nothing incongruous about the opening title song. The movie takes place in downtown NYC which is an ethnic, cultural smorgsabord. A kick-ass song is a kick-ass song, and this one’s got a ton of great momentum. Kudos to Spike Lee for his choice.
Not a movie, but the TV show Lost had a piece of score music that I always found to be out of place. It was a trombone (or maybe tuba) sting, about a second and a half long, that began very low and slid slightly higher, making it sound rather comical, IMO. Yet they always played it during very tense and dramatic moments, usually right before commercial.
“Oh no, the Smoke Monster is coming for us!” Bwooooomp!
“Panic in Year Zero,” (1962). Ray Milland and family are in the boonies when L.A. is nuked and must “fight for survival.” I don’t think RM’s hat comes off the entire movie. The music is tinny, brassy and jazzy; you kind of expect to see a jalopy with a gang of high school kids in it come ripping around the corner, heading to a shindig.
That reminds me of another one—4D Man, an sf movie with Robert Lansing as a guy who can walk through walls. It has a loud big-band jazz score by Ralph Carmichael. I can sort of see what the filmmakers were thinking—the Lansing character uses his powers to go on an urban crime spree—but on the whole, it doesn’t work.
This was a detail straight from the book. I always appreciated that nod to the author, but I can see your point.
Well, after all, it was a great big world with lots of places to run to.
Metamorphoses aka Winds of Change. Japanese anime, based on Greek mythology, with a disco soundtrack.
Actually, it is an enjoyable movie, but the music has not aged well.
Except for in the hole. Lotion?
How about the opposite idea? Someone decided it would be cool to update the movie Pink Floyd. Complete fail.
I watched Pacino’s “Scarface” the other day (first time in 30+ years), and the Giorgio Moroder soundtrack was AWFUL. The movie might have played better without music.
If you ever saw ABCs Eyewitness news before Cool Hand Luke, this segment was made bizarre:
Of course that made me wonder if “treacly fluff” was a common expression. It only returned 39 hits on Google, but oddly two were from right here:
In 2002
And in 2012
That movie was a great disappointment to me. It was supposed to be a modern rock version of Fantasia, with original music by the Stones and others. They even got some of the original Disney artists to work on it.
Eventually, though, the music didn’t get done, and they had to fall back on that awful disco soundtrack. Even worse, in my mind, was the animation – often very fluid, but too often undirected and pointless. (It didn’t help to have the heroes and heroines played by Big-Eyed Kids). The whole thing was supposed to be done without dialogue, a la Fantasia, but audiences got so lost that they ultimately hired Peter Ustinov to do a complete voice-over.
I followed the film since it was first announced, and was hoping for something great.
Speaking of Fantasia and fails, there was one extremely awful edition of Fantasia in the mid-1980s:
One thing the Wikipedia entry doesn’t tell you is that the new recording was awful – it didn’t match the timing and tempo of the original. It’s hard to see how it could have been. Unlike real-life movies, in the case of animation the soundtrack is recorded FIRST. It’s extremely difficult to match your score to existing action onscreen, and it looks as if they didn’t even try. All the cues are “off”, and the music doesn’t match up with the action onscreen. Disappointing. There’s a reason this was never re-released in theaters, or on any home video format.