Office Space is about the drudgery of corporate officework, but its soundtrack is gangster rap.
What other movies (or documentaries or something similar) have soundtracks that are fairly unusual in some way?
The Third Man was played entirely on a zither.
Forbidden Planet had a soundtrack of ‘electronic tonalities’ instead of music.
Dead Man had a soundtrack of solo (mostly electric) guitar by Neil Young. Guitars themselves aren’t unusual, but just electric guitar and nothing else is unusual.
In 1971 Miles Davis released the soundtrack to “Jack Johnson”, a documentary about the tragic story of the first black heavyweight boxing champion. So what better soundtrack to a movie set around 1915 than a hard rock-jazz fusion?
For the 1973 fillm THE STING set in 1936 featured the ragtime tunes of Scott Joplin (1868-1917)
The Life Aquatic - Studio Sessions
Acoustic covers of David Bowie songs, in portuguese.
Marie Antoinette (2006) is scored mainly with pop records from the 20th Century.
All This and World War II (1976) is composed of newsreel footage from World War II accompanied by Beatles songs performed by other name artists.
The Wicker Man - NOT the piece of shit with Nicolas Cage, but the original film. All the music was recorded by a small group of British psychedelic-folk musicians who actually appear in the movie playing the music in many of the scenes, with the extras providing additional vocals in some cases. See here to understand what I’m talking about. The music itself is often very weird. Supposedly this one movie’s music inspired a whole genre of British “neo-folk” music, although I have a hard time believing that the origin was that singular.
Crash - again, NOT the piece of shit from 2005 but the far more interesting movie whose title it stole, starring James Spader and Rosanna Arquette and the phenomenal Elias Koteas. All of the music was composed by Howard Shore and features variations on a theme of weird, dissonant, jarring guitar chords. Main theme here.
Harold and Maude, one of the best movies ever, features a soundtrack entirely recorded by Cat Stevens, which gives the movie a totally unique feel. Tea for the Tillerman, which was later used as the Extras opening song, is among them.
There Will Be Blood had weird, jarring music composed by Johnny Greenwood of Radiohead. Actually, I once favorably compared this soundtrack to Howard Shore’s one for Crash. Some of the tunes are similar. This is my favorite one - it’s the music playing when Daniel and Henry go out on horseback to survey the “Bandy Tract.”
Dog Day Afternoon famously has no soundtrack at all, except for Elton John’s Amoreena playing over a montage of scenes from New York in the summer, in the movie’s opening credits. Watching this movie, you become very conscious of just how much a movie is affected by the music in it - and how overused music is in many cases.
More to follow, when I look through my list of movies.
There Will Be Blood was really robbed of an Academy Award due to an inexplicable ruling on it being insufficiently original work.
I always felt The Princess Bride has a somewhat unusually modern soundtrack. For a pseudo-renaissance-era fantasy movie, there’s a lot of keyboard and electric guitar. It generally works quite well, though.
Movies like the Koyaanisqatsi series or Baraka have soundtracks that are the only audio in the movie, which isn’t too common.
2001: A Space Odyssey famously abandoned the commissioned score in favor of the mostly classical music Kubrick had been using as a filler for editing - those tracks became the iconic pieces used.
Planet of the Apes score was considered avant-garde in 1968. Mostly percussion, lots of syncopation.
And Cronenberg stole it from a 1978 William Shatner movie. Right?
Because if you can “steal” a one-word title you’ve got to go back as far as you can. What does Mr. Shatner have to say about the theft? And doesn’t that make Cronenberg a complete hack for “stealing” a title? That William Shatner, he’s always been a hog, am I right? Holding the rights to a one-word title and loudly chastising anyone who comes along and “steals” it. But he got to it first, so he owns the title. Everyone else, including Cronenberg, is just a criminal.
Inglourious Basterds, set in WWII, uses some anachronistic and eclectic tracks, including spaghetti western pieces and Bowie’s “Cat People.”
Another soundtrack by Miles is the French Elevator to the Gallows (1958) – Ascenseur pour l’échafaud (original title) where:
The track came out on record as: Jazz Track
Spaghetti western pieces are often anachronistic to begin with, since they tend to feature electric guitars.
Similarly, A Knight’s Tale uses classic rock songs throughout, including the opening scene where the crowd of peasants at a joust are singing (and doing the drumbeat) along to Queen’s We Will Rock You.
Tangerine Dream did the entire soundtrack for the very underrated 80s vampire movie Near Dark. It was unique.
Jerry Goldsmith apparently thought the best soundtrack to accompany the story of a 1950s backwoods basketball team in Hoosierswas a bunch of synth sounds. Hoosiers would have aged much better and been much more timeless with a period soundtrack.
Agreed. But it was in this instance a part of the aural potpourri Tarantino created that somehow worked in support of his film–IOW, not typical WWII background.
This reminds me of an old thread Favorite Movie Music – with audio which is old enough that many of the links are dead, but where this post
(bad link)
pointed me to THE KEEP 1983 OPENING SEQUENCE
Mesmerizing!
I am a huge Tangerine Dream fan, and I had never heard this before now.
Thanks, Zeldar! Truly trance-inducing.