It’s not a movie, but didn’t The Sopranos make a point that all the ‘soundtrack’ music was actually being played by something or someone in the scene? That was kind of neat. I vaguely remember that technique from one or two low budget movies, but can’t think of an example.
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I don’t think they quite stuck to it, but it held for certain values of all.
Lots of films lack music. Tod Browning;'s 1931 Dracula 9the one with Bela Lugosi) has no music aside from the opening credits and music heard when they’re at the theater (and then it’s music that’s “naturally there”, not a score). I believe the cio-produced Spanish version made on the same sets at the same time is similarly scoreless.
IIRC, Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory has no music. At the end, a woman sings a song. Again, it’s music that “occurs naturally”, not a score.
Kurt Cobain was probably unable to use the Internet to find out that there already was a British band named “Nirvana.” Bands, filmmakers, and the like these days do not have the same excuse. Artists, if you are going to choose a one-word title, please be aware that it is likely already taken, and go to Google to verify.
Along with Tarantino, Wes Anderson (mentioned once up above) uses unusual but effective music.
For a lot of people, that was their “this movie sucks” moment. Reflecting on it, I have seen many “medieval” movies with electric guitars, and I always picture some middle-aged producer thinking that kids love guitars. In A Knight’s Tale, I do like that they made it a point, rather than just putting it because they could.
Generally true - except for the opening and closing music for each episode. But in almost all other cases, the music was coming from somewhere, usually a car stereo, radio, the stereo in a store or restaurant, etc. But there are scattered instances of “disembodied” music with no physical source making its way into episodes during certain scenes. The montage of Chris relapsing on heroin at the Italian festival in the 6th season, with Tim Buckley’s song “Dolphins,” for instance.
Woody Allen’s Sleeper is set several hundred years in the future, and the soundtrack is ragtime played by the Preservation Hall Jazz Band. Here’s the theme.
Sleeper is one of my favorite Woody Allen films, in large part because of the soundtrack. It gives it a very interesting vibe.
Music coming from an on-screen source is called diagetic music. Trivia.
There were a couple of places where the film makers explicitly showed that they were “translating” some of the cultural bits for modern audiences. In the scene where they dance, the music starts off with period instruments and composition while they perform a pattern dance, and gradually changes to Bowie’s “Golden Years” with modern dance moves. I’ll admit that on first viewing I didn’t get some of this, though I still thought it was a decent movie. On a second viewing, it clicked and I started to like it a lot more because they were making a point by deliberately including modern elements so that viewers could get, on a visceral level, how people in that time period felt about jousting and war games.
Ladyhawke, on the other hand, is good despite the music, which had no reason to be “modern” other than the director apparently thought synthesizers sounded cool. Most of the movie could have done without a soundtrack, I’d argue.
Agreed. Also, nothing against Willy DeVille, but I want to mute the credits every time I see the Princess Bride. It’s a bit saccharine and incongruous.
Slight spelling correction: Diegesis - Wikipedia
The soundtrack to ***Honeymoon in Vegas ***consisted of a variety of artists doing Elvis covers.
The Big Lebowski may be the only movie to feature music by Captain Beefheart and Moondog.
Inception uses the Edith Piaf song as a central element. The tempo of the song indicates the “dream depth” of the characters.
And most of the soundtrack was improvised by Young as he was watching the film. I don’t know much about soundtracks, but I imagine that to be quite an unusual way of composing one.
“a filler for editing”???
tut-tut
Maximum Overdrive, being mostly carried by AC/DC songs.
Flash Gordon, wonderfully done by Queen.
The DVD extras for The School of Rock reveal that Jack Black and the entire cast and extras on set filmed an appeal to (I think it was) AC/DC to use “Highway to Hell,” the rights to which had been previously denied, in the movie. The band relented and the song was used.
The Blair Witch 2: Book of Shadows has a song that breaks into a few rounds of “witchlike” chanting.
The chanting is in Japanese.
Nothing else about the movie was remotely Japanese, except possibly that Japanese horror movies were gaining popularity when the movie was made, and nothing in the Blair Witch story had anything to do with Japan.
The only explanations were that the band had some link to Japan, or that the music producers used Japanese for “foreign gibberish.” For a movie made in 2002, I hope it was the former.
The Phantom of the Opera is a musical that, being set in an opera house, attempts to mimic opera without actually being an opera. As a result, all of the songs sound like operatic music to a lay-person, but have incredibly anachronistic elements (electric guitar solos, pausing the music to read a letter, etc.). Depending on who you ask, this is either fine or the worst thing ever.