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Cinema Songs

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What is your favorite song from a film, or song brilliantly used in a film?

I have so many and if this thread takes off I’ll post a few. But I’ll start with Curtis Mayfield. Obviously Superfly is his career highpoint; few soundtrack composers get to undermine the entire film they are soundtracking (low budget has a certain freedom). But this song, No Thing On Me (Cocaine On Me) doesn’t get the attention it deserves. It’s a glorious piece of joy.

So folks, film soundtracks or moments from films brilliantly soundtracked by the perfect song. Let me know…

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  1. I’ve said it before…. Super Fly is a brilliant concept album with a rather mediocre film attached to it.

    It’s absolutely awesome, and it’s not even Curtis’s best album (that’s There’s No Place Like America Today, if you need to know).

    Contribution to the thread: when I finally got round to watching the Prisoner TV series all the way through about 5 years ago, I was stunned by the use of All You Need Is Love in the final episode. Inspired!

  4. Favourite soundtracks again? Yay! Let’s do favourite cover versions again after this!
    Lodestone of Wrongness and I are both pleased to see that Sufjan Stevens has been nominated for a ‘Best Song’ Oscar for Mystery Of Love, from the film Call Me By Your Name. Beautiful song. Not a bad film neither, although I can’t help thinking that were the film about a heterosexual couple, with less of a noticable age difference, it never would have garnered such attention as it has. Would have been quite boring, in fact. But it’s very pretty to look at on account of it being set in Italy, which is very pretty to look at. The closing scene is much talked about as it supposedly reminds one of one’s first adolescent heartbreak (unless one commited suicide as a result of one’s first adolescent heartbreak, in which case it wouldn’t remind one of anything). I actually prefer the song used in the closing scene, Visions Of Gideon (again by Lodestone’s most favourite ever artiste).

    • Yes, good shout, Gary.
      “Call me by Your name” is … erm … an absolute ‘peach’ of a film. And the Sufjan song that plays over the final credits certainly is a winner.

  5. Ooh one of my favourite topics. Where do I start???? Too many to mention, and I’ll need to really hold back here to avoid clogging up the thread.

    I mean, to start with you could probably cut and paste every scene with music in it from Martin Scorsese’s entire career. Man’s a master at cutting film to music.

    And another obvious choice would also be the opening credits from Reservoir Dogs, where Quentin Tarantino uses Little Green Bag and in two minutes flat defines a look, a feel, an attitude for an entire cinematic generation.

    I think though I’ll post a scene from my favourite film from last year, Baby Driver. The soundtrack and the way the film was cut to the rhythm of the music was one of the things I loved about it. This scene in particular is just brilliant. Baby is being chased on foot by the police, and it’s all soundtracked by Hocus Pocus by Focus. The little bit I love is at the shopping mall bit, about two minutes in here – he runs through a clothes shop stealing sunglasses and a jacket as a disguise, and the rap playing over the shop PA briefly synchronises with Hocus Pocus on the soundtrack. A subtle and easily missed moment, but just brilliant.

    Edit – SPOILERS – don’t watch this clip if you haven’t seen the film yet.

    • I think anyone who hasn’t seen the film yet should watch that clip, as it’ll save them time and money. For that is pretty much the whole film. Car chases and shooting. No real story, no real characters, nothing whatsoever to say, nothing you haven’t seen a million times before. Far “cooler” editing and music than Fast And Furious 5 though.

        • Which is more than Baby Driver got close to doing with me. I’m with Gary. I enjoyed the skill but found the film emotionally empty and the attempt to justify Baby’s blankness with a back story was back of an envelope stuff. I imagine the editing and the whole crash bang wallop of it was great in a cinema but it doesn’t carry over well to the living room. Jamie Fox was enjoyably scary though.

      • I loved this film so much I typed up a big glowing review as soon as I saw it, and was just about to post it here when someone beat me to it and reviewed it first.

        Anyway, just because you slagged it off, I’m going to post my entire review here instead!

        **BABY DRIVER (2017)**

        Just when 2017 was starting to feel like a damp squib of a year for cinema, along comes irrepressible wonderkid Edgar Wright with a feast for our senses.

        There are few greater joys in the cinema-going life than seeing a young director capitalising on their early promise. Wright came to popular attention (well, my attention anyway) with the sublime Spaced. That turn of the century sitcom about slacker Londoners showed how far a talented director on a miniscule budget could get by on good taste in music and a killer eye for hyperactive editing and choreography.

        Back then, Wright seemed able to reflect and celebrate a particular kind of nineties cinema (Tarantino’s postmodernism, Scorsese’s coolness, Wes Anderson’s wit), while being young and nimble enough to not feel like a plagiarist. Imagine what he could do in the cinematic mainstream! – we all thought (well, I did).

        And here he is. He’s been gradually building it up (Hot Fuzz, Scott Pilgrim) but I think Baby Driver is his defining opus (so far).

        A simple, effective story about a young getaway driver (Ansel Elgort) who’s also a certified music geek (the ingenious conceit is he has to constantly listen to his iPod to drown out his tinnitus), Baby Driver has an addictive jukebox soundtrack, which synchronises beautifully with an adrenaline rush of car chases and shootouts. It’s probably the most pleasurable experience you’ll have in a cinema all year. In the best way you can imagine, it’s Drive Ryan Gosling (mute, mysterious driver) blended with La La Land Ryan Gosling (song and dance man).

        But, oh, that soundtrack. Eclectic, but not unbearably so – and obscure, but not intimidatingly so – it’s a hipster’s dream from back when hipster wasn’t a dirty word. Edgar Wright has been honing this stuff since those Spaced days, and he knows just how to drop the right track at the right time to bring a smile to your face.

        I can only really approach this film as a fellow music geek. (I’m sure muggles will appreciate it as well – you can get off on the sheer effervescence of the thing – but an awareness and a love of mixtape culture will certainly help you out). It’s important to clarify that this isn’t just some High Fidelity level smugness – Baby Driver is nothing if not inclusive. You might love dumb party hip hop like Jump Around, or you might love cool soul like Harlem Shuffle. Either way, you’ll be welcome here. But if you know both songs start with that same horn fanfare (which crops up minutes into this), and more importantly you don’t care which one you’re just about to hear, then Baby Driver will hit your sweet spot.

        Here’s five songs as a taster. If you recognise these, then you’ll get a feel for how delicious Baby Driver is. And if you don’t recognise them yet, then you’re in for a treat. (Go fire these up on Spotify now and go for a drive).

        – Bongolia (The Incredible Bongo Band)
        – Smoke Joe’s La La (Googie Rene Combo)
        – Baby Driver (Simon and Garfunkel)
        – Holy Calamity (Handsome Boy Modeling School)
        – Let’s Go Away For Awhile (Beach Boys)

        Oh, and it also has a very funny script, plus it has Jon Hamm, Kevin Spacey and Jamie Foxx. Check, check, check.

        Edgar Wright, you done good.

  7. Anyone up to speed with s.5 of Vikings? Skip the limp reviews, apart from the rounding it all up mid-season finale of episode 10, it has been everything Britannia isn’t. And the opening music is this corker from modern day Shield Maiden, Fever Ray:

    So it isn’t a cinema song, but box set TV is the new cinema, right, with a shed load of good music rounding it out.

  8. Laura Marling’s What he wrote is used extremely effective in On body and soul, a Hungarian film that is nominated for an Oscar for best foreign language film.

    I doubt that this “trailer” based around the song will make you dash out to see it, which is a shame as it is a gem. Exquisitely acted and photographed, poetic, suggestive and even hilarious at moments.

  10. Here’s an interesting scene. Nanni Moretti’s Palombella Rosso. You have to put up with Johnny Foreigner spouting gibberish for a few seconds, as they’re arguing about who should play in a water polo match, when a kid presses play on the stereo and Bruce’s I’m On Fire starts playing. It’s a really weird break that has absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the film. In fact, it’s the only bit of the film I liked. At the pool I go to, the teenagers play water polo. I should reenact the scene.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0m1x93mEcO8

  11. There has been enough for me to post another. Have any of you ever had a mindless job that you hated, which you often did whilst still under the influence of alcohol or drugs from the previous evening? Then this moment in Lynn Ramsay’s brilliant film Morvern Caller when “Some Velvet Morning” by Lee Hazelwood and Nancy Sinatra kicks in will resonate

  12. Claire Denis’ ‘35 Shots of Rum’ has this amazing, speechless, slow dance sequence set to ‘Nightshift’ by The Commodores. It’s the heart of the film where the dancers carefully signal their feelings and the lady realizes the guy she pines for is just not interested. It made me realize what a potent slowburn that ever-so-80s song can be.

    • How do you feel about the whole Hi Fidelity concept in the film and/or book in general? I think it nails a lot of things about a lot of the type of people who populate this blog. I certainly recognise myself in it. Bit of an overgrown man-child, obsessed with music, obsessed with COLLECTING music and different ways of listing and sorting music. (Speak for yourself, Arthur).

      Anyway, I like the film and the book. The book probably slightly more as the film drifts into schmaltziness at the end. (In the book for example, the character would never groove along with his girlfriend to his friend’s cover band playing Sexual Healing, without an ironic inner monologue about how slightly cheesy and ridiculous it is – in the film, John Cusack seemed to be genuinely enjoying it and I didn’t buy that).

    • Agreed. I came across this track opening the 1974 Live! album that I bought in Woolies thirty years ago this spring I’d been given WGO for Christmas and couldn’t get enough of the great man. The live version is highly dramatic as the fans are going wild – I think MG hadn’t appeared in concert for about four years, which was a long time in them days. Elsewhere there’s a rather odd medley of some of his sixties hits and terrific versions of Let’s Get It On and What’s Going On.

      I come up hard (hurrr)

  17. Spoiler alert………..
    When you kill off one of your main characters, it takes some balls to open the following episode like this.

    No theme tune, no credits, just Johnny and a few pissed off friends

  18. Hoje by Taigura, a big hit in Brazil in the 60s, sets the scene in the opening sequences of Aquarius.

    The protagonist, Clara, brilliantly played by Sonia Braga, is a former music journalist and music plays a big role in the film. It is a slow burner that paints a rich portrait of modern Brazil but don’t expect lots of action.

    Lots of action, humour and brilliant sound track? Go for Guardians 2!

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