There are few
more powerful combinations
than when just the right song meets
just the right scene. To put all our favorites
in one place, The Dissolve compiled 50
remarkable combinations of pop
music (broadly defined)
and moviemaking.
Not Fade Away
“Roadrunner” by Sex Pistols
David Chase is notorious for the way he concluded his TV series The Sopranos, but he upped the ante on odd endings with his feature filmmaking debut, Not Fade Away. A meandering but bracingly personal look at how the counterculture infiltrated suburban New Jersey in the late 1960s, Not Fade Away takes its hero, Douglas Damiano (John Magaro), from garage-rock glory to hippie-infested Hollywood, where he plans to give up the drums and pick up a movie camera. As he walks near the Capitol Records building down trash-strewn Los Angeles streets, he hears a broadcast from the future, playing Sex Pistols’ cover of The Modern Lovers’ “Roadrunner.” Then his teenage sister—the movie’s occasional narrator—steps out to tell the audience that rock ’n’ roll can change the world. Her dance to “Roadrunner” cuts to an old black-and-white TV performance of black and white pop singers dancing together, illustrating with astonishing clarity and profundity just what the primal, communal power of music can achieve. —Noel Murray
Halloween
“(Don’t Fear) The Reaper” by Blue Öyster Cult
Blue Öyster Cult enjoyed its biggest hit in 1976 with the macabre—and, yes, cowbell-assisted—“(Don’t Fear) The Reaper,” a seeming ode to suicide. Part of what makes its appearance in John Carpenter’s Halloween so effective is how little of the song is used. Carpenter confines it to a few bars, heard coming from the radio of a car like an omen of the bad things about to come down on an unsuspecting small town. A clever bit of understated scene-setting, it sends a chill before the really chilling stuff begins. —Keith Phipps
Nowhere To Hide
“Holiday” by Bee Gees
Most of the events in Lee Myung-se’s 1999 South Korean thriller—a heavily stylized cops-and-robbers saga—stem from a murder that takes place on the “40 Steps,” a prominent staircase in Busan. Though it’s a violent scene, Lee presents it in a dreamy, impressionistic daze, focusing as much on autumn leaves and spattering rain as on the killing itself. To accentuate that quality, he sets the whole thing to “Holiday”—not the Madonna hit, but an early Bee Gees single, predating the group’s disco superstardom by a decade. Mournful and minor-key, but featuring a lilting nonsense chorus (“dee dee da dee dee dee”), it ideally suits what’s happening visually—which the killers themselves must have understood, as we see one of them insert a disc into their car’s CD player (reflected in his shades) just before the song begins playing. —Mike D’Angelo
The Devil’s Rejects
“Free Bird” by Lynyrd Skynyrd
Taking a fluid approach to genre that even Quentin Tarantino would envy, Rob Zombie followed up his sleazy 2003 horror film House Of 1000 Corpses with the ultraviolent “killers on the run” movie The Devil’s Rejects, turning the villains from the earlier film into the sort-of heroes of the second. And as part of Zombie’s experiment in audience identification, he ends The Devil’s Rejects with bittersweet flashbacks to his rogues in happier times, before they drive out to face a police roadblock and certain death. It’s a beautifully shot, horrifically bloody climax, scored to Lynyrd Skynyrd’s defiant country-rock anthem “Free Bird.” The song choice underscores how B-movies and rock ’n’ roll both have a way of getting otherwise law-abiding people to feel empathy with bad birds who cannot change. —Noel Murray
Dogtooth
“Flashdance… What A Feeling” by Irene Cara (as interpreted by Older Daughter)
In Yorgos Lanthimos’ discomforting allegory Dogtooth, a Greek family keeps its children literally walled off from the outside world, making up stories to explain the strange objects and animals (and words) that sometimes drift into the compound. The movie takes place when the kids are young adults, and getting harder to protect. When the unnamed eldest daughter (played by Aggeliki Papoulia) gains access to videotapes of Hollywood movies, she imitates them at odd moments, such as when she and her sister perform a sloppy dance in honor of their parents’ anniversary, and the eldest suddenly breaks off and starts doing Jennifer Beals’ bump and grind from Flashdance. Her mother angrily stops her, but it’s too late: the delicious poison of popular culture has seeped in. —Noel Murray
Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story
“Beautiful Ride” by Dewey Cox
In the final moments of 2007’s Walk Hard, Eddie Vedder introduces “Beautiful Ride,” the magnum opus of Dewey Cox (indelibly played by John C. Riley), as the fake music legend’s “final masterpiece that will sum up his entire life.” It’s a spot-on parody of both the breathless hyperbole of rock mythology (and rock biopics) and Vedder’s own tendency toward pretension. That’s an awful lot for any song to live up to, but “Beautiful Ride” matches the hype. It’s a sweeping, strings-laden ballad that’s poignant and heart-tugging almost in spite of itself, a self-consciously big song about a man coming to terms with the sum of his life and the hard lessons incurred along the way as he stands on the brink of death. It’s a stirring climax that doubles as a parody of a stirring climax, with Cox’s life flashing by him. It’s the perfect ending, not just to the film, but also to its subject’s life, as the film reveals that Cox died exactly three minutes after his first and last performance of “Beautiful Ride.” At least he went out on a high note. —Nathan Rabin
Gamer
“I’ve Got You Under My Skin” by Sammy Davis Jr.
Fight sequences and dance sequences have a lot in common: They both involve intricate choreography, require actors with specific and rare physical gifts, and represent motion pictures at their most pleasurably literal. The parallels between fights and dances are made explicit in this ingenious scene from Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor’s Gamer, a science-fiction film set in a world where videogame technology has advanced to the point where players can remote-control real people (called “Slayers”) in deadly combat. In this sequence, champion Slayer Kable (Gerard Butler) confronts the game’s creator, Ken Castle (Michael C. Hall), who has a small army of cronies under his mental command. Set to the utterly appropriate sounds of Sammy Davis Jr.’s rendition of the Cole Porter standard “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” Castle and his minions boogie and bop like refuges from the creepiest Busby Berkeley film ever made, then break formation to test Kable in hand-to-hand combat. Hall dances like a puppet on strings, playing up the themes of control inherent not only in gaming, but also in fight and dance choreography. Gamer is a moderately satisfying action film with a few provocative science-fiction concepts, but the “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” sequence burrows into the subconscious and stays there. —Matt Singer
Slumdog Millionaire
“Paper Planes” by M.I.A.
The Grammy-nominated “Paper Planes” is M.I.A.’s best claim to a crossover single, thanks largely to its high-profile association with two films in 2008. Pineapple Express got to the Clash-sampling Kala track first, prominently featuring the song in its ad campaign, but Danny Boyle’s sleeper hit Slumdog Millionaire ultimately did better by “Paper Planes” in the long run. The Oscar-sweeping film mixes classic and modern music from India, spearheaded by Indian-cinema mega-producer A.R. Rahman, but Boyle wanted M.I.A.’s song in the mix from early on. It fits right in with the songs and film surrounding it, thanks to Diplo and Switch’s worldbeat-referencing production and M.I.A.’s lyrics, particularly the anthemic chorus, which features a chorus of little kids crowing that they’ll “take your money.” In a cinematic testament to literalism, Boyle paired the song with a montage sequence of kid brothers Salim and Jamal hustling for food and money. M.I.A.’s buoyantly downbeat mercenary anthem nicely encapsulates the contrast between the panoramic visuals of a train chugging through the Indian countryside (a possible nod to the Rahman-scored 1998 Hindi film Dil Se, which was a crossover hit in Boyle’s U.K.) and the tiny, dirty kids riding on top of it, scuttling from con to con just to stay alive. —Genevieve Koski
Beau Travail
“The Rhythm Of The Night” by Corona
In one of the most audaciously unexpected final scenes ever conceived, Claire Denis’ 1999 allegorical revenge tale Beau Travail abruptly ends with a French Foreign Legion officer (Denis Lavant), who’s spent the entire movie as a seething, barely mobile repository of envy and spite, standing by himself on the floor of a mirrored, colorful disco. As Corona’s 1993 hit “The Rhythm Of The Night” plays, he paces, smokes his cigarette, makes one tentative dance move, then another, then finally lets every emotion he’s ever repressed burst forth in a frenzy of spastic motion. If there’s a dance sequence in movies more electrifyingly unhinged, it must involve physical injury. —Mike D’Angelo
Mauvais Sang
“Modern Love” by David Bowie
In Leos Carax’ 1986 futuristic noir about a mysterious plague affecting those who make love without emotional involvement, David Bowie’s hard-driving pop anthem “Modern Love” initially seems to make the young criminal Alex (Denis Lavant) physically ill, as he starts staggering down the street, beating his stomach with his fists. As he keeps moving, however, his steps gradually become freer, his movements more graceful, until he’s running at full speed to the music, the camera barely able to keep up. It’s a portrait of pure, irrepressible joy—all the more potent for the way it’s suddenly interrupted, as the song cuts off and Alex skids to a halt. Though Mauvais Sang is a relatively obscure film, this particular scene makes an impression; Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha features a blatant homage in which Greta Gerwig dashes through New York to the same tune. —Mike D’Angelo
McCabe & Mrs. Miller
“Winter Lady” by Leonard Cohen
Robert Altman uses the same three Leonard Cohen songs throughout his hazy 1971 Western McCabe & Mrs. Miller, treating them like signposts to show where Warren Beatty’s gunslinging gambler John McCabe is in the story. “The Stranger Song” plays when he rides into the fledgling mining town of Presbyterian Church and announces his plans to build a casino/brothel. “Sisters Of Mercy” plays when his motley crew of prostitutes arrives, followed closely by the classier Constance Miller (Julie Christie), who takes over the whorehouse and makes it a success. And “Winter Lady” scores the scenes where McCabe’s life and business are threatened by one of the big trusts, and he seeks comforts in the arms of Miller, an opium addict too aloof to give him all he needs. “Winter Lady” is especially poignant at the movie’s end, playing as Miller’s descent into an opium daze is intercut with shots of McCabe dying in the snow, with Cohen singing forlornly about a woman no one’s ever going to grow old with. —Noel Murray
Manhunter
“In A Gadda Da Vida” by Iron Butterfly
The showdown between Will Graham (William Petersen), a former FBI profiler known for getting inside the serial-killer mind, and imposing monster Francis Dollarhyde (Tom Noonan), the murderer Will has been brought out of retirement to capture, comes to an appropriately outsized conclusion in Michael Mann’s Manhunter. With a blind damsel in distress (Joan Allen) trapped in Dollarhyde’s forest lair, Graham approaches the house without backup, to the insistent keyboard and percussive thump of Iron Butterfly’s epic song “In A Gadda Da Vida.” As the keyboard sound grows louder and the song’s hook finally emerges—duh duh duh-duh- duh-duh do do do—Mann cuts to the killer, standing over his victim with a knife at her throat, spotting his pursuer through a large bay window. In glorious slow-motion, Graham leaps through the glass as the music reaches its mad crescendo, kicking off a finale that revels in bloody excess. —Scott Tobias
Pee-wee’s Big Adventure
“Tequila” by The Champs
The “Pee-wee Dance” is inextricably linked with The Champs’ 1958 Latin-tinged guitar instrumental, thanks to the unforgettable sequence in Tim Burton’s 1985 film Pee-wee’s Big Adventure where Paul Reubens’ bike-seeking manchild mollifies a bar full of murderous bikers called “Satan’s Helpers” with a bartop dance routine. The combination of the kitschy song, the herky-jerky dance, the grimy setting, and a pair of pristine white platform shoes (borrowed from the bar’s incongruously greasy line cook) is so memorable, it’s become its own pop-cultural touchpoint. It was further immortalized in novelty-song form the following year by Joeski Love, with “Pee-wee’s Dance,” a goofy hip-hop track that samples the “Tequila” melody and highlights footage from Big Adventure in its music video. “Tequila” was a successful one-hit wonder in its own right before its appearance in the film, and it’s been featured in other movies since—notably the 1993 kiddie flick The Sandlot. But anyone who’s seen Pee-wee’s Big Adventure—i.e., all right-thinking people—would be hard-pressed to think of anything else when that opening riff comes over the speakers. —Genevieve Koski
The Last American Virgin
“Just Once” by Quincy Jones f/James Ingram
Pitched as a typical teen sex romp, Boaz Davidson’s The Last American Virgin is surprisingly honest about the consequences of fooling around, especially in the climactic sequence where dorky hero Gary (Lawrence Monoson) sells everything he owns to help the girl he secretly likes (Diane Franklin) get an abortion, only to see her back in the arms of his best friend. The movie ends with Gary stumbling across the two of them kissing in the kitchen, right after he’s spent the last of his money on a locket inscribed “Dear Karen With Love.” As James Ingram’s vocals for the weepy Quincy Jones R&B ballad “Just Once” play on the soundtrack, Gary drives away, weeping. Cue credits—and a round of applause for one of the ballsiest ways anyone’s ever ended a sexploitation quickie. —Noel Murray
Band Of Outsiders
“The Madison” by Michel Légrand
Jean-Luc Godard’s flippant gangster romance Band Of Outsiders has Anna Karina, Sami Frey, and Claude Brasseur as free-spirited Parisians pretending to be hoodlums, and in that spirit of play, Godard packs the film with references to his favorite poets and Hollywood movies. In the most famous scene, the three antiheroes spontaneously dance in a café to a jazzy Michel Légrand song, doing a clumsily choreographed, perfectly charming number copied from a half-remembered Nicholas Brothers routine. This is the movie in miniature: three people gamely but sloppily posing as something they aren’t, and enjoying the goofiness of it all even as they get swept up in their roles. As “Odile,” Karina in particular looks like she’s having a ball doing “The Madison,” hoping—at least according to the narrator, who keeps interrupting the song—that the boys on either side of her recognize how adorable she looks. If they don’t, the audience sure does. —Noel Murray
Hedwig And The Angry Inch
“Wig In A Box” by John Cameron Mitchell
“Wig In A Box” is a testament to the transformative power of music. As performed and directed by John Cameron Mitchell in the 2001 film adaptation of the Off-Broadway musical Hedwig And The Angry Inch, “Wig In A Box” serves as a sort of origin story for Hedwig, an East German pan-gender performer who dreams of rock stardom. The titular hairpiece turns out to be Hedwig’s saving grace at her lowest point, when her husband leaves her stranded in a small Kansas town to run off with another man, just as the Berlin Wall falls, rendering moot her decision to get a sex change and marry him in order to escape East Berlin. The right combination of wig and song—LaVerne Baker and a giant beehive, an 8-track and a Farrah Fawcett wave—transports Hedwig from her grimy trailer life to a fantasy of fame and glory, and the film follows suit. In a sequence that reflects of the movie’s stage origins, the song starts out intimate and close as Hedwig mourns in her trailer, then builds as she tries on wigs, before blowing up into a full-on glam-rock performance on a stage made from the original trailer (plus a quick detour for a full-on sing-along, complete with subtitles and bouncing-wig dot). It’s an over-the-top blend of Broadway, music-video, and musical-film conventions that’s singularly Hedwig, and a major contributing factor to the song’s enduring, anthemic appeal. —Genevieve Koski
Saturday Night Fever
“Stayin’ Alive” by Bee Gees
John Badham’s bleak portrait of late-1970s living in New York’s outer boroughs opens with a helicopter shot swooping down over the Verrazano Bridge, with New York City’s skyscrapers looming in the background, so close and yet so far. We zoom in to Brooklyn, where John Travolta’s Tony Manero is staying alive—but just barely. The Bee Gees’ immortal disco anthem amplifies Travolta’s cocky strut, but the lyrics (“Life goin’ nowhere / Somebody help me”) underline his dead-end despair. Tony wants to live in Manhattan, but he’s stuck in Bay Ridge putting shirts on layaway while running errands for a crummy hardware store. The relentless rhythm of “Stayin’ Alive” and a series of super-low-angle shots give Tony an aura of greatness that Badham immediately undercuts when he walks past an attractive woman on the street and she won’t even give him the time of day. According to Barry, Robin, and Maurice, Tony’s a woman’s man, but it’s clear that it’s ladies who have no time to talk. —Matt Singer
The Blues Brothers
“Everybody Needs Somebody To Love” by The Blues Brothers
Picking just one great musical moment from The Blues Brothers is like picking just one vital organ: You kind of need them all. “Think” by Aretha Franklin, “Shake A Tail Feather” by Ray Charles, “The Old Landmark” by James Brown, “Boom Boom” by John Lee Hooker, “Minnie The Moocher” by Cab Calloway; any (or all) could make this list. Pressed with a nearly impossible choice, we’ll select The Blues Brothers themselves performing Solomon Burke’s “Everybody Needs Somebody To Love,” which is one of the all-time great concert scenes that’s not actually from a concert movie. The crowd at the Palace Hotel Ballroom (actually the Hollywood Palladium) is absolutely electric, singing, screaming, and clapping along with Jake (John Belushi, at his most charismatic), Elwood (Dan Aykroyd, at his most charismatically spastic), and the rest of the band. It looks like the greatest rock show of all time, which explains why no one gets pissed off when the Blues Brothers sneak out after just two songs. —Matt Singer
The Royal Tenenbaums
“These Days” by Nico
Time doesn’t exactly stop when Richie Tenenbaum (Luke Wilson) sees his adopted sister Margot (Gwyneth Paltrow) disembark from a Green Line bus after he returns from a year in self-imposed exile, living apart from her. Instead, it slows down and starts moving to the beat of Nico’s 1967 recording of the Jackson Browne-penned “These Days.” It’s the right song for the moment, a description of life being lived as a postscript, the action of earlier, happier years having given way to a time of solitude and reflection. The moment lasts only a few seconds, but without a line of dialogue, it sums up where the characters have been, and where they might yet go. —Keith Phipps
Moulin Rouge!
“Like A Virgin” by Madonna (as interpreted by Harold Zidler)
Baz Luhrmann’s brilliant, bludgeoning jukebox musical isn’t known for its subtlety, but where most of the songs serve a straightforward-enough function—Ewan McGregor’s character sings “Your Song” to explain the song he’s written, etc.— Luhrmann’s gonzo staging of Madonna’s defining hit turns it inside out. Rather than a woman proclaiming her own renewal, it’s sung by Jim Broadbent’s leering cabaret impresario/panderer, promising a potential investor that his star attraction is cleansing her soul for his eventual ravishing, rather than abed dying of tuberculosis. With Broadbent fastening a lopsided bridal veil out of a lace tablecloth and a chorus of male dancers backing him up, it’s a grotesque parody of the skin trade, as vulgar and appalling as the thing itself. —Sam Adams
The Cable Guy
“Somebody To Love” by Jefferson Airplane (as interpreted by Chip Douglas)
In its day, The Cable Guy was known as a costly flop, painted pre-release with a target the size of Jim Carrey’s then-unprecedented $20 million salary. But like Carrey’s abrasive cable-installer, repelling people is what The Cable Guy, directed by Ben Stiller and produced by Judd Apatow, does best. Carrey’s Chip Douglas is a comic monster, a yawning void whose desperate need for human companionship finds a target in Steven Kovacs, the unsuspecting victim played by Matthew Broderick. The movie’s running, deeply uncomfortable gag is that the harder Chip tries to make friends, the further he pushes Steven away; it’s as if his social ineptness is contagious, and Steven doesn’t want to catch it. Chip’s karaoke rendition of Jefferson Airplane’s “Somebody To Love,” which he introduces with a reference to the Maysles brothers’ shattering documentary Gimme Shelter, is a grotesque spectacle, but it’s also a confession of need, an over-the-top spectacle masking a reservoir of deep, discomfiting loneliness. —Sam Adams
Back To The Future
“Johnny B. Goode” by Chuck Berry (as interpreted by Marty McFly)
Leaving aside the characterization of Chuck Berry as a plagiarist, the “Johnny B. Goode” sequence in Back To The Future is as memorable as movie-music scenes get—which makes the idea that director Robert Zemeckis almost cut it out of the film seem practically heretical. Chuck Berry’s guitar-god classic—performed in the film by “Marty McFly,” a.k.a. singer Mark Campbell and a pair of stunt-guitar fingers—serves as a celebration of Marty’s continued existence, which has just been ensured as the 1955 versions of his parents kiss at the Enchantment Under The Sea dance. Prompted to play “something that really cooks” by Chuck’s cousin Marvin, leader of Marvin Berry And The Starlighters, Marty introduces Hill Valley’s crinoline-and-saddle-shoe crowd to the wonders of rock ’n’ roll and changes music history forever. Or something. Marty’s conspicuously 1985-sounding version of “Johnny B. Goode” quickly devolves into a noodly guitar wankfest that highlights the disconnect between Marty’s world and his parents’—it turns out they “aren’t ready for that yet”—and sends the time-traveling teen scurrying back to 1985 and the musical paradox he’s created. (Which apparently involves a lot of Huey Lewis And The News.) —Genevieve Koski
Anchorman: The Legend Of Ron Burgundy
“Afternoon Delight” by Starland Vocal Band (as interpreted by the Channel 4 News Team)
San Diego’s Channel 4 News Team is composed of such manly men that they know not from the ways of love. After fearless, scotch-soaked anchorman Ron Burgundy (Will Ferrell) has sex with co-worker Veronica Corningstone (Christina Applegate), the rest of his buddies—Brian Fantana (Paul Rudd), Champ Kind (David Koechner), and Brick Tamland (Steve Carell)—ask Ron to explain the magic of romance. Ron discusses the concept in song, specifically the Starland Vocal Band’s double-entendre-filled ode to nooners. Ferrell starts out solo, but the rest of the News Team quickly joins in for some surprisingly solid four-part harmony. It’s a delightful comic interlude that doubles as a perfect metaphor for Adam McKay’s entire directorial approach to comedy: The gags seem random and heavily improvised, but the sparks only ignite when the ensemble is in perfect sync. —Matt Singer
The Karate Kid
“You’re The Best” by Joe Esposito
As the writer of “Gonna Fly Now” and five Rocky scores, composer Bill Conti has become the official saint of people getting their asses in shape. Though less famous, his most rousing composition is the aptly named “You’re The Best” from The Karate Kid, where a performance of the song by Joe Esposito accompanies the all-important montage as Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio) rises through the ranks of the All Valley Karate Tournament against the evil Cobra Kai dojo. The 1980s were defined by their training montages, and The Karate Kid’s is one of the best, thanks in large part to Conti’s absurdly macho anthem, which turns a shrimpy teenager’s fights with a bunch of Southern California douchebags into one of the most epic tales of hand-to-hand combat ever committed to the silver screen. —Matt Singer
Trainspotting
“Lust For Life” by Iggy Pop
One of cinema’s most memorable character introductions comes in the first minute of Trainspotting, as shoplifting heroin junkie Renton (Ewan McGregor) and his friend Spud flee security guards to the relentless, bouncy beat of Iggy Pop’s “Lust For Life.” As Renton lays out his philosophy in voiceover—who needs all the boring accoutrements of regular life when there’s heroin?—the song evokes a similarly druggy, rambling, clubby happiness, the sense that there’s no need to worry about tomorrow as long as tonight is fun. The song’s irony and energy match nicely with the scene’s irony and energy, as Renton and Iggy Pop both express frankly horrible outlooks on the world, but make it sound cheerful enough to be compelling. (As a list runner-up, Trainspotting’s similarly irony-aware use of Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day”—which plays as Renton slides into a comatose overdose—is a similarly fantastic mating of mood and music, intent and conscious reversal.) —Tasha Robinson
Jackie Brown
“Across 110th Street” by Bobby Womack
In Jackie Brown, Quentin Tarantino retooled Elmore Leonard’s novel Rum Punch into a meditation on 1970s blaxploitation pictures, imagining what might’ve become of one of Pam Grier’s classic characters 20 years down the road. He uses Bobby Womack’s Across 110th Street theme song to bookend the film, first playing it as Grier’s stewardess title character sneaks money past airport security (in a shot that apes the opening of The Graduate), and then again at the end, when Jackie drives away from Max Cherry (Robert Forster), a good man too frightened to be with her. The latter scene is a heartbreaker, as Max—with a faint smear of Jackie’s lipstick still on his lips—walks off into an out-of-focus blur, while in the car Jackie listens to “Across 110th Street” and mouths along to Womack singing about the hard life on the streets. Womack’s song is about crime in an abstract way, but Jackie adopts its words as her own—just as Tarantino does with other people’s music, books, and movies. —Noel Murray
Reservoir Dogs
“Stuck In The Middle With You” by Stealers Wheel
The use of upbeat pop music as an ironic counterpoint to violence has been a fixture of blood-splattered dark comedies for so long that it can be hard to imagine a time when it wasn’t an obnoxious cliché. Yet when a pop-culture-crazed music lover and former video-store clerk named Quentin Tarantino used Stealers Wheel’s infectious Bob Dylan knockoff “Stuck In The Middle With You” to soundtrack a key scene in Reservoir Dogs, as vicious hood Vic Vega (Michael Madsen) does a happy little dance before mutilating a cop for kicks, the scene’s power had as much to do with its novelty as the incongruous juxtaposition of bubblegum pop-folk and graphic violence. Like so many of Tarantino’s innovations, it’s a great, groundbreaking sequence that spawned countless imitators, which have done little to blunt the impact of the original. —Nathan Rabin
Grosse Pointe Blank
“Under Pressure” by David Bowie And Queen
On the surface, the professional killer John Cusack plays in Grosse Pointe Blank couldn’t be more different from Say Anything…’s determined optimist. But imagine Lloyd Dobler with his heart broken and his hopes dashed, and it’s not hard to see him taking refuge in Martin Blank’s skin, trading “How hard is it to decide to be in a good mood?” for “Sports, sex, no real relationships.” But at his 10th high-school reunion, Martin starts to realize what he’s been missing. He reconnects with an old flame played by Minnie Driver and finds himself unexpectedly bewitched by a classmate’s infant, in whose eyes he sees a reflection of what might have been and what can still be. As director George Armitage intercuts ever-tighter close-ups of Martin and the wide-eyed babe, the soundtrack swells with the strains of “Under Pressure”’s closing section, where fear and anxiety finally give way to a plea to “give love one more chance.” Cusack sells the comedy in Martin coming up short, a professional tough guy brought to heel by a drooling babe, but Armitage lets the moment play long enough for its deeper undercurrents to take hold. Even killers can start again. —Sam Adams
American Psycho
“Hip To Be Square” by Huey Lewis And The News
“Most people probably don’t listen to the lyrics, but they should,” secret maniac Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale) shouts as he blasts Huey Lewis And The News’ “Hip To Be Square.” “It’s not just about the pleasures of conformity, and the importance of trends, it’s also a personal statement about the band itself!” Then he puts an axe through the head of his work associate and rival Paul Allen (Jared Leto). Bret Easton Ellis’ novel American Psycho is punctuated by long, rambling chapters analyzing music in order to express the protagonist’s banal but self-important relationship with pop culture, but Mary Harron’s film mostly concentrates it in this moment, when the grinning Patrick uses “Hip To Be Square” to cover the noises of his latest murder, while spouting shallow, ironic analysis in an upbeat tone that matches the song’s chipper hookiness. The music and the murder set up a startling cognitive dissonance, as does the gap between what Patrick is saying and what he’s doing. But as with Clockwork Orange’s appropriation of “Singin’ In The Rain,” this scene sets up a memorable, unsettling association that’s impossible to shake. —Tasha Robinson
Wings Of Desire
“From Her To Eternity” by Nick Cave
In Wim Wenders’ tragic fantasy Wings Of Desire, angels Damiel (Bruno Ganz) and Cassiel (Otto Sander) wander Berlin, experiencing the world in black-and-white and listening in on humanity’s inner thoughts, noting how even in crowds, people live in emotional isolation. Then Damiel falls for lonely circus performer Marion (Solveig Dommartin), and sets aside his immortality to be with her. Entering the human world of physical sensation and rich, vibrant color, he seeks her out for the first time at a Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds concert, while Cassiel jealously lurks onstage, unseen by the enthusiastic mortal crowd. The song seems to comment on Damiel and Marion’s relationship, as Cave bellows out his lyrics about a stricken voyeur, spying on the melancholy woman in the apartment above, drinking in her tears and stealing pages from her diary, but not daring to reach out to her. His agonized wail, combined with Cassiel’s growing agitation, give the scene an intense charge: What could be a soft, sweet romantic fantasy about two lost souls finally meeting and comforting each other is instead about the raw need they both feel, and Cassiel’s need for his own connection. Where Ganz and Dommartin keep their faces cool and calm, Sander and the song express their pain for them. —Tasha Robinson
Mean Streets
“Tell Me” by The Rolling Stones
Mean Streets wasn’t Martin Scorsese’s first film, but it was his first fully realized statement of where he’s from and what he’s about. Inspired by the way Kenneth Anger used pop music in his groundbreaking avant-garde shorts—to energize, comment, and subvert—Scorsese personalized the gangster genre by setting it in the Italian-American New York neighborhood where he grew up and scoring it with blasts of the rock and R&B he loves. Even divorced from the context of the rest of Mean Streets, there’s a crackle to the scene where Harvey Keitel’s guilt-ridden mobster Charlie dances through a strip club that’s been tinted hellfire-red, while The Rolling Stones’ thumping “Tell Me” plays loudly. Keitel stands on the camera dolly, which makes it look like Charlie’s floating up the stage, where a black stripper gyrates. Here, in a hard jolt to the viewer’s subconscious, are all of Mean Streets’ dichotomies: black and white, man and woman, sacred and profane. —Noel Murray
Chungking Express
“California Dreamin’” by The Mamas & The Papas
Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking Express tells two stories of love, disappointment, and hope in the midst of urban chaos. They’re connected by little more than shared themes and and a shared setting, yet the handoff between them is magical. As the story of Cop 223 (Takeshi Kaneshiro) winds down, he bumps up against Faye (Faye Wong), one of the protagonists of the second story. “At the closest point of our intimacy we were just 1 centimeter from each other. I knew nothing about her,” he says in voiceover as the strains of The Mamas & The Papa’s “California’ Dreamin’” start to play. “Six hours later, she fell in love with another man.” Exit Cop 223, enter Cop 663 (Tony Leung), and we’re off into the second tale, a story of yearning and dislocation seemingly keyed off the mood of the song, which Faye plays again and again. —Keith Phipps
Buffalo ’66
“Heart Of The Sunrise” by Yes
To the minor extent that Vincent Gallo’s directorial debut has a plot, it involves his character, Billy, seeking revenge on the Buffalo Bills placekicker whose missed field-goal attempt ostensibly ruined Billy’s life. Near the end of the film, Billy finally shows up at the strip club owned by the retired player, gun in hand. Rather than accompany this surreally staged, grotesquely violent scene with music that might actually be heard in a strip club, or even music that would conventionally heighten the intensity of a shootout, Gallo chooses—yes!—Yes. Not only does the track’s sinuous groove provide plenty of offbeat tension as Billy walks in, it thrillingly shifts into high gear at the precise moment that he spots his victim. Prog kill! —Mike D’Angelo
Morvern Callar
“Some Velvet Morning” by Lee Hazelwood and Nancy Sinatra
There are few soundtracks as a cool and eclectic as the one director Lynne Ramsay assembled for Morvern Callar, which includes tracks by Can, Aphex Twin, Boards Of Canada, The Velvet Underground, Stereolab, and Ween. The songs are all integrated powerfully into the story of a young woman (Samantha Morton) who’s processing her boyfriend’s suicide. From the dead man, she inherits a mixtape, and the songs inform her long and often peculiar grieving process. When Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazelwood’s “Some Velvet Morning” accompanies her heroine’s trip to the supermarket, Ramsay offers some gorgeous imagery while cleverly alternating between the song and the tinny bleed heard from her earbud headphones. This is Ramsay’s way of making the audience feel like it’s accessing her private world. —Scott Tobias
Show Me Love
“I Want To Know What Love Is” by Foreigner
Lukas Moodysson’s sweet coming-of-age movie Show Me Love—known more internationally under the less sweet but more descriptive title Fucking Åmål—follows the travails of two teenage girls who have little in common, but develop an intense bond neither one can understand. Stuck in a dead-end town like fucking Åmål, five hours out of Stockholm, the morose Agnes (Rebecka Liljeberg) has romantic feelings for the more popular, outgoing Elin (Alexandra Dahlström), but can’t bring herself to follow through on them. But one night in the back of the car, while hitchhiking to the city, Agnes and Elin finally kiss to the Foreigner hit “I Want To Know What Love Is,” which Moodysson cranks from the low background noise of the first verse to the triumphant roar of the chorus. Like “Tiny Dancer” in Almost Famous, it’s a song they’d likely find cheesy under normal circumstances, but it’s powerful in this one. —Scott Tobias
GoodFellas
“Layla” by Derek And The Dominos
The second movement of Derek And The Dominos’ “Layla” marks a dramatic shift from the virtuosic guitar rock of Eric Clapton and Duane Allman to a piano coda that affects a more melancholy tone. The sense of finality in the coda, of something great coming to a end, makes it the perfect cue to signify the bitter, bloody conclusion to Henry Hill’s mafia adventures in Martin Scorsese’s GoodFellas. After pulling off the dramatic Lufthansa heist of 1978, many of Henry’s cronies ignore a directive to keep from conspicuous spending, and Jimmy (Robert De Niro) makes them pay the ultimate price for it, starting with a couple found in a pink Cadillac with the blood-spattered sticker still on it. As Scorsese’s camera glides over a montage of bodies, Henry wistfully recalls a good job gone bad and looks ahead to their psychotic partner Tommy (Joe Pesci) becoming a made man. “Layla” signals ill portents on that front, too. —Scott Tobias
The Graduate
“The Sounds Of Silence” by Simon & Garfunkel
Like its source novel, Mike Nichols’ The Graduate is full of nervous, discomfiting babble in which not much is communicated. Aimless recent college grad Ben (Dustin Hoffman) realizes he has no real interests or goals, and as his boring, intrusive suburban family and their dull friends surround him with a cloud of well-meaning words, he tries to fend them off with equally meaningless chatter. But periodically, the film shuts down the dialogue and just observes Ben, while Simon & Garfunkel speak for him, through “Mrs. Robinson,” “April Come She Will,” “Scarborough Fair/Canticle,” and especially “The Sounds Of Silence.” In the most moody, evocative sequence, after Ben begins an unwise and unwanted affair with his parents’ friend Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft), Nichols simply lets “Sounds Of Silence” play out at full length while Ben cycles between his parents’ pool and their friend’s bedroom, while staring emptily into space and not seeing a future. As gently melancholy as the song is, it matches up so effectively with Ben’s mood that it develops a grim power—which Nichols uses to strong effect at the end of the film, when the song begins again, and Ben’s momentary triumph at breaking with Mrs. Robinson and her plans gives way to the understanding that he still doesn’t know where to go next. —Tasha Robinson
Say Anything…
“In Your Eyes” by Peter Gabriel
No one who’s seen Cameron Crowe’s generation-defining romance Say Anything… can forget the iconic moment when Lloyd Dobler stands under Diane Court’s bedroom window, a boombox hoisted above his head, his teenage heart on his overcoat sleeve, and declares his undying love by blasting Fishbone’s “Bonin’ In The Boneyard.” At least, that’s what was playing when John Cusack filmed the scene that wound up defining the movie (and Cusack’s career), the moment when Lloyd swallows his pride and heeds the advice offered by Lili Taylor’s confidante: “The world is full of guys. Be a man.” Fortunately, Crowe decided that the best way to show Lloyd’s encroaching manhood was not to have him blaring funk-metal in the wee hours, and after some protracted negotiations, Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes” took Fishbone’s place, a tender reminder of the unlikely couple’s first night together and a promise of possibilities to come. —Sam Adams
Almost Famous
“Tiny Dancer” by Elton John
There comes a point more than halfway through Almost Famous when even William Miller, the music-mad protagonist of the film based on Cameron Crowe’s experiences as a precocious teen journalist for Rolling Stone, has had enough. After weeks of following the up-and-coming band Stillwater on tour, the bloom has fallen off the rose, thanks to clashing egos and other problems. Then something magical happens: The music transcends. And it isn’t Stillwater’s music—which is frankly a few tiers short of transcendent—but a pop song by Elton John, an artist who falls on the wrong end of their spectrum of cool. The members of an up-and-coming rock band in the mid-1970s probably wouldn’t confess to liking “Tiny Dancer,” but they know the lyrics like everyone else. When the bassist, played by honey-voiced Red House Painters singer Mark Kozelek, belts out a verse on the tour bus, it’s like a spark to kindling, especially since the song itself, with its steady crescendo of a chorus, gains momentum over time. With each line, the members of Stillwater and their hangers-on push past their grogginess and ill feelings and belt out the song with an unfettered joy that’s divorced from their dysfunction, and entirely about the music. —Scott Tobias
High Fidelity
“Dry The Rain” by The Beta Band
“I will now sell five copies of The Three E.P.s by The Beta Band,” record-store owner Rob (John Cusack) whispers to his employee Dick (Todd Louiso) during a typically busy day at Championship Vinyl. So far the customers have been grooving to Aretha Franklin and Stiff Little Fingers, but “Dry The Rain,” the opening track from The Beta Band’s first EP, Championship Versions, stops them in their tracks. It’s not hard to hear why: The band’s ingratiating, tough-to-define sound prompts a “What is that?” feeling that’s soon followed by an “I have to have that feeling.” It’s a passing moment in the film that captures the joy of hearing something new and wonderful, particularly when it’s easy to feel like you’ve heard it all. It also captures an experience that soon retreated to the margins as digital music became the norm, and shopping at record stores, getting advice from clerks, stumbling across the unexpected, bumping into fellow music lovers, and falling in love over dusty old records became the exception. High Fidelity hit theaters in 2000, but it already seems like the product of another age. —Keith Phipps
Wayne’s World
“Bohemian Rhapsody” by Queen
Freddie Mercury died from AIDS-related complications mere months before Penelope Spheeris’ Wayne’s World hit theaters, making the film’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” sequence an inadvertent but ultimately poignant tribute to the late Queen singer. The 1975 single scores a night out with Mike Myers’ Wayne, Dana Carvey’s Garth, and their assorted long-haired compatriots as they cruise the streets of Aurora, Illinois in Garth’s flame-paneled AMC Pacer, seemingly oblivious to the hilarious disconnect between the song’s operatic epicness and their ultra-mundane suburban surrounding. But the humor does nothing to undercut the sequence’s sincere appreciation of the song: The boys’ car-bound sing-along positively bursts with joy, the perfect distillation of the guileless love of all things “excellent” that sets Wayne and Garth bumbling down the path of TV stardom as the film progresses. “Bohemian Rhapsody” was already a classic-rock-radio staple before Wayne’s World, but the song enjoyed a second renaissance following the film’s release, ensuring that a generation that wasn’t even born when it was originally released will forever feel the uncontrollable urge to headbang right after Freddie hits that high note. —Genevieve Koski
Boogie Nights
“Sister Christian” by Night Ranger, “Jessie’s Girl” by Rick Springfield, and “99 Luftballons” by Nena
Boogie Nights owes a debt to both the films of Quentin Tarantino and the filmmaker’s larger-than-life persona, most notably in the scene where a trio of coked-up, desperate hustlers played by Mark Wahlberg, John C. Reilly, and Thomas Jane travel to the house of wealthy eccentric Rahad Jackson (Alfred Molina) to sell him bogus drugs. Jackson has Tarantino’s excitable speech patterns and pop-culture obsessions, though his analysis of Rick Springfield’s “Jessie’s Girl” is somewhat lacking in sophistication. (He discerns that it’s a song about jealousy.) The debt to Tarantino’s films is even more obvious: Anderson seems intent on trumping Tarantino’s use of music as an ironic counterpoint to grisly action by having the jittery, doomed drug deal happen while Jackson not only plays “Sister Christian” and “Jessie’s Girl,” but also pontificates on their meaning their greatness, while bragging about his friendship with Springfield. The pop-rock glossiness of “Sister Christian” and “Jessie’s Girl” takes on a sinister connotation in this dangerous context. The unexplained presence of a young man randomly tossing firecrackers around only adds to the clammy discomfort. By the time the scene gets to “99 Luftballons,” the commentary has stopped. Boogie Nights ensured that no one would be able to listen to any of these super-hits of the 1980s the same way ever again. —Nathan Rabin
Stranger Than Paradise
“I Put A Spell On You” by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins
Jim Jarmusch’s second feature has no shortage of deadpan moments, and one of the best comes early. Fresh off the plane from Hungary, Eva (Eszter Balint) makes her way to the apartment of her cousin Willie (John Lurie) while playing her favorite song on a portable cassette player: “I Put A Spell On You” by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. It’s a slice of wild, untamed, American rock ’n’ roll, and it’s no doubt part of what’s brought her to this country in the first place. But instead of discovering the America the song’s promised, she wanders through a sleepy, paper-strewn stretch of New York. Her look of disappointment says more than any dialogue could convey as Screamin’ Jay screams on anyway. —Keith Phipps
Blue Velvet
“In Dreams” by Roy Orbison
Roy Orbison’s voice has an ethereal quality that David Lynch employs to brilliant effect in Blue Velvet, by having a shadowy underworld figure played by Dean Stockwell lip-synch “In Dreams” at the behest of crazed sadist Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper) in front of a literally captive audience (since it includes folks the bad guys are holding hostage). Pitched somewhere between a fantasy and a nightmare, the character actor’s full-bodied, androgynous performance of Orbison’s moody hit—part drag-queen vamp, part after-midnight croon—embodies the sinister sensuality and artful interplay between light and dark that defines Blue Velvet. It’s a sequence of bizarre and unexpected tenderness in the middle of a violent, disturbing film. —Nathan Rabin
The Lovers On The Bridge
A fireworks-timed medley of songs by Iggy Pop, Johann Strauss, Public Enemy
There’s nothing small about Leos Carax’s The Lovers On The Bridge, a glorious budget-busting fiasco on par with Fitzcarraldo, Apocalypse Now, Heaven’s Gate, and other such celebrated auteur follies. When Parisian authorities balked at Carax’s request to take over the Pont-Neuf bridge for three months, his set designer created a model in another city, and various mishaps and shutdowns left the production tens of millions of francs in the hole. But all that excess feeds into Carax’s outsized vision of two vagrants (Juliette Binoche and Denis Lavant) in love, particularly a climax that has them cavorting madly on the bridge while the bicentennial Bastille Day fireworks pop off in the background. Carax seems to have challenged himself to keep the background from overwhelming the fore, and he pipes in a selection of music that segues from Iggy Pop to Public Enemy to Johann Strauss. —Scott Tobias
Shaft
“Theme From Shaft” by Isaac Hayes
Times Square, morning; commuters on their way to work. Just as the opening credits begin and private detective John Shaft (Richard Roundtree) emerges from the subway en route to his office, Isaac Hayes’ theme kicks in, like the overture to the coolest, funkiest musical ever. Shaft contains no voiceover and almost no exposition; in a sense, Hayes is the film’s narrator, explaining everything we need to know about our main character. He’s the one who tells us Shaft’s a “black private dick” and a “sex machine to all the chicks,” and that he’s a “complicated man” and “no one understands him but his woman.” In supplemental materials on the Shaft DVD, director Gordon Parks tells Hayes how he wants the scene scored: “That should be a driving, savage beat,” he says, “so that we’re right with him all the time.” Accordingly, Hayes actually matches that driving, savage beat to Roundtree’s footsteps so he’s swaggering through midtown in perfect synchronization with the music. It’s as if Shaft is such a bad mother, he can actually hear his own theme song. Before he’s said or done anything more than take a leisurely morning stroll, Hayes’ music has already made him one of the coolest characters in movie history. —Matt Singer
The Big Lebowski
“Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In)” by The First Edition
The Big Lebowski was the Coen brothers’ seventh feature, but the first in which they relied more on needle drops than on Carter Burwell’s score. The film’s eclectic soundtrack features everything from Henry Mancini to Yma Sumac, but its centerpiece is a crazily goofy dream sequence, set to a psychedelic Kenny Rogers number from his early days with The First Edition. As the future Gambler tells us of a time when he saw so much that he broke his mind, the Coens do their best to replicate that scenario, with Jeff Bridges shaking his moneymaker dressed as a porn-movie cable guy and Julianne Moore glaring at him in full Viking regalia, surrounded by a chorus of women wearing enormous bowling-pin headdresses. —Mike D’Angelo
Dancer In The Dark
“I’ve Seen It All” by Björk
The bulk of Lars von Trier’s 2000 musical Dancer In The Dark is shot Dogme 95-style, with handheld digital cameras and minimal setup, but the musical sequences break those rules dramatically, amping up the color and the choreography while using an array of stationary cameras placed at striking angles. Icelandic art-pop singer-songwriter Björk stars as Selma, a factory worker with failing eyesight, who endures one injustice after another with meek resignation. Selma’s point of view is best expressed in the Oscar-nominated song “I’ve Seen It All,” which she sings as a duet with her occasional suitor Jeff (Peter Stormare), who’s trying to convince her to do something about her encroaching blindness. As the clacking of a passing train sets the beat, Jeff tells her about all the wonders of the world she could still see, and she counters with all the awfulness she’s already seen, and could do without. It’s a stirring, provocative song, suffused with the sadness of a woman who hears about the awesomeness of Niagara Falls and sighs, “I have seen water. It’s water. That’s all.” —Noel Murray
A Hard Day’s Night
“A Hard Day’s Night” by The Beatles
It starts with a single chord and explodes from there. As the title track of A Hard Day’s Night plays over the opening credits for The Beatles’ first film, the screen fills with screaming teens chasing their elusive idols, who were at the time still enjoying the first wave of international stardom. From there, director Richard Lester lays one variation of the same gag atop the other as the boys don disguises and duck out of the way. The camera stays loose and the editing rapid as Lester borrows techniques from the French New Wave and an inventive short film he made with his friends in The Goon Show, until it starts to create a vibrant new cinematic vocabulary all its own, one filled with youthful energy and little regard for what had come before. It was, in other words, the movie equivalent of the Beatles, and the perfect way to kick off the film. —Keith Phipps
Do The Right Thing
“Fight The Power” by Public Enemy
Cinematic introductions don’t get more dramatic or inspired than Rosie Perez’s first scene in Do The Right Thing (which was also her film debut). The film opens with Perez, then best known as a choreographer and dancer, dancing by herself on an empty stage, while images of the Brooklyn neighborhood where the film takes place are projected in the background. And it all plays against the incendiary backdrop of Public Enemy’s “Fight The Power.” Perez’s dancing is aggressive and pugilistic; she alternates between skin-tight outfits and boxing attire in a sequence that establishes a tone of feverish intensity before its characters speak a single word. This is what throwing down the gauntlet looks and sounds like. —Nathan Rabin