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