There was an episode of television’s Friday Night Lights when a new character plays in his first game and forces a game-changing fumble. The lead-up sequence is unabashedly manipulative, as an unseen announcer criticizes Coach Taylor’s inflexible play calling and repeatedly exhorts the Panthers’ need for a big play. I remember remarking, out loud, “this is so predictable!” And yet, despite my awareness of how shamelessly Peter Berg was jerking the puppet strings of my heart, I couldn’t help but feel a swelling of excitement when Santiago burst through a blocker and leveled the quarterback with a blindside hit, sending the ball tumbling into the hands of a teammate and changing the momentum in the Panthers’ favor.

No movie has ever made me feel both so wonderfully uplifted and so deeply cynical at the same time as Forrest Gump (1994). The film itself is the feel-good story of the twentieth century, taking us on a tour of many of most significant events of the sixties and seventies, each punctuated by a digitally recreated appearance by Forrest and one of his homespun sayings. It’s pretty difficult to resist his good nature and simple charm, and there are plenty of scenes where I find my emotional response is more predictable than the salivating of Pavlov’s dogs. And it doesn’t really bother me. On the other hand, while the soundtrack to the film serves its purpose by providing appropriate period music to accompany the fantastical events of Forrest’s life and the world he inhabits, it is absolutely infuriating. I’ll explain why in a moment.

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Teen angst is one of the most tempting lodes for an ore-seeking filmmaker to mine. It’s something of a shared experience; the instinct to rebel against authority in any form is a universal characteristic of adolescence. It’s something that most members of any audience can identify with, and sympathize with. But what makes working with teen angst so tricky is that the source of a teenager’s anxiety and frustration tends to change drastically with each generation, and relying on traditional subjects needs to be done perfectly or it becomes just another cliché in an oversaturated genre. Teen angst in literature has given us Holden Caufield and Gene Forrester. Teen angst in film has given us Jim Stark, John Bender, and Jimmy Cooper.

In Rebel Without a Cause (1955), Jim Stark’s issues are caused by his frustration with the dynamic between his ineffectual father and his domineering mother; a reflection of the paternalistic Father-Knows-Best culture of the fifties and sixties. In The Breakfast Club (1985), John Bender has an equally fitful reaction to the behavior of his own father, an abusive alcoholic. Quadrophenia (1979) is a timeless story because more than anything, its protagonist’s problems are driven by a search for identity.

Of Quadrophenia, Pete Townshend himself said, “The music is the best music that I’ve ever written, I think and it’s the best album that I will ever write.” I think Townshend is absolutely right. It’s got a more coherent story and more relevant subject material than Tommy (1969), and the complexity of the music in the album, while often a handicap when dealing with large audiences, is what takes it into masterpiece territory. Quadrophenia is one of the best albums ever produced, and the film version is one of the most memorable portrayals of teen angst that’s ever been captured.

The Film: Quadrophenia

The Song: “I’ve Had Enough”

The Artist: The Who (more…)

In my post about The Rules of Attraction a few weeks back, commenter Idp presented the idea that many of the heroes in action movies fall into a subclass of the alpha male as “reluctant alphas.” I think there’s something to this. A number of classic action movies (Commando, Rambo, Lethal Weapon) introduce their hero as someone who lives in relative isolation and is either persuaded or forced to act in an extraordinary situation. At the same time, these characters continue to resist occupying positions of actual leadership, and the corresponding responsibilities that accompany such positions. The case of Captain Benjamin Willard, played by Martin Sheen, provides an interesting example of this “reluctant alpha” in both fictional material and in the actor’s real life.

The Film: Apocalypse Now

The Song: “The End” (download)

The Artist: The Doors

Who’s Who:

In this opening scene of Apocalypse Now (1979), we’re introduced to our reluctant hero, Captain Benjamin L. Willard, played by Martin Sheen. It’s hard to imagine anyone other than Martin Sheen as Captain Willard, although Harvey Keitel had originally been cast to play the part and was actually dropped two weeks after shooting had already begun. Sheen suffered a near-fatal heart attack during production, which was one among many other disasters that came close to shutting the film down entirely. (more…)

There’s a certain art to crafting a great movie trailer that is sort of a scale model of the art of crafting the advertised movie itself. Often a trailer contains dialogue that’s been edited together differently than what you eventually hear in the movie, scenes and jokes that are dropped by the final cut, and songs by Coldplay or Fatboy Slim that are completely absent from the film or its soundtrack album. The recent rash of recut, homemade trailers for imaginary films like “Shining” and “Must Love Jaws” have taught us that a clever and dedicated editor can completely redefine a movie simply by selecting fragments of it and piecing them together in a unique way.

Awards for the best trailers are handed out in June at the annual Golden Trailer Awards. Statuettes shaped like a gilded camper trailer are awarded to previews in just about every conceivable category — Best Documentary, Best Foreign Romance, even Best Video Game Trailer.

Personally, I think the greatest triumph in the art of making trailers is “the ugly duckling” — taking a terrible movie, distilling the finest two minutes of footage, choosing the perfect music, writing some good lines for voice-over god Don LaFontaine to intone with thunderous import, and stitching them all together to create an overwhelming rush of images and emotions that convince the viewer, all contradictory knowledge notwithstanding, that a movie like Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor (2001) is going to be great.

Some trailers have the opposite effect. I had to be dragged kicking and screaming to see There’s Something About Mary (1998), which turned out to be hilarious. The trailer for Go (1999) is another disaster, yet the movie is actually pretty good. I’d heard enough about the disastrous screening of Southland Tales at the Cannes film festival in 2006 to know that the film was going to be an overwrought mess. But when I watched its trailer I was pretty enticed by the use of the ponderous “UK Surf” version of the Pixies’ “Wave of Mutilation” in the first half. And given my limited knowledge of the movie’s plot, Elbow’s “Forget Myself” seemed like it would be used somewhere in the film’s final moments, or possibly over the end credits. To my dismay, it isn’t used in the film. At all.

The Film: Southland Tales

The Song: “All These Things That I’ve Done”

The Artist: The Killers

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Sometimes, when you’re choosing the soundtrack for an adapted screenplay, the source material hands your songs right to you (such as in the novels High Fidelity by Nick Hornby, and American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis). And even though it’s about 2700 years old, Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey most likely did include its own soundtrack as a critical part of its performances in its original iterations. The Odyssey begins with the line “O Muse! Sing in me, and through me tell the story…” and consists of 12,110 lines of dactylic hexameter, which probably lent itself very well to a musical form. In the Coen Brothers’ loose adaptation O Brother Where Art Thou, however, the original rhyme and meter of the text (which of course, was in Greek) and the music, if it was actually preserved, have been discarded to accommodate the vernacular and musical traditions of Depression-era Mississippi.

The Film: O Brother Where Art Thou

The Song: “I’ll Fly Away” (download)

The Artist: Gillian Welch and Alison Krauss (more…)

The first time I ever visited Sherman Oaks and saw the childhood home of my old roommate Miles (this was back when we lived in San Diego, before he got famous), I mentioned to him that I felt like I’d been there before.

“It looks familiar?” he asked me.

“Yeah.”

“That’s because it’s been in the background of every porn movie you’ve ever seen.”

He explained that, to his knowledge, no porn had been filmed specifically in his house, but that the architecture was very typical for homes in the Valley. This was when I first learned that the San Fernando Valley is the pornography capital of the world. In Boogie Nights, and later in Magnolia, Paul Thomas Anderson treats the San Fernando Valley with the same reverence that Michael Mann reserves for Los Angeles in Heat and Collateral and John Hughes holds for Chicago in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

From the very beginning of the film, when the muted undertones of Michael Penn’s composition “Big Top” are shattered by the energy of the Emotions’ classic “Best of My Love,” it’s clear that music is going to be a very important aspect of the movie. The collection of ’70s and early ’80s songs Anderson uses in his film blend seamlessly into the scenes, gliding along perfectly in the background until the appropriate moments when the music itself is brought forward and allowed to speak as though it were a character itself. In Boogie Nights, Paul Thomas Anderson demonstrates just how much a great soundtrack, when properly presented, can add to an already excellent film.

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As I expect every one of you knows, Heath Ledger died yesterday. I won’t speculate as to the details of his death (I’m sure the tabloids and gossip websites will have that covered) but I have no doubt that plenty of people are reeling from the loss. My original plan was to write about the following scene a few weeks down the road, but in the face of yesterday’s events, I thought it might be fitting to move it to the front of the queue.

The Film: Two Hands

The Song: “These Days”

The Artist: Powderfinger (more…)

Exit Music is a sister series to Motion Picture Soundtrack. Yeah, they’re both named after Radiohead songs. So what? You wanna fight about it? As long as you’re less than 5′2″, 120 lbs, and don’t know any martial arts, you’re on.

It’s often said that you only get one chance to make a first impression. It’s certainly true for films. In many movie reviews, the opening sequence is treated with a certain kind of reverence – it sets the tone for the remainder of your experience. It can succeed spectacularly, as in Boogie Nights, treating us to a sprawling masterpiece that introduces the characters and setting and kickstarts the plot all at once. It can hypnotize us, like in Apocalypse Now, where we see a vibrant green jungle lazily explode into fire. Or it can be a disaster, such as in Fox’s newly debuted Sarah Connor Chronicles, where guns appear out of thin air, the dream-sequence conceit is painfully obvious, and disinterested conversations fill a roomful of viewers after fewer than fifteen seconds have gone by. When presenting a product, a filmmaker needs to deliver a good first impression. Failure to do risks losing the respect of your audience before your story has even begun. But what about last impressions? If you make a sufficiently bad one, it may be the last impression you ever get to make.

In films, the song that is chosen to cover the final credits is often one of the most overlooked aspects of the soundtrack. For movies that succeed, it allows the viewer the chance to relax in their seats, pat their bellies in contentment, and gnaw on the bones of the feast they’ve just enjoyed. For movies that fail, it offers one last shot at redemption. (more…)

Never in my life have I been so glad that I wasn’t caught up in the hype for a film.

Yes, obviously, I was aware of Cloverfield. I’m way too big of a movie geek for it to have stayed completely off my radar. But while some spent the months before its release doing little more than surfing the web and scrutinizing every piece of information that leaked out (or, more likely, that producer J.J. Abrams knowingly and willfully released, albeit in a manner to make it look like it had been leaked), before going into the theater, I really only knew two things about it:

1) It was a creature feature about New York City being attacked by a monster big enough to rip the head off the Statue of Liberty.
2) It was done in a manner resembling “The Blair Witch Project,” where the footage was supposedly a found document, made by people who’d survived the attack.

Hey, man, you had me at “a monster big enough to rip the head off the Statue of Liberty.” (more…)

To begin: Music has been a essential part of movies since the very first images were committed to celluloid — in fact, motion picture scores existed before spoken dialogue did — so it’s not surprising that one of the most important aspects of a film’s production is what songs are used and how they are grafted onto the visual product. Motion Picture Soundtrack is a new feature in which I will do some research on the songs that are used in some of my favorite scenes in my favorite movies, and why they happen to work so well (as well as some instances where the scenes fail). In order to discuss things properly, I’ll have to operate under the assumption that you’ve seen the film before. It’s not exactly my mission to dump a bunch of spoilers into these posts, but I’m not going to avoid them, either. (more…)