When Movies Kill Your Favorite Songs

I DO not keep up with popular music, so you'll have to excuse me if I haven't heard of Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix. You'll also have to grant me a measure of leniency when I confess that my favorite song recorded in the '00s is probably the Killers' "All These Things That I've Done," an anthem long since overexposed. It is a mainstream hit by a mainstream band by any account, but to me there is something so transcendent in the five minutes of its glowing production and its plaintive declarations. I only regret that its well-known interlude of "I got soul, but I'm not a soldier" is so slick that it invited endless repetition, misappropriation, and ultimately haughty disdain for admirers who think that the song is the best of the decade.

Recently I watched Richard Kelly's Southland Tales in a theater. It was a free screening that 28 people started and 14 finished. Southland Tales had premiered, apparently unfinished, at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival to critical disapproval. While I've never understood the appeal of Kelly's Donnie Darko, I watched Southland with as open a mind as a director would hope his (or her!) audience to have. Just because a film has the most execrable cast after Valentine's Day doesn't mean that I will automatically dismiss it. Similarly, just because a film has Rebekah Del Rio singing some lines in Spanish doesn't mean we have the next Mulholland Dr. on our hands.

So I sat through the whole thing, not letting the literal halving of the audience compel me to walk out on a movie for the first time—and I witnessed Kelly and two-time Emmy winner (because those SNL bits are clearly a high point for television comedy and merit recognition) Justin Timberlake violating the marvelous recording by the Killers with an insipid musical production.

This movie made me think about when good music is squandered in film. Off the top of my head, I have also heard "All These Things"

1) in the trailer for Reign Over Me (because the song says, "You gotta help me out"—see, it fits the theme!);
2) in a Nike commercial (because the "I got soul" refrain will stir the athlete in you); and
3) in überdouche Matt Damon's promo spot for The People Speak (because the song says, "I wanna stand up"—see, it fits the theme!).

The only band I still keep up with is Radiohead, and last year alone I saw the otherworldly "No Surprises" from their masterwork OK Computer played for a scant ten seconds in both Whip It and New York, I Love You. Why use it if you're not going to do anything with it? It is not suitable music to accompany the rekindling of a romance between Robin Wright Penn and Chris Cooper, nor to set the mood for Ellen Page's blossoming love.


THERE ARE directors like Scorsese, P.T. Anderson, and Tarantino who use pop music so ingeniously that their song choice can become forever linked to the film sequence. From beginning to end, Goodfellas is built on a backbone of pop music: a few highlights are "Then He Kissed Me" over the long take into the Copacabana, "Layla" over the montage of corpse discoveries, and the celebrated "Last Day as a Wiseguy" sequence that (among other techniques) frequently shifts songs to mirror the drug-addled mind of Henry Hill. The opening titles of Mean Streets burst open with Phil Spector's Wall of Sound in "Be My Baby"; Robert De Niro's Johnny Boy is introduced immortally over "Jumpin' Jack Flash"; Casino depicts Sharon Stone's sad demise over "The House of the Rising Sun."

Boogie Nights (Goodfellas for the porn industry) is also propelled forward by its soundtrack, starting with "Best of My Love" heralding Anderson's directorial verve in his virtuoso opening shot. There are too many highlights here as well: "Spill the Wine" over Anderson's I Am Cuba homage; the "Sister Christian"/"Jessie's Girl" Wonderland sequence; the end credits with "Livin' Thing."

Tarantino has managed to assemble eclectic songs along with numerous Ennio Morricone quotations to score films as different as Kill Bill and Inglourious Basterds. When songs are used so adeptly, as is often the case with these three directors, I cannot imagine the music in any other film context. So when "Jumpin' Jack Flash" appears at the end of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, or "Livin' Thing" shows up in Chaos Theory, or "Battle Without Honor or Humanity" shows up in the Kung Fu Panda trailer (let alone during every sports event since), I get a little disappointed. To me, cinematic use of such songs is proscribed for a long, long time: they have already been so reverently enshrined by the hands of masters.

Furthermore, I hope that filmmakers will also be responsible with the untapped musical gems that have yet to be consecrated. Please don't use a ten-second Radiohead snippet just because you like the band so much. (Incidentally, I heard ten seconds of "Planet Telex," first track from The Bends, in Southland Tales.) I wait for the day when a filmmaker will use Radiohead felicitously. In spite of my wide-eyed idolatry for Christopher Nolan, I didn't care for Thom Yorke's "Analyse" over the end credits of The Prestige.


WHAT ARE your favorite pop song/film sequence pairings? Are those songs off limits for the foreseeable future? And when have your favorite songs been squandered?