Movies with awesome music usage

[elmuerte]

I was watching Dark Shadows again. One thing that really sticks to me with this movie is the awesome usage of (licensed) music. It doesn't happen that often that I think that the usage of music in the movie is really fitting and contributing to the movie.

 

So... here a thread to discus movies where licensed music really plays a contributing role (rather than supporting). So it's about preexisting music that was properly used in a movie. Thus, no original music created for a movie.

[tegan]

Although it doesn't appear in the movie itself, the music in the first trailer for Watchmen is "The Beginning is the End is the Beginning;" a slow, sordid B-side version of a similarly-titled song that Smashing Pumpkins wrote for Batman & Robin. It remains the single most ingenious detail surrounding a Zack Snyder film ever.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3orQKBxiEg

 

 

 

Also: I love that of all the music they could have gone with for the introduction of James Tiberius Kirk in Star Trek 2009, they went with "Sabotage."

 

[Barnastyz]

Platoon and Forrest Gump are two good examples of this.

[elmuerte]

Oh right, Watchmen. The title scene was absolutely excellent. And then there was the burial.

[Patrick R]

A little history on this sort of thing:

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKzz0zF9k54

 

That's Kenneth Anger's seminal art film Scorpio Rising (NSFW). It's soundtrack is made entirely of modern pop music (which was unheard of at the time) and is mostly used for tonal dissonance to heighten the chaos and anxiety of the film (the subject matter of gay S&M bikers already being plenty daring in 1963*), which would later be a direct influence on filmmakers like Martin Scorsese and David Lynch.

 

How those two filtered the influence of Anger (think the

or

) would later define how Tarantino used music, which in turn would influence a whole lot of other people to take this ironic sort of approach. Eventually it would even reach

. 

 

Some of my favorites include...

 

The ending of Beau Travail (don't worry, spoiler free!) with Corona's "Rhythm of the Night". Works better in context, but still Denis Lavant's dancing is insanely great.

 

The end of Fallen Angels (still, not really any spoilers), with The Flying Picket's cover of Yazoo's "Only You"

 

The opening of Heavenly Bodies with Sparks' "Breaking Out of Prison"

 

 

 

*Eventually it took the Supreme Court to say that his film was art for Vice Squads to stop busting theaters this movie played at.