Movies Made Better By Their Scores/Soundtracks

It is my personal opinion that a movie can be made or broken by its score and/or choices of music.  Some movies benefit A LOT from their music while others benefit from a more subtle use of sound and tone.  Below is a small list of films whose musical scores stick out the most when I think back to them.  What others do you think should go on such a list?

Jaws

A lot of Spielberg films could probably go on this list but this one sticks out the most because it is its score that transforms it from a wonderfully shot horror/adventure film to a truly terrorizing film experience.  We do not see the shark for a full hour into this film yet before we do we are already scared to death of it.  Here is a case where the score of a film actually gives an absent character (the shark) presence well before it ever even arrives on screen — a pretty impressive feat.

Donnie Darko

Richard Kelly has a true gift with selecting music for his films — or maybe it’s just that he knows his own material so well that it’s almost premeditated.  Maybe it’s both.  With Donnie Darko Kelly’s music choices always seemed to be doing two things at once: reminding the audience that the film is, indeed, set in the 80s, and also unnerving the audience as it plays along with Kelly’s often whimsical camera shots.  Oh, and we’re not talking about 80s hair-metal, either.  No, sir, we’re talking about all of those bands who had a small love affair with their synthesizers.  You know who they are.

And let us not forget Gary Jules’ truly haunting cover of Tears for Fears’ “Mad World.” Crazy awesome.

Children of Men

Here’s one of those cases I was mentioning where a film is made better not necessarily because of its music, but rather because of its lack thereof.  So much of what makes this film wonderful is the use of mostly diegetic sounds in its numerous long takes that make the heart pound twice as fast as it would if there were only some generic action beat pulling you along.  Oh, there’s still occasional score cues but they usually only hit when characters are at their most emotional state, which really only serves to impact the audience twice as hard as well.

Garden State

This movie is all about its musical choices.  Each song seems to play into, in one way or another, what is happening in the scene at hand.  And most, if not all, of the songs are fairly easy listening which plays well with protagonist Andrew Largeman’s seemingly constant stoic behavior.  Not much else I can say.  The film and its soundtrack just go hand in hand.

Slumdog Millionaire

The soundtrack to Slumdog Millionaire excels at keeping your heart beating when it’s already damn near on the brink of exploding as it is!  The film has a lot of story to tell and the score conveys its emotion almost perfectly.  Big deal, right?  Lots of movie scores can do that.  Very true.  Slumdog gets a nod, though, because its score conveys a constant sense of kinetic energy that rushes over the audience and abruptly jerks them back in, almost daring them to take their eyes off the screen.  And in the end you may just feel the sudden urge to jump to your feet and dance along with the credits as well.

Forrest Gump

This film is chock FULL of music (just gander at its 32-song soundtrack).  Save for the more dramatic moments when an actual score is present (which is lovely as well), the music in this film seems, at times, to literally carry the story along and allow a life’s worth of adventures to flow almost seamlessly.

No Country for Old Men

Here’s a film with just about no music or score at all and my god is it effective.  The Coen brothers are usually pretty good at selecting the right kind of music for their films but here they knew just what they were doing when they decided to be as subtle with their sounds as possible.  Like Children of Men above, No Country for Old Men knows exactly how to keep an audience on the edge of their seat without succumbing to age old music and sound tactics that would have probably only served to annoy the audience more than anything else.

American Graffiti

Like Forrest Gump, this film is filled to the brim with classic oldies (in fact, its soundtrack may actually be bigger than Gump’s).  Probably the original Teen Movie, American Graffiti really captured the spirit of adolescence (the excitement, the confusion, the sheer frustration!) and I doubt it could have been done without a constant music stream throughout.  It invokes the feeling one gets (or used to get) when riding around The Strip with the radio/mp3 player/CD player on constant play — remember?  Of course you do.

Southland Tales

Yes, another Richard Kelly film.  I can’t help it — if the man ever decides he has no more stories to tell, I think he’d do well to go into sound design in feature films.  Anyway, there is a point to having another Kelly film on this list.  You see, Southland Tales wasn’t quite the masterpiece we were all hoping for after Kelly gave us Donnie Darko years prior.  Maybe it was the expectation.  Now, I’m not saying that it’s an awful film because amongst all of its craziness it also has a lot of charms to it.  And on repeated viewings it’s just plain fun pulp fiction.  The soundtrack, though, is quite wonderful — composed of songs selected by Kelly as well as an actual score composed by Moby.  Unlike Darko where the music just seemed to blend with the craziness, the music in Southland just seems to escalate it.  Fun stuff.

Lady in the Water

Ah, and here we may have the most important one on the list.  I know this film took a lot of flack, and though I’ll always be a Shyamalan fan, I get it.  Of all of his movies, this one may be my least favorite — I mean it damn near almost explains itself to death (and at times does so in a somewhat cocky manner).  Yet, that said, I can keep coming back to watch this film again and again because of its soundtrack.  Seriously, go back and listen to this thing; I’d almost go so far as to call it magical.  Composer James Newton Howard crafted a beautiful score for this film and it is probably because of his talent alone that the audience can actually feel like the film is a fairy tale (or “bedtime story” as the tagline insinuates).  And if you do pick up the soundtrack, you may be surprised by how much you love the Bob Dylan cover songs as well — specifically Silvertide’s version of “It Ain’t Me Babe” and A Whisper in the Noise’s version of “The Times They Are A-Changin’.”

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And so that concludes my short list.

What are you’re suggestions?