Movie Music Moments

This might be coming out of left field, but it’s something I’ve been increasingly pondering in my free time (which is becoming increasingly abundant.  Damn youse job market!).

Every so often in cinemaland,  the visuals, the acting, and the story take a backseat to something very underrepresented and special: the music. There are moments in film where the music is so perfectly composed or inserted at just the right moment to really drive home the point of a moment, serving as a layer on top of the rest of the sensory input we’re receiving from performance and speech and sound effects which speaks to something…more. It’s ethereal, summarizing a directorial point in the film, an unseen cue that may speak to the deeper emotional state of the character, or perhaps the writer and director themselves. The background suddenly takes precedence, and an entire film’s worth of emotional weight and resonance can hit with a few opening chords. I’m going to place a few of my own picks below, but please, add your own in to the comments. Also, if you haven’t seen the films, ignore the clips I manage to find. You’d be cheating yourself out of the real feel of things. Too, some of these may include SPOILERS, which I’m vehemently against, so, you’ve been warned.

The Matrix – Spybreak – Propellerheads

“Freeze!”

Neo and Trinity share a look, and then all hell breaks loose. As the first shot is fired, this song kicks in, and never before has a song been so synonymous with a debaucherous orgy of bullets and killins. You know exactly what song I’m talking about, in all likelihood, and if you don’t recognize it by name, you will as soon as you watch the clip. The scene has left an indelible mark on the movie map, and the adrenaline-laced breakbeat here works flawlessly, whether the tempo of the characters is in slow motion or full speed. It is seamlessly and undeniably entwined with the film, the lobby shootout, and the feel of the movie as a whole.

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

Children of Men – Ruby Tuesday – Franco Battiato (Rolling Stones cover)

Who would have thought a human rights group called the Fishes would be so damned brutal?

Our hero Theo is hiding a girl pregnant with the first child in eighteen years at the house of an old friend, Jasper Palmer, and the Fishes are on the way. Jasper urges Theo to take the girl and run, and that he’d be along. As Theo flees, this song plays, melancholy and melodic in the background while Jasper uses Quietus – a government issued suicide kit – on his catatonic wife. The old hippy, played perfectly by Alfred himself, Michael Caine, Lives a calm and placid life, taking care of his woman and growing hybrid herb in his secluded home. The delicate and gentle preparations for his wife’s (and dog’s) demise, aware of his own impending death, is made only the more tender with a song that encapsulates the character. It’s a track Jasper would have loved, but would also have brought him down, just as this moment does.

(Just the song, as the scene isn’t avilable)

Fight Club – The Pixies – Where Is My Mind?

Tyler has a smoking hole in the back of his head, the Narrator has his hand in Marla’s, and the skyline is being decimated by homemade explosives stuffed into vans, erasing everyone’s credit history, debt and all. In a pre-9/11 world, the sight of the skyscrapers buckling was a lot different, emotionally, than it is now. Still, the haunting “OooooOooo” from the beginning of the track over a lazily strummed guitar as the financial empire crumbles is vividly memorable. Things might suddenly make sense for our protagonist, he’s allowing himself his first real bit of affection towards his anti-lover (that he’s consciously aware of at least), and while he has a bleeding hole in his cheek, things seem to be looking up. The sort of curious, quirky, insane hopefulness of the moment is encapsulated well in this Pixies track.

“Trust me. Everything’s gonna be fine.”

28 Days Later – In The House, In A Heartbeat – John Murphy

So we just watched a bunch of insane monkeys kill a group of over-ambitious PETA members, escape, and then we have to see Cillian Murphy’s penis. Things aren’t going well.

But as he stumbles through the empty hospital room, along the empty floor, through the rest of the empty building, onto the empty street, into the empty city, a buzzing in the background slowly gets louder. Louder. Oh, it’s music! But it’s so quiet… No, it’s getting louder, and louder, and now there’s drums, and it’s getting louder, and there’s still nothing around. Why isn’t there anyone in the streets, the stores, the windows? And it’s getting louder, and the guitar kicks in, and you get that realization, that “holy shit…I’m alone here” vibe coming from the music, adrenaline and fear and that creepy sense of exhilaration when something terrible happens.

(Just the song, as the scene isn’t available)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1KJjqdalp8

Fire away, friends.