RYMER RECOMMENDS: MY FAVORITE SOUNDTRACKS

Now that I’ve wrapped up my journey through an ostensible list of the greatest films ever made, I wanted to get personal. One of the chief powers that movies have is being able to provide comfort as we return to them time and time again; this is my key relationship to them. The ways that they do this, and the level to which they’re designed to do this, often vary (I don’t think horror movies are meant to be a comfort to anyone, but surely some people will disagree). The reasons we seek them out for comfort can also vary, but with everything we’ve collectively experienced over the last two and a half years we all deserve some small measure of respite. Last week, I was busy fighting COVID-19 after finally getting infected with it and turning to familiar movies was like putting on another comfortable hoodie.

Most films have music present in them to help create the mood of a scene or, when done right, encapsulate the tone of an entire film. The filmmakers can choose to create new music or use existing music to complement their work. Likewise, the music that they choose to use can be an instrumental score composed of different pieces or a soundtrack featuring vocal music by a collection of artists. While most soundtracks rely on pre-existing music, there have been plenty of instances where an artist creates an entire album specifically to accompany the movie. How the director chooses to deploy their soundtrack is as varied as each of their styles. Sometimes, soundtrack is used in conjunction with silent image to do all the talking; sometimes a song can offset the harrowing nature of a scene, and sometimes it can amplify it; sometimes the soundtrack can be used as a sincere expression of the story’s themes, and sometimes it can be used to satirize them. You’ll find an eclectic mix of not just music, but how the music functions below.

There are a few ways that a film’s soundtrack can help a movie become a source of comfort worth recommending. A key criterion is that the music is good, and for the sake of this list I’ll be avoiding anything too depressing. The best soundtracks have a way of sticking in our memory, and linking to our memories of experiencing the movie – when we hear the song, we think of the scene that it was in. There are plenty of times when a movie introduces new music to us, and we stumble into new favorites. In a few instances below, the soundtrack is better than the film it’s in, and so we return more for the music than the movie. What’s truly special is when the film and the music assembled for it complement each other so perfectly that they become inseparable while each achieving something special.

There will be a few genres of movie missing below. Musicals and animated movies featuring fantastical song and dance routines are a cheat code to a list like this, and are also worthy of their own list since what could be more comforting? I’ve also excluded musical biopics based on real musical figures since, you know, the work of selecting songs is obvious and they’re often the most important and well-known songs of all time. I’ll also be excluding “rock docs” or concert films, but if I didn’t, The Last Waltz would make the need for the rest of any list unnecessary.

Let’s do this.

Reserved for Quentin Tarantino. In his breakout debut feature Reservoir Dogs, Tarantino established himself as a “soundtrack maker” with a talent for populating his movies with a variety of musical choices that can only be matched by his variety of pop cultural references. In Dogs, the criminals are actively listening to the “Super Sounds of the 70s” on the radio while trying to molehunt within their heist crew, and in Pulp Fiction and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood the music is evenly split between what the characters can hear and what the audience can hear. In Kill Bill, Inglorious Basterds and Django Unchained, it’s exclusively for the audience.

For my money, it’s Jackie Brown’s soundtrack that takes the cake, with a Pulp-like split between the diegetic (the characters are listening in the movie and acknowledging that fact) and non-diegetic. In Jackie Brown, Tarantino created a rather gentle and sweet crime film that, through the vehicle of Pam Grier’s fantastic performance, pays deep tribute to Blaxploitation cinema and to a broader black culture that he is quite obsessed with. The soundtrack, fittingly, is almost exclusively made up of black artists and showcases an evolution of R&B over the course of a few decades. It’s a precise choice by him that creates the movie’s subtext all on its own, and it’s got some all-timers.

Reserved for Martin Scorsese. If Tarantino is the prime “soundtracker” of Gen X, he has Martin Scorsese to credit as a model. Scorsese has bounced from soundtrack to score across his career, sometimes within his films, but even as recently as 2019 and as far back as 1973, Scorsese has been using popular music to mark time and place, and not just punctuate a moment but to perfect it. He is the #1 example of what I was talking about when I said that a piece of music in a movie can forever link that song to that visual moment to create something that exceeds the worth of either.

You’ll find excellent musical moments in all his best crime films – Mean Streets, Goodfellas, Casino, The Departed, and The Irishman – and all of them have a fluctuation in their frequency of musical moment. Raging Bull’s soundtrack is a soundtrack of classical pieces that emphasize the tragedy at the heart of the film, After Hours uses music to emphasize its bizarreness, and The Aviator uses music to mark a time and place as well as communicate a cracking mind.

There are few soundtracks, or few movies, that are better or more impactful than GoodFellas. This is also the #1 example of something I was talking about earlier – every musical moment contributes to the mood of the scene that it’s in, but the soundtrack communicates the same thing that the movie does. By using this soundtrack as he does, Scorsese turns a chronicle of three decades in American criminal life into a chronicle of three decades in American culture. And just as the soundtrack turns from older doo-wop into rock n’ roll, Henry Hill’s life spirals out of control due to his involvement with and abuse of drugs within a mafia system that begins collapsing upon itself.

Reserved for the Coen Brothers. The Coens use music in vastly different ways than Scorsese, and don’t have as much of an M.O. when it comes to their music’s usage. For the most part, they save it for an evocation of time and place as well as a function of the story (one exception is the musical cues of the stoner comedy par excellence The Big Lebowski, which is an all-time comfort recommendation). Otherwise, they mostly rely on score to complement their work, and then of course they also have the masterful No Country for Old Men, which doesn’t need either.

There are two Coen films that use music the most that are each worthy of a recommendation. The first is the Depression-era spiritual and bluegrass music of O Brother, Where Art Thou?. Here, the music is used to both underscore the action onscreen and evoke the film’s setting. On their odyssey across the heartland, our three runaway convicts encounter religious folk singing hymns, potentially magical sirens singing their own spirituals, a man who sold his soul to sing his blues, and our heroes themselves who masquerade as the “Soggy Bottom Boys”, a bluegrass trio of constant sorrow. The second is Inside Llewyn Davis, which is a portrait of the fictional Dink trying to survive and make it big in the ‘60s folk scene of New York’s Greenwich Village. It’s a tribute to artists, then and now, who never quite had the right combination of talent and luck to break out and is one of the most beautifully bleak movies to look at. Though ultimately harmless, it is thoroughly dour, yet its music is so achingly gorgeous that the whole film succeeds as a comfort watch, though that could quickly turn into a comfort cry.

Other Great Soundtrack Makers. By way of honorable mention, I want to tip my hat towards some other filmmakers who know how to make a damn fine soundtrack, and create a damn fine needle drop to punctuate their work. Spike Lee is quite flexible with the music that he uses, and a perfect example of this is in Do the Right Thing, but he still conjures up plenty of good stuff in Malcolm X, BlacKkKlansman, and two years ago in Da 5 Bloods. Paul Thomas Anderson has an ear for the ‘70s and ‘80s, as he uses music from that era to lift Boogie Nights and Licorice Pizza right into the stratosphere (he uses Sister Christian and Jessie’s Girl to create unbearable life-and-death tension in Boogie Nights). Wes Anderson approaches his music much more anachronistically; you’re as likely to hear the Rolling Stones as the Ramones as indie rock. His best soundtracks come from Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums, with a shoutout to the Portuguese David Bowie covers from The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.

Diegetic Ditties. Stepping away from a focus on the filmmakers and towards a short list of films, my next recommendations are soundtracks that are mostly diegetic. Our characters crank these tunes, ride all night, argue about what to play next, and the music takes over.

You’ll find this in plenty of party films, with Project X claiming the title of being the rager of a generation fueled by dance hits that still get played at parties. Two years ago, Steve McQueen released the immaculate Small Axe collection of films, with its best being the second entry, Lover’s Rock. McQueen makes a sumptuous fairytale out of a London house party powered by a slew of West Indian hits, and effectively communicates not just the ebb and flow of a party like this, but how these parties were a refuge to a community facing discrimination. And though it’s not quite a party film, I ought to pay a little tribute to the soundtrack of Dirty Dancing, and its use of music as the springboard for sexual awakening in the face of an older and more restrictive generation.

There are many key similarities between American Graffiti and Dazed and Confused: both happen over the course of a single night, both are retroactive tributes to a generation of high schoolers on the cusp of adulthood, both contain loose plotting revolving around a night spend cruising around town, and both are delightful films to spend your time in. They both use diegetic music to supply their exceptional soundtracks, and I don’t care enough to draw the line on how often this is or isn’t the case.

The events of Juice bring into question whether it’s a comfort film, and it stands with Menace II Society and Boyz ‘N The Hood as the signature hood films. Before things inevitably go bad in Juice, we’re given a portrait of young men, particularly Omar Epps’ Q, who are obsessed with the hip-hop scene. He is constantly listening to any record he can get his hands on, and subsequently the film’s first half is powered by a constant flow of music that creates time, place, and tone and is a blast to listen to and experience.

Just play the hits. I don’t need to over-engineer this, and in these instances neither did the filmmaker. To evoke an era in American Life, play a hit! To create a predictable emotional response from the audience, play a hit! For me and the members of my generation, these films are often gateways into the popular music of the past, so it was all new to me even if an older generation would roll their eyes at the selection. In 15 years when I’m watching a movie with my children and the world’s most obvious Red Hot Chili Peppers song is used, I’ll try not to roll them too hard, and let the next generation discover the stuff I grew up on.

Forrest Gump’s soundtrack encapsulates a variety of ‘50s and ‘60s rock, sometimes intercepting with Gump’s own brush-ups with celebrities and historical events. Remember The Titans is one of the most joyful listening experiences of the hits from the same time that I could ever imagine, and Almost Famous surrounds the music of its fictional band on the cusp of the big time with the music of those who really made it. The Big Chill uses the hits in conjunction with its own characters reflecting on how far they have or haven’t come since they were all together in the ‘60s and is essentially their college soundtrack. Similarly, Grosse Pointe Blank uses new wave and ska to power the reunion of the High School Seniors of 1986 (and was a staple in my parent’s cars when I grew up, go figure). In American Hustle, David O. Russell is content to let the glam pop of the late ‘70s do most of the talking, using it to anticipation before the next confrontation as well as power the fallout from the last one. And though I already paid Boogie Nights its tribute, its soundtrack of hits runs the gamut of the disco scene, the pop rock scene, into the dawn of synth ‘80s pop.

Superheroes. Even before the now-dominant MCU entered culture, I remember the music used in Spider-Man 2 as an encapsulation of 2004’s pop rock, but this spot is mostly reserved for a few later Marvel entries. I would be remiss if I didn’t throw some respect on the “Awesome Mixes” of the Guardians of the Galaxy films, with a special nod to the first film and thus “Vol 1” of the mix, which completely owned the summer of 2014. Kendrick Lamar did a predictably excellent job creating the soundtrack for Black Panther (little of which appears in the film), and Taika Waititi has his fair share of needle drops in his Thor entries.

No Words Needed. Just a couple of entries here – while soundtracks do most of the talking in almost every other movie that I listed up to this point, there were a couple of examples that I couldn’t fit anywhere else. The singularly gorgeous and ultraviolent Drive features Ryan Gosling’s best silent hero, and so the film contains long passages of him just staring and driving. However, a bubblegum-pop soundtrack featuring an awful lot of synths does all the interior character work that a monologue would normally achieve, and this was the best example of this phenomenon that I could think of. My other pick in this category is Top Gun, in which the soundtrack is used to communicate all the internal feelings that the actors are unable to, because when they don’t sound like humans. In a movie that is nothing more than a collection of iconic, beautiful images and sounds, I had to give the sounds some props.

Single Artist. Another category of two picks, though I’m certainly overlooking many worthy entries, I’ve got two stories of young men who don’t know how to properly enter the world of adults upon their graduation from college. The first, 1967’s The Graduate, tells the story of the fictional Benjamin Braddock trying to navigate an affair with Mrs. Robinson, genuine love for her daughter, and the conflicting voices within society that want to steer him down the same paths they took. The way that director Mike Nichols shoots it, and the fact that he exclusively uses the countercultural music of Simon and Garfunkel, turned this small comedy into a countercultural anthem for the ages. My second pick here is 2007’s Into the Wild, which tells the true story of Chris McCandless, a young man who rejected society after learning a troubling truth about his father and hitchhiked his way across America before fatally settling down in the Alaskan wild. Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder supplies a folksy energy to this soundtrack, underscoring the movie’s themes of isolation and finding yourself. Although Vedder didn’t perform all the music here, he had a hand in selecting it and I wanted to compare the two films. Sometimes you gotta bend your own rules.

Live Performance. My final category nearly bends into the musical genre, with the difference being that the only songs sung in the movie are by characters who acknowledge that they’re singers, and that the song’s performances are treated as such within the movie. The #1 example here is the incredibly bizarre film Purple Rain, which is probably best approached as a vehicle for Prince’s excellent performances than a story that makes any sense. Similarly, A Hard Day’s Night is best viewed as a collection of Beatles performances, and good ones at that. All versions of A Star Is Born work here despite some tragic outcomes, with me and my wife preferring Bradley Cooper’s version.

I’m also choosing to slot 8 Mile here because Eminem’s character is an aspiring rapper participating in rap battles, but there aren’t as many in the film as you would think. Its soundtrack, like Black Panther’s, is an impressive assembly of artists for this sole project but doesn’t really make its way into the film. My final film recommendation is simply one of the best films about America that I’ve ever seen, and I’m ashamed of how long it took me to discover, but that’s Robert Altman’s Nashville. Altman instructed his actors, the vast majority of whom are playing country music artists in town for a festival, to write and perform their own music. The result is a level of authenticity that is quite breathtaking, and yet that’s only one element of Altman’s great masterpiece. Through three days in Nashville, he cuts a cross-section of the various elements of American life and society with blistering effect that is as by turns bitterly satirical and defiantly hopeful.

Full Movie List:

• Tarantino: Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown, Kill Bill, Django Unchained, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

• Scorsese: Mean Streets, Raging Bull, After Hours, GoodFellas, Casino, The Aviator, The Departed, The Irishman

• Coen Brothers: The Big Lebowski, O Brother Where Art Thou?, Inside Llewyn Davis

• Spike Lee: Do the Right Thing, Malcolm X, BlacKkKlansman, Da 5 Bloods

• Paul Thomas Anderson: Boogie Nights, Licorice Pizza

• Wes Anderson: Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic

• Diegetic Ditties: Project X, Small Axe: Lovers Rock, Dirty Dancing, American Graffiti, Dazed and Confused, Juice

• Just Play the Hits: Forrest Gump, Remember the Titans, Almost Famous, The Big Chill, Grosse Pointe Blank, American Hustle, Boogie Nights

• Superheroes: Spider-Man 2, Guardians of the Galaxy, Thor: Ragnarök, Black Panther

• No Words Needed: Drive, Top Gun

• Single Artist: The Graduate, Into the Wild

• Live Performance: Purple Rain, A Hard Day’s Night, A Star Is Born, 8 Mile, Nashville