Tuesday, December 10, 2013

Movie Soundtracks

I have pretty strict ideas about what constitutes a good movie soundtrack. A record full of songs, no matter how great the songs are, does not make a good soundtrack if those songs are just thrown together and have nothing whatsoever to do with the movie they are associated with. A movie soundtrack, in my opinion, should be so closely aligned with a movie that listening to it will always transport you back to the key moments of the film.

My five favorite movie soundtracks are:

Eddie and the Cruisers
Eddie and the Cruisers II: Eddie Lives
Dirty Dancing
Saturday Night Fever
Grease

Every song on these soundtracks brings me back to the movie experience. Hell, I can't listen to John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown Band without thinking I'm listening to the fictional Eddie and the Cruisers. Dirty Dancing was when I realized Patrick Swayze could write and sing. John Travolta starred in two of the movies and on the soundtracks, and then Olivia Newton-John . . .what a voice. These are some of my favorite movies and the soundtracks are just as spectacular.

2 comments:

  1. Mr. Holland's Opus has an excellent soundtrack. I can listen to that and tell you the moment they played every song. :-)

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  2. One of my favorites. There were actually two soundtracks released. One was the original movie score by Michael Kamen. The other was a soundtrack of popular songs that appeared in the movie. This definitely meets my criteria for a good soundtrack.

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