The critical consensus at the end of 2000 was that it had been one of the weakest film years in recent memory. Which may have been true, despite O Brother, Where Art Thou?, the Coen brothers' delightfully warm and weird Depression-era re-telling of Homer's Odyssey. But for music lovers, 2000 was an amazing year at the movies, and it produced ...
Few observers expected that Whitney Houston's first big-screen role in 1992's The Bodyguard would generate a phenomenon. Not that the film itself was a phenomenon -- it was a healthy success, due not only to Houston, but to her co-star Kevin Costner's drawing power -- but the soundtrack's success was astonishing. The Bodyguard followed Houston's ...
How confident was DreamWorks about the success of their animated Bible epic The Prince of Egypt? So confident that they decided to simultaneously release three soundtracks for the film, each targeted at a different audience. It was an audacious move, since there were few songs in the film -- which means that not only did "the official soundtrack" ...
Grease was a huge success as a Broadway musical prior to hitting the big screen in 1978. That was the version that transformed Grease into a phenomenon -- it was a runaway box office success, and then became a TV, cable, and video favorite. The soundtrack rivaled its film counterpart as a pop culture perennial, and it's not hard to see why -- its ...
The über-romantic comedy Love Actually has an über-romantic comedy soundtrack to match, collecting love songs old and new as well as sassy and empowering tunes. Kelly Clarkson's "The Trouble With Love Is" manages to be romantic, sassy, and empowering all at once, with her vocals reflecting their urban ballad surroundings. An emphasis on songs from ...
Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical adaptation of Gaston Leroux's 1911 gothic mystery novel The Phantom of the Opera proved to be at least the composer's second-most successful project, behind only Cats, and with the potential to outdo even that blockbuster. The musical opened in London in October 1986 and in New York in January 1988, and both ...
This album includes songs from the hit movie -- both old favorites (Bruce Channel's "Hey Baby"; "In the Still of the Night," from The Five Satins; and Mickey & Sylvia's "Love Is Strange") and recent ones (Eric Carmen's "Hungry Eyes" and "(I've Had) The Time of My Life," performed by Bill Medley and Jennifer Warnes). "She's Like the Wind" is ...
Walt Disney Pictures had its fourth straight massive hit with an animated movie musical in the summer of 1994 with its tale of the coming of age of a young lion. The movie studio changed composers, replacing Alan Menken, who wrote The Little Mermaid, Beauty And The Beast, and Aladdin, with Hans Zimmer (instrumental score) and Elton John (songs); ...
The starring roles in Once, the little movie that could by writer/director John Carney, stars the Frames' Glen Hansard and Czech singer and songwriter Markéta Irglová. The songs, representing those of the character Guy, and his collaborator Girl, are made up of simple and attractive acoustic pop, full of guitars, piano, a small drum kit and ...
Mega-producer Kenneth "Babyface" Edmonds assembled quite a cast for this critically acclaimed soundtrack (and movie). The phenomenal Whitney Houston leads a mostly all-star cast of artists. Houston is featured on three of the 16 selections including the "Exhale (Shoop Shoop)," which crested at the number spot on the Billboard R&B charts for eight ...
Footloose was one of those rare pop culture phenomena that was so ephemeral it wound up defining the time. That's not to say that it wasn't silly -- after all, it was a film about a boy fighting to dance, just to dance! -- but it did capture the feeling of mainstream pop in the throes of the Reagan revolution. Perhaps that's why the soundtrack ...
Call it a soundtrack producer's dream. One of the most vital and influential bands in modern-day music cuts a song entitled "If God Will Send His Angels" just months before you are hired to put together a soundtrack for a movie entitled City of Angels. The band is U2, and their song not only opens the City of Angels soundtrack, but it is also the ...
Maurine Watkins' satirical play Chicago has gone through several permutations since it opened at the Music Box Theatre on Broadway on December 30, 1926. There was a silent movie version in 1927, followed by a sound film called Roxie Hart starring Ginger Rogers in 1942. In 1975, director/choreographer Bob Fosse and the songwriting team of John ...
James Horner's score for James Cameron's epic romance Titanic is much like the film itself -- against all expectations, it delivers exactly what it promises. His score is grand, without falling into typical melodrama, and delicately romantic, without being sickly sentimental; it offers genuine emotion and excitement, with the haunting vocals of ...
The lush soundtrack to Out of Africa added much to this movie. It was composed and conducted by John Barry and also includes some Mozart. ~ MusD, All Music Guide
Composer Stephen Flaherty, lyricist Lynn Ahrens, and librettist Terrence McNally's stage musical adaptation of E.L. Doctorow's novel Ragtime took a long time to get to Broadway, with full-scale productions in Toronto and Los Angeles dating back more than a year before the New York opening, and they used that time well. One need only compare the ...
If you scanned the back cover of the soundtrack to Shrek, without seeing the film first, it's hard not to think that this is an album that's designed to be a crossover success, containing very few songs that are in the film. You'd be wrong. Almost all of the 12 songs on this soundtrack (there's a 13th track, an excerpt of Harry Gregson-Williams ...
At the very least, director Baz Luhrmann has created something different here. His modern-day musical weaves new cover versions of songs from the past three decades into one story about a brothel in turn of the century Paris. Its an odd combination to begin with, and the soundtrack itself bounces back and forth between very hip, modern tracks from ...
Coming along in the summer of 1962, four and a half years after the Broadway opening, the film version of The Music Man appeared in an era when Hollywood was more likely to be faithful to stage musicals, rather than dramatically altering them, as had been the practice in the past. The Music Man found Robert Preston re-creating his starring role as ...
The soundtrack to the Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant romantic comedy Notting Hill is every bit as consciously classy as the film it supports. If it isn't as ingratiating, that's because it's significantly harder to offer a twist on a formula soundtrack album than on a formula movie. With a film, little details, supporting characters, and subtle, ...
With a track listing that's roughly half rock, country, and pop songs and half Randy Newman's score, the Cars soundtrack is probably the least inspired collection of music to support a Pixar film. However, that's only in comparison to the brilliant soundtracks to their other movies -- especially Finding Nemo and The Incredibles. Both the pop music ...
Alan Parker's adaptation of Roddy Doyle's crackerjack novel The Commitments kept its focus on the music -- the classic American R&B and soul the titular workingman band cranked out in pubs across Ireland. As a book and film, The Commitments was all about love of music, so it didn't matter if the soundtrack offered workmanlike versions of oldies ...
Perennial surfer dude/singer/songwriter Jack Johnson lends his voice to the eternally silent Curious George on this collection of "Sing-A-Longs and Lullabies," original material built around the famous monkey and his strange obsession with "the Man with the Yellow Hat." Universal Pictures couldn't have picked a better collaborator for this ...
Seether's lead singer/songwriter, Shaun Morgan, is an unabashed, unapologetic worshiper of Kurt Cobain, using Nirvana's sound as a template for Seether and, more importantly, interpreting Kurt's teenage angst as something entirely un-ironic and confessional. This is a pretty skewed reading of Nirvana but not an uncommon one, and there have been ...
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