Fans of John Schlesinger‘s Oscar-winning Midnight Cowboy would do well to check out this piece When You Awake laid down last year discussing the “what could have been” in relation to the film’s official soundtrack. Both scored and supervised by composer John Barry, the film had lined up a number of potential tracks that, for [...]

I took a film class once where we contemplated what kinds of movies could or could not be construed as Westerns. The professor was tall and lanky in a bow tie, with hands that hung down to his knees, a mustache and a ‘power donut’ hairdo. There were some cute girls with dyed hair and [...]

Horror films have always straddled the line between sex and violence. One could say the same about porn. Put the two genres together and add a heavy dose of irony and psychedelic drugs and you get something that approximates Jesus Franco’s 1971 film Vampyros Lesbos. In fact, all politics aside, there is nothing really horrific [...]

Truly great soundtracks don’t come easy. This is what makes the companion to Trainspotting so unusual. Not only does it manage to nail the cultural moment the film portrays (and aurally recreate the film’s story in its running order), but it also escapes the film entirely becoming its own album. It plays out like a [...]

“If you build it, they will come,” or in the case of Yo La Tengo, if they record it I will most likely eventually get around to listening to it — whatever the it may be.  In this case, the it in question is a collection of tracks the group  scored for various films over [...]

I have to admit, I’m not always excited about the idea of a single artist recording the entire soundtrack to a film. It’s usually not the most career-defining moment for a musician. Sure, there are exceptions – but for every Aimee Mann and Magnolia, there are at least nine or ten Princes and Batman soundtracks. [...]

“Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.” Written by Robert Towne, directed by Roman Polanski and starring Jack Nicholson, Chinatown undoubtedly stands as one of the greatest films of the twentieth century. Classic film noir, on a base level, Chinatown tells the story of private detective J.J. ‘Jake’ Gittes as he attempts to solve what (at the [...]

If the below description of this lost blaxploitation flick’s soundtrack doesn’t pique your interest then I would wager you have never watched Dolemite, The Mack and Superfly back-to-back (which, I might add, comes highly recommended if you’re feeling funky and happen to have an afternoon to kill.) “He was a pusher that became a preacher. [...]