This movie is great drama, the soundtrack is also great, I love the songs but I found they broke the mood/ambiance of the mood and a more subtle approach would have been more touching.
However the tunes really put you in the picture as they were what was played at the time.
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I'd have to agree - great music, bad context.
-drl
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I agree that it was effective and not a distraction. Also, building on the previous poster's note that this approach became clichéd in the '80s (I didn't think it got that bad until the '90s, but okay), it's worth pointing out that the concept of movie soundtracks of pop music of the past was more or less started by Mean Streets and American Graffiti, both in 1973—only five years earlier. And it's not as if Ashby was throwing in songs haphazardly; to take one example, note how the finish to the Beatles' "Hey Jude" (na-na-na-NA-na-na-na...) coincides with the bus departure of the Marines. There was care and craftsmanship in the song placements.
shareI think the use of pop music in this film is very effective. I saw the film during its initial theatrical release when this sort of soundtrack was uncommon. I remember being devastated (and terrified) by the "Sympathy for the Devil" suicide scene. I'll never forget the power of that imagery and sound.
shareThe music and its usage was very hit-or-miss for me; the best moments, like "Expecting to Fly" during the love scene, "Time Has Come Today" during Bruce Dern realizing his wife's affair (interestingly, it uses the entirety of the song to channel the begin of his downward spiral) and "Once I Was" during the final cross-cutting of one man finding a healthy way to move on from his past and his grief, and another one who just gives up totally, was incredibly moving because Ashby took the meaning and the tone of the song and married it to his character's emotions and conflicts. The more quizzical choices, like "Hey Jude" "Ruby Tuesday" and "White Rabbit," reminded me of Forrest Gump's soundtrack in which the filmmakers just said, "Hey, let's use a lot of popular 70s music to remind the audience it was during Vietnam!" They did nothing to add to their respective scenes.
Still, I'll take the unnecessary musical cues if it means I can keep the last scene with Tim Buckley.
And I hope that, perhaps should the film come out on Blu-Ray, that someone clean up the soundtrack; the songs sounded like they were recorded off a record player and the sound was wobbly at times.
There's something I know when I'm with you that I forget when I'm away.
with the cross cut edits--amazing.
🌴🌴🌴🌴🌴🌴🌴🌴🌴
Yes, it was definitely overused, which I thought was the only major flaw of this movie. The writing and performances were strong enough on their own to heighten the emotion of the story and as such I felt the music often took away from those elements.
Illusions Michael. Tricks are something a whore does for money.
I loved the music and felt that each song applied to the situation that we were seeing.
shareI don't necessarily disagree, but that's not always a good thing. I felt like the music in this film was used as a crutch in order to get the audience to feel the emotional intent of the scene. A great storyteller generally can get the emotion of the scene through the writing, the acting, and the editing.
Music can definitely add to a film sometimes, but the scenes were good enough on their own, that I felt it was often a distraction and sometimes even condescending. There are so many scenes that would have been so much more hard hitting without the music, especially the scene with Dern and Fonda in the hotel room, Voight's protest, and the ending. The music relieved me of their tension when I should have felt my hands sweating.
Illusions Michael. Tricks are something a whore does for money.
Personally, I didn't feel like that, but I can understand that someone would. I would have been ten when all this was going down, but I was surrounded by people that were affected by all this and I remember that the music was integrated into everything and seemed to have such meaning for so many. Maybe that is why I have the viewpoint that I do. I'm old. :\
sharePopular music of the 60's was often politically-charged. I can't think, offhand, of one Jimi Hendrix song that wasn't about the social and/or political issues of that time, unless the song was about sex...Music was important, it wasn't just entertainment. Music was a way to protest what was going on in the government and society. Music was a way of protesting the war in Vietnam, and what was going on at home.
Music was a vehicle for my generation to have a voice. The music in the film works exactly for that reason, because music was the voice of the generation portrayed in the film. Music was just as necessary to us as the air we breathed. The two scenes, though, that were the most poignant and heart-wrenching for me were the one where "Hey Jude" and " Sympathy For The Devil" were used. I don't think those scenes would have been as powerful without the music. This film used music in a powerful way.
Human Rights: Know Them, Demand Them, Defend Them
great music, period.
Hal Ashby & Scorcese put a lot of great 60s songs in great movies. Unfortunately a lot of people tried to copy them, and now it's an annoying cliche.
Yes, the music without exception was all great... but there was too much of it. Luke's speech at the end would have had even more impact if there'd been no other sound in the scene to distract from it (same with what happened to Bob, etc).
"Your mother puts license plates in your underwear? How do you sit?!"
In 1978, this was an unusual approach for a film, let alone a Vietnam film (of which there had been very few up until then).
I wouldn't judge it by the done-to-death standards since then.
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It certainly did start to seem like some kind of a "greatest hits of the late 1960`s" - and it had more Rolling Stones than a bloody Scorsese movie. I don`t think this stuff was always appropriately applied.
"facts are stupid things" - Ronald Reagan