Simple question. Do you think movies should stick to music only during the time period the movie is supposed to take place? Example a movie in the 70's shouldn't have music from today.

So many movies seem to stick to this and I think in a way it limits what the director can do. Some movies break away from it though with disastrous consequences (see A Knight's Tale) but I think if done well, the results could be fascinating. I would love to see a period epic movie without something other than some generic score that seems to encompass every epic movie. I don't believe it would be too terribly out of place to have a beautiful modern song playing.

Would it bother you to hear modern music in an epic film?

I hated it in A Knight's Tale and Moulin Rouge, I haven't seen Marie Antoinette yet.

But yes, I could see it working, but not if the movie is intended to be taken seriously, the music really does set the mood and having modern music to a serious scene that takes place during the crusades wouldn't sit well with me.

It's sort of like saying. "I want a Victorian aged movie where the characters wear some khakis and gap shirts"

The music is a great part of creating the setting. You change it around and you're bound to get some sort of fuck up like Marie Antoinette

I don't think there's anything that takes me out of a movie quicker than music that doesn't fit the time period. I usually couldn't care less if a car or piece of technology shows up onscreen that wasn't out for another year or so from the time the movie was set, but as soon as they start playing music that is more than a year out of date for the period, they've lost me.

I think it's a case by case thing for me. I thought it worked like a charm in Moulin Rouge because it updated the Genre and the Movie for me. In contrast, Chicago used music that fit the 30's setting and it felt like a 60+ year old musical. That was not a bad thing but it added nothing interesting to the film.

But I can see where using music that doesn't fit might be an issue.

I believe that it really depends on the skills of the producer (who usually is the one making the initial choices) and the other responsible parties. Look at Johann Strauss' Blue Danube Waltz from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Phillip Glass may have been considered as a contemporary modernist but instead his score for Koyaanisqatsi is absolute perfection.

But neither of these films has music from the "future," in terms of when the movie was set. Classical music is used all the time in films, but if it were used in a period movie that was set before the music was written, that's the issue that I think is being discussed in the thread.

I think the issue at hand is more about using pop songs in anachronistic ways than the use of classical music (even if it is also anachronistic) since classical music is somewhat generic and timeless.

I think the use of pop songs really only works in a meta-textual way, for satiric effect, or when the fourth wall is being broken.

So it would be really out of place to have something like Iron Maiden's "The Trooper" playing during a big battle scene in Braveheart unless the movie was somehow winking at the audience.

I haven't seen Marie Antoinette yet, but from the trailer and the poster (with the punk-style font) it seems like New Order and other such bands might be appropriate in that case.

Knight's Tale seemed to want to straddle a line between being that kind of movie (where they had Chaucer as a character and tried to make it seem like some medieval John Hughes flick) but otherwise felt like it was trying to be a Hollywood epic.

A Knight's Tale was the movie that popped into my head when reading the thread title. I didn't know anything about the movie, and it almost ruined it for me when the music started.

I immediately thought of "Gangs of New York" and the opening sequence. Some people HATE the music that's at the beginning of this movie, but I think it's one of the best I've seen. Keep in mind I'm no cinematographer or even someone who aspires to one day make movies...I'm just a fan of movies. For me the music set the pace for the chaos and brutality of that scene as much as the editing did.

It depends on the movie. I had no problem with the modern pop hits in Moulin Rouge since that flick is both a musical and a fantasy. It's not like hearing "Like a Virgin" suddenly killed the realism of the story.

On the other hand, it's always bugged me in the case of something like Dirty Dancing. I don't mind "Hungry Eyes" or "She's Like the Wind" playing in the background during a montage. But for everyone to start dancing to "I've Had the Time Of My Life" at the end of a movie set in 1963 was a little too much. Especially when the rest of the film, they were dancing to 50's music.

I prefer the music to match the film's timeline.

Moulin Rouge was a little different, since they took contemporary songs but performed them in a way that made them seem as if they were written in a time period.

I agree... maybe it's unfair, but the willing suspension of disbelief goes only so far, and for music that the viewer KNOWS did not exist at the time the film takes place to suddenly start playing, it catapaults you (well, me at least) right out of the film and back into my seat in the theater, and as soon as you remember you're watching a movie, the experience is ruined.

The rare exception that proves the rule. Also, Peter Gabriel has never been a cookie-cutter musician, and his music (especially the recent stuff), while I wouldn't say "ahead of his time", seems almost to exist outside of time. And while splitting hairs... the fact that it was only instrumental helps. For some reason lyrics would have shitcanned the whole thing.

Take "300" for example... they used a heavy bass, electric guitar driven soundtrack for much of it and it was fine. While not even remotely trying to pass as an historically accurate film, or even a serious piece of drama, it still would have taken me out of the film if they suddenly started playing Godsmack or Disturbed or something.

I don't know if it's fair or not, but the time in which the movie is set MUST be taken into account. It seems like you can use any and all pieces of music up to and including that time period, but anything after and the movie loses its dramatic weight.


Doc

I remember reading before the film's release that the score was to be this 'genre' and I balked... but after seeing it integrated into the actual scenes I had no problem with them at all.

I think the music has to suit the tone of the movie/scene. Despite not being from the same time period as the film is set in, I thought the music/songs in A Knight's Tale, Moulin Rouge, and 300 all suited the films perfectly well, because they helped set the mood for the film. If it fits with the tone of the movie/scene and does not distract from the scene then I have no problem with the use of music from outside of the time period. Hence, hearing a 70's song being played on a radio in a scene of a drama set in the 50's wouldn't work.

The NIN track used for the trailer set the tone perfectly. It reenforced the mood they were aiming for. Now having said that, if they used the same type of soundtrack for Braveheart, it would have ruined it.

I guess it's less of a science and more of a gut-decision type of thing... as long as the score FEELS right, slight innaccuracies can be accepted. Going back to Braveheart as an example (or any 'Scottish'-themed movie that features bagpipes)- Braveheart's celtic theme was very evocative and greatly added to the overall atmosphere, and yet the bagpipes and flute used throughout most of the score were actually irish instruments. Their Scottish coutnerparts weren't as melodic. This switch is extremely common. At the end of 'Wrath of Khan', Scotty is playing an Irish bagpipe.

This kind of change is made all the time, and it completely works... having an audience of pre-industrial-revolution theater goers belting out "Smells Like Teen Spirit", however, seems crass and movie-killing.


Doc

When watching POTC At World's End, I thought I heard electric guitar during one aerial shot. Whatever it was, it took me out of the movie for a second.

I didn't know Michael Bay directed it.

Hated it in a Knights Tale, but loved it in Marie Antoinette. I think the actual participation in the music in a Knights Tale made it worse.

Was this during the Sergio Leone scene where they all walk up to the sandbar to Parlay? I actually kind of liked that.

It honestly all depends on the movie. In Marie Antoinette I thought it was done well.

What I'm still waiting for a movie to use is the scores and soundtracks of older movies without any hint of irony. Not a 70's bow-chika-bow type song, but something truly from that era. Some Lalo Schifrin stuff, and the key would be to have the same (I don't know the term) "clipped" horns and strings from that era. The instruments just sounded different:



I can't find a clip, but I'd also refer to the official 1969 documentary about the 19th Olympiad in Mexico City, specifically the 10,000m race.

By definition, all epic movies set in ancient times have modern scores. When Korngold wrote for The Adventures of Robin Hood or The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, he made no great attempt to infuse the score with typical melodies of the period. His score was what he did best in any medium: a brand-new neo-Romantic composition that sounded like Richard Strauss on steroids.

When Dimitri Tiomkin, Alex North or Miklos Rozsa worked on The Fall of the Roman Empire, Cleopatra or Ben-Hur respectively, they worked on instinct. There is no way after all of knowing what the music of ancient Romans or Egyptians really sounded like, so their job was to come up with a symphonic score that would fill the big screen and to give an overall impression of grandeur, variety and exoticism and a sense of time and place by any means necessary. Composers of every generation do this differently and according to what they know. And they usually do a far better job that just having Moses trek through the desert to the sound of the Beach Boys.

I know a lot of fuss was made about Rozsa "researching" the music of ancient Rome for Quo Vadis, but that was mostly hype. All he had to work from was the medieval transcription of a few bits of melody from the 11th century that were purported to go back "a long time". Same for El Cid. Even movies set in the XVIIIth Century get boring fast(1) with only "period" baroque and folk source music and accomodations have to be made in the way of modern "psychological" background compositions or by simply updating the medium, like the score to a period comedy like Tom Jones, which, despite relying on ancient instruments like the harpsichord, is really totally modern in spirit.

(1) One exception: Barry Lyndon

As for using any kind of existing composition as anything other than source music in any kind of epic, I think it's mostly a no-no. It might have worked in a very personal film like Marie-Antoinette but it's an abomination in many other films. Even the great Bernard Herrman was furious at Stanley Kubrick for having dumped Alex North's original score to 2001: A Space Odyssey to replace it with existing too-well-known classical compositions by other composers. He found it "vulgar"... His reasoning was that these compositions took the viewer right out of the picture and into the images he had once associated with them.

There was a joke once that went: "A true intellectual is a person who can listen to Rossini's Willam Tell Overture without thinking of The Lone Ranger."

I think the reverse is also true and that, for some people at least, it's hard to watch "The Lone Ranger" without thinking of William Tell or Rossini.

http://www.sermons4kids.com/lone_ranger.mp3

No.

Yes, that was the part. It sounded really good but seemed a bit out of place for me.

It's called symphonic jazz and its main proponents were Leonard Bernstein, Elmer Bernstein, Lalo Schifrin, Michel Legrand, John Barry and William Russo (Three Pieces for Blues Band and Symphony Orchestra, Op. 50). The style can be traced back to Franz Waxman's score for Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954): http://www.amazon.com/gp/music/wma-p...617930-3204757

It can also be argued that Alex North's Spartacus (1960) is mostly symphonic jazz: http://www.amazon.com/gp/music/wma-p...848701-7775937