Fox Searchlight’s latest pop-indie festival pickup, (500) Days of Summer, is promotionally packaged, as is typical for the distributor, with a hip soundtrack featuring multiple songs from The Smiths and Regina Spektor, as well as tunes from Feist, The Doves and the obligatory Simon and Garfunkel. Though heavily dependent on music, the movie is not a musical, yet like other Searchlight releases it has that one moment where the line between non-musical and musical is just barely crossed.

In the past we’ve seen this moment restricted to diegetic circumstances, whether a dance performance or an in-scene duet of a Moldy Peaches song. But this year Searchlight’s titles have been venturing even further, first with the non-diegetic, Bollywood-influenced song and dance in Slumdog Millionaire and now with an equally fantastical sequence in (500) Days, in which Joseph Gordon-Levitt struts about to Hall and Oates’ “You Make My Dreams,” joined by a surplus of extras and an animated bluebird.

Musical numbers in non-musical movies can certainly work, as is evident in Citizen Kane and many David Lynch and Adam Sandler films, but there’s something very forced and cliché about the sequence in (500) Days. Never mind that it seems lifted out of Enchanted, a movie we very much despise, and never mind that we prefer our Zooey Deschanel movies to feature musical interludes performed by the singer-actress herself rather than lip-synced by her costars (director Marc Webb acknowledges the mistake of not including her in the scene); this number is just completely over-the-top and unoriginal.

In response to the scene, we’ve selected five of the worst musical numbers from non-musical films to show what kind of horrible company (500) Days of Summer is in.
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Michael Bay is apparently a big fan of the 1986 animated cult classic Transformers: The Movie. Last month, he revealed his desire to get Leonard Nimoy, voice of “Galvatron” in the cartoon film, to voice a robot character in his latest live-action installment, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. And awhile back it was revealed that the sequel might have a new version of Stan Bush’s terrible ’80s anthem “The Touch” on its soundtrack. But are these the correct ways to pay homage to the old series/movie? Wouldn’t we rather actually have Transformers that look like the Transformers characters we remember from our childhood? And wouldn’t we rather have a good script and competent directing/editing? Okay, these last things might not be totally relevant to the 80s cartoon, but regardless they are elements that should be more attended to than any lame winks at members of the cult audience.

Anyway, I bring all this up because a music video for the remake of “The Touch” (titled “The Touch: Sam’s Theme”) has popped up online. Featuring both Bush and a Linkin Park-wannabe rapper in the recording and video, the new version — which still hasn’t been confirmed as being in the new film (don’t do it MB) — is undeniably worse than the original somehow. But it makes me wonder: in 10 years or so, when Boogie Nights is remade and reset in the 2000s, should this be the version of the song covered by Dirk and Reed?

A few other bloggers and commenters agree that it’s a downgrade after the jump:

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I don’t watch American Idol, not even when it features Quentin Tarantino or the singing of “movie songs.” And from what I can tell, I didn’t miss much last night when the show brought the filmmaker back on as a mentor while the finalists sang a terrible selection of soundtrack hits. Apparently Tarantino was wasted on the broadcast, and I don’t mean intoxicated; I mean he was pretty much useless to the way the show works. But here’s one thing: the AI episode got people on the film blogs talking, and that might give the show attention it doesn’t normally receive — not that it really needs any additional viewers or coverage, of course.

Oh well, here’s another thing: in connection with the show (though really not seen until today), we got a new clip from Inglourious Basterds featuring Mike Myers, which seems to be a joke — or a deterrent for some of us if it’s not a joke.

After the jump, the internerds weigh in on their opinion of the episode, the filmmaker and the clip:

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The Academy’s list of 49 tunes deemed eligible for the Best Original Song Oscar this year seems like a lot for the Music Branch to pick through. That is, until you notice that more than one-fifth of those contenders are from the same film (High School Musical 3, which, thanks to a new rule, is only allowed, at most, two nominations in this category) and you recall that last year’s list included many more songs (59) to choose from. The talent involved this year, however, is tremendous, at least in terms of those performers who sing the tunes on the soundtrack (many of whom had a hand in the songwriting). These artists include Mariah Carey, Etta James, Beyonce Knowles (who played Etta James), Norah Jones, will.i.am, Jack White and Alicia Keys, Danny Elfman, Emmylou Harris, Chaka Khan and Regina Spektor.

Add to those big names such heavyweights as Bruce Springsteen and Peter Gabriel, both of whom are locks to be nominated, as well as tween favorites Miley Cyrus and Zac Efron (along with the rest of the cast from High School Musical 3), and you could have one hell of a concert if the Academy simply turned its awards telecast into one big celebration of the year’s songs written for the screen. Unfortunately for ABC, the Oscars aren’t just about securing viewers, so there’s no promise that the most popular artists will be among the five nominees. Rather, the true Oscar-worthy songs are those tunes that serve their respective films best — in terms of context as much as in the quality of their songwriting.

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The soundtrack to Twilight is currently the number one album in the U.S., and a band called Paramore is experiencing great success by association. They have two songs featured on the soundtrack, one of which, “Decode,” has been released as the album’s lead single. Though Paramore have been around for some time and were even nominated for a Grammy earlier this year, they have never charted quite as well on the Billboard Hot 100 as they currently are through this Twilight connection. And chances are they’ll never have quite as big a hit again.

Countless other artists have had their biggest break with a song prominently featured on or released through a movie soundtrack, and many of these artists disappeared into obscurity afterwards. Or, at best, they maintained a modest career, never achieving the kind of chart-topping high they once received courtesy of a hit film.

SpoutBlog has compiled a list of ten such “one-hit wonders,” though we made some rules and exceptions in order to both narrow things down (no themes or plot songs) and include a few significant tracks that aren’t technically the only hits from their respective performers. Basically, we’re presenting ten artists who would be a lot less famous had they not licensed a single to a soundtrack and who shall forever be best known for that one song from that one movie.

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• At GreenCine Daily, David Hudson rounds up the reviews of Stop-Loss, which are, surprisingly, pretty positive (Peter Keough and Bill Weber are the exceptions that prove the rule). My favorite pullquote comes, as usual, from Armond White’s mixed review: “Peirce conflates war tragedy with her own sense of melodrama, making Stop-Loss a coincidentally sexy polemic. It could be worse.”
• The Hills: The Movie? Dreams DO come true!!!
• The Playlist has details on the soundtrack for indie road tripper Backseat, which includes songs from !!! and Pretty Girls Make Graves.
• Jeff Wells hears Tommy Lee Jones is gonna play Donald Rumsfeld in W.
• Dennis Hopper will accompany his disasterpiece The Last Movie to the Marfa Film Festival.

At PopWatch, Gary Susman passes along the rumor that The Kinks may be reforming for a reunion tour. “Which is cool, because there’s such a groundswell of demand to see the Davies brothers joined onstage, for the first time since 1969, by drummer Mick Avory and bassist Pete Quaife,” Sussman writes. “Well, okay, not really…”

This may seem like a tangent, but bear with me: I spent some time with my 20 year-old sister and her friends over the holiday, and their iPods are full of songs by bands from waaayyyy before their time–bands like The Kinks, New Order, Joy Division–but only the tracks that have been used in semi-recent, semi-indie movies, like The Darjeeling Limited, Marie Antoinette and Control.  I was in the car with two of these kids, and when “You’re Gonna Miss Me” by The 13th Floor Elevators came on someone’s iPod, I glanced down and saw that the album it came from was the High Fidelity soundtrack.

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A few weeks back, I commented that the soundtrack for AJ Schnack’s documentary Kurt Cobain: About a Son “looks amazing.” Instead of focusing on Nirvana’s greatest hits, Schnack built the soundtrack and the film around songs that Cobain loved and listened to through various stages of his life. A few weeks back, a reporter asked Schnack to name the soundtrack to his own life, and now the filmmaker has challenged a number of bloggers (including yours truly) to do the same.

AJ set out the following rules for the endeavor:

1.) It must reflect music from each part of your life, including childhood, awkward pre-teen years, all the way up to your current existence
2.) It should be music that is not just your favorite songs, but also things that make sense thematically
3.) It cannot be your own music
4.) Challenge at least 2 other bloggers to do the same.

I noticed that Tom Hall wrote blurbs for each of his choices, while AJ did not. With my list, I elaborated on a few choices and left others cryptic. As Schnack’s film is broken down into sections based on the cities in which Cobain lived, my list is broken down by own geographic location when these songs had an impact on my life.

We’ll start with a teaser. You’ll find the full list after the jump. Oh, and I tag these two: Filmbrain and The Cinetrix

LOS ANGELES

Malcolm McLaren, “Madame Butterfly” (see video above)
Malcolm McLaren’s Fans came out in 1984, and at the time, I had no idea who Malcolm McLaren was, nor did I have any concept of how ridiculous it was that the puppetmaster behind the Sex Pistols was releasing an album of synth-pop opera covers just seven years after Never Mind the Bollocks. My mom bought it–I actually have a vague memory of her hunting it down at the Tower Records in Sherman Oaks before finally finding it at the Music Plus in Studio City. I was a four year-old budding ballerina, and when she’d put the record on, I’d practice my pas de bourrée. At some point I choreographed an entire ballet to the full record, with yours truly playing all the parts (thankfully, this was before the advent of affordable consumer camcorders). It’s the first music I remember requesting to listen to.

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On Friday, I wrote a bit of a gusher over the upcoming About a Son, in which I speculated that the film and its associated soundtrack were Nirvana-free because securing rights to Kurt Cobain’s recorded output is rumored to be difficult and costly. Over the weekend, About a Son director AJ Schnack wrote a comment on that post with some further information:

Thanks for the blog love. Want to clarify one point. As crazy as it may sound, the decision to not use Nirvana music was not a financial choice, nor was it obstruction from another party. I tried to put a Nirvana song at the end, but it struck all the wrong notes in a film that is not so much about him as a musician as it is him as a man. Ultimately, I thought that Steve Fisk and Ben Gibbard’s score music worked better for the end of the film. It’s not the most commercial choice in the world, but I think it fits the movie I made. However, on your larger point that anyone can (and should) go home and listen to Nirvana (preferably In Utero as it was the album he was writing and recording at the time of the interviews) after seeing the film - I am in total agreement.

I’ve seen the film, and I would agree that it makes more sense to fill the soundtrack with music Cobain would have listened to, rather than music he made. In any case, the current soundtrack has a mixtape quality that I like a lot, and that I imagine will go over fairly well with the Pitchfork set.

I’ve come across three interesting stories on film scoring today. Here’s a round-up:

• Tomorrow Unlimited has an interview with Carlos Dengler (otherwise known as Carlos D, otherwise known as the bassist for Interpol) about his fledgling side career as a film scorer. Dengler composed music for a segment of HBO’s strange content/marketing hybrid Voyeur, which you can watch by going here. For more on the Voyeur muddle, check out this post on Screens by Virginia Heffernan, who tries to sort out a definition of this “blurry thing surrounded by a lot of talk about how many-splendored it is.” Semi-related: see artist Doug Aitken’s video for Interpol’s “NYC”, which contains its own city-surveillance themes, above.
• On his blog, New Yorker music critic Alex Ross pokes at the details of a meeting between expressionist composer Arnold Schoenberg, and 1930s MGM mogul Irving Thallberg. Thallberg had allegedly heard a broadcast of Verklärte Nacht and initiated a meeting with Schoenberg to discuss the latter scoring the former’s production of The Good Earth. Thallberg complimented Schoenberg on his “lovely music”, which rankled Schoenberg, who prided himself as the master of atonality. But has the story has been misreported? Ross investigates. [Via GreenCine Daily]
• Techno star/tea mogul Moby has set up a website to allow student, indie and other non-profit filmmakers free access to his music for scoring purposes. “The music is free as long as it’s being used in a non-commercial or non-profit film, video, or short,” Moby writes on the site’s splash page. “If you want to use it in a commercial film or short then you can apply for an easy license, with any money that’s generated being given to the humane society.” [Via Cinema Minima via Twitter]