The 80s boasted some unforgettable soundtracks
|||Theresa Smith
RELEASING this week, Sing Street is a movie set in the ’80s about an Irish boy starting a band. Not only does it capture the sound of the 1980s, it is also a reminder of how much fun the music was.
Is there any movie image more iconic than John Cusack holding his boombox over his head to get Ione Skye’s attention in Say Anything… (1989) with Peter Gabriel’s In Your Eyes, her favourite song, blaring out for all to hear. Audiences have forgiven Cusack for so many terrible casting choices because of that one unforgettable scene.
As good as his scripts were, would John Hughes’s films be as memorable still, if they didn’t have the perfect soundtrack and that one song that will always remind you of that movie and how you felt at that moment when you first watched it?
Did you know that OMD wrote If You Leave to play over the closing scene of Pretty In Pink (1986) in two days, because Hughes changed the ending and needed a new song. They wrote it to play at the same timing as Simple Mind’s (Don’t You) Forget About Me which plays over the opening and closing credits of The Breakfast Club (1985). Because, originally, the dancers in the Pretty In Pink scene danced to Simple Minds’ song.
Sometimes the song totally makes the movie – as strong as Sigourney Weaver and Melanie Griffith are in Working Girl (1988), that moment when Carly Simon’s Let the River Run plays, turns the boat commute to Manhattan into something spiritual.
And yes, while Patrick Swayze’s hypnotic hip shaking ways totally owned in Dirty Dancing (1987), no amount of remakes will ever take away from Eric Carmen’s version of Hungry Eyes. Swayze’s version of She’s Like the Wind might be a perfect example of non-sensible lyrical pop, but who cares, it played over the sad scene and we all cried buckets every time.
Everyone loved George Miller’s reboot of his Mad Max series last year, and that red onesie-playing guitarist certainly created an impression. But there is no way anyone is going to top Tina Turner’s We Don’t Need Another Hero from Mad Max Beyond the Thunderdome (1985). Turner owned that song, not only as Aunty Entity, ruler of Bartertown, but as the true survivor she is.
Karate Kid 2 (1986) was a sequel that revisited the same story, but who cares, it had Peter Cetera’s The Glory of Love. Just like Ghostbusters (1984), that fun theme song means there is only one way to answer the question: who you gonna call?
Still, sometimes the film and song don’t quite live up to each other’s potential, like the case of Absolute Beginners and The Mission.
Both films released in 1986 and are ignominiously credited as leading to the downfall of British film house, Goldcrest. Yet the Absolute Beginners theme song was David Bowie’s most successful 1980s chart hit and the score for The Mission is considered one of Ennio Morricone’s best works.