DavesMusicDatabase.com is devoted to ranking, rating, and reviewing music of all genres and eras. The DMDB blog serves up album and song reviews, best-of lists, music history snapshots, and music-related essays.
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 | Dave’s Faves:Top 25 Music Movies |
These are my personal favorite music movies. The list includes on-screen musicals, documentaries, biopics, and feature films. Click here to see other media-based lists, such as best videos and best music books of all time.
1. All That Jazz (1979)
6. High Fidelity (2000)
11. West Side Story (2021)
16. A Star Is Born (2018)
21. Once (2007)
Resources/Related Links:
First posted 11/5/2023. |
 | Music Movies:Top 50 All Time |
50 lists were aggregated to come up with this list. The focus here is on feature films, biopics, and documentaries. More conventional musicals are ranked on a separate list. Click here to see other media-based lists, such as best videos and best music books of all time.
1. This Is Spinal Tap (1984)
11. 8 Mile (2002)
21. Woodstock (1970)
31. Tommy (1975)
41. Once (2007) Resources/Related Links:
First posted 3/31/2010; last updated 11/5/2023. |
"Help me! My career is slipping away!"
image from kdamos.es
I’m not talking about your recently failed marriage to Katie Holmes. We all saw that coming, right? This is much more serious. You, the man who’s starred in 17 movies grossing more than $100 million (see the box office for all his movies here), may have lost your Midas touch.
With $37 million banked, Rock of Ages won’t be joining that blockbuster club. You can’t shoulder all the blame, though. After all, the typical over-the-top intensity you infuse in rock star Stacee Jaxx has some critics hailing you performance as Oscar-worthy.
Still, with widespread derision heaped upon Rock of Ages, you’re left helplessly watching your personal and professional life tanking. You no longer have the luxury of a two-income household. You’re faced with being a single dad, scrounging enough cash to cover child support and alimony payments. Like Jerry Maguire, you need, a break—and soon—to get you out of this slump. You need to make another rock movie.
It might seem like risky business, but Mr. Top Gun, you can tap your own blockbuster-making talents, mix in the elements of critically successful music movies, and gift the world with a true rock film for the ages. Here’s how.
Tip #1: Start with a director who knows rock ‘n’ roll.
“Rock ‘n’ roll” is a specific genre, not an interchangeable term with “pop music”. My kids watched Camp Rock this week, after which I posted on Facebook that Disney owed them an apology for suggesting that the Jonas Brothers and rock have anything to do with each other.
Kudos to director Adam Shankman for adapting Broadway’s Hairspray to the big screen (itself a reworking of John Waters’ 1988 comedy film of the same name). However, when ‘80s hair-band and arena-rock anthems are put in the mouths of Julianne Hough and Diego Boneta, they are scrubbed free of whatever grit they first possessed, and the audience feels like its watching an episode of Glee (which Shankman also directed, by the way). Movie critic Richard Roeper said, “Every time an actor belts out a hit, you’re reminded that the original, however, cheesy, was better.” (15 June 2012, Rotten Tomatoes)
So, Tom – instead of Shankman, tap Cameron Crowe or Rob Reiner. They directed you in Jerry Maguire and A Few Good Men respectively – and both have helmed iconic rock films. More on those in a moment.
Tip #2: If any actors are going to sing, make sure they really know how to sing.
Rock of Ages cast member Malin Akerman told USA Today that you “made a good, good rock star, that’s for sure. I let him know if this acting thing doesn’t work out, he’s definitely got a second career as a rocker.”
Tom, you have all the right moves. You look the part and your stage presence could be a primer for wannabe rockers. However, if I’m listening to “Paradise City” and “Pour Some Sugar on Me” I’d rather hear Guns N’ Roses and Def Leppard than the man who slung drinks in Cocktail back when those songs were hits.
So, Tom – leave the singing to someone else. Maybe Jamie Foxx? You guys worked together in Collateral. The legendary Ray Charles approved Foxx to play him in the 2004 biopic Ray! and the result was an Oscar for Best Actor.
Tip #3: Musicians are not actors.
When it comes to pipes, Mary J. Blige is the 21st century version of Aretha Franklin. When it comes to acting, her role in Rock of Ages is akin to Lou Reed’s performance in 1983’s Get Crazy. That bad B-movie focused on a New Year’s Eve concert at a Fillmore East-type venue. Among the performers were a Mick Jagger type played by Malcolm MacDowell and a reclusive singer played by Reed. I’ll happily debate anyone who questions Reed’s contributions to the music world, but you can knock his acting ability all you want.
So, Tom, what can you learn from this? If you’re going to put musicians in your film, do it with documentary footage. Call up Martin Scorsese. He did great things for your career in The Color of Money. Since then, he’s won a Best Director Oscar and done a slew of music documentaries, including Living in the Material World, Shine a Light, No Direction Home, and The Last Waltz. The latter, about The Band’s farewell show, has been called the best concert film of all time. Watch Levon Helm. He looks convinced that if he pours enough energy and anguish into “The Night They Drove Ol’ Dixie Down” he might prevent The Band from breaking up.
Tip #4: Avoid rock clichés – unless you can make them farcical.
The best moment in Rock of Ages comes when we get a glimpse into Stacee Jaxx’s psyche as he unloads to a reporter about the burden of being a rock star. I imagined a hard-hitting and probing film built around this premise. Then you launched into Bon Jovi’s “Wanted Dead or Alive”.
The documentary Anvil! The Story of Anvil doesn’t beat the viewer over the head with a clichéd tale of rockers who drink a lot, do drugs a lot, and have sex a lot. Instead, it probes the life of rock musicians who will never be stars, but keep slogging away at it anyway, because it’s what they love to do.
Tom, if you must deal with clichés, use This Is Spinal Tap! as your guide. Director Rob Reiner brilliantly mocked the absurdities of the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle in what some consider the best rock movie of all time.
Tip #5: There’s a fine line between goofy and joyful.
Rock of Ages opens with Julianne Hough as a small-town girl determined to make it big. She boards a bus bound for Hollywood and soon passengers are crooning advice to her via Night Ranger’s “Sister Christian.” I have no idea why no one on the bus broke into a screaming fit begging to get off at the next stop.
Tom – this brings us to Cameron Crowe, again. The man knows how to show power of music to create joy. Crowe explored his years as a Rolling Stone journalist in the fantastic Almost Famous. In one scene, the weariness of life on the road has clearly taken its toll. However, the tour bus travelers break into an impromptu sing-along with Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer” and everyone on the bus – and in the theater – is left smiling.
Tip #6: Rock music has the power to heal.
The Music Never Stopped tells the real-life story of a 30-something whose short-term memory is robbed from him by a brain tumor. As a result, his mind is stuck in the teen version of himself in the early ‘70s. His father, desperate to connect with his son, realizes the only way to do so is through the music of his son’s youth. Despite vehement opposition to his son’s Deadhead tastes, the pivotal point of the movie is when father and son go to a Grateful Dead concert together.
Rock of Ages, however, just leaves viewers in pain. Tom, we know you’re hurting as well, but you can get through this. You can make a rock-themed blockbuster. After all, you’re the guy who taught us all to love old time rock ‘n’ roll – and in your tighty whiteys, no less.
image from musiccareers.net
There is a moment in Pirate Radio (2009) – an inexplicably deleted scene relegated to DVD extras status – that nails the joy of being a music geek better than anything since High Fidelity (2000). Academy Award winner Phillip Seymour Hoffman leads his band of fellow DJs through London in the late ‘60s on a bachelor party night of depravity. They pause for reflection across the street from Abbey Road studios. Hoffman points out that the Beatles might be in there recording at that very minute. In a salute to the power of music, he states “there’ll always be poverty and pain and war and injustice in this world, but there will, thank the Lord, also always be the Beatles.”
Similarly, there will always be movies about poverty and pain and war and injustice, but there will also be those about the Beatles. And Elvis. And the Rolling Stones and the Who and Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash and Ray Charles and…Anvil.
Anvil? In the mid ‘80s, these metal-also-rans seemed poised to take over the world alongside contemporaries like the Scorpions, Whitesnake, and Bon Jovi. The where-are-they-now documentary Anvil: The Story of Anvil (2008) is a real-life This Is Spinal Tap (1984) that doubles as a heartwarming tearjerker about a group that should have hung it up years ago, but just can’t abandon the dream that they still might make it big. Singer Steve “Lips” Kudlow says that jumping off a cliff would be the easy way out to which drummer Robb Reiner replies, “You won’t jump off the cliff ‘cause I’ll stop you.”
Of course, music-oriented movies aren’t just about rock ‘n’ roll. The relationship between the two mediums dates to roughly the births of both art forms. The first couple of decades of the 20th century saw the simultaneous rise of recorded music and the addition of sound to film, the latter most notably in 1927’s The Jazz Singer. As soon as Hollywood saw dollar signs and discovered the power of pilfering instead of creating something new, they raided Broadway. If it was big on stage, it could be big on screen (1933’s 42nd Street, 1936’s Show Boat, 1949’s South Pacific, 1956’s The King and I).
Disney spawned its own version, complete with animated princesses, woodland creatures, and puppets (1937’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, 1940’s Pinocchio, 1940’s Fantasia, 1941’s Dumbo, 1942’s Bambi, 1950’s Cinderella).
When Elvis started swiveling his hips the musical gasped for breath. The rock ‘n’ roll era saw the arrival of vanity projects from the genre’s biggest stars. The King of Rock and Roll churned out Jailhouse Rock (1957) and a slew of other B-grade movies while the Beatles made A Hard Day’s Night (1964), which some call the greatest music movie ever made.
The traditional movie musical sounded a few last hurrahs (1961’s West Side Story, 1965’s The Sound of Music) before going largely mute until the new millennium (2001’s Moulin Rouge!, 2002’s Chicago). In the meantime, though, Hollywood figured out how to marry the musical to rock ‘n’ roll (1973’s Jesus Christ Superstar, 1979’s Hair) and churn out celluloid treatments of classic rock albums (The Who’s 1975 Tommy, Pink Floyd’s 1982 The Wall). The Wall and Heavy Metal (1981) also de-Disneyed the cartoon world with decidedly non-kid-oriented animated fare.
Shooting a dose of electric guitar into the film community didn’t just banish the musical to has-been status, but also birthed new genres. The tradition of seeing rock legends on stage and off kicked into high gear with 1967’s Don’t Look Back, 1970’s Woodstock, and 1970’s Gimme Shelter and has continued to the present with the aforementioned Anvil movie, Michael Jackson’s This Is It (2009), and It Might Get Loud (2008). How can you not be awed into rock star worship by the scene in the latter movie of Jack White crafting an electric guitar out of scrap material?
Of course, reality isn’t always what it’s cracked up to be so the film industry also embraced the biopic. This allowed film makers to more liberally edit which details of real-life personalities to embellish and which to forget. While telling the story of a musical legend was nothing new – the story of composer George M. Cohan in 1942’s Yankee Doodle Dandy comes to mind – the zest and decadence of rock star lives (1986’s Sid & Nancy, 1987’s La Bamba, 1989’s Great Balls of Fire) gave the format a new twist, for better or worse. On the plus side, the past decade has rewarded us with Academy-Award-winning performances in the depictions of musical icons Ray Charles (2004’s Ray!) and Johnny Cash (2005’s Walk the Line).
On the negative side, the rock-and-roll lifestyle is little more than a cliché in other movies. The Runaways (2010) had its moments, including Kristen Stewart’s spot-on Joan Jett look, but what should have been deeper commentary on the exploitation of girls in a predominantly male-driven business was yet another look-how-drugs-destroyed-them cautionary tale.
Then there was Crazy Heart (2009). While seemingly about a fictional character, it played like a biopic about Kris Kristofferson in an alternative world where he:
a) passes out nightly in a drunken or drugged stupor
b) is relegated to performing in small-town seedy bars and bowling alleys
c) has an inevitable meltdown on stage as “a” clashes headlong into “b”
d) still commands more than his share of sexual conquests no matter how old, fat, or drug-addled he becomes
Don’t get me wrong – Jeff Bridges earned his long overdue Best Actor Oscar – but did we need another musical journey through the life of a damaged soul who beds much younger women on his hopeful road to redemption?
Movies don’t always take music so seriously. The Blues Brothers (1980) reminded us just how fun music is. This Is Spinal Tap delighted in its absurdities. The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) gave us the full-on participation of live performance in all its camp and bad movie-making glory.
Speaking of camp, the ‘80s saw the MTV-inspired era of “is this a film or one big soundtrack promo?” with Flashdance (1983), Footloose (1984), and Dirty Dancing (1987). Not that light, adolescent-oriented fare was new – Elvis’ movies weren’t exactly competing for Oscars and the Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon music-fueled Beach Party romps of the ‘60s weren’t focusing energy on commentary about the political relationships of the world’s super powers.
Of course, the very birth of rock ‘n’ roll, and subsequently its introduction in film, is tied to marketing to teens. Bill Haley & the Comets’ “Rock Around the Clock” provided the soundtrack for the opening of 1955’s Blackboard Jungle. While the movie aimed for anti-social commentary, it incited its audience to riot more than ponder the consequences of delinquent behavior.
Okay, so what’s the point of this music-goes-to-the-movies history lesson? Well, the first point is a music-goes-to-the-movies history lesson. Second, though, is this: at its worst, music-meets-film can evoke eye-rolls with over-the-top portrayals of people inspired to delinquency or decadence. At its best, however, a cherished musical film moment serves up a metaphor for pondering the human condition.
It doesn’t have to be that deep, though. Sometimes a movie simply prompts people to dance in the aisles or be transported beyond their surroundings for the moment. One afternoon, my sons and I were walking home from school during a light drizzle. We were all equipped with umbrellas but I soon noticed my boys twirling theirs on the ground and dancing around them instead of holding them aloft. Sure enough, their impromptu rain-soaked musical number was inspired by – what else? Singin’ in the Rain.
image from inquistitr.com
trailer for This Is Spinal Tap
Among the movie’s iconic moments are the monumentally small Stonehenge stage prop, the amplifier which goes to 11, and the absurd stories about their series of drummers “spontaneously combusting on their stool, drowning in somebody else's vomit,” AZ or expiring in a bizarre gardening accident. Much of the dialogue was ad-libbed, giving the film a more authentic feeling.
