Movies That Rock

These songs are iconic in and of themselves, but they achieved an even mightier impact when they were mated with key moments in classic movies. It’s impossible to hear the Bee Gees’ street-survivor anthem “Stayin’ Alive” without picturing John Travolta strutting down a Brooklyn street to the tune’s pulsing disco beat in Saturday Night Fever. Easy Rider probably wouldn’t have become the ultimate ’60s counterculture flick without rebel-rousing tracks like Steppenwolf’s road-renegade battle cry “Born to Be Wild” backing Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper’s cross-country motorcycle trek. And Simple Minds’ “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” accompanies not only Breakfast Club high-school misfit Judd Nelson’s upraised arm in the film’s final scene, but many people’s memories of their own high-school days.

In Next Steps, the movies mold new memories for classic cuts.

Sometimes a song’s place in your mind is forever altered when that song is immortalized on the silver screen in an entirely new context. Elton John’s music-box ballad “Tiny Dancer” had been a pop-radio staple since the early ’70s, but in the 2000 film Almost Famous a rock band and their entire entourage sing along with the tune on their tour bus, giving it a whole new spin in the process. The Psychedelic Furs’ “Pretty In Pink” was a college-rock favorite in 1981, and five years later it became the inspiration — and theme song — for the John Hughes teen film of the same name, earning the track a bigger audience than ever. And, in 1958, when Ritchie Valens cut the Latino rock classic “La Bamba,” he could never have imagined that Los Lobos would be covering it in a biopic about Valens’ own life, three decades later.

Mock rockers and femme fatales are all part of the soundtrack, in Deep Cuts.

Can’t get those movies out of your mind, can you? Whenever you hear Urge Overkill’s alt-rock cover of Neil Diamond’s drama-drenched “Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon,” you automatically picture a black-wigged Uma Thurman dancing around her house in Pulp Fiction, don’t you? The Bangles’ heavy-riffing version of Simon & Garfunkel’s “Hazy Shade of Winter” surely inspires images of Andrew McCarthy cruising down the L.A. streets of Less Than Zero’s opening sequence. But if mock-rockers Spinal Tap’s bass-heavy “Big Bottom” brings anything to mind other than the band banging it out with multiple bass guitars in This Is Spinal Tap, we don’t even want to know about it.

Whether you’re chowing down on popcorn in a darkened movie theater or kicking back on the couch in front of your own living room TV, a film can be a powerful multimedia experience. The songs you soak up in the soundtrack lodge themselves in your head and heart just as much as anything else on the screen, if not more. Of course, films like Purple Rain and The Harder They Come probably wouldn’t even exist if not for the songs of the same name, but then there are tracks like Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes” and Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark’s “If You Leave,” which gained a whole new level of emotional resonance from Say Anything and Pretty In Pink, respectively. Experience the ultimate stack of tracks that helped make movie magic, right here. Shush, it’s starting . . .