Soundtracking: "South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut"

Chris Feil's soundtrack series doesn't "Blame Canada" this week while he is at TIFF...

When Book of Mormon opened on Broadway, it was met with a fairly shocked response that Trey Parker and Matt Stone were able to create such an old-fashioned musical within their own foul-mouthed lexicon. It was as if people had quickly forgotten that they had already created a catchy and sweet musical on screen with South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut. And this was a few years before musicals would be cool at the movies again and a bit of a “gotcha” joke on their fanbase expecting simple crudeness, so maybe it’s easy to forget just how gutsy the South Park movie was.

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Soundtracking: "Almost Famous"

Chris Feil's weekly series looks back at Cameron Crowe's rock opus...

Of everything that Almost Famous gets right about our relationship with music, its richest insights come from how it explores the importance of music in adolescence. Cameron Crowe is telling his own story of his teenage music journalism days in the film, but that’s not solely why the film feels so personal. It’s personal because it’s about that time in our life when music is never more personal.

When Crowe stand-in William Miller is gifted a treasure chest of vinyl from his sister Anita she isn’t just handing over the greats, she’s tasking him to find himself. At that age our musical taste is a vessel to both define ourselves and connect to others, to develop some kind of community or shared experience. It’s in the background of every heartbreak and happy memory, even if it just played in our heads. Through music, Crowe makes the intensely personal into something universal. Just like a song.

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Soundtracking: "The Big Chill"

Chris Feil's weekly series looks at the use of music in movies

The Big Chill is one of the definitive films about the baby boomer generation, marking their coming of a certain age where life begins to look a lot less like what they were promised. And this is a generation that was promised an awful lot. It’s appropriate then that Lawrence Kasdan packs the film with tunes that contrast a youthful optimism with more complicated tones of soulful longing.

Many of the songs featured in the film would become soundtrack staples to the extent that they became movie cliches. Off-hand you can probably think of a half dozen films that also featured “The Weight” by The Band or “Joy to the World” by Three Dog Night. But what The Big Chill got right - and first, mind you - about much of this music is how it was the tapestry of that generation...

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Soundtracking: "The Bodyguard"

Whitney: Can I Be Me debuts this Friday on Showtime. Chris Feil takes a look at the icon's biggest soundtrack...

The Bodyguard doesn’t deserve its iconic mega-selling soundtrack. Granted, most of us have never pretended that that the film was even a whiff as good as all that glorious vocal dexterity Whitney Houston lays into her six tracks. But rest assured: the movie itself is even worse than you remember.

Among its many sins, the most egregious is how it ignores its own musical assets. The Bodyguard exists in a world where you can enter someone’s home and just happen upon an extended dance sequence being shot for a music video - but it also presents a world where that isn’t anywhere near as fun as it sounds. It spends the first act under the illusion that we give a crap about five or six things more than we do about Whitney’s voice. Why go to the creative effort to cast one of the biggest music acts of the era (and in a quasi-musical!) if you don’t know how to use her?

No sweat for Whitney, even if her acting performance netted her some harsh reviews. As ever, her musical contribution remains untouchable...

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Soundtracking: "Evita"

It's Madonna's birthday!! Chris Feil looks back at one of her biggest soundtracks...

By the mid-90s, musicals were all but dead, even though Disney created their own resurgence in animated form. Madonna’s career however was always heading toward reviving it: she constantly reinvented the game for the music video and her Breathless Mahoney songstress was Dick Tracy’s genre flirtation device. With her divisive performance in Evita, she brought the cinematic musical back into the popular culture and delivered a hit soundtrack in the process.

And I should qualify that for emphasis: a hit soundtrack to a quasi-opera about propaganda and Argentine political figures when the popular music landscape highlighted Alanis, Tupac, and The Smashing Pumpkins. Madonna did that in arguably the least accommodating musical or cinematic climate, and perhaps only Madonna could have done it. Like it or not, much of the film’s success (even musically) is thanks to her star power, no matter how indelible Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s score remains.

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