10 Best Drama Movie Scores

This list of emotive efforts is compiled in order of release.

The Godfather  (1972) – Nino Rota

Family and honor.  A certain sophistication and panache.  The ‘old country’.  Rules and etiquette, and people who will not hold back with if these are broken.  All in all, The Godfather.

Taxi Driver  (1976) – Bernard Herrmann

Herrmann’s final score invokes all his great Hitchcock ones from the past.  The contrast of innocence and sleaze that the movie revolves around (Travis Bickle’s childish naivety and his taste for firearms and porno theatres; Jodie Foster’s world-weary but pubescent prostitute) is clearly portrayed in this memorable piece.

The Deer Hunter  (1978)  – Stanley Myers

This is one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever written, period.

Chariots of Fire  (1981) – Vangelis

Nothing invokes victorious, slow-motion running like this slow-burning theme.  The Sun newspaper has been milking it for their London 2012 Olympics coverage for months.

Local Hero  (1983) – Mark Knoppfler

Dire Straits are a bit of a joke these days, used for throwaway gags in the likes of Shaun of the Dead (Simon Pegg’s Shaun has no qualms about lobbing one of their LPs at marauding zombies).  This pisses me off, as they were one of the best British bands of the ‘80s – and this haunting, gorgeous theme to Bill Forsythe’s wistful tale shows how evocative they could be.  Newcastle United F.C. fans will know what I mean.

Crocodile Dundee  (1986) – Peter Best

Best’s theme uses guitar, drum, and (notably) didgeridoo to create an outback atmosphere that builds slowly and gets under your skin, working towards a rousing climax.  Strewth!

7. Dances with Wolves (1990) – John Barry

You can almost feel the wind blowing through your hair as you survey the vast open frontier, the sun slowly setting across the flatland and bathing the scene in an amber glow.  Man I love this theme.

True Romance  (1993) – Hans Zimmer

I should, by rights, be putting the music from Terrance Malick’s Badlands ('Gassenhauer' from the classical suite 'Musica Poetica' by Carl Orff) here instead, seeing that Zimmer shamelessly rips it off.  But then, True Romance is a pretty shameless flick, and besides I’ve always thought that Badlands is overrated.  This theme is an oddly innocent counterpoint to the carnage the film throws up, and reminds us that at its core it is – aw, shucks! – just a sweet tale of love.

Braveheart  (1995) – James Horner

Nothing like a good emotional piece of full-on orchestral music to deepen the impact of an anti-English re-working of history.  Horner is really the best at this kind of epic, affecting score, and I should also mention the ace dance remix that moved ravers on the dance floor just as much in the late ‘90s.

Requiem for a Dream  (2000) – Clint Mansell

At one point, this music was used to add a bit of drama to every reality show and TV spot around.  Don’t think any of those featured heroin injections into abscesses or a dirty old man gleefully yelling “Ass to ass!” (although feel free to correct me).  Not to mention New Line ripped it off for thier The Lord of the Rings: the Two Towers trailer, too.  Not hard to see why, as it’s one of the most powerful scores of modern times.

BWD – David Cronenberg

A look at the Best, the Worst, and the most Different (for better or worse) of the Canadian gore auteur’s canon.

Best

Videodrome (1983)

One of the interesting things about Cronenberg’s early work is that you witness his craft develop film by film.  From Shivers (1975) through Rabid (1977), The Brood (1979) and Scanners (1981) you can observe a consistent through line and witness a new creative force finding his feet.  The Brood and Scanners are more polished than his ‘70s work, but it was with this ode to the evils of television that we saw him come into his own.  At once compelling, baffling, grotesque, unsettling, resonant and unique.

The Fly (1986)

A success in every conceivable way, The Fly is one of those rare occasions where an intellectual, arty director manages to cross over into the mainstream and deliver a huge hit whilst not compromising his vision one bit (aided covertly by producer Mel Brooks, who pulled off the same trick with David Lynch on Elephant Man).  As the director himself said: “An artist's responsibility is to be irresponsible. As soon as you start to think about social or political responsibility, you've amputated the best limbs you've got as an artist.”  Here, the artist was definitely on show, but so were the kind of box office receipts that announced Cronenberg to a wider audience.

Naked Lunch (1991)

Ol’ Davey boy has adapted his fair share of novels, but taking a stab at William S. Burroughs’ impenetrable semi-autobiographical fantasy is his most audacious attempt to date.  Burroughs and Cronenberg are a match made in surrealist hell and by combining the wandering opium-drenched tales with incidents from the beat author’s own life (such as 'the William Tell incident'), Cronenberg creates something that resembles a story and even almost makes sense.  But, of course, not quite – well, no movie where a durg-addicted half-typewriter-half-cockroach issues top-secret national security orders to the protagonist through its anus is ever going to be a study in coherence.   Special mention to Peter ‘Robocop’ Weller as the solid and sardonic core that keeps the endeavour from careering totally off the rails.

Crash (1996)

There’s no other movie quite like Crash (ignoring the 2004 film of the same name, which is just as unlike it as anything else is).  It’s been described as ‘a porno set on an alien planet’ and so it proves; not many films have three sex scenes in the opening ten minutes, as detached couple James Spader and Deborah Kara Unger float through their empty lives seeking thrills from mutually shagging anything that moves but finding no satisfaction.  That is until Spader is in a fender bender and starts an affair with the other victim, Holly Hunter, whose husband was killed in the incident, a liaison that leads them to Elias Koteas and his underground movement of re-staging famous crashes (Mansfield, Dean) and generally gaining sexual arousal from car crashes.  Definitely odd and unsettling – it featured in a typically childish ‘band this filth!’ Daily Mail campaign upon release – but also somehow haunting and beautiful. 

A History of Violence (2005)

Often I regret watching movies in the cinema, since an audience’s noise can ruin the experience – the worst is comedies that turn out to be unfunny but still elicit hysterical laughter at obvious jokes and warmed-up scenarios.  I saw A History of Violence on the big screen, and the audience reaction was telling, and very interesting.  There was actually a lot of laughter at a film that no one would describe as a comedy;  but this was awkward, uncomfortable laughter, caused by the tonal shifts as Viggo Mortesten’s family man Tom Stall jolts into his old self, gangster Joey Cusack – sudden, brutal, and shocking.  Cronenberg doesn’t shy away from the viciousness, and that extends beyond just showing blood and gore to an under the surface dissection of a family that becomes infected with violence.  In this way, the movie is as much about disease and transformation as any of his others, and was even more accessible vehicle for bringing the Cronenberg themes to a wider audience than The Fly.

 

Worst

M. Butterfly (1993)

Jeremy Iron’s character must have slept through Biology class, since he fails to clock that the ‘woman’ he’s been having an affair with is really a bloke.  Even if you can suspend your disbelief enough to get over this ridiculousness, M. Butterfly is still a dull and pretentious operatic misfire.

A Dangerous Method (2011)

Despite a trio of good lead performances – Viggo Mortensen and Michael Fassbender excel as Freud and Jung, and Keira Knightley is, despite some reports, solid – A Dangerous Method never find a narrative foothold and is just a collection of intriguing but shallow psychoanalytical insights with no coherent flow.  The result is as boring as a droning undergrad lecture; when Knightly-spanking doesn’t liven things up, you know you’re in trouble.

Different

Fast Company (1979)

Those complaining about how ‘un-Cronebergian’ the man’s recent output is would do well to remember that he could go against his own grain decades earlier.  Despite having no body mutilations, transgression themes or identity crisis, this tale of drag racing across the US does showcase one of the director’s more covert obsessions:  things that go vroom.  Only unlike in Crash, no one has sex with a car crash wound.  

Bad Teacher (2011)

Starring: Cameron Diaz, Justin Timberlake, Jason Segel, Lucy Punch

Directed by: Jake Kadsen

Written by: Lee Eisenberg, Gene Stupnitsky

Duration: 1hr 32 mins

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

Here's an odd case:  a movie that borrows the concept of another movie (typically trusted/good natured figure behaving badly) and switches the profession and gender.  Bad Teacher is in no way related to the hilarious Bad Santa, but nevertheless has the good grace to acknowledge its debt to the 2003 film via its familiar title.  That gives credit in my book, but dignity alone isn’t quite enough to save an ultimately disappointing comedy.

BAD... OR, AT LEAST, INADEQUATE

Of course, Terry Zwigoff’s dark masterpiece is an unrealistic bar to reach, and unlike some cases, the relationship to an earlier movie does not directly hamper ones enjoyment.  Sure, its idea is no longer original, but it’s still a good ‘un (the film makers may have also been inspired by the heavy-drinking, -smoking, -swearing educators in the Channel 4 comedy/drama series Teachers – unsuccessfully ported to the US in 2006).

 

MY, WHAT AN APPEALING WOMAN

So where does Bad Teacher fall short?  Something Bad Santa does well is make an unlikable protagonist sympathetic.  Willie, the heavy-drinking, foul-mouthed, antisocial antihero, is a loser, but ultimately a pitiful and harmless (except to himself) individual who’s been beaten up by life.  Bad Teacher, on the other hand, centres around Cameron Diaz’s Elizabeth Halsey, a selfish, shallow junior high teacher.   She turns up to class hungover, puts on movies every lesson, doesn’t know the students’ names, that sort of thing.  Lord knows how she successfully got through her training to become qualified in the first place.  Anyway, Halsey’s mission in life is to marry a rich man who will provide for her every whim, a plan that’s working out fine until her meal-ticket fiancée comes to his senses and leaves her.  Dejected, she soon finds an alternate target in Scott (Justin Timberlake), the new cover teacher and heir of a men’s watches empire. 
 

But to snare her new benefactor, she decides she needs to get her breasts enlarged to maximise her appeal, and so starts raising the funds by scamming the school and parents out of money in any way she can.  When the film eventually runs out of steam with that angle, it introduces a new plot development:  a competition with a convenient cash prize for the teacher whose class gets the best scores in the state, and so Halsey changes tact and for the rest of the duration the laughs are wrung out of her struggles to suddenly become the model teacher.

UGH, JUST GIVE IT UP, LOVE...

There are two main problems with this film, the biggest being Diaz herself.  All the men fancy her, despite her being thoroughly unpleasant – and on a personal level, I don’t find the woman to be particularly attractive, so when she repeatedly gets what she wants through manipulating a succession of salivating males, I found there very little to relate to.  Seeing Jason Seagal’s likable gym teacher embarrass himself by fawning all over her is just cringe-worthy.  This is just personal taste, sure (what isn’t?), but since so much of Bad Teacher hinges on Diaz’s appeal, the film can’t help but fall flat if the viewer doesn’t buy into it.  Talking of flat, the idea that having her breasts ‘enhanced’ into immobile silicone orbs will increase her attractiveness is also not something I go along with, either.  

Diaz doesn’t have the charm to pull off her worst behaviour, antics that include forcing drugs onto her butter-wouldn’t-melt middle-aged co-worker  (“Just fucking do it, weed is awesome!”);  critically assessing the youngster under her charge as ‘losers’, ‘freaks’ and so on; and stealing the proceeds from the school’s charity carwash – and her entry to the annuls of cinematic auto-sudding scenes (Cool Hand Luke, Wild Things, One Night At McColls) is anti-climatic, too, Tony Scott-style magic hour lighting and excessive slow motion substituting genuine sexiness.  

MEH...

The film also insists on laying on awful plinky-plunky Desperate Housewives-style piano cues for whenever Diaz is being manipulative, completely diluting the intended deliciousness of her scheming.

The second problem is that too much of the humour revolves around sourpuss Halsey being surrounded by extremely perky and jolly characters, so Diaz can pull a variety of unimpressed faces.  Fair enough, it’s an amusing enough concept.  But after the same routine has been repeated over and over, all we’re really left with is a film made up of annoying, over-enthusiastic jobsworths and do-gooders, with Diaz in the middle (the game Segel is the exception, but he is so under-used it’s a wonder he even bothered turning up).

RIVERS WILL BE CRIED

Timberlake does well with his anti-sex symbol role, going as far from his 'sexy back' image as imaginable and showing an admirable self-irony; coupled with his solid work in The Social Network, JT looks to be making a successful singer-to-actor transition.  There’s also a good running gag where Segel takes advantage of Timberlake’s earnestness, especially in a scene at a museum where he keeps contradicting himself and Timberlake’s flaccid Scott blindly keeps on agreeing.

AN ANNOYING CHARACTER MADE BEARABLE (JUST)

But it's Judy Punch, as the earnest ‘friend across the hall’ Miss Squirrel, who is by far the best thing in the film, effectively playing the story's antagonist – although with a lead as unpleasant as Diaz, I ended up siding with her.  She goes from do-gooder to Halsey’s nemesis, seeking to foil her colleague’s increasingly erratic scams and prevent her from stealing Timberlake from under her nose.  Punch – a familiar face on British TV and now making waves Stateside – does solid comic work throughout, and that she shines despite being saddled with the most annoying of all the annoying characters is to her infinite credit.

To be fair, Bad Teacher does avoid the temptation to give Halsey a full turnaround to remorseful sainthood, which would have been too much.  We don’t want to see a neat, comfortable character arc; we just want it to be worth spending an hour and a half of our time in her company.  Sadly, it isn’t.  **1/2