Romeo + Juliet
1996
Buy the album on Amazon

I was a big fan of this movie when it came out and (though I still for some reason haven’t seen Strictly Ballroom) it made me an ongoing big fan of Baz Luhrman. It was the coolness and fun and frenetic energy of it, it was Leonardo DiCaprio, fresh from The Basketball Diaries, and the totally cute MSCL-era Claire Danes, and a great cast all around, like Harold Perrineau in drag and John Leguizamo being bad-ass, and it was the music (2 new Radiohead songs!), etc. On a personal level, I also really enjoyed it because in my sophomore year of high school, our theater department put on this play, and I was the Friar, and quite frankly, I didn’t really understand everything that I was saying. Seeing the masterful Pete Postlethwaite at work, it all became totally clear to me.

Besides loving him as a director, this film demonstrates how great Baz Luhrman is with music. It’s obvious he loves music as much as filmmaking (I’ll save a Moulin Rouge entry for another day). This opening scene is a great example (and totally makes me want to watch it again):

http://vimeo.com/24201361

A few of my picks:

Radiohead – “Talk Show Host”

This was in the prime of my love for Radiohead. It was a cool song then and it’s still a cool song now:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yU7sUENatUU

“Mundy – To You I Bestow”

I really liked this song when I first got the soundtrack (and I do still have a fondness for it), and bought his album and was into it for a bit, but now I’m not sure I ever even digitized it, and I could maybe recall one other song from it if I tried hard.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVUHr8if_zU

Stina Nordenstam – “Little Star”

Similar to Mundy – this is a lovely song and I really liked her voice on here and bought her album. I may have even bought the follow-up. She’s cool and interesting, but her voice is almost so unique that I’m almost never in the mood to listen to it.

Similar to Trainspotting, this one also had a Vol. 2, which is also great. It’s mostly just the instrumental score, which I really liked, but also includes some great audio clips from the film and a few additional songs, like this one from Quindon Tarver.

Quindon Tarver – “When Doves Cry”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9CnoKDPq3s