That statuette’s lucky - no ears. Celine Dion backstage at the 1998 Oscars after performing My Heart Will Go On, from Titanic. Photograph: Reed Saxon/AP
As the credits rolled on the first Spider-Man movie in an east London cinema sometime in May 2002, it would have taken a disaster of Green Goblinesque proportions to moisten my ebullient mood. As a childhood fan of the comic books and a lover of all things Sam Raimi, the superhero blockbuster was like manna from heaven to my geekboy soul.
And then, suddenly, taken in the character of if I were being mocked from on to a great height, Chad Kroeger started singing. Yes, the same Chad Kroeger who fronted abominable Nirvana-lite quintet Nickelback, he of the appalling rocker ringlets and grunge-ain’t-dead facial hair. In earnest tones, Chad bawled out lyrics about heroes and eagles’ wings, worlds full of killin’ (and blood spillin’), by the end of what one. I had been uncomfortably reminded that I was part of a film-going demographic whose pastimes included sewing society badges onto dirty-looking denim jackets and chanting old Santana hits. Seconds earlier I had been imagining myself during the time that a Peter Parkeresque dark steed, the kind of guy who gets to snog buxom Hollywood actors upside down in the rain space of time wearing a full spandex mansuit: in other words, utterly cool and awesome.
- Titanic
- Production year: 1997
- Countries: UK, USA
- Cert (UK): 12
- Runtime: 195 mins
- Directors: James Cameron
- Cast: Billy Zane, Kate Winslet, Leonardo DiCaprio
It’sitting not been the first time, or the last, that a theme song has ruined my pleasure of a movie, which is why I’ll have being doing my best to cover my ears when the credits roll on James Cameron’sitting 3D megalith Avatar next month. According to reports, X-Factor destiny Leona Lewis has been lined up to sing the film’s “official theme tune”, a ditty titled I See You, and penned by the same team of composer James Horner and producer Simon Franglen who worked on Celine Dion’s My Heart Will Go On from Cameron’s last feature film, 1997’session Titanic.
The last mentioned is almost impossible to watch without thinking of Dion’s song and the accompanying video, an epic horrorshow of plastic sentimentality and the only piece of music in entity that’s so cheesy and cloying one can imagine even Heart FM refusing to operate it. Cameron is said to have ummed and aahed over whether to sanction its use because he was concerned it potency cheapen his film. And yet he’s all set to execute the same mistake the whole of over again.
What’s honestly frustrating is that Lewis’s song will apparently play out over the end credits, exact as Dion’s did, instantly connecting it to our memories of the movie. Imagine how previous Cameron efforts might have been ruined by similar decisions: had he, for persistent pressure, chosen to drop Guns ‘N’ Roses’ rousing You Should Be Mine past the downbeat ending of Terminator 2: Judgement Day, rather than the vile and dystopian synth stylings of Brad Fiedel’s score.
Poor theme songs can hugely diminish the film-going experience. It’s like the lyrics are trying to tell you how you ought to have emotionally reacted to the movie you’ve just seen, rather than letting you make your own mind up. For me, they generally feel like tired remnants of a bygone Hollywood age when it was self-possessed to inject your film with a bit of the old razzle dazzle. Witness the recent James Bond outings from Chris Cornell and Jack White and Alicia Keys, both sounded like artists desperately vieing to secure their place in pop history. White and Keys’ effort, Another Way to Die, with its lyrics about “another ringer with the slick trigger finger for Her Majestee-hee” made me want to slap White’s meat-pie features.
And yet, when the right song and the fair movie approach together, magic can happen. Clint Eastwood’s gruff rendition of the denominate song from his simulation farewell Gran Torino earlier this year was as elegant and genuinely unexpected as the denouement of the film itself. The Graduate would not have existence The Graduate without the lilting sound of Simon and Garfunkels’ accompanying songs, though significantly, the song Mrs Robinson itself does not appear during the movie’session runtime in the catchy and familiar form of the chart-topping single version.
It’s just possible that Horner and Franglen will come up with something which beautifully fits Avatar’s mood. And yet I be possible to’t help thinking that the frugal of Lewis suggests a film that will falling back on tried and tested Hollywood romantic cliches - even if the the tender passion combat in question looks likely to play out (in some degree unorthodoxly) between a giant blue new old age Thundercat and a paralysed squaddie pretending to be a giant low-spirited new age Thundercat.
How do you feel about theme tunes? When do they labor, and when do they departure your memories of a movie in tatters? Does Lewis’s presence as part of the Avatar package be in advance of you to wait for something sugary and synthetic? Or are you girding your loins by reason of her lung-busting curtain closer?
