More than anything, Mitchie wants to spend her summer at a prestigious rock camp in order to pursue her dream of becoming a singer. Mitchie thinks her prayers are answered when her mother gets them jobs at the camp as cooks. Upon arriving at camp, Mitchie discovers the competition among the campers is tough both in the classroom, and for the attention of Shane - a teen pop star, and this summer's celebrity teacher. Shane (Joe Jonas)- who is seeking inspiration for his own music - overhears Mitchie singing, but never sees her face. Haunted by her unique sound, he sets off to find the girl behind the beautiful voice as she confronts her fears and learns to step into the spotlight.
Walt Disney Records proudly presents the SOUNDTRACK to the HOTTEST DISNEY CHANNEL MOVIE OF THE YEAR! Featuring musical superstars, JONAS BROTHERS plus a whole new cast of musical talent that's sure to be the SUMMER'S BIGGEST HIT!
Original Soundtrack "My Blueberry Nights"
$9.98NEW
Cinephiles will know My Blueberry Nights as Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai's first American movie; music fans will know it as Norah Jones' first movie, period. Not only does she play one of the leads, but she also contributes a new song, "The Story," to the soundtrack. Backed by brushed drums, a stand-up bass, and a cool piano, Jones is at her jazziest and sultriest, oozing a sly honky-tonk, come-hither sensibility. Ry Cooder's score is represented by a trio of tracks; the best, "Ely Nevada," is a spooky little thing that feels lifted from a David Lynch movie, but Cooder's spectacular (and varied) guitar work is in evidence on all three cues. Two other instrumentals are the acoustic, wistful "Pajaros," by Gustavo Santaolalla (Brokeback Mountain), and Shigeru Umebayashi's "Yumeji's Theme," already in the director's In the Mood for Love. Fittingly, for a romantic road movie that takes place partly on the ghostly, highly symbolic Route 66, the rest of the album is made up of songs that represent very American sounds. Cat Power (who has a cameo in the film) brings two tunes from her Memphis album, The Greatest, and they coexist nicely next to Otis Redding's smoldering "Try a Little Tenderness," Cassandra Wilson's eerie cover of Neil Young's "Harvest Moon," and Mavis Staples' powerful take on "Eyes on the Prize." --Elisabeth Vincentelli
Original Soundtrack "Step Up 2: The Streets"
$8.50
There's not much left to say about The Wire, David Simon's intricately plotted Baltimore crime drama that ran on HBO from 2002 to 2008. Critics loved the show so much it was almost embarrassing, but its audiences were never as large as those of The Sopranos, or even Real Sex. Five Years of Music is strictly for Wire fans. Music was, of course, used sparingly in the show, appearing as it does in real life: in a cop car (the Pogues), from a boombox (club music), or on headphones. This wasn't Miami Vice, and such restraint may have rendered the music all the more poignant and powerful, but obsessive Wire fans (is there any other kind?) will enjoy this disc far more than pedestrian listeners. The former will instantly recall the scene when Solomon Burke covers Van Morrison ("Fast Train"), or in which season the Blind Boys covered Tom Waits' grand theme song, "Way Down in the Hole". With four different takes of the opening theme, snippets of dialogue throughout, and this mish-mash of song, how could it be otherwise? --Mike McGonigal
Original Soundtrack "Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story"
$10.19
The Chipmunks may have been CGI-ized but the helium-distorted, super-high-pitched singing style of Alvin, Simon and Theodore has been preserved. If you have kids or are a kid at heart (with a special fondness for novelty tunes), this is a goldmine. The 'munk classic "The Chipmunk Song (Christmas, Don't Be Late)" is covered twice: the "DeeTown OG Mix" is a fairly faithful version, while the "DeeTown Rock Mix" goes the emo-lite route; another nugget, "Witch Doctor," also gets dusted up, with the addition of a so-so rap. Nice bonus: The 1958 versions of these two songs are included as well, for old times' sake. Newer tracks are just as zany. The CD starts off with a take on David Powter's hit "Bad Day," which sounds completely insane done Chipmunk-style; "Funky Town" is downright hair-rising. The DeeTown Syndicate not only produced it all but also contributes several songs of its own that waffle between corny hip-hop ("How We Roll") and contempo Disney Channel style ("Coast 2 Coast"). It's all really nutty and really fun. --Elisabeth Vincentelli
Many people have covered Bob Dylan's songs over the years, but few quite like this. On the double-disc soundtrack that accompanies Todd Haynes' extremely confounding biopic of the already plenty confounding folk icon, we get the likes of Sonic Youth, Cat Power, Yo La Tengo, the Hold Steady, and Antony & The Johnsons doing their best Dylan impressions and often failing gloriously. Former Pavement frontman Stephen Malkmus does a particularly fine job oozing his way through "Ballad of a Thin Man," while Wilco's Jeff Tweedy draws the moody beauty out of "Simple Twist of Fate," and Sufjan Stevens lends his typically baroque touch to "Ring Them Bells." Special credit has to go to the Million Dollar Bashers, the unofficial house band that includes Steve Shelley on drums, John Medeski on piano, and Tom Verlaine on guitar, along with other notable musicians. The generous track list and dynamic set of contributors promises that this album will provide plenty of awe long after the film itself has been forgotten. --Aidin Vaziri
Original Soundtrack "Across The Universe [Deluxe Edition]"
$9.64
ACROSS THE UNIVERSE - MUSIC FROM THE MOTION PICTURE DELUXE - 2 DISC VERSION
A love story set in the 1960's amid the turbulent years of anti-war protest, mind exploration and rock `n roll. Jude (Jim Sturgess) and Lucy (Evan Rachel Wood), along with a small group of friends and musicians, are swept up into the emerging anti-war and counterculture movements with "Dr. Robert" (Bono) and "Mr. Kite" (Eddie Izzard) as their guides.
FEATURING SONGS FROM THE GREATEST SONGWRITERS OF ALL TIME, PERFORMED BY THE CAST INCLUDING EVAN RACHEL WOOD, JIM STURGESS, DANA FUCHS, MARTIN LUTHER McCOY, BONO, JOE COCKER AND EDDIE IZZARD
Package art will incorporate stills from pivotal scenes from the movie and a 16-page folder foldout poster with a strawberry image.
Even those allergic to musicals may be won over by Once, a tender-hearted Irish romance with songs by Czech Republic-born Markéta Irglová and Frames frontman Glen Hansard. (The film's director, John Carney, actually used to play bass in the group.) The trick here is that Irglová and Hansard also play the leads; because their characters are shown busking, writing music, or rehearsing, the songs are smoothly integrated in the film. The overall acoustic mood won't surprise fans of the Frames--some tracks ("Say It to Me," "When Your Mind's Made Up") have even popped up on the band's albums, though the arrangements are more pared-down here, befitting the scruffy, street-musician setting. Being the lesser-known entity, Irglová feels like a revelation; she sounds a bit like a folkie Björk on "If You Want Me," and her song "The Hill" is downright heartbreaking. Irglová and Hansard had already made the 2006 album The Swell Seasontogether, so their collaboration here feels really organic--they sound particularly good together on the title track, for instance. Now that's the kind of magic you want from musicals. --Elisabeth Vincentelli
Directors Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez spent $53 million to pay loving tribute to the vintage hundred-thousand-dollar exploitation fare that inspired Grindhouse's two-movies-for-the-price-of-one thrill ride. Tarantino's half of the exercise (which also includes Robert Rodriguez's self-scored Planet Terror) features another effusive slice of the director's eclectic musical sensibility to underscore its manic tale of stuntman/psycho-killer Kurt Russell and his muscle-car-fueled exploits. Tarantino works from a familiar formula that variously mixes evocative, semi-obscure Italian film cues from Morricone and Dinaggio, contrasting slices of '60s catalog from the great Jack Nitzsche and Brit Invasion also-rans DDDBM&T and some '70s fodder from both ends of the Top 40 via Smith and T. Rex, also stirring in a savory mid-disc run of R&B that stretches from PG&E's upbeat read of "Stagger Lee" through more familiar fare from Joe Tex, Eddie Floyd, and the Coasters. The director also serves up a couple of those deliciously off-kilter obscurities that have come to be his musical trademark as a coda: Eddie Beram's thumping "Riot in Thunder Alley" and April March's infectious ditz-pop take on Serge Gainsbourg's loopy "Chick Habit." --Jerry McCulley
Andy Garcia directed, starred in and composed the score for this obvious labor of love movie, set in late-'50s Cuba. In his spare time, he also played the piano in the Lost City Orchestra, the de facto house band that performs Garcia's music as well as numbers by the likes of Ernesto Lecuona, widely acknowledged as one of the greatest Cuban composers ever ("A la Antigua," "Danza Lucumi," and "La Comparsa" unfurl glorious string charts). Garcia plays a nightclub owner in Havana right before and during the revolution, thus making music an integral aspect of the movie--no wonder this two-CD set features 45 tracks. In keeping with the movie's period feel, the non-score songs are made up of an array of amazing Cuban dance classics by the likes of Rolando Laserie, inspired player of boleros and guarachas, or mambo master Cachao López (the subject of a documentary directed by Garcia). The latter performs the instrumental version of the gorgeous "Si Me Pudieras Querer," the song that serves as the movie's love theme, while Bola de Nieve handles the vocal one. It was brave of Garcia to juxtapose his own compositions to such numbers, but it's also hard not to think they sound a little bland by comparison. --Elisabeth Vincentelli
Original Soundtrack "Dreamgirls: Music From The Motion Picture [2-CD Deluxe Edition]"
$14.20
The big question about this soundtrack is: how's she doing? No, not Beyoncé, silly--how's Jennifer Hudson doing? And more specifically, how's she doing by "And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going"? To this reviewer's ears, she doesn't top the original Effie, Jennifer Holliday--or even Lillias White, from the 2001 Dreamgirls in Concert. On the other hand, Hudson isn't afraid to pullout all the stops, whipping herself up into a total diva frenzy as the song gets caught up in an unstoppable crescendo. As for Beyoncé, she adapts superbly to the 1960s- and 1970s-tinged material, though "Listen"--a ballad that also appears on her own B'day album--lacks the spirit that infuses the classic tunes on this album. For make no mistake: this is hard-hitting, high-octane music, infused with an urgency and passion that makes most contemporary R&B albums sound timid. When Hudson and Beyoncé duke it out on "It's All Over," or when the "One Night Only" ballad gets reinvented as the dance-floor burner "One Night Only (Disco)," the sheer energy flowing from the speakers is transporting.
Note that this two-CD Deluxe Edition features a larger booklet and additional tracks, including dance remixes of "One Night Only" and "And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going," as well as composer Henry Krieger's demo of "Patience." --Elisabeth Vincentelli
More from the Dreamgirls Cast
B'day, Beyoncé
American Idol season 3: Greatest Soul Classics, (Featuring a track from Jennifer Hudson)
Marie Antoinette may be a period film, but don't expect minuets: Sofia Coppola's candy-colored portrait of the doomed queen moves to a punk beat. Whatever you think of how that approach works in the movie itself, it makes for a bracing two-CD soundtrack that's like a mix tape put together by a DJ particularly attuned to the tastes of 2006, not 1786. A dominant chunk of the selection is made up of vintage postpunk tracks, from Siouxsie and the Banshees' "Hong Kong Garden" to Gang of Four's "Natural's Not in It," from New Order's "Ceremony" to the Cure's "All Cats Are Grey." The giddily fun Bow Wow Wow offers a counterpoint to all that seriousness with three songs (two of them, including the iconic "I Want Candy," remixed by My Bloody Valentine's maestro Kevin Shields). Newer contributions come from acts as diverse as retromongers the Strokes and avant-electronicists Aphex Twin and Squarepusher, while Dustin O'Halloran (half of the L.A. duo Devics) contributes three nice, Debussy-style piano solos. The most conventional choices of the lot are a pair of harpsichord pieces by Couperin and Scarlatti, as well as Vivaldi's "Concerto in G," a chestnut that's got to be in every single film set in the 18th century. --Elisabeth Vincentelli
2006 soundtrack to the award-winning film made up of 18 different short segments, each of them featuring a different director and a different cast. The majority of the soundtrack has been composed by Pierre Adenot but it does contain two tracks performed by Feist: 'We're All In The Dance' and 'La Meme Histoire' among other artists. Universal.
While Disney has successfully cornered the market for younger teens with its Disney Channel musicals, Step Up shows the company (through its Buena Vista subsidiary) addressing the older high-school set with equal flair. Directed and choreographed by Anne Fletcher (choreographer of the excellent Bring It On), the musical depicts a clash between kids representing "street" and more formal dance, though its soundtrack is resolutely turned toward the R&B/hip-hop/dancehall axis. The CD starts off with three fab collaborations: "'Bout It" by Yung Joc and 3LW, Ciara and Chamillionaire's fantastically elastic "Get Up" (which may be even better than Ciara's smash hit "1, 2"), and Sean Paul and Keyshia Cole's "(When You Gonna) Give It Up to Me." But the three most dance-inducing tracks are solo ones: Kelis is at her funkiest on "80's Joint," and it's practically impossible to stay still during Drew Sidora's bouncy "Til the Dawn" (including an Earth, Wind & Fire sample) and Jamie Scott's Prince-esque "Made." Don't miss, tucked toward the end, Deep Inside's "Lovely" and Gina René's "U Must Be," two wickedly catchy slow songs. --Elisabeth Vincentelli
