As you sit in the dark, air-conditioned atmosphere of a theater and realize the two-hour odyssey that has taken your mind and emotions beyond their normal bearings is about to come to an end, your mind begins to levitate. Not way up in the clouds like some drug-induced haze, but just slightly above yourself, scattered and shapeless. Then the credits begin to roll and music starts to play, suddenly, it crystallizes. Your body and brain become one again as the preceding narrative that unfolded before your eyes begins to have some meaning and perspective. All this, simply thanks to the power of music. A film's musical accompaniment to the ending credits may seem like a relatively inconsequential aspect of filmmaking given the numerous amount of elements that are involved with making a motion picture, but as the last artistic choice a director can make, it is essentially the final word of any film. If you view a movie as an artist's conversation with the people and world he or she finds themselves surrounded by, then a film's closing credits music is the director's summation and/or exclamation of what the film was trying to communicate. When it's done well, it encapsulates the themes, emotions, and tone of what many hard working actors and crew members spent months of their lives trying to create, and when it's done well, there are few more powerful moments in cinema. There are numerous films that have used music brilliantly in their finales, but being the base-10 society that we are, what follows is a list of the ten best uses of music during the ending credits of a movie. Note that films which used music composed specifically for that movie were not considered (maybe another list for another day). Instead, only films using pre-existing music were considered for this list. With that being said, enjoy the memories and enjoy the music.
A film fanatic at a very young age, starting with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle movies and gradually moving up to more sophisticated fare, at around the age of ten he became inexplicably obsessed with all things Oscar. With the incredibly trivial power of being able to chronologically name every Best Picture winner from memory, his lifelong goal is to see every Oscar nominated film, in every major category, in the history of the Academy Awards.
