But in a startling sequence set to Curtin Mayfield’s jittery life-of-a-pusher funk track, “Super Fly” shows us what a dealer really does, with an ingeniously edited split-screen montage of still photographs that lasts for the entire song. In 1972, when Gordon Parks Jr.’s sturdy and revealing underworld drama - it now comes off as thinly veiled racism to tag it with a term like “blaxploitation” - was first released, most people would have described a drug dealer as a guy who stands on a ghetto street corner selling drugs. Chris Pratt’s moves make him look like the universe’s most soulful frat boy, and director James Gunn makes 1974 sound like a very distant planet of paradise. “Guardians of the Galaxy” establishes its rockin’-through-the-cosmos vibe from its sublime opening scene, in which Peter, traipsing through the ruins of a distant planet, does a dancing-with-myself boogie to Redbone’s fantastic 1974 hit. Luckily for us, his mother had fantastic taste (or maybe it’s just that she came from a terrific era). The relationship between Peter Quill (aka Star-Lord) and rock ‘n’ roll is simple: He remembers his late mother through mix-tapes of her favorite songs, and those tracks are his life-line - the family tie that sustains him. The “Wayne’s World” sequence captures, as nothing else in movies has, the inner credo of every bedroom head-banger: “I play along, therefore I am.” Yet the weirdest thing about it is that a song that takes enough twists and turns to make “Stairway to Heaven” sound like “Tutti Frutti” could ever have become an anthem for teenagers. Queen’s legendary art-rock epic is, of course, one of the most eccentric songs in rock history: a lyrical heavy-metal suite that’s at once a ballad, a modernist opera, and a head-banging orgy. The most famous, and ecstatic, sequence in “Wayne’s World” consists of nothing more than the pie-eyed metal-head stoners Wayne (Mike Myers) and Garth (Dana Carvey), along with a few pals, rocking out to “Bohemian Rhapsody” in their car, singing and playing air guitar, air drums, air everything. And though the song has been used many times in movies since to evoke the exhilaration of the open road, it was only “Easy Rider” that played off the underlying nihilism of the lyrics (“Fire all of your guns at once/And explode into space”), creating a rock-film vibe as sinister as it is exciting. It’s that vision that first elevated Steppenwolf’s hard-rocking 1968 biker ode into an anthem. Wyatt (Peter Fonda) and Billy the Kid (Dennis Hopper), side by side on their low-rider Harley choppers, cruising down a sun-kissed highway that beckons like a dream that could be a nightmare, is one of the cinema’s greatest images of American freedom. What follows are the 27 greatest rock ‘n’ roll moments in all of movies (at least, in one critic’s opinion). So we figured we’d fill in the back story of that tradition. It’s a piece of rock ‘n’ roll cinema that draws, by now, on an extensive and exhilarating tradition. “Baby Driver” is a movie about heists, car chases, love, and - mostly - the way that rock ‘n’ roll can, and should, provide the soundtrack for all those things.
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