Make your system sing with these great musical movie moments.

I’ve covered my fair share of music and movies here in Show-Offs over the years. Interestingly enough, as I look back over previous columns, I notice a distinctly never-the-twain-shall-meet approach to the cinematic and lyrical media.

I’ve tended to look at films through the flame-colored glasses of your typical trade-show gear demo: lots of kabooms, crashes, crunches, kapows, and other onomatopoeia. Great big, sphincter-tightening action set pieces that cut through a video screen like hot scissors through Jell-O and make an audio system wail and thump like it’s taking a beating.

My focus on music has generally been just as myopic—blind, in fact, aside from the occasional concert video. Some of the greatest moments in entertainment history have occurred when these two fundamental media meet in the middle, when music and cinematography come together to create a magical something that all the witty dialogue, brilliant lighting, and whiz-bang special effects in the history of cinema could never hope to match. So let’s take a look at a few such scenes—scenes where song elevates the movie-watching experience to a whole new level and, just as importantly, scenes that are guaranteed to rock your home theater to its foundations.

Across the Universe
Best Scene: 14—“I Am the Walrus”
Julie Taymor’s bombastic musical epic has been written off by many critics as little more than a pretty frame, cobbled together merely to prop up two hours’ worth of Beatles tunes. As if that were a bad thing. The film takes a dash of Hair, a splash of The Wall, and a heaping helping of Moulin Rouge! , mixes them with selections from the greatest catalogue in music history, and dumps out a concoction that’s somehow both fresh and familiar, jarring and comforting—like a cotton-candy time bomb you want to explode again and again.

This Technicolor volcano really starts to blow its top about halfway through, when a hilariously trippy Bono takes the stage as Doctor Robert and leads us on a Magical Mystery Tour through the ins and outs of “I Am the Walrus.” He holds the first verse close to his chest, and the mix follows suit, filling the front speakers to the brim but no further. By the second verse, the pulsing beat spills out of the front channels into the room. Sight and sound melt together into a synesthetic orgy of classic rock-and-roll riffs and kaleidoscopic hues. By the time the final breakdown rolls around and the surrounds erupt in a tornadic torrent of sticky, swirling psychedelia, you’ll be hanging on to the carpet to keep from falling through the ceiling.

Almost Famous
Best Scene: 7—“Something in the Air”
I bet you thought I would head straight for “Tiny Dancer,” didn’t you? Au contraire. While that tour-bus sing-along is undoubtedly the heart of the film—and already one of cinema’s truly classic scenes, a scant eight years after its debut—an honest fan has to admit that a gaggle of burnt-out stoners warbling sentimentally and off-key doesn’t make for the best of speaker demos, no matter how much feeling they put into it. No, if you really want to rock your system, you’re going to have to back up a bit, back to young William’s first real introduction to the decadent world of rock.

As much as I love the untitled director’s cut, for our purposes the theatrical version works best. The real sonic yumminess kicks in during William and Penny’s car ride to the Continental Hyatt House: The acoustic guitar intro to Rod Stewart’s “Every Picture Tells a Story” traces pretty aural patterns through the air, weaving a climate of soothing calm—artificially enhanced and elongated by stretching the silence after the intro way past its breaking point. Then Bam! One massive, room-filling, drum-driven beat shatters the fragile serenity from the front and doesn’t let up. It doesn’t pour from every speaker because it doesn’t need to—the riff holds its own from the left and right speakers alone, anchoring the cacophony of traffic and chatter that spills from the surrounds and tying the din together with a cool, thumping beat.

August Rush
Best Scene: 8—“Urban Soundscape”
This heartwarming (if admittedly sappy) little latter-day fairy tale harbors between its credits innumerable musical moments, largely due to the six-string talents of the incomparable Kaki King, whose hands double for those of the titular character. The praise due to her inventive, percussive, and eclectic guitar stylings could easily fill a column alone. But one of my favorite musical Show-Off scenes in the film features nary a lick from the venerable ax; in fact, more compositionally conservative listeners may consider the scene to be devoid of music entirely. For my money, though, our hero’s introduction to New York is accompanied by one of the most toe-tapping mishmashes ever to grace my home theater.

As with Almost Famous, the auditory intent is to thrust you into a big, new world, but the background noise isn’t woven through the fibers of a classic song. Instead, the background noises are woven through themselves to create a surround sound experience like no other—a song that can only be described as “found music.” The boom-boom-scrape-scrape-rat-a-tat-swish of jackhammers and revolving doors and rollerblade wheels and subway trains comes together to create a richly textured tempo that’s big, bold, beautifully orchestrated, and sure to leave your speakers huffing and puffing.

The Blues Brothers
Best Scene: 22—“Shake a Tail Feather”
I know what you’re thinking: It’s an infinitely quotable classic with one of the best soundtracks of the ’80s, but there’s no way you would ever use The Blues Brothers to demo your system, right? If your typical experience with the film involves flipping past it on WGN at two in the morning, we could forgive you for thinking so. Despite that perception—actually, maybe because of it—the remixed audio on this decade-old DVD makes for one deliciously shocking Show-Off.

Truthfully, the first 12 measures of Ray Charles’ iconic turn in the film will probably do little to dispel its low-fi reputation. Even after Ray’s vocals kick in, the mix is mostly mono-fabulous. When the track finally gets its groove on, the first thing you’ll notice is that Donald “Duck” Dunn actually wasn’t hired for his looks: His bopping bass lines might not knock the drivers out of your subwoofers, but they will wiggle around and give you a flirty little two-handed smack on the rump. If that doesn’t get you, the horns leaping out from the surrounds to playfully smack you in the back of the head surely will. Crank it up loud enough, and your guests will be so tickled by the sensory assault, they might not even notice the lack of a SuperStation logo in the lower right-hand corner of the screen.