Name That Movie Mondays! (Vol. 7: Special Huey Lewis & the News edition)
Aug 4, 2008, 02:32 PM | by Mandi Bierly
Categories: DVD/Video, Film, Music, Name that Movie Mondays!
In honor of Huey Lewis & the News' theme song for Pineapple Express, we're looking back at two of the band's finest movie moments.
Which 2000 film used "Hip to Be Square" in a killer scene?
Which 1985 film earned Lewis an Oscar nomination for cowriting "The Power of Love?"
Answers — and interesting trivia courtesy of Lewis himself— after the jump...
Huey Lewis says he okayed the use of "Hip to Be Square" in American Psycho (below) but got in a dispute over its inclusion on the film's album. "They tried to pull a little showbiz thing on me, which left a bad taste in my mouth. Because of that, I've never seen [the movie]," he says. "People tell me it's a really cool scene." (For the record, Lewis says the song is not a personal statement on the band, as suggested by the titular character Patrick Bateman: "The truth of the song is, I wrote it originally in the third person. 'He used to be a renegade / he used to fool around / he couldn't take the punishment and had to settle down.' It was about a phenomenon that's articulated much better in a book called Bobos in Paradise. The phenomenon where people from the '60s started to drop back in, cut their hair, work out, that kind of crap, but they kept their bohemian tastes. And that's why today, the ruling class are Bobos. They're bourgeois bohemians. I thought it would be funnier in the first person, but I kinda mistold the joke a little bit and I think some people thought that, in fact, it was an anthem for square people.")
The filmmakers behind Back to the Future (below) imagined Huey Lewis & the News would be Marty McFly's favorite band, and asked Lewis to record an original song for the picture. He said he'd just send them the next track the band wrote, and if it worked, great. He ended up earning an Academy Award nomination for "The Power of Love," but lost to Lionel Richie (White Nights' "Say You, Say Me.") Says Lewis, "I thought we were gonna win. What's funny is, at the Oscars, Marvin Hamlisch turns around and goes, 'Too bad, dude, you're gonna get screwed ... Lionel's on the aisle."
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