Love & Mercy

Few bands are as iconic as the Beach Boys, who spent years creating a catalog of incredible music. Running the gamut from catchy pop songs to experimental rock, they have a song for every occasion … and for every movie. With the wonderful Brian Wilson biopic Love & Mercy now available on Blu-ray and DVD, let’s take a look back at the most memorable uses of Beach Boys music in movies and TV. After all, it’s hard to find something that wasn’t improved through the use of one of their tracks.

The good movies are supposed to come out in the second half of the year. January through June, that’s the dumping ground; the crap that was so toxic it had to get buried in the winter, followed by the empty-headed excitement of summer blockbuster season.

I know Brian Wilson, the genius behind the great pop group the Beach Boys, had a tough decade or two after the collapse of his band. But to transform from Paul Dano to John Cusack in the span of a couple years? Those are some seriously hard times...

‘Love & Mercy’ – which premiered this week at the Toronto International Film Festival – isn’t the first movie to try to explore the life of Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys. There was the 1990 television movie ‘Summer Dreams: The Story of the Beach Boys,’ which told the story from the late Dennis Wilson’s perspective. Then there was the more expensive-looking, but still made for television ‘The Beach Boys: An American Family’ that aired in 2000. So, yes, we’ve seen Brian Wilson’s mental health dramatized before.