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Musical
We’re not even a month into 2024, and I already have a contender for most bonkers movie of the year. Coming from Norway, The Bitcoin Car is a tragicomic musical about a small village that begins to experience troubling phenomena when a brand-new bitcoin mining facility starts operations. This movie has it all: an irrepressibly upbeat song about how death unites us all, singing electrons, an anti-capitalist worldview, and a goat named Chlamydia.
There is a sequence in the first half of Neptune Frost that references the biblical revelations of the prophet Ezekiel. An important character in the three major Abrahamic religions, Ezekiel is given a prophecy from God, who is accompanied in the vision by four cherubim that have “four wheels” that move alongside each creature.
In Neptune Frost, codirectors Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman reimagine this holy encounter with a mix of DIY style that manages to add to its ethereal, dream-like quality. The Ezekiel counterpart in the movie has a harness attached to his back with five bicycle wheels that slowly rotate slightly above and behind him as he moves. The addition of blacklight paint to the wheels and the characters in the scene makes the sequence even more mysterious and hypnotic.
Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story is an absolute delight. The spell it casts is more hypnotic than that of the original film version, which won the award for Best Picture at the 34th Academy Awards. This new version has also been nominated for Best Picture, and knowing Hollywood’s regard for its own history and mythological status, I wouldn’t be surprised if West Side Story is the Best Picture winner at the 94th Academy Awards as well.
If you know anything about Ron and Russell Mael of the band Sparks, you know they’re only interested in pleasing themselves when it comes to their art. (If you don’t know anything about Sparks, you can learn quite a lot, like I did, from the new Edgar Wright documentary about the band, called The Sparks Brothers.) If you know who Leos Carax is, it’s likely you’ve seen his 2012 film Holy Motors, so you know how visually inventive and wacked-out his singular aesthetic is.
This trio of artists have come together to create a sui generis piece of cinema in Annette. A sort of rock opera by way of the French musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg – Carax also hails from France – Annette is by turns uplifting, depressing, silly, and hopelessly bleak. That wild mixture makes for a heady experience in certain moments, but it also never quite gels into a cohesive whole. Add to that a lead performance from Adam Driver that is, while bold and an example of an actor challenging himself, emotionally distant, which made it hard for me to connect with.
Let me tell you a story. Have you heard of the Broadway musical Hamilton? Of course you have. Well, the guy who created it and launched a phenomenon wrote another musical before he set the world on fire with Hamilton. It was called In the Heights, and it was also a success, running a little under three years for 1,184 performances on Broadway. After having seen the touring version of Hamilton, the filmed version of the Broadway production – the world is waiting for a proper movie version – and listening to the cast recording on repeat (my wife fell in love with it when the show really caught fire in 2016), I felt I had a handle on what creator Lin-Manuel Miranda is all about. After seeing the film adaptation of In the Heights, that assessment is confirmed. LMM is a champion of unabashed optimism and joy.
This is the next entry in my ongoing 100 Essential Films series. If you missed the first one, you can find the explanation for what I’m doing here. Film number seven needs no introduction, really. It’s a movie that most of us know by heart and have seen dozens of times. It’s The Wizard of Oz. I’ve probably seen it a dozen or more times, but this viewing was certainly the closest attention I’ve ever paid in terms of theme and production detail. I tried my hardest not to simply be swept away to the magical land of Oz; that’s no easy feat, which you know if you love the movie as much as I do. Like every other film in the series so far, I borrowed a Blu-ray through intra-library loan. It was the 2013 release in commemoration of the film’s 75th anniversary. The transfer is gorgeous.
This is the next entry in my ongoing 100 Essential Films series. If you missed the first one, you can find the explanation for what I’m doing here. Film number six is the first feature-length animated film ever produced: Walt Disney’s (with the help of dozens of artists) Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. I had the experience that probably most people would have upon sitting down to watch it: I know the basic story, the songs, and the characters (including all of the dwarfs), but I don’t know that I had ever actually watched the whole thing from beginning to end, aside from maybe when I was three years old. The movie is just so ingrained in our cultural memory, it’s easy to assume you’ve actually seen it, even if you haven’t. Just like the other films in the series, I borrowed a Blu-ray through intralibrary loan. It was the 2016 Disney Blu-ray release, and the film looks fantastic.
It’s impossible to say if author P.L. Travers would have liked the second Disney film to feature her most beloved creation, the magical nanny Mary Poppins, any more than she liked the first. As documented in the 2013 film Saving Mr. Banks, Travers disliked almost everything about what became one of Disney’s most cherished movies, 1964’s Mary Poppins. She hated the musical numbers, she hated the animated characters, she hated the changes Disney made to the Poppins character. If Saving Mr. Banks is to be believed, she hated the general whimsy of the picture. That’s the exact quality that has made it such an enduring piece of pop culture.
The new sequel Mary Poppins Returns – a project which Travers stymied for decades and her estate finally approved years after the author’s death – manages to conjure some of the whimsical magic of the original. But the movie also suffers from being over-plotted to within an inch of its life. It’s true that the original has a message, but it never becomes as overbearing as the one in Mary Poppins Returns. The actress portraying Poppins in the new film, Emily Blunt, also has the insurmountable task of living up to the iconic performance of Julie Andrews. Both of these factors make Mary Poppins Returns a shadow of the movie that it attempts so very hard to evoke.
If the marketing material for Pitch Perfect 3 – the tag line is “Last Call, Pitches” – is to be believed, this is the swan song for a series that’s generated a sizable cult following. In this latest outing, the saga of the Barden Bellas ends not with a bang, but not exactly with a whimper. I have to damn Pitch Perfect 3 with a heaping helping of faint praise. It’s just okay. The movie is, thankfully, nothing like the complete disaster that Pitch Perfect 2 was, yet it never captures the elements that made the original so charming and so memorable.
This time around, the members of our favorite competitive collegiate a-cappella singing group are finding that post-college life, a.k.a. the real world, isn’t everything they had hoped it would be.
It’s been a rough year. We lost Bowie. We lost Prince. We may have lost American democracy as we know it. The jury is still out on that one, 2016. Director Damien Chazelle couldn’t get here soon enough with the follow up to his breakout film Whiplash. It’s called La La Land, and it’s everything we need right now. It’s infectiously upbeat, idealistic, heartwarming, and joyous. Basically, it’s everything the world seems to be lacking right now. In addition to being uniquely cinematic, La La Land is the breath givingnew life to the big Hollywood musical, a genre that’s best days have been gone for 50 years. What the 2011 surprise hit The Artist did for silent films, La La Land promises to do for musicals. Both films allow Hollywood to indulge in its favorite pastime, looking back to its golden days and reminding itself of its former glory. You’ll notice The Artist didn’t lead to a boom in production of new silent films. Neither is La La Land likely to lead to a major revival of musicals. The most magical thing that both movies do is remind us that the old cliché “They don’t make ‘em like they used to,” isn’t exactly true. Sometimes they do, and it’s a rare and special enough occasion, so when it happens, we should count ourselves exceptionally lucky to witness it.
