Loud and Proud Musicals
WICKED-ly good movies
It feels likely that 2024 will mark the first time since 1968 that two musicals get nominated for Best Picture1. And yet, stuff like this is still popping up on social media…
It’s a knife when … nobody wants to act like a real musical anymore. Every major trade publication has reported on the phenomenon over the last year that flies in the face of truth in advertising principles regarding musicals. If you get the sense that the studios are ashamed to show you the goods, they’re not wrong.
As Deadline reported last year around Wonka’s notably music-less promotion of the very musical film, “Apparently, test-audience focus groups generally hate musicals and the only way to get people into the theater with one is to trick ’em. If they get in the door and wind up enjoying themselves, then business is solid for a studio on a musical.”
“To start off saying musical, musical, musical, you have the potential to turn off audiences,” Paramount’s president of global marketing and distribution Marc Weinstock told Variety earlier this year. “I want everyone to be equally excited.” Respectfully, everyone should be excited for the best version of whatever a movie is — and the movie shouldn’t be ashamed of that in its presentation (looking at you, Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd) or promotion.
There are many great movie musicals out there deserving of being blared from the rooftops as such, and many offer a much more unique interpretation of the genre than simply transposing a work from stage to screen. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.) If you want to move beyond Wicked or — god forbid — Emilia Pérez, I’ve rounded up ten toe-tapping takes on the movie musical worth watching.
Annette, Amazon Prime Video
If you missed this very early newsletter from the first month of Marshall and the Movies, allow me to point you back to this explainer on the unique musical that is Leos Carax’s Annette. “Carax is deliberately trying to push you away, yes, but not out of some misplaced sense of provocation,” I wrote, “Is Annette really that stupid/crazy/simple/overwrought/[insert adjective here] … or is Carax just holding up a mirror and forcing you to confront how those qualities are embodied in another work that you love? Maybe now, you can see those things more clearly filtered through this off-kilter prism.”
Dicks: The Musical, Max
With Dicks: The Musical, New York comedy scene mainstays Josh Sharp and Aaron Jackson may come the closest anyone’s come in recent memory to inheriting the spirit of intentional tawdriness that defines the now-canonized work of John Waters. In an age where lazy commentariat label anything remotely silly as “camp,” how nice to see a movie that actually understands the way to weaponize bad taste for the intentional effect of outsider art. This queer reimagining of The Parent Trap as a parodic movie musical is precisely the kind of satire that works because it understands what people love about the genre.
Golden Eighties, Criterion Channel
Let me reassure anyone who survived Chantal Akerman’s endurance test Jeanne Dielman — her musical Golden Eighties is not going to try your patience with similar durational cinema techniques! Here, she embraces the spectacle and schmaltz of the old Technicolor musicals like Singin’ in the Rain. But she’s more interested in pulling back the curtain to understand the forces that underline the spectacle as she uses song and dance to explore the struggles of shopping mall employees. The abstraction of the setting from the get-go ought to tell you she’s more interested in penetrating a consumerist psyche than issuing paeans to it.
The Hole, Metrograph at Home
Here’s one of the more unique entries on the list, and I only just watched it recently out of morbid curiosity because I couldn’t believe that notorious slow cinema purveyor Tsai Ming-Liang made a musical. The Hole is a remarkable example of how movies can contain multitudes. The duality is striking as two people in a Taiwanese apartment complex go about their lonely lives during a pandemic … but find an odd connection through a hole in the floor/ceiling that connects their dwelling spaces. As their lives silently and suddenly intersect, an odd presence emerges to help give voice to their feelings: Grace Chang, a Hong Kong musical star. In her lavish musical numbers staged ironically against the drab backdrops of their building, Chang’s songs achieve that noble purpose of music as articulated by Victor Hugo — that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to remain silent.
Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc, available to rent from various digital platforms
“Bruno Dumont certainly goes for it in his rock musical Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc, a unique retelling of the familiar Joan of Arc mythology,” I wrote in my review of the film back out of TIFF in 2017. “This audacious re-centering of the French hero’s earlier days takes a Baz Luhrmann-esque approach, sans pop irony, in its rendering of her struggle through head-banging tunes.” For those who don’t want the Wikipedia version of history, you really can’t get much farther than a stale textbook than watching stoic nuns doing a fully choreographed number in their habits.
Popeye, Amazon Prime Video
It’s only logical that Robert Altman, one of the most innovators of cinematic sound, would want to take a stab at a movie musical. His 1980 adaptation of comic strip favorite Popeye into a song-and-dance affair was met with negative reactions upon its release but has since become something of a beloved cult favorite (perhaps due in some part to Paul Thomas Anderson grafting one of Shelley Duvall’s numbers into Punch-Drunk Love). With the pointedly mirthless energy of the English ensemble and the slightly muttered delivery of the singing, Altman feels decades ahead of the genre’s push for injecting more realism into the flourishes of the genre. There are still some bumps in his experimentation, but I find the ability to translate the fantasy of characters who only existed in lines on paper and turn them into flesh-and-bones people quite remarkable.
Praise This!, Peacock
As someone who hasn’t been shy about my distaste for pandering “faith-based” films, I approached my assignment for Praise This! last year with a healthy amount of skepticism. “Pitch Perfect for Jesus jams” didn’t exactly inspire a lot of confidence. And yet, much to my surprise, this Peacock original really delivered — both on musicality and morality. (I mean, turning Megan Thee Stallion’s “Savage” into a song about serving godliness and not … well … come on!) “The film recognizes that there are plenty of people who view Christianity and being part of a church as a crucial, if not all-encompassing, portion of their lives. Rather than turning Christians into a monolith, Praise This is willing to get into the thorniness of their faith as they try to reconcile it with their varying struggles and desires,” I wrote in my Stream It recommendation for Decider last year.
Repo! The Genetic Opera, Amazon Prime Video
I felt like I was at an off-Broadway show in the best possible way while watching Repo! The Genetic Opera. This gothic rock opera maintains the lo-fi charms of a show that’s just a stone’s throw geographically and a mile stylistically from the Great White Way. Director Darren Lynn Bousman captures something of the fever dream feeling of encountering that has a grand idea but little means to achieve it. This world of organ failures and the corporate repo men who come to reclaim organs has a gaudy and gray look to its dystopian visual effects. Luckily, the enthusiasm and energy of all those involved in this passion project still shine through. I mean, this movie stars Alexa Vega (Carmen from Spy Kids), has a supporting turn by Paris Hilton, and relies on Paul Sorvino to sell several big musical numbers. This is “so bad it’s good” at its best.
West Indies: The Fugitive Slaves of Liberty, Criterion Channel
An anti-colonialist history of the African slave trade and continued French rule of the continent, but make it a movie musical? Yes, please. Med Hondo’s West Indies: The Fugitive Slaves of Liberty stages the entirety of its action on a slave ship constructed in the middle of a dilapidated warehouse, making the connection between the different guises of capitalist exploitation of workers visible and palpable. As the film collapses time and space, Hondo both provides and undercuts spectacle as a tool for setting and reclaiming cultural narratives. It’s scorching and sensational.
Zero Patience, Tubi (free with ads)
If I’m being charitable (and I am with this week being Thanksgiving and all), this is what I think Emilia Pérez thinks it’s doing. Zero Patience is like the messy cousin of Angels in America as filmmaker John Greyson stages his own variation on the gay fantasia. This messy but marvelous movie musical uses the notorious “Patient Zero” myth in the spreading of AIDS as a springboard into an exploration into the wild mess of feelings as a plague spread through the gay community in the ‘80s and early ‘90s. As every system of logic seemed to break down in the wake of the virus’ deathward devastation, it only makes sense that it would turn such skepticism toward tools of genre and narrative. At every turn, Zero Patience defies expectations around where it might go as it seeks an elusive (and perhaps unknowable) answer to the nature of reality. So it only makes sense that Patient Zero should turn up as a ghost and make things all the more interesting. If nothing else, this is a fascinating artifact deserving of far more attention in the New Queer Cinema movement of the ‘90s.
I have two interviews for Slant Magazine this week for films opening today!
First, there’s Mohammad Rasoulof, the writer/director of The Seed of the Sacred Fig. This extraordinary thriller about an Iranian family crumbling along the same fault lines as the country is worth seeking out in a theater — you won’t find a more gripping third act in any film this year.
Second, there’s Justin Kuritzkes, screenwriter of Queer but also my beloved Challengers. It was fun getting to discuss the similarities I observed between the two projects he made with director Luca Guadagnino, even if I don’t feel much closer to having a handle on the film than I did in my rapid turnaround review for The Playlist out of Venice.
Also, here's a piece from the archives worth re-reading this week: Greta Gerwig’s ‘Lady Bird’ Deserves To Become Cinematic Thanksgiving Canon.
You can keep track of all the freelance writing I’ve done this year through this list on Letterboxd.
You can always keep up with my film-watching in real-time on the app Letterboxd. I’ve also compiled every movie I’ve ever recommended through this newsletter via a list on the platform as well.
The one track from Wicked movie I’ll be bumping:
The Wicked press tour gets a worthy sendoff from The Cut’s E.J. Dickson. I should have ranked this higher than #6 on my most anticipated press tours of 2024. They out-Gaga-ed the master this year.
Apart from its Ayo Edebiri erasure, this Nate Jones story for Vulture on our current Irish pop culture moment is wonderful.
Joe Reid may have topped himself with the Oscars alternate history by imagining what happened if Russell Crowe hadn’t won Best Actor for Gladiator.
Daniel Craig is thinking a lot about Chappell Roan if you even care.
Something Advent-ageous is coming for paid subscribers on Sunday.
Yours in service and cinema,
Marshall
You could potentially make that 2018 saw two musical Best Picture nominees with A Star is Born and — vomit — Bohemian Rhapsody. Neither even ran in the Musical/Comedy category at the Golden Globes, so I say it doesn’t count!