Soundtracking: The Best Musical Moments of 2019

by Chris Feil

Another year of Soundtracking has brought plenty of reflection on music in the movies. From more milquetoast musical biopics to studio musicals to pop songs reinvented through their placement into cinematic narratives, songs on film in 2019 were as ripe for dissection as ever. Let's discuss the best musical scenes of 2019.

Honorable Mentions:

- Cats' thesis: "A cat is NOT a dog, OKAY?!"

- Ash is Purest White making "YMCA" cool again

- MidSommar's creepy folk songs and Frankie Valli irony

- "Thunder Road" catharsis in Blinded By The Light

- Knives Out punctuating its middle finger finale with The Rolling Stones

- Joni Mitchell's "Blue" distilling The Last Black Man in San Francisco's melancholy...

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2019's Best Screen Animals

Different lists each for our "Year in Review"

We had hoped to put the entire cast of Cats on this list of the big screen's best animal characters but alas... very few of them are worthy to ascend to the Heaviside Layer let alone our year end list of the best big screen animals! This list is dedicated to bunnies as those beady-eyed cuties had a rough year at the movies. They were used solely for unsettling mood, multiplying sybolism and raw meat (gross) in Us and later popped up as an instrument of toxic masculine shaming in Jojo Rabbit. Bunnies deserve better in 2020! Which filmmaker will answer the call and treat them well onscreen?

Without further ado let's talk the screen animals we fell hardest for at the movies this year.  

11 Dumbo (elephant)
Here's the thing. Tim Burton and Screenwriters and (presumably) Disney corporate were so intent on expanding the movie (it's 48 minutes longer than the original Dumbo!) that it keeps pointing to everything but the star mutant attraction. Dumbo is as adorable as his ears are big but he's a supporting player in his own movie. They lost the thread or Dumbo could've topped the list.

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Seven Stocking Stuffers!

Our year in review continues. A new list daily.

MERRY CHRISTMAS, HAPPY HANUKKAH, HAPPY KWANZAA to our beloved readers! 

For this festive morning of gift-giving, here's a list of some treasures from this year's movies that would make some lucky recipient smile from ear to ear. Which of these 7 would you most want to kiss Santa Claus for stuffing in your stocking this morning? Do tell in the comments.

(We wanted to include JLo's Hustlers fur or Tom Mercier's mustard Synonyms coat but we've never seen a stocking big enough to include either so we decided clothing was not allowed for this particular list) 

• The 'Scholar's Rock' from Parasite. You'd have to be more careful with it than the Kims were but it did bring them sudden success as advertised. 

• A Sith wayfinder from Rise of Skywalker. They are very rare so they're valuable. Though why would you want to go to Exegol? What a (surreal) dump...  

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New Podcast: Us, Dumbo, The Beach Bum, and Gloria Bell

by Murtada Elfadl, Chris Feil, and Nathaniel R

 

Now that 2019 movies are more than underway, a new season of the Podcast is upon us! 

Index (55 minutes)
00:01 Julianne Moore is Gloria Bell
12:30 Jordan Peele's Us starring Lupita Nyong'o  [MAJOR SPOILERS]
33:30 Tim Burton's Dumbo
40:00 Randomness
42:50 Harmony Korine's The Beach Bum and Matthew McConaughey's strange year
52:00 Randomness

Supplemental Reading
• Film Comment Gloria Bell review
• Murtada's Beach Bum review
• Chris's Us review
• Jason's Serenity review
• Paulina García's great performance in the original Gloria

You can listen to the podcast here at the bottom of the post or download from iTunes. Continue the conversations in the comments, won't you? 

Gloria Bell, Us, Dumbo

Soundtracking: Gloria Bell

by Chris Feil

For everywoman Gloria Bell, you are what you listen to. In this retelling, as it was with his Chilean original starring Paulina García, Sebastián Lelio places his eponymous hero in a headspace where music is all around. This time it is Julianne Moore who frequents dance clubs with bisexual lighting and sings in her car as if no one is watching. But the film succeeds through the audience’s musical voyeurism of watching such vulnerable moments, all of them stitched together into the broader canvas that is her life.

Lelio curates a batch of upbeat standards of adult contemporary radio, many of them overly familiar but here they provide specific texture...

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