The Color Purple, Wonka, The Hunger Games.

In Slate Annual Cinema club, film critic Dana Stevens emails with fellow critics—for 2023, Bilge Ebiri, Esther Zuckerman, and Mark Harris—about the year in cinema. Sometimes, other critics interrupt. Read the first entry here.

It’s time for me to be the hero Gotham needs and boycott this movie club!

It’s comforting to hear a handful of film critics I respect say they’re actually optimistic about the future of movies and going to the movies, but what astounds me is that someone has yet to pinpoint one of the main reasons for this mass return to theaters. The Movie™ may or may not be back, but Musical movie certainly! Quite a few of the most anticipated and most successful films of the year are musicals, but strangely enough, the marketers behind these films have tried to hide their musical nature from potential audiences so that tickets are bought and butts are in seats. This wasn’t just the year of music, it was the year of… stealthily music.

Of course, the year’s two most hidden musicals are two of the biggest films of December, Wonka And Violet. VioletThe initial trailer for the film has a lot of people wondering why the Hollywood gods were giving us yet another adaptation of Alice Walker’s classic 1982 novel, when no less a director than Steven Spielberg first directed it in 1985, and was nominated for 11 Oscars in the process. . I mean it’s not like Violet It is the hottest IP around! Interested parties who dig a little deeper will realize that Blitz Bazawule is the one to take over Violet It is actually a screen adaptation of the 2005 Tony Award-winning Broadway musical. Likewise, fans of Timothée Chalamet may have been excited about the lover who portrays the most famous chocolatier in the literary canon, wonka, In the movie From the Mind Behind the Lover Paddington films. But they won’t know who WonkaPromotional materials Greta Gerwig’s muse will give us a bit of a tune and a change of ball amid his confectionary shenanigans.

However, the hidden music of 2023 actually exists beyond the films We are Entire musicals, but for some reason, I don’t want the ticket buyer to know. The term also includes films that are considered musicals this year but pretend to be different. I’ve already broken down Slate’s film on how much of an action movie it is on the surface Song of songbirds and snakes It sure has a lot of singing in it! The music, written by Grammy Award-winning Americana and country artist Dave Cobb, is as important to the film’s critique of spectacle as the action scenes. You can convince yourself you were there for the Hunger Games mayhem, romantic tension, or world-building all you want — you and I both know you were more involved in the events of Panem when Rachel Ziegler was loudly singing “The Old Before.”

Still not convinced? The hidden music doesn’t stop there. Esther has already pointed it out correctly Barbie“Musical numbers that sound like they were dropped from the 1950s.” Yes! Dua Lipa gets the puppet and lends her voice to an early dance number, while Ryan Gosling steals the show with the sweeping, Grammy-nominated song-and-dance “I’m Just Ken,” complete with a slew of Ken’s background music. Animatedly confronted in its appropriate turf war fat or West Side Story. Then there’s Dana’s top ten pick Theater camp. The brainchild of some true music lovers, including Evan Hansen himself, Ben Platt, Theater camp He delighted the theater kids of the world with his hilarious mockumentary about the battle for the soul of a theater camp in upstate New York. The undisputed climax of the film is the cast of child actors who master the beautiful, distorted final performance of “Joan, Still.”

Hollywood may have fooled the musical aversion to sitting through two-plus hours of catchy harmonies, chases and hooks, but no one minded! In fact, 2023 has proven that we probably all want a little song and dance with melodrama and existential crises, even if we don’t know we do. And this trend shows no sign of stopping, with another very disturbing and confusing trailer for the January adaptation I mean girls (The Musical) – Thank God for that.

musically justified,

Rare