My final musical moment from the films of 2023 comes from another movie I’ll discuss in more detail in coming weeks. This one is writer-director Ti West’s X, a slasher film set in 1979 and following a small crew filming an adult film on a secluded farm.
This scene comes about halfway through the film when one of the actresses, Bobby-Lynne (a delightful Brittany Snow), sings Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Landslide’ while the group is hanging out in their cabin.
[WARNING: This post contains major spoilers for the movie Aftersun. If you plan to see the movie, I recommend doing so before reading this.]
As with several of the movies I’ve featured this week, I will be writing more about this one when I get to my top ten list, so I won’t go into too much detail here. But given that the scene in question comes in the film’s very final moments, it’s difficult to share it without exploring the movie’s plot and themes.
I wonder what the odds were of two of my favorite musical movie moments in 2022 coming from Jenny Slate. Slate is a brilliant comedic and dramatic actress whose work I’ve loved for years but I never knew she had the power to profoundly move me with her singing voice.
Today’s song comes from the movie I liked least among this week’s musical selections, but it may well be the scene I loved most. It appears in the forgettable romantic comedy I Want You Back, which features Slate and Charlie Day as new friends who bond over being dumped and vow to help each other win back their exes.
It’s not often that a movie uses one of my favorite songs in one of its most emotional scenes, so when it happens you can be damn sure it’s going to end up on this list.
Such was the case in the delightfully funny and bittersweet Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, a feature length movie inspired by a series of YouTube shorts by writer/star Jenny Slate and writer/director Dean Fleischer Camp. This is another movie that will come up again soon so I won’t spend too much time on it here.
No rundown of 2022’s best musical moments would be complete without a shout-out to likely Best Song winner ‘Naatu Naatu.’ This ecstatic dance number is a highlight of director S. S. Rajamouli’s historic drama/action epic RRR.
I’ll have more to say about RRR in the coming weeks, but for now I’ll just marvel at the Indian tradition of dropping elaborate song-and-dance routines in the middle of just about any movie. That demolishing of genre lines makes for such an unpredictable moviegoing adventure.
Meet Me In Montauk 