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.
My next musical moment from a 2022 film comes from Matilda the Musical, Netflix’s adaptation of the hit Broadway show.
I’ve never seen the stage show and I’m only passingly familiar with the beloved Danny DeVito-directed original film (let alone the Roald Dahl book), so this was my first real exposure to this story. I ended up liking it quite a bit.
I interrupt your normally scheduled Random Weekend for a couple of bonus movie posts.
My initial plan was to spend next week featuring five of my favorite musical moments from last year’s films. I culled the list down to seven but was having trouble deciding which to cut. Then it occurred to me that nobody is forcing me to constrain these posts to the weekdays.
So I’m starting my music moments early.
By the end of the month I won’t have named every 2022 movie I watched, but I’ll have come pretty damn close.
This week I’ve covered horror, international, animation, and the movies in my 11-40. A week from now I’ll count down my top ten. So that leaves the movies on the bottom half of my 2022 list.
I won’t list or comment on all of them, but I will call out movies from three categories: Perfectly Fine Romantic Comedies, Middling Superhero Sagas, and Disappointing Efforts by Notable Directors.
Meet Me In Montauk 