The highs and lows of the new movie musical boom
It’s a time of plenty for movie musicals, with Steven Spielberg and Tony Kushner’s take on “West Side Story,” Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “Tick, Tick ... Boom!” and the anticipated performance of Peter Dinklage in “Cyrano” arriving before the end of the year. Also coming: the animated musicals “Encanto” from Disney and Universal’s “Sing 2.” Who better than film critic Justin Chang and theater critic Charles McNulty to explore what this abundance says about the state of the movie musical?
CHARLES McNULTY: The movie musical seems to be making another of its perennial comebacks. I’m wondering if there’s anything different about this recent resurgence. I finally caught up with Leos Carax’s “Annette,” which you proposed might be seen as a “corrosive remake of that much sunnier showbiz romance, ‘La La Land.’” Although darker and more febrile, “Annette” does seem indebted to the dreamlike fluidity of Damien Chazelle’s 2016 blockbuster. Has space opened for more maverick sensibilities?
JUSTIN CHANG: I certainly hope so, Charlie, though there are maverick sensibilities and then there is Carax’s sensibility, which feels like it’s on another planet. It’s a funny thing about “Annette”: Just about every person I know who disliked it — and I know many! — also couldn’t help but express a measure of gratitude for its existence. There are certainly a lot of reasons why Carax’s movie might not work for a viewer: its narrative longueurs; its bitter, tortured emotions; its songs by Ron and Russell Mael, which many found too repetitive (they are, although I also found the best of them irresistibly catchy). As a doomed showbiz romance set in a curdled fairy-tale vision of Los Angeles, it really is a kind of anti-“La La Land,” which is to say an anti-crowdpleaser. And love it or hate it, that runs
