Soundtracking: "Hearts Beat Loud"

by Chris Feil

Brett Haley is quietly becoming the American independent counterpart to Once and Sing Street’s John Carney, crafting happy-sad narratives with music as a key ingredient. With music partner Keegan DeWitt, Haley’s films feature characters at the end of their performance days taking one renewed grasp toward fulfillment. His newest film Hearts Beat Loud is the most addictively musical, and like his I’ll See You in My Dreams before it, its songs come straight from the heart.

Loud is the story of Frank and Sam Fisher, played by Nick Offerman and Kiersey Clemons, a father-daughter pair preparing for imminent college bicoastal separation. Frank is a failed musician and now record store owner, forever pushing the gifted Sam towards a music collaboration she perpetually resists...

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Soundtracking: "Wall-E"

by Chris Feil

It’s a rare thing for a Disney film to borrow music for a film rather than provide original material, but Pixar’s Wall-E is an even rarer brand of masterpiece. Today, on its tenth anniversary, it is still as sublime an experience for the senses as it ever was.

When the film opens with a musical theatre classic, we are told instantly that we are in for a different kind of science fiction world view. Its nearly dialogue free visual storytelling has been rightly lauded, detailing the a polluted post-evacuation earth through the robots left behind. But one crucial and charming aspect to the silent love story it tells is how swiftly it reveals character through its needle drops...

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Soundtracking: "The Lion King"

by Chris Feil

When The Lion King arrived in 1994, it felt like the first Disney film fully developed in its post-Little Mermaid resurrected era. Whereas the genius of Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin feel like passion projects born of new financial fluidity, this film rings like a triumphant self-actualization of its return to dominance. It’s right there in the in the rising sun and thunderous opening incantation of “Circle of Life” - Disney reclaiming with force what they had lost and owning the cyclical nature of creative power.

It’s arresting stuff on a meta level, but that’s still incomparable to the song’s visceral gut level impact. Paired with the imagery of a convening animal kingdom both too fantastical to be true and rendered with breathtaking reality, “Circle of Life” feels so monumental that even immersive IMAX screens and sound systems can’t do its scale justice...

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Soundtracking: "Love, Simon"

by Chris Feil

Love, Simon is chasing the ghost of John Hughes, a brand of uplift where teen woes are packaged conventionally and without condescension for maximum warm fuzzies. Naturally that package must include an anthemic sound, music that connects with the generation it depicts and becomes part of the fabric of what we remember about the film. But if Love, Simon is supposed to be a gay alternative on Hughesian comedy, does the sound also have its gay twist?

Simon’s signature sound comes from Jack Antonoff and his band Bleachers, bookending the film. Instead of the singular force of Simple Minds’ “Don’t You Forget About Me” as Hughes employed in The Breakfast Club, it’s more like the film uses Antonoff as the artist to hang its headphones on instead of one song. He’s a straight musician, but Bleachers is fairly embraced by the queer teen set - at least the kind that the film depicts. Though in an age where Troye Sivan can produce hit bops about bottoming, is that really enough for the film to define itself musically?

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Soundtracking: "Muriel's Wedding"

by Chris Feil

It’s a sad truth that the closest thing we’ve gotten to Toni Collette starring in a screen musical is Muriel’s Wedding (and Connie and Carla, but that's for another day). The forgotten half-truth is that it isn’t the only screen ABBA musical. Sure, Mamma Mia! actually features full blown singing and dancing, but just because Muriel’s Wedding’s musicality exists in the daydreaming of its heroine, that doesn’t mean we’re spared the delights of a slew ABBA’s biggest hits. But the tunes are so crucial to the film’s identity and omnipresent throughout that it’s a huge missed opportunity that Muriel’s inevitable stage adaptation will never be the ABBA jukebox musical that could have been.

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