Another year, another round, and we are back to recount the best in music and film of 2023!
Ultimately, I saw even fewer new movies this year than I used to, but somehow, the average quality of what I did manage to see seemed especially high. Despite the strike and all the failures and struggles and just plain idiocy infecting the film industry, it was still a damn good year at the movies, with a bevy of masterpieces that featured some of the best film music I've ever heard. This year's lists are especially meaningful to me, so let's start it off right with the best in film music!
7. John Wick 4 (Tyler Bates & John Richard)
The John Wick franchise, one of the best original IPs to come out of the past decade, came to a fittingly grand conclusion before a hilariously empty Sacre Coeur. While I will need to revisit the series once more to decide where each of the films hold up individually in my mind, the score for this final chapter was easily the best of the series to date. I know there are spinoffs and future installments planned, but much like Endgame, this was the organic spiritual end the franchise needed, and I will leave it at that.
6. Suzume (Radwimps & Kazuma Jinnouchi)
Your Name remains the peak of both Makoto Shinkai and Radwimps' film work, but Suzume is the closest they've managed to come to achieving that sort of emotional height, easily surpassing their interim film, Weathering With You. A great set of music for an excellent adventure-fantasy story about time, loss, and the beauty of first love.
5. Godzilla Minus One (Naoki Sato)
So few of us saw this one coming, a powerful, creative, and gripping re-emergence of the Godzilla franchise from the doldrums of its American adaptations. Even better, it brought a smashing and raucous score along with it, the perfect accompaniment to a damn-near perfect film. The film didn't miss a beat, and neither did the music.
4. Past Lives (Christopher Bear & Daniel Rossen)
The production of the music for this deceptively powerful Korean-American drama mirrored the story of the film as well, with distance playing a key role in forming the musical themes of the film and how they interact over the course of an amazing story about how time and chances taken or missed shape the curvature of our selves. This is one of the year's best listens even when divorced from the film it was made for.
3. The Boy and the Heron (Joe Hisaishi)
While his work on the latest Miyazaki might not be as instantly iconic as the top, top tier of his discography, Hisaishi's score for The Boy and the Heron nonetheless builds itself up in a way that I found quite powerful and affecting. The main piano theme is simple and effective, and even the "big" moments from the orchestra are not as grand-sounding or bombastic as some of Hisaishi's previous highlights. All that is to the film's benefit; both it and the music are works that thrive on just being themselves and denying the expectations or overhype that would otherwise threaten to sink a new work by old masters like these.
2. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (Daniel Pemberton)
The first Spider-Verse movie was, to put it bluntly, perfect, as was Pemberton's soundtrack. And this year they came back and did it again, better than before. I will gush more about the film in my next post. As far as the music is concerned, there are so many wonderful moments where original themes are brought back and re-worked into the new score, while still making room for new additions. Gwen's theme is a fucking banger, and Miguel O'Hara gets the year's single best musical motif for a villain. And the main musical theme for the broader and seemingly limitless Spider-Verse the movies are building out gets the same treatment as the franchise as a whole, made bigger, bolder, better, more exciting. I adore this franchise, and I am praying, PRAYING, that the creators get the message and let the foot off the gas enough for the creative teams building these wonderful creations to have the proper time and energy to give Miles' story the sendoff it deserves.
1. Oppenheimer (Ludwig Göransson)
Göransson is That Dude, there's just no denying it. As fantastic as his work with Ryan Coogler has been- Black Panther remains the single greatest original soundtrack to come out of the entire MCU- he finds a whole other level in Nolan's latest, and arguably, greatest, film to date. The very idea of using the musical motifs themselves, especially the violin theme for Oppenheimer, and breaking them down- making them more violent, clashing, dissonant- as a way to mirror the chaos and unpredictability of the quantum world the rise of the atomic age centers around is an absolutely brilliant concept. Simple to conceive, perhaps, but unimaginably tricky to pull off in practice, and he does here. My personal favorite track is „Destroyer of Worlds“, laid over the haunting visuals of the final scene where a world is imagined to collapse into fire and ash, as a pulse of music builds in its frantic energy. The track is a major reason why this was, for my money, the single greatest concluding scene in any film of 2023.
-Noah
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