2024's Film Objects of Interest - Five Musical Moments (By Ciaran Duff)

Link to Ciaran's Substack! (@coduffwrites)

This series, Film Objects of Interest, is a project I’ve had on the back burner for a very long time. It comes from my difficulty forming opinions on whole films and tendency to focus on particularities. The artistry of numerous films goes unrecognized because popular criticism revolves around the work as a whole, rather than its many parts. Specific moments are what I’m here to write about. Individual scenes, esoteric performances, and theater experiences— there is much more to movies than the oversimplified picture of their entirety.  

This is a segment of Film Objects of Interest focusing on the objects of interest that caught my eyes and ears in 2024. As a musician and lover of music, I believe that musical moments, whether score, needle drops, or something else entirely, can bring great power to films. These are five musical moments of 2024 that impacted me greatly.

Anora - “Greatest Day” by Take That

Anora, winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes and my favorite of the Oscar Best Picture nominees, is a scoreless film, preferring to adhere to the ambiance of its many chaotic locations and diegetic music within them to move the movie forward. The film features “Greatest Day,” a song by Take That, twice, in probably the most euphoric needle drops of the year. The first comes during the opening credits as the camera dollies across the private rooms of a Manhattan strip club, HQ, eventually halting and focusing in on our heroine, Ani. The song reaches its chorus as the title card loudly announces the film’s subject, ANORA. It’s a tone-setter, and it begins the first act’s painting of Ani’s labor as a sex worker and struggle under the material conditions of capital, with the contrasting tone of a both joyous and optimistic EDM banger. The second instance is when Ani and Vanya get married, which seems, on first watch, to be the peak of the rising action of a fun comedy film—a film Anora proves quickly not to be. The highs brought by this track make the lows of the second half of the movie far more upsetting. The hedonic playfulness of the first act and the second act’s screwball pressure cooker comedy are both opened by “Greatest Day,” but, much like the song itself, the hype it brings is a veneer. Just as the rise of a pleasant, feel-good EDM song eventually reveals its plasticity, Anora reveals, underneath its Shakespearean high-wire act, a mundanity: the failure of capital and material conditions is not magical. Reality is not a Cinderella story or a tragedy. It's a Monday, and the market opens at 9.

Hundreds of Beavers - “Jean Kayak and His Acme Applejack” by Wayne Frank Tews & “Lubricator” by Frank McDonald

Hundreds of Beavers, which opens with three and a half minutes of musical exposition, in the form of a bluegrass fable, features one of my favorite scores of the year. “Jean Kayak and His Acme Applejack,” by Wayne Frank Tews and The Seafield Monster Quartet, serves as a perfect introduction to the zany tone, look, and feel of the movie. Incredibly, the song’s lyrics are some of the only words in a primarily silent movie, yet they still feel appropriate in context. And it has a reprise 40 minutes in, during the opening credits! The end credits track, “Lubricator” by Frank Macdonald and Chris Rae, is a cheap production music track used to pay homage to the ending of the 1985 Filipino action film, Blood Debts, and my favorite needle drop of the year. More is to be said about the last act of the film in a later installment of 2024’s Film Objects of Interest, but “Lubricator” is the perfect cherry on top of the movie.

Twisters - Score by Benjamin Wallfisch

Twisters was a huge surprise of the summer for me. I was expecting a fun time at the movies (which, to be clear, I got), but Lee Isaac Chung (Minari) left a shockingly profound mark on the film, making for a more humanistic and thoughtful film than I have come to expect from the modern blockbuster. I did not care much for the contemporary country music album featured in the film and written for it, as Twisters: The Album is a collection of almost comically generic pop country songs that directly spell out every beat of the movie to a ridiculous extent. I did, however, care for Benjamin Wallfisch’s score (who is also co-credited with Hans Zimmer on the score for Blade Runner 2049). Much of the score is a generic action movie score, with beats timed to the film and likely produced as an afterthought to temp music, but some of the touches mesh fantastically with the humanistic ruminations of Chung’s work. In particular, the piano motifs and soundscape surrounding the tracks “Nature’s Masterpiece” and “Kate’s Theme” bring a sense of wonder specific to the Lee Isaac Chung take on the film, producing an incredible, sweeping sensation.

The Brutalist - Score by Daniel Blumberg

The Brutalist, being the epic that it is, has an appropriately grand score from Daniel Blumberg, one that carries the weight of the 215-minute behemoth it's attached to as though it were an easy task. It’s filled with discordant tones and sweeping melodic lines from a uniform horn section, blending contemporary ideas with nostalgic motifs. The thing about watching The Brutalist in a theater that was so surprising for me is that it moves, in no small part due to the score layered under virtually every scene. Some tracks that stand out are the three-part overture that opens the film, setting the tone for a remarkably classical and yet wholly dissonant experience that suits the film very well, and the pre-intermission track, “Steel,” which effectively builds up to what is the apex of the film’s homeric spirit. The soundtrack also wastes no time with telling you where you can find songs from a scene in a film, as the track titles are hilariously literal to many of the actual scenes in the film (some of my favorites being “Jazz Club,” “Handjob,” and “Heroin”).

I Saw the TV Glow - “Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl” by yeule

I Saw The TV Glow is my favorite film of 2024. It’s an impressive sophomore dysphoria suicide horror feature (if there ever was one) from Jane Schoenbrun, one that aptly balances the intimacy and quietude of microbudget indie filmmaking and the scope of its character’s emotional turbulence. A similar balancing act is found in its soundtrack, an esoteric and diverse myriad of tracks, featuring music commissioned from Schoenbrun’s favorite artists. It would be foolish not to mention Alex G’s score, which is one of the best of the year, but unfortunately, not one I had much to say about, and Caroline Polacheck’s Starburned and Unkissed, which underscores one of the best scenes in the film. The first song on the soundtrack album, however, is the most impactful musical moment of the year for me. The opening sequence of the film, set to yeule’s “Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl,” is possibly the best marriage of picture and sound seen this decade. A cover of the 2002 Broken Social Scene song, yeule's version adds a texture and griminess to the already beautiful build of the song. To be clear, I’m not talking about the studio version of yeule’s cover, which is available on the album. If you watch the film, it is evident that the version of the song included is a distinct demo from the one you can stream. I find the film’s version to be far more impactful. The song builds, much like the Broken Social Scene version, from a solo acoustic guitar, with piano embellishments and electronic elements fading in. It’s a perfect introduction to the themes and visual language of the film, featuring kids playing in a pink, purple, blue, and white parachute. All the while, our protagonist disconnects from the world around him, losing himself in the media that speaks to him. Though it doesn’t make much narrative sense as a sequence, yeule’s growling yet comforting vocals and production are a perfect tone setter.