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    Are We in a New Golden Age for the Movie Soundtrack?

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    Between “Barbie,” “Across the Spider-Verse” and now “I Saw the TV Glow,” directors are making the case for the film album experience.After watching “I Saw the TV Glow,” the new film from the director Jane Schoenbrun, I felt a sensation I hadn’t felt in a while: I need this soundtrack.The genre-defying movie is a surreal story about two high schoolers in the 1990s who become obsessed with a “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”-like show called “The Pink Opaque.” It’s a rich film that draws on horror, ’90s television and Schoenbrun’s experience coming out as transgender. But it also boasts some incredible tunes, like a hypnotic cover of Broken Social Scene’s “Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl” by the artist yeule and performances from King Woman, Sloppy Jane and Phoebe Bridgers, who appear onscreen as musicians at a club the characters visit.The full soundtrack has more to love: The swelling emotion of Caroline Polachek’s “Starburned and Unkissed” and the throwback rock of Proper’s “The 90s,” with lyrics about the TV show “Xena: Warrior Princess.” Listening, I felt like a kid again.That was just Schoenbrun’s intention. The director thought the film needed a “great teen angst soundtrack.” But they were also nostalgic for the idea of soundtracks in general. They remembered thinking, “‘Wait, where did those go?’ You know, because the soundtracks of my youth were such a huge part of what brought me to movies,’” they said in a video call.Citing soundtrack “canon picks” like “Donnie Darko,” “The Royal Tenenbaums” and “Garden State,” which turns 20 this year, they admit these are “pretty obvious slash perhaps a little embarrassing” choices. I relate. I also had an iPod in the early 2000s filled with soundtracks, and one of the most frequently played was “Garden State.” The accompaniment to Zach Braff’s indie breakout — about a man in the midst of a quarter-life crisis who goes home for his mother’s funeral — was as much a cultural moment as the actual film, going platinum and elevating bands like Frou Frou and the Shins.Indeed, the beginning of the aughts felt like the last great heyday for the soundtrack. Think of the indie vibes of “Garden State,” the bluegrass foot-stompers of “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” or even the pop rock of “Shrek.” (If you want embarrassment, just ask me how much I loved that soundtrack.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Honey, I Blew Up the Family Film

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      What ever happened to the live-action adventures and G-rated titles adults and children could watch together in the theater?My son’s first movie was “La La Land,” which he watched strapped to my chest during a baby-friendly matinee in Brooklyn. He was 7 months old then, hungry and appropriately fussy, which means that I spent most of the movie standing at the back of the theater — nursing, jiggling, shushing — and that neither of us has seen “La La Land” all the way through. But you can’t say I didn’t start him early.For me, moviegoing is a pleasure learned in the 1980s from my own mother. She mostly took me to movies that she wanted to see — “Stranger Than Paradise,” “Heat and Dust.” That decade brought plenty of kid-centered blockbusters too: “E.T.,” “The Goonies,” “The Princess Bride.” Moviegoing is a habit I’ve hoped to instill in my own children. A theatrical experience insists that we all watch the same thing at the same time. At home, on movie night, I’m as likely to be dealing with the dishes or scrolling on my phone. In a theater, we share the experience. Also: popcorn.But as we’re not superhero fans (and unlike my mother, I balk at taking school-age kids to R-rated films), our moviegoing has been sporadic. Most months, there’s nothing we want to see in theaters. We’re not alone.In the spring, Matt Singer, the editor and critic at ScreenCrush.com, posted on Twitter, “As a parent of little kids it would be great if there was literally *any* movie in theaters right now I could take them to.” His choices at the time were “Shazam! Fury of the Gods,” a PG-13 sequel with a body count that would have terrified his 5-year-old, or “Puss in Boots: The Last Wish,” which had already been running for four months, mostly because exhibitors keen to attract a family audience had no other options.G-rated titles have largely disappeared. Even the Pixar film “Elemental” was rated PG.Disney/PixarNow, in August, there are a few more films in wide release. My kids, 7 and 10, recently saw “Elemental,” Pixar and Disney’s latest animated collab, with my mom. (Her tastes have mellowed.) Theaters are still showing the live-action remake of “The Little Mermaid” and the computer-animated “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse.” “Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken” seems to have come and gone more quickly, though it remains available on demand.David A. Gross, a film consultant who publishes a newsletter on box office numbers, estimates that family films will earn about $4.9 billion this year, commensurate, or nearly, with recent prepandemic totals. But there are only 12 major theatrical releases currently scheduled for the whole of 2023, about half as many as in 2019. And the lineup, which includes the current “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem” and the forthcoming “Paw Patrol: The Mighty Movie” and “Trolls Band Together,” is not particularly inspiring.“The companies aren’t in it for charity,” Gross said. “They’re going make movies that have an advantage.”Of these 12, a third could reasonably be called original: “Elemental,” “Ruby Gillman” and the forthcoming “Wish,” with Ariana DeBose voicing Disney’s latest animated heroine, and “Migration,” about a family of ducks written improbably by Mike White (“White Lotus”). The others all depend on pre-existing intellectual property — cartoons, video games, books. Many of these movies, though by no means all, have a lowest-common-denominator feel, testifying to conservatism among studios and a deficit of imagination and ambition.So what happened to the great family movie?Well, a lot of things. “It’s cultural, it’s technological, it’s financial, it’s sociological,” said Paul Dergarabedian, a senior analyst at Comscore, a media analytics company.“Wish,” from Disney,” is one of the few original films aimed at children this year.Walt Disney Animation StudiosWhile certain stressors on the family film predate 2020, the pandemic obviously compounded the current predicament: It disrupted the supply chain, pushed many families out of the moviegoing groove and diverted quality releases to streaming services. Of the major genres, the family film has been the slowest to rebound theatrically, which has made studios reluctant to take chances on a wide release for riskier material.“Right now, the question is what does it take to get any movie in the theater that isn’t giant branded I.P.,” said Nina Jacobson, a producer and a past president of the Buena Vista Motion Pictures Group, a studio in the Walt Disney Company. The theatrical marketplace, she suggested, has largely stopped taking those chances, creating a closed loop. “If you don’t give people anything to go to see other than Marvel movies, then you can say only Marvel movies work,” Jacobson said.But family films have been undergoing a shift that predates both 2020 and Marvel dominance. The G rating, a stalwart of the films of my childhood, has nearly disappeared, a corollary to the reluctance of producers of family films to admit that they’re meant for families.“My entire career, there has been a shortage of movies that the youngest kids can see in the theater,” said Betsy Bozdech, an editorial director at Commonsense Media, a site that rates and reviews media aimed at children. “The G rating basically doesn’t exist anymore.” This year, we will probably see no full-length G-rated movies. (Even the “Paw Patrol” sequel is PG.) Only a decade ago, there were 18. In 2003? More than 30.The dearth of family films is also a function of the much chronicled demise of midbudget movies — including ones that Jacobson oversaw, like “Freaky Friday” and “The Princess Diaries.” Midbudget movies don’t have to work as hard to earn back their investment and they can afford to appeal to a narrower tranche of the moviegoing public, meaning the releases can be more particular in tone and style.Since the turn of the millennium, there has been a related move away from live-action theatrical family films and toward animation. What live action there is, as in the case of Disney’s high-grossing remakes, often relies on so many computer-generated effects that it doesn’t seem live at all. (Compare the recent, dutiful live action “Beauty and the Beast,” with 1989’s delightful “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids” or 1991’s delirious “Hook.”) These movies can still delight and make meaning, as with the ecstatic kid reactions to Halle Bailey’s Little Mermaid. But there’s particular wonder and possibility in seeing characters who look like you or behave like you onscreen, in real-world or real-world adjacent situations.“To see a young lead in a movie who you identify with, to see a story with you in mind, to see that you matter in that storytelling as a young person, those are movies that you hold onto,” Jacobson said.No one has to go to the movies anymore. Wait a month or two or six and you can see these same films from the comfort of your couch. And quality may not even matter absolutely. Certainly there are days — rainy or too hot — when the temptation of a climate-controlled seat and Raisinets suffices, no matter the movie on offer.But if we want movie theaters to survive, that will mean building the moviegoing habit in children, which means giving them an experience, beyond the candy counter, that keeps them coming back. A third “Trolls” movie may not offer that. Instead studios will need to get comfortable with some risk and some trust, making movies for children that don’t talk down to them.“Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio,” a Netflix movie, shows that auteurs are still interested in making films for young viewers.Netflix, via Associated Press“Kids are more sophisticated and have the emotional capacity to be able to absorb things that traditional Hollywood doesn’t think they can absorb,” said Todd Lieberman, a producer whose coming-of-age World War II tale, “White Bird: A Wonder Story,” will be released later this year.We can’t expect an “E.T.” every year, or even movies commensurate with the gems I recall from my youth: Agnieszka Holland’s “The Secret Garden,” Alfonso Cuarón’s “A Little Princess,” John Sayles’s “The Secret of Roan Inish.” But we should expect better. And better remains possible.Prestige directors are still interested in family movies — see “Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio,” Greta Gerwig’s “Little Women” and planned Narnia movies. And have you seen the “Paddington” movies? Perfection. So it doesn’t seem unreasonable to imagine a future in which there are more and finer children’s movies in theaters, ones that send you back out into the light blinking and amazed. As an adult moviegoer, I often feel spoiled for choice. If we want children to return as adults, we should spoil them, too.“Give people great original family content and they will show up,” Jacobson said. “But it’s on us to give it to them.” More

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      When Spider-Man Met Jeff Koons

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      Our critic spots references to Hilma af Klint and Lichtenstein in “Across the Spider-Verse.” Koons, who inspired the film’s creative team, gets top billing with an animated survey (before his work is destroyed).“Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse,” the sequel to the 2018 reimagining of the arachnid-adolescent superhero, doubles down on the first installment with an inventive and magpie visual style. The result is, at least in part, a crash course in art history (literally so, as characters frequently crash into works of art).While the film is largely rendered in computer-generated animation that speeds by at a dizzying clip, there are moments of slowed, even stunning beauty: backgrounds dissolving with painterly effect, shifting into emotive abstraction reminiscent of, at turns, the work of Kandinsky, Mondrian and Hilma af Klint. New York’s cityscape is softened into brushy, Impressionistic swaths. Ben-Day dots stutter across the screen, a nod to the story’s comic book source material, but also calling up Roy Lichtenstein’s appropriations of the same.Justin K. Thompson, a director of the film, said the collision of techniques and applications was deliberate. “We wanted to emulate dry brush, watercolor, acrylic,” he said. “I looked a lot at the work of Paul Klee, the work of Lyonel Feininger.” The experimental films of John Whitney, a pioneer of computer animation, were another inspiration.There are also a number of more direct allusions to contemporary art. An early set piece in the Guggenheim Museum’s Frank Lloyd Wright building allowed the filmmakers gleeful abandon. A version of the perennial Spider-Man villain Vulture that appears as if lifted from a Leonardo da Vinci parchment drawing tumbles through the museum’s rotunda, wielding weapons inspired by da Vinci’s fanciful and terrifying inventions and causing havoc in what quickly appears to be a Jeff Koons retrospective. The fight scene deploys several of Koons’s sculptures of inflatable toys, like “Lobster” (2003) and “Dolphin” (2002), hurled as projectiles. Naturally, a Koons Balloon Dog, his most readily recognizable work, receives top billing.The scene’s version of Vulture, grappling here with one of the multiverse’s many Spider-Men, appears as if lifted out of a Leonardo da Vinci drawing.Sony Pictures Animation“When we talked about the Balloon Dog we said, ‘What could we do with it? What would be special?’” Thompson told me. Koons, he recalled, “was actually the one who said, ‘You know, one thing about the Balloon Dog is it’s this thing that has a lot to do with breath. It’s filled with human breath. But we’ve never actually seen the inside of one. What if we cut one open and we could see what was inside?’ And we just kind of looked at each other, like, ‘But what’s inside?’ And he said, ‘Whatever you want.’”What’s inside ended up being a sight gag that follows after Vulture lops off the head of a 12-foot-tall Balloon Dog, from which spill countless smaller Balloon Dog sculptures, satisfying the nagging suspicion that Koons’s outsize works are in fact elaborate piñatas. (The scene brought to mind an episode earlier this year, where a collector visiting the Art Wynwood fair in Miami accidentally shattered a 16-inch edition. The film was already well through production.)“It was moving to me,” Koons said on a phone call from Hydra, Greece, “because I always thought of the Balloon Dog as kind of a ritualistic work, something that could have a mythic quality to it, a little bit like a Trojan horse or Venus of Willendorf, where there would be some form of tribal community.” (His own balloon Venus did not seem to make the final cut.) Koons considered the Balloon Dog’s presence in the film as “truly participating in a larger community where people can rally around it.”Spider-Woman joining the fray during the Guggenheim battle. In our own universe, the Jeff Koons retrospective took place at the Whitney.Sony Pictures AnimationThe scene, which also features several of Koons’s earlier, stranger and less exposed works, like the polychromed wood sculpture “String of Puppies” (1988), from the “Banality” series, the stainless steel bust “Louis XIV” (1986), and several of his 1980s vacuum cleaner assemblages, is a homage to an artist who served as the original, if indirect, influence for the first “Spider-Verse” film’s direction. In 2014, while still in an early conceptual phase and at an impasse as to how to create a kind of postmodern version of the deathless hero, Phil Lord, a co-writer of the screenplay, and Christopher Miller, a producer, visited the Koons retrospective at the Whitney Museum. Lord has said the exhibition crystallized their thinking.“You could look at ‘The New,’ ‘Equilibrium,’ ‘Luxury & Degradation,’ ‘Antiquity,’ ‘Hulk Elvis,’ all different bodies of work that possibly seem like this kind of multiverse,” Koons offered. “Where you could have things existing at the same time but in different ways.”Whether the deep dive into Koons’s oeuvre resonates with casual viewers is another story. As the plot swings between slightly overbearing teen angst and extrapolations into quantum physics — itself an extended metaphor for the angst-inducing, open-ended possibilities of adolescence — the art in-jokes feel like a concession to adult aesthetes. (“I think it’s a Banksy” is a one-liner recycled from the first film, referring to something that looks nothing like a Banksy. Everyone laughed at the joke at the Upper West Side screening I attended, but not at the Koons stuff.)Spider-Man and Spider-Woman in a quiet moment. The film’s animated images often speed by at a dizzying clip.Sony Pictures AnimationThe idea that, in an alternative universe, Jeff Koons’s career booster took place at the Guggenheim instead of the Whitney is perhaps the most in-joke of them all, something even seasoned art-world insiders might not have fully appreciated. “There was a discussion for many years that I would have my retrospective at the Guggenheim — it never happened,” Koons told me. “So it was wonderful to see.”For his part, Koons gushed about the result: “I think the film is really astonishing, and I think culturally it’s playing a very important role for a whole generation of young people to inform them about the possibilities of perception.” He went on to say, “I never had seen richer colors — the reds are phenomenal!” Koons was born in ’55 and grew up on Disney. “There was a certain point in the ’70s maybe where we saw animation fall off,” he said, “and then with Pixar we saw this tremendous leap forward. The film uses that technology as a base but brings back a texture, really the texture of the senses. I mean, it’s like the way we perceive a Rembrandt or a Titian.”Asked if he was at all disturbed by seeing representations of his work obliterated by animated superheroes, Koons responded with Zen Buddhist diplomacy. “I care very much about the world. I care about living. I care about existence,” he said. “Everything turns to dust. The world around us turns to dust, universes turn to dust. What’s important is how we can enjoy the world that we’re in, and be able to have the perception of what our future can be. As an artist, it’s nice to feel in some way that the fine arts are able to participate within culture.” More

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      ‘Canon Event’ TikToks Use a ‘Spider-Verse’ Phrase That Almost Didn’t Make the Film

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      The “canon event” videos play on the film’s idea of certain events in life being immutable. But the directors nearly went a different way with the concept.In one video, an older brother watches with dread as his younger brother gets a perm. In another, a girl agonizes while her 10-year-old sister buys a maroon lifeguard hoodie.“I can’t interfere, it’s a canon event,” read the captions on the videos, as an ominous audio clip plays in the background.Those TikToks, a mixture of concern and schadenfreude, are a few of the thousands of videos powering a trend that has catapulted a new phrase into the pop culture lexicon: the “canon event,” a pivotal moment that must happen in order for people to mature into their future selves. It’s a concept that draws on the music and plot of the animated blockbuster “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse.” But that language almost didn’t make it into the film.“A canon event is something that’s unfortunate at the time it happens, that turns out to have happened for a reason,” said John Casterline, a 19-year-old creator who has three and a half million followers on TikTok.

      @h1t1 character development ♬ Libets Delay by The Caretaker – Alt Tik Tok Sounds The videos play with this concept by spotlighting those disappointing, mortifying or simply weird moments that we wish we could change: breaking up with a high school sweetheart, getting kicked out of a friend group, adopting an embarrassing hairstyle.Choosing to see these events as immutable canon and posting about them on TikTok is a form of group catharsis — a recognition that it’s precisely because of those moments that we’ve become who we are today.“Since you get to know that people have this shared cringey, awkward experience, you don’t feel alone,” said Josh Referente, a 20-year-old creator on TikTok who has more than one million followers and who has posted several canon event videos. “It helps you process it a lot better. It was a step in your life that helps you move toward the right direction.”The phrase “canon event” isn’t entirely new — in comics culture and superhero fandom, canon has long meant those elements of a character’s story that are part of a shared fictional universe.But the phrase was popularized by “Across the Spider-Verse,” which has topped $600 million at the box office worldwide. In the film, Miles Morales travels to a universe full of other Spider-People and learns that each one is destined for a series of “canon events,” including the loss of a parental figure and the death of a police captain. To interfere with any of these canon events is to invite the destruction of the entire multiverse.

      @itsteresasong its me, im the girl #canonevent #toweltime ♬ Spider-Man 2099 (Miguel O’Hara) – Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse – Daniel Pemberton Originally, the film wasn’t going to include any mention of a canon event, Kemp Powers, one of the film’s three directors, said in an interview. The team had settled on “convergence event,” but that term confused the early focus groups who saw the movie, so they switched to canon instead.“One of the funny things about it is the whole idea of the canon event was something that we were worried people weren’t going to understand right till the last minute,” Powers said. “So the fact that not only did they understand this concept but that it took on a life of its own, I thought was really entertaining.”Powers, who does not have a TikTok account, said that for a while he didn’t know social media was running with the concept. After the film’s release, he was sitting in Los Angeles International Airport when he heard two people cracking jokes about canon events.“And I’m like, ‘That can’t be about our movie.’ You know what I mean? I was just like, that’s weird,” he said.But soon friends and even his two children started sending him TikToks.

      @benesherick You must let it happen, it is a Canon Event🗣️ #Inverted ♬ blue hair – 𓆩❤︎𓆪 “If you’re so lucky to put something out in the world that connects to people, it’s a reminder that it immediately doesn’t belong to you anymore,” he said. “You have no idea what they’re going to do with it.”The canon event videos follow a specific formula. They feature a scene or a caption that captures an awkward or regrettable real-life moment accompanied by a snippet from a portion of the score, “Spider-Man 2099 (Miguel O’Hara),” and include the parenthetical phrase: “It’s a canon event. I can’t interfere.”The score was composed by Daniel Pemberton, who said that segment was the product of a synthesizer being run through a variety of algorithms to end up with a “punchline” bit of audio.He said he faced his own canon events while composing the music.“I had to fail a lot within this score with ideas that didn’t work until I found ideas that really did,” he said.For Pemberton, it’s natural that the idea of a canon event has resonated with so many people.“I don’t really do a lot of social media but I think there has always been a projection of unattainable or unrealistic lifestyle that I found quite toxic, and the thing I like about canon event is, it’s giving people a bit more ownership over the truth of their lives,” he said. More