In The Heights (2021 musical film by Lin-Manuel Miranda)

My wife and I saw an early screening of this film, at the "IMAX" theater at AMC's Town Center 20. (IMAX in quotes because it's a 4K projection with a single projector.)

I'd never seen the Broadway musical, only seen a handful of them, but this was funny, sweet and moving. Miranda has a real gift for creating memorable melodies,

 

It was a little surprising that we saw a free advanced screening, but didn't receive any questionnaires. Normally, they supply a page of questions including whether or not we would recommend this to someone else.

 

I can't stand Miranda, but this is the one good thing he's done; sort of his Sondheim on West Side Story moment, with all the rest a slow slide into overhyped mediocrity.

 

What has he done besides this and Hamilton?

I don't follow Broadway in the slightest, because I don't live in New York, and I don't have giant piles of money to see even the touring shows.

 

Not much, but a bunch of mediocre Disney stuff.

ITH was his flash in the pan, and Hamilton garbage save for a couple of songs.

 

...which must have been why it was the hottest ticket on Broadway.

 

People are astonishingly stupid/sheepish/easily led, and that includes the Pulitzer folks; they get it right about once every dozen tries or so; ITH more deserving, but still pretty weak in comparison to, say, Natural Death, The Wiz or West Side Story.

If you've seen the movie/show The Producers, that's Hamilton, but dripping with unintended irony & insult; many Black intellectuals rightfully despise it.

But people, in general, are idiots, yes.

 

He wrote a lot of the music for Moana, which I love. He has not really been very prolific. I wish he would do more. I saw Hamilton (the filmed version, on Disney+) and thought it was incredibly great. I heard his next project is as a director, so who knows, maybe he is tapped out as a musical writer. I am very, very much looking forward to seeing In the Heights - the trailer looks great!

 

My nephew got to play the role of Usnavy in both high school and an amateur production. He got to meet Lin (before Hamilton fame ) at one of the shows -he was very nice and complimentary towards my nephew. The show is a lot fun -hopefully the movie captures this.

 

His career hit a bump after he challenged Shoes1916's brother to a dual.

 

Brother from another mother.

 

Just came from a showing of "In the Heights" at a movie theater- the first time I've been inside a real movie theater in 15 months or so.

Thought the film was absolutely spectacular, one of the best 'movie musicals' I've ever seen, brimming with life, energy, and incredibly vibrant and effective staging, choreography, cinematography. The songs as standalone songs are probably not hugely memorable (they showed a preview for the Spielberg 'west side story' and i still cant get some of those west side story melodies out of my head) but that's really not as big a problem as it sounds- the story, acting, and the rest are all so effective that its really really well done. And in a way, the music supports the action more this way, if that makes any sense. Can't recommend it highly enough!

and to make the experience even more sweet, one of the cast members (not one of the main leads, tho.. more of a cameo- it was the person speaking to the crowd at the political rally in the film) was in the theater with us seeing the movie!!!

and for the record, I saw both the filmed version of 'hamilton' and the actual original broadway production ,with the original cast- great stuff too, you can tell a lot of similar ideas in both hamilton and in the heights in the way the characters were developed, music developod, etc-- and there's a great 'easter egg' little music-on-the-phone moment in the movie of 'in the heights' that's a shout out to hamilton, too!

(and there are three hamilton cast members in the 'in the heights' cast, as well!)

 

We're going back to see it again in about 30 minutes, in Dolby Cinema.

Thank you AMC A*List!

I do plan to get one of the open caption units from the customer service desk so I can follow all the lyrics.

 

He also translated some Sondheim lyrics into Spanish for a revival of "West Side Story" which I saw back in 2009-it was interesting but didn't really work-

I like "Hamilton" a lot but was a bit disappointed in "In the Heights" after watching the film version on HBOMax last night. The story seemed kind of unfocused to me and wasn't really sure where its head was at in terms of its larger message and themes. A lot of the performances were good but there were a lot of plot points that went unresolved. I'll bet it worked a lot better on stage.

 

From what I understand, they really trimmed the story down, eliminating characters and even songs. That said, I thought it worked perfectly well.

 

I never saw the full-scale Broadway production but did see a small student-type production of it about six years ago. As I remember, yes, the songs were longer and more involved in the stage production, and I think some of the dialogue was changed or edited. (and the DACA subplot might not have been the same in the original, perhaps?) But this movie is so cinematic, its not 'stagey' at all, as sometimes things adapted from the stage can be.

 

Just got out of our second viewing.

It's worth the premium for Dolby Digital with its improved sound system and extended dynamic range.

 

My wife and I loved the movie, but she (a Broadway/musical devotee) explained to me how much of the plot of In the Heights was changed for the film- a considerable amount. One major difference is the identity of the winner of the lottery ticket. In the stage version, you learn who won right at the start, there is no mystery, and what the winner does with the money informs the rest of the musical.

This was changed for the movie, and it creates some confusion, we thought. She also explained other changes, some of them pretty significant. We still loved the movie, though. The pool sequence, which wasn’t in the staged version, is spectacular.

 

I did get the open caption unit, and followed all the lyrics. So now that I fully understand everything that was said or sung in the film, I can see the third time in the next few weeks, and will really be able to just wallow in the film.

 

Yes. I was just about to comment how the song playing on Jimmy Smit's phone was probably my favorite moment in the movie. I laughed out loud.

 

Some of the irony and insult of Hamilton are surely intended; tossing out any requirement for the ethnicity of the actors to align with those of the historical characters they portrayed is subversive from the jump, for example. Their lines may lack some hoped-for didactic value, but in a stage production, I'll take broadly comic satire over didacticism any day.

It's valid to have problems with the historical verisimilitude of Hamilton; Lin-Manuel Miranda was basically working from a knowledge base of one book- Ron Chernow's biography of Hamilton, which has been heavily criticized for its omissions, misreadings, and related flaws of interpretation. And I've always had problems with "historical fiction" appropriations of any kind, for the purposes of theater or film, because the abridgements are typically massive, and often events are outright confabulated and characters invented, sometimes as "composites." Hamilton is imbued with "Disneyfication", arguably. But if that's true, the same goes for 1776. And Annie. And Les Miz. etc.

That said, I think Hamilton transcends the flaws of its historical narrative content. No one expects historical accuracy from the plots of Shakespeare's plays; their value resides in skillful wordplay, resonant character portrayal, and depiction of relatable human concerns and responses, and the tragedy resulting from errors that are all too human. And that's where I think Hamilton succeeds. Simply in terms of adapting the stylistic innovations drawn from hip-hop to craft a story for the theater stage, Hamilton is a real breakthrough. It isn't clumsy. Miranda gets the flow right. The battle rapping face-offs between characters in conflict are outstanding adaptations when employed as a technique for stage dialogue. I like the songs, too. I like The Wiz, and I enjoyed the songs, but I don't think they're better melodies or musical stage productions than the numbers in Hamilton. Miranda has the sort of compositional range that comes from having big ears. He does complex verbalizing rap, and reggaeton, and Broadway show tunes, and Supertramp/Queen comic rock opera. With hat tips to several other genres along the way. So while Hamilton fails as history, it's A-grade entertainment. The song crafting may be derivative, but how much in the realm of popular song is left to innovate at this point? The tunes hit all the right notes. If they often wear their influences openly, they aren't plagiarisms. And as far as the deeper matters of theme, the tragic pathos in the play is genuine. That isn't easy to do without coming across as smarmy or treacly. The emotions of grief and loss are definitely expressed in bold outline, but I don't hear any false notes. If The Heights is anywhere close to the quality of Hamilton, I'm sure I'll love it.

 

Thanks for saying so eloquently what I'm not knowledgeable enough about Broadway musicals to express.

 

Thanks in return, but the truth is that I don't know all that much about them either. For the most part, I'm more familiar with the soundtracks than the musicals themselves. Mostly, I just know what I like, and Hamilton ticks a lot of those boxes. I'd probably have paid more attention to Broadway- and theater performance in general- if the monologues, dialogues, and plot development were skillfully written and performed in hip-hop rhythm and rhyme. But that's a wide set of skills, in fields thus far overwhelmingly populated with performers whose talents reside in one specialized realm, and having little familiarity with the others that are required to script and stage a play that draws on those performance techniques. In that respect, Lin Manuel is sort of the right guy in the right place at the right time. I'm hoping that there will be others to follow, hopefully equaling or exceeding his achievement. Although I also expect missteps. It's so much easier to write a bad, trite, mediocre play or Broadway production than a credible one, much less a classic. And lol, it took a long time for me to uh process the corny and sentimental aspects found in even the best Broadway musicals and many of the songs. The directly declarative sincerity of the narrative pitch in so many of those numbers, the songs in West Side Story being a classic example. It took me a while to realize how well it's done. The baseline value of melody in songcraft, and the ways that lyrics can work to serve that value.

 

I saw the movie last Friday in a late afternoon showing that was well attended. I enjoyed watching it a lot.

 

I saw an early afternoon screening on Sunday. It was the best-attended film I’ve seen in the past two months that I’ve returned to seeing films in the theater. Lots of large groups of young people, and some older people too.

I loved it, btw. I thought it was better than Hamilton, which I loved! I’ll definitely see it again very soon.