Clever but not memorable

Twenty twenty-one has been a Lin-Manuel Miranda kind of year for me. In April I finally saw Hamilton, an experience made possible by a quick weekend trip to Sydney with my wife to celebrate our 13^th anniversary, a few weeks after the show finally debuted in Australia. We’re going to follow that up by watching the filmed version on Disney+ within the next few months.

Then Wednesday night, while I’m away for the week in the town of Nagambie, I drove to the larger town of Shepparton (about 40 minutes away) to visit their local Village Cinemas and see In the Heights, which opened last week in Australia, two weeks after its American opening. (If I weren’t writing the current post, I might have written one about the fact that my critics card is apparently not accepted at Village Cinemas in the country, and that country Village doesn’t believe in 25 minutes of trailers and other ads, meaning I missed about the first minute of the film.)

I think Miranda is extremely clever. But I do not think he is particularly memorable.

I’ll explain.

The very first impression one gets of Miranda’s work is just that: how clever it is. The flow of his lyrics is masterful, a modern, hip hop-influenced stream of ingenious rhymes and thought-provoking content. In the moment, the music sounds quite good too.

The problem is, I cannot remember any of it the moment I’ve stopped experiencing it.

This first occurred with Hamilton, which I liked a lot but did not love. It could never have lived up to the enormous hype accumulated over some five-plus years.

But I had expected, or at least hoped, to be humming the songs as we made our way home from Sydney’s Lyric Theatre in the Uber that night. A musical can be unsuccessful dramatically – not a problem for Hamilton – as long as it connects with you musically.

And Hamilton did, in the moment. I was tapping my toes and maybe even grooving my shoulders a bit. But with one notable exception – “My Shot” – I couldn’t actually remember how any of the songs went. I was sure they’d all sound familiar if I watched the show again, and I’m sure that will be my experience when we watch the D+ version. But they had not lingered with me after they stopped hitting my eardrums.

It was the same with In the Heights. Again there is one exception, the opening song “In the Heights.” But part of me wondered if this was only because it was about my third time hearing it, since I’d seen the trailer a couple times before watching the movie.

I had a feeling this might be the case given what my fellow critic on ReelGood, John Roebuck, said about it in his review: 

"Musically, In the Heights might be considered a blueprint for Miranda’s later achievement. That he is talented is unquestionable – he’s got reams of the good stuff – and when In the Heights is at its best it erupts in an unbridled expression of happiness that only those unwilling to discard their cynicism will resist. But there is a short attention span to Miranda’s music – a shortcoming he didn’t manage to quite shake in Hamilton – and his attention drifts just as a song is finding its melodical feet. It can make for unsatisfying listening, and instead of whipping Spotify out to blast the soundtrack on my happy jaunt home, I struggled to remember any standouts."

Is this a problem?

Logically, yes. Whatever else it may do right, a musical’s calling card should be its songs. There should be a couple that are such indisputable successes, you feel like you’ve known them all your life.

But I really did enjoy both experiences and consider them to be (qualified) triumphs. I had a great time with both of these vital documents.

Maybe I’m looking at some of my favorite musicals with rose-colored glasses, and not remembering those experiences as well as I should. I tend to feel like a good eight of the songs in Jesus Christ Superstar, my favorite musical, immediately inserted themselves in my subconscious and never left. But maybe this didn’t actually happen until a second or third viewing. It was so long ago that I no longer remember.

A recent favorite also makes a poor point of comparison. Since this is a film blog, let’s talk only about the movie The Last Five Years and leave aside The Book of Mormon, which may be my favorite live theatergoing experience of all time. My Last Five Years viewing was atypical to be sure, as I watched it twice during my 24-hour rental period, then bought the soundtrack and listened to that at least ten times. I know those songs quite well likely because of repeat exposure.

I guess the point is, I feel no inclination to buy the soundtracks for Hamilton and In the Heights because the initial exposure was not addictive enough. Maybe feeling like I’ll never know the songs intimately is contributing to my desire not to purchase them.

But I do have a second viewing of Hamilton coming up on D+. That could be the turning point, I suppose, for that material, if it really lodges in my brain on the second viewing. And given how much fun I have with it in the moment, this is certainly possible. And thinking about it, I realized I actually do remember a second song from that show, King George’s “You’ll Be Back.” So there’s a chance.

As for In the Heights, I’m not sure I will be revisiting that material real soon. For about 45 minutes I was in a state of delirious joy, but the film steadily suffers from pacing issues from then onward, to the point that the songs started to really seem like filler, particularly Abuela’s song and the song that takes place in that courtyard after everyone’s lying around in the heat caused by the blackout. Which itself seemed like a bit of an artificial narrative device. (I did try to find the names of these songs online, but could not match the titles with what seemed to be happening in the narrative.)

The movie was strong on singing, acting, dancing and choreography (those last two are not exactly the same), but not very poignant in terms of its drama, no matter how hard it tried. I wanted to feel the acuteness of these characters’ angst, but usually, I just didn’t. (I hope it goes without saying that this is not because I can't relate to the plight of Latinos in Washington Heights. I've related to plenty of cinematic plights that did not match my own.)

Interestingly, I think Miranda’s most successful score that I’ve experienced is the first I ever experienced: the one for Moana. I actually don’t love that movie either, but I do feel like I remember more of its songs. Then again, I’ve also seen that one twice.

I don’t think any of these observations are really an indictment of Miranda. He’s got an exquisite talent and a distinct voice that the world is lucky to have. I look forward to any and all future projects, as well as the past ones I have not yet seen.

I just wish they'd lodge in my brain and take up residence there, because that’s what I want from them.

Maybe the next one.

Cat's Away 2: Trailers work

Night #6 here. Cat's Away. The second one.

When you're doing a double feature in the type of film festival I'm doing -- in other words, where you can't start until late because your rascally kids need one more thing before they go to sleep -- it helps if you can watch the first movie with them. And start it at 7:15.

So Friday night saw the return of Movie Night, a slot filled by Harry and the Hendersons during the first Cat's Away. That title was chosen to scratch an itch for my son, who was (still is?) in a phase of intense curiosity about Bigfoot, as well as to feed my own idle curiosity -- the type of curiosity I have about any film I have not yet seen.

This time, the choice was just for me.

That's right, neither of my kids were into the idea of Moana, a film they had already rejected when it was in the theater -- which was the primary reason I myself have not yet seen one of last year's most prominent animated releases, which I always try to get on my year-end chart. When I suggested it, bracing myself for the blowback, my older son balked at the idea and the younger one more or less followed suit. I knew this was shaping up to be another one of those conflicts where my older son wants me to watch some type of feature-length Pokemon thing, while I want to watch a "real movie." Because it's on Netflix, I didn't even have the argument that I had committed to it by renting it.

But I had a trick up my sleeve.

It's called a trailer.

I don't know why I've never thought of this before, but a trailer is the perfect way to get a child interested in a movie he thinks he doesn't want to see. Disney knew what they were doing when they cut an action-heavy trailer for Tangled, to sell it to boys who didn't think they wanted to see a movie where the girl was the hero. A similar dynamic exists in Moana. There's a fair bit of action, including a set piece involving pirates (coconut pirates, but still), and on IMDB I happened to get that trailer that played up the boy stuff. (I don't know if there's actually a "princess version" of the trailer -- possibly not.)

Probably all it really took was a glimpse of the lava monster that serves as this film's "big bad," and my older son was sold. He didn't even need to finish watching the trailer. Meanwhile, the younger one was saying "When are we going to start watching Iguana?"

Fortunately in one respect but unfortunately in another, they ended up liking the movie more than I did. It was fortunate as it meant there was no mid-movie rebellion, which might have happened even though they knew the choices were to watch the movie or go to sleep, but unfortunate because I really wanted to love Moana. And didn't.

There's no doubt it's Disney's most technologically advanced film to date, which should come as no surprise, and the verisimilitude of the imagery -- not to mention the use of some magical water effects -- gave me chills with some regularity. But this is also one of Disney's most formulaic films. Every story beat came at us from miles away, and it led me to the cynical notion that this script was constructed using time code -- at exactly 5:38, this needs to happen, and at exactly 26:14, this needs to happen. And so forth.

My favorite recurring bit was probably Maui's moving tattoos. For some reason they reminded me a bit of Hercules, a Disney film I always liked that I'm due to rewatch.

The other brilliant thing about the kids watching the first movie with you is that when it's over, they're really ready to go to sleep. Even the younger one was asleep within five minutes of me depositing him in his bed.

Which allowed me to turn to:

Blow Out

Brian De Palma's 1981 film has always occupied a special spot among my cinematic fears of the horrifying unknown. And here's how I think that must have happened.

Around the time Blow Out become available to watch on The Movie Channel, the only cable station we subscribed to when I was growing up, I had probably just seen and fallen in love with Grease. I must have then wanted to see another movie starring Danny Zuko.

It was at this point I suspect my mother must have told me the reasons why I couldn't see it, and in her trademark clueless fashion, gave me more specific details why than I wanted. This is the woman who went into detail describing gruesome aspects of Jaws and The Exorcist before I was even ten years old. While I remember those stories quite well, I don't remember what she said about Blow Out, only that it gave me the idea that something truly disturbing, possibly of a sexual nature, occurs to a character in this film. The fact that I didn't know what it was might have made it worse, as it allowed my mind to fill in the details.

That impression has persisted to this day, though I obviously have made no attempt to fill in those missing details before now. But I threw Blow Out on my brainstorming list for the first Cat's Away upon seeing it available on our streaming service, Stan, and Cat's Away 2 afforded it an actual time slot.

Unfortunately, I came away disappointed with both that horrifying unknown and the movie itself. There's a serial killer in this movie who strangles women and then carves a bell design into his victims, which on the face of it sounds bad. But there's not much in the way of graphic violence, and certainly nothing to cause someone to discuss this films in hushed tones. Certainly nothing that compares to either The Exorcist or Jaws. I kept waiting for this big awful thing to happen, and it never did.

And as might be expected, the film has not aged all that well. The distracting musical clues, some slow-mo, stuff like that all place it in the early 1980s. Which is not always a problem and ideally, should never be, but you can't help the impression a film has on you. While John Travolta gives a pretty good performance, I thought his co-star, Nancy Allen, was actually kind of awful. She's not meant to be a smart character -- she's an escort -- but the performance itself is pretty stiff.

I did enjoy the aspects of the film that reminded me of another movie involving a foley artist, Peter Strickland's Berberian Sound Studio. I have to wonder if Strickland's film was influenced by Blow Out, as both films touch on the idea of trying to record the perfect scream for a B horror movie. And perhaps if I'd seen them in that order I would have thought Berberian was derivative of Blow Out, though they differ significantly after the main basic setup. While Berberian becomes a psychological horror, Blow Out becomes a paranoia thriller, and I did appreciate the way this fits into a tradition from around that time that mostly involves the films of Alan J. Pakula. Blow Out also has a very memorable shot involving fireworks at its end. Ultimately, though, it was just a three-star movie for me.

If two movies were good, why not another four or five on Saturday? My kids are going for a sleepover at their aunt's house, so ... watch out.