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In the Heights thoughts
I had a lot of trepidation about this adaptation because a) film adaptations of musicals in general tend to be...not that great, and b) I really loved the original musical and knew all the words to the OBC recording. Combine those two things and I was worried.
But it was good! I have my complaints and, like, it's cheesy, but it has to be cheesy.
Adaptation stuff:
For the most part, I thought the changes they made were either really good or neutral. Some I hadn't anticipated: moving Abuela's "Patience y Fe" to her death scene would not have worked in the stage show but I was mostly okay with it here, and dropping Camila completely made a lot of sense. Putting "Carnaval del Barrio" at the end worked really well.
I'm not so sure about the whole ~reveal~ with the lottery ticket? It seemed a bit unnecessary? In the show, you find out about it the night of the blackout; in the film, it's like a big climactic moment. This required some shuffling and rewriting of lyrics that seemed awkward to me but that may just be because I literally know every word of every song by heart.
Most of the songs that were cut were understandable. "Enough" or "Hundreds of Stories" or "At Sunrise" are all good songs and I missed them, but I thought it was wise to cut them. My two complaints are "Inultil" and "Everything I Know," which are two of my favorite songs in the show and would have worked really well in the movie. Maybe they didn't think Jimmy Smits could handle a song on his own? But it would have worked so well with his characterization and I just love that song. And "Everything I Know" is one of those songs that makes me a weepy mess. I really missed it. (If I'm being a jerk, I would say they should have cut the Piraguero scenes instead, but I guess Lin had to have his cameo.)
The choice to have Usnavi on the beach telling the story to some kids and then reveal at the end that they were never actually at the beach was a bit of a headscratcher but I think I've come around to liking it. Probably part of that is that the little girl who played his daughter is one of the cutest children I've ever seen in my life. What an angel.
Thematically, the film went a lot harder about racism/immigration issues than I remembered in the show. I liked Nina getting to talk about specifics of things she went through in being a first generation Latina at an elite school. And the stuff with Sonny being undocumented was just heartbreaking and so, so good. The view of immigration in the film is much more nuanced and less optimistic than the one in the show, and I think that's a very good thing. Saying right out, look, Sonny can fight for a green card for years and he still might not get it was heartbreaking but real, and I appreciated that. The show was also to some extent about gentrification, and maybe it's just been so long since I saw it, but I feel like they went harder on that than the movie. Basically, I felt like the show was one of those essentially optimistic stories about immigration that Americans like to tell: you'll come and you'll struggle, but if you just work hard, it'll turn out okay for your kids. And the film was like, actually, it might not be that great for your kids either. I respect that.
Look, this is not a subtle movie. It's just not. If you're looking for subtlety, go elsewhere. It's on the nose and it's cheesy, but it's unashamedly those things, and sometimes we need those things. It has heart--it wants to be special and heartwarming and with any musical but especially this one, it's better to go too far towards the cheese than to hang back with irony.
As a musical:
This was always, always a story about community before it was a story about anything else and I love how the film made that so explicit. I'm not usually one of those people who thinks A Cast of Thousands is necessary, but it so worked here. Having these huge set-pieces with tons and tons of people dancing and singing just absolutely 100% works for this story. And it looks like they shot a lot of footage of actual Washington Heights neighbors and I love that. I love that even the dancers looked like normal people, and a wide variety of normal people at that. The choreo was over the top at some points (the beginning of "96,000" with the animation? Why?) but on the whole I thought it was energetic and enjoyable.
The director did not make the mistake that my personal musical-adaptation nemesis Tom Hopper makes: he doesn't try to keep everything "realistic" and he completely embraces the fantasy elements of musicals. Having Nina and Benny dancing on the walls of the apartment building for "When the Sun Goes Down"? Wonderful choice. And going straightforward with the candles in "Alabanza"? Also wonderful. The power of that song is its simplicity. I liked the celebration of Cuban culture in "Pacencia y Fe" and Vanessa running down the street under the bolts of fabric for "It Won't Be Long Now."
The cast:
Anthony Ramos was just as lovely as I knew he'd be. For one thing, I just love to look at him with his eyes and his freckles. But he's also got a great voice and a great presence and (frankly) I think he's a better Usnavi than Lin. Just fantastic casting. And the kid who played Sonny was just as good. I have always had a soft spot for Sonny, and he was wonderful in this movie. MY SON.
The actresses who played Nina and Vanessa did a good job, but I didn't feel like their voices were strong enough for the parts they were playing. Nina's voice is good and Vanessa's is fine, but they're kind of thin and not powerful enough for some of the songs they're asked to sing. As a result of trying to compensate for their voices, the sound mixing was just...off. I'm not knowledgeable enough about these things to explain more, but I just really had a problem with a lot of the sound mixing and thought it was one of the weakest things about the movie. (Also some of editing was not, imo, the best, but it didn't hamper the film too much.)
Benny: great. Jimmy Smits as Kevin: great. Marc Anthony in the most shocking, unexpected cameo: great. (Although he looks rough. I wonder how much of that was good makeup.) Stefanie Beatriz was having more fun than everybody else put together. Mimi Marquez as Dani? YES THANK YOU. The lady who played Abuela is really not old enough for that role, but hey: is there a single Hollywood movie that doesn't feature at least one actor who isn't old enough or is way too old for their role? She's got a great presence and voice so I will overlook this.
Little things:
+ Nina chasing her younger self. So sweet.
+ Dani and Carla are girlfriends! (Or maybe wives!)
+ Christopher Jackson as Mr. Softee was a pretty hilarious cameo.
+ Changing Benny and Nina to exes worked well, but it was a surprise when Usnavi and Vanessa got some of their lines in "Blackout."
+ I am a deeply cheesy person and one of my favorite lines in the show is "It's a wonderful life that I've known/Merry Christmas, you old building and loan," which I have always felt that Lin included just for me.
+ So. Much. Product placement. I hope Tide to-go pens paid a lot of money for that inclusion. But they genuinely are a wonderful piece of merchandise that I could not live without so it could have been much worse.
+ The "You'll Be Back" Easter egg did make me laugh, I admit.
Also they showed the trailer for the West Side Story remake and...idk. Visually it looks great. But I probably won't see it, mostly because I really dislike the guy they chose as Tony. And also because even though I like Steven Spielberg just fine, I don't think he's right for this particular film at all. Also, my God, talk about too old! I realize they were never going to cast actual teenagers, though I think that would make the story much more powerful. But did they have to fill the entire cast with people in their late 20s/early 30s? Couldn't they have found anyone who was like 22? I realize the original film had this problem too, but it's so much more aggravating now.
I am glad they seem to have kept the Jerome Robbins choreo though.
Oh, and I didn't know that they had adapted Dear Evan Hansen. Interesting.
But it was good! I have my complaints and, like, it's cheesy, but it has to be cheesy.
Adaptation stuff:
For the most part, I thought the changes they made were either really good or neutral. Some I hadn't anticipated: moving Abuela's "Patience y Fe" to her death scene would not have worked in the stage show but I was mostly okay with it here, and dropping Camila completely made a lot of sense. Putting "Carnaval del Barrio" at the end worked really well.
I'm not so sure about the whole ~reveal~ with the lottery ticket? It seemed a bit unnecessary? In the show, you find out about it the night of the blackout; in the film, it's like a big climactic moment. This required some shuffling and rewriting of lyrics that seemed awkward to me but that may just be because I literally know every word of every song by heart.
Most of the songs that were cut were understandable. "Enough" or "Hundreds of Stories" or "At Sunrise" are all good songs and I missed them, but I thought it was wise to cut them. My two complaints are "Inultil" and "Everything I Know," which are two of my favorite songs in the show and would have worked really well in the movie. Maybe they didn't think Jimmy Smits could handle a song on his own? But it would have worked so well with his characterization and I just love that song. And "Everything I Know" is one of those songs that makes me a weepy mess. I really missed it. (If I'm being a jerk, I would say they should have cut the Piraguero scenes instead, but I guess Lin had to have his cameo.)
The choice to have Usnavi on the beach telling the story to some kids and then reveal at the end that they were never actually at the beach was a bit of a headscratcher but I think I've come around to liking it. Probably part of that is that the little girl who played his daughter is one of the cutest children I've ever seen in my life. What an angel.
Thematically, the film went a lot harder about racism/immigration issues than I remembered in the show. I liked Nina getting to talk about specifics of things she went through in being a first generation Latina at an elite school. And the stuff with Sonny being undocumented was just heartbreaking and so, so good. The view of immigration in the film is much more nuanced and less optimistic than the one in the show, and I think that's a very good thing. Saying right out, look, Sonny can fight for a green card for years and he still might not get it was heartbreaking but real, and I appreciated that. The show was also to some extent about gentrification, and maybe it's just been so long since I saw it, but I feel like they went harder on that than the movie. Basically, I felt like the show was one of those essentially optimistic stories about immigration that Americans like to tell: you'll come and you'll struggle, but if you just work hard, it'll turn out okay for your kids. And the film was like, actually, it might not be that great for your kids either. I respect that.
Look, this is not a subtle movie. It's just not. If you're looking for subtlety, go elsewhere. It's on the nose and it's cheesy, but it's unashamedly those things, and sometimes we need those things. It has heart--it wants to be special and heartwarming and with any musical but especially this one, it's better to go too far towards the cheese than to hang back with irony.
As a musical:
This was always, always a story about community before it was a story about anything else and I love how the film made that so explicit. I'm not usually one of those people who thinks A Cast of Thousands is necessary, but it so worked here. Having these huge set-pieces with tons and tons of people dancing and singing just absolutely 100% works for this story. And it looks like they shot a lot of footage of actual Washington Heights neighbors and I love that. I love that even the dancers looked like normal people, and a wide variety of normal people at that. The choreo was over the top at some points (the beginning of "96,000" with the animation? Why?) but on the whole I thought it was energetic and enjoyable.
The director did not make the mistake that my personal musical-adaptation nemesis Tom Hopper makes: he doesn't try to keep everything "realistic" and he completely embraces the fantasy elements of musicals. Having Nina and Benny dancing on the walls of the apartment building for "When the Sun Goes Down"? Wonderful choice. And going straightforward with the candles in "Alabanza"? Also wonderful. The power of that song is its simplicity. I liked the celebration of Cuban culture in "Pacencia y Fe" and Vanessa running down the street under the bolts of fabric for "It Won't Be Long Now."
The cast:
Anthony Ramos was just as lovely as I knew he'd be. For one thing, I just love to look at him with his eyes and his freckles. But he's also got a great voice and a great presence and (frankly) I think he's a better Usnavi than Lin. Just fantastic casting. And the kid who played Sonny was just as good. I have always had a soft spot for Sonny, and he was wonderful in this movie. MY SON.
The actresses who played Nina and Vanessa did a good job, but I didn't feel like their voices were strong enough for the parts they were playing. Nina's voice is good and Vanessa's is fine, but they're kind of thin and not powerful enough for some of the songs they're asked to sing. As a result of trying to compensate for their voices, the sound mixing was just...off. I'm not knowledgeable enough about these things to explain more, but I just really had a problem with a lot of the sound mixing and thought it was one of the weakest things about the movie. (Also some of editing was not, imo, the best, but it didn't hamper the film too much.)
Benny: great. Jimmy Smits as Kevin: great. Marc Anthony in the most shocking, unexpected cameo: great. (Although he looks rough. I wonder how much of that was good makeup.) Stefanie Beatriz was having more fun than everybody else put together. Mimi Marquez as Dani? YES THANK YOU. The lady who played Abuela is really not old enough for that role, but hey: is there a single Hollywood movie that doesn't feature at least one actor who isn't old enough or is way too old for their role? She's got a great presence and voice so I will overlook this.
Little things:
+ Nina chasing her younger self. So sweet.
+ Dani and Carla are girlfriends! (Or maybe wives!)
+ Christopher Jackson as Mr. Softee was a pretty hilarious cameo.
+ Changing Benny and Nina to exes worked well, but it was a surprise when Usnavi and Vanessa got some of their lines in "Blackout."
+ I am a deeply cheesy person and one of my favorite lines in the show is "It's a wonderful life that I've known/Merry Christmas, you old building and loan," which I have always felt that Lin included just for me.
+ So. Much. Product placement. I hope Tide to-go pens paid a lot of money for that inclusion. But they genuinely are a wonderful piece of merchandise that I could not live without so it could have been much worse.
+ The "You'll Be Back" Easter egg did make me laugh, I admit.
Also they showed the trailer for the West Side Story remake and...idk. Visually it looks great. But I probably won't see it, mostly because I really dislike the guy they chose as Tony. And also because even though I like Steven Spielberg just fine, I don't think he's right for this particular film at all. Also, my God, talk about too old! I realize they were never going to cast actual teenagers, though I think that would make the story much more powerful. But did they have to fill the entire cast with people in their late 20s/early 30s? Couldn't they have found anyone who was like 22? I realize the original film had this problem too, but it's so much more aggravating now.
I am glad they seem to have kept the Jerome Robbins choreo though.
Oh, and I didn't know that they had adapted Dear Evan Hansen. Interesting.
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I felt like a lot of the changes weren't conceptually bad, but they didn't make a lot of sense - like Sonny, this smart, politically plugged-in kid, doesn't realize that he can't go to college until they attend that rally? Daniela and Carla are teasing Vanessa about how Usnavi loves her after their failed blackout date when she obviously already knows? Dropping all of the Nina/Benny/Kevin conflict when that drives so much of the story? (And refocusing the story on Usnavi/Vanessa when they . . . don't have much of anything?) It just felt like a lot of the story felt at loose ends because the changes weren't merged properly with the original. (And I had to laugh at Melissa Barrera in particular saying "they cast the best people" when asked about colourism in the casting, because she was by far the weakest link.)
The Chris Jackson cameos were cute, though! Did you watch for the credits stinger?
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That is definitely a moment where they went for the ~dramatic moment~ over realism.
Daniela and Carla are teasing Vanessa about how Usnavi loves her after their failed blackout date when she obviously already knows?
See, that bothers me not at all, because I always read Vanessa as knowing all along. She's just pretending to be in denial about it.
Dropping all of the Nina/Benny/Kevin conflict when that drives so much of the story? (And refocusing the story on Usnavi/Vanessa when they . . . don't have much of anything?)
The former doesn't bother me, but I agree with you that the script tried too hard to produce conflict with Usnavi and Vanessa that was unnecessary.
And I had to laugh at Melissa Barrera in particular saying "they cast the best people" when asked about colourism in the casting, because she was by far the weakest link.
Agreed completely.
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Also I have a HUGE crush on Melissa Barrera from her work on Vida and I was extra impressed by her acting because her Vanessa is so different from the character on that show. I did not feel like her or Nina were cast for their singing though, I agree on that. . .
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Right??? I was so delighted with him!
I was extra impressed by her acting because her Vanessa is so different from the character on that show.
Interesting!
Apparently Nina's actress is an actual singer with an actual career? Which, maybe she just sticks with stuff within a limited range and it works, but she doesn't have the power that the stage!Ninas I'm familiar with have always had.
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But yeah, if they were going to go for lesser known cast they definitely could have gone for people with more stage experience.
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I did think there was a colorism issue (as others have pointed out) and the actresses for Nina and Vanessa look startlingly similar (both light, both very thin).
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It also met my most important criteria for a musical: it was fun!
Indeed!!!!
Nina and Vanessa look startlingly similar (both light, both very thin).
I don't think they look facially anything like each other, but you're right about color/body type. Frankly, they were both worryingly thin.
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*This is actually where TV can work better than movies for me, as I have more time to get accustomed to the same new faces every episode!
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At least Rita Moreno gets paid.
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RIGHT???? How hard would it have been to find anyone else????
At least Rita Moreno gets paid.
Word.
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And I cannot wait to enjoy Dani and Carla :)
They were so cute!
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(Asking the side questions here but I'm genuinely confused)
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I heard they cut the racism against Benny plotline too, which disappoints me!
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