BEFORE: Lin-Manuel Miranda carries over to make a cameo in this film that he directed, and also introduced at the NYC theater where I work, a special screening where he did a Q&A. Now, I'm not supposed to engage with the celebrity guests, the most I can do is interact with them a bit as I'm cuing them to take the stage. I follow the rules, plus it's so much cooler to not be blown away by them when I'm breathing the same air as them, in the same room. Eh, you've seen one celebrity, you've seen them all (OK, not really...). I've encountered perhaps more than my fair share of famous people, and only been struck speechless and bowled over twice - and one of those times was interacting with "Weird Al" Yankovic. I mean, I respect LMM but Al is the real musical genius - and I think those two hang out with each other.
If I hadn't dropped in "Vivo", then two actors would have carried over from "In the Heights" - the chain would have worked either way, it's funny like that sometimes. But you may wonder, why didn't I include the filmed version of "Hamilton"? Yeah, that would have made some sense here, but that's really just a filmed version of the staged play, not a true filmic adaptation - so I could have made it work, but part of me doesn't really think it qualifies as a "film". Still, I've reviewed filmed versions of rock concerts, so there's an argument for it, but still, a film version of a play performed on stage just seems like it doesn't fit in. I wouldn't really be judging the movie, I'd be rating the play, and sure, "Hamilton" is great, it doesn't need my help.
This is NOT my Easter film, now I'm running a bit behind but I can still fudge the numbers a little bit and count the next film as my Easter film...
THE PLOT: On the cusp of his 30th birthday, a promising young theater composer navigates love, friendship and the pressures of life as an artist in New York City.
AFTER: I kind of have to read between the lines here, because this film doesn't give a lot of information away, pretty much the director is expecting that if you're watching, you're coming in with a ton of background information about who Jonathan Larson was and how he lived and worked, writing in a crappy apartment in the Village with a revolving door of roommates and people crashing there to help pay the rent. And then he finally got his break, a musical revue called "Tick, Tick...Boom" which was all about how hard it is to be a writer, with songs based on the things that happened to him during the struggle to write about how hard it is to be a writer. This naturally leads me to think, "Geez, get OVER yourself already,,," This film partially focused on the AIDS epidemic of the 1980's and 90's, but it's almost as if the much more devastating disease ravaging the artistic community was the dreaded writer's block, they're essentially equivalent here.
I was late to the "Rent" party, so I wish I enjoyed that film more, I wish I knew more about Jonathan Larson, but it's not really my world. People now hold up Larson as something of a sacred cow in the theater world, because "Rent" really connected with so many people, and because he died just before its premiere. Would the play "Rent" have been as successful had he lived? Would he have produced something bigger and better after "Rent", or was that it for him? Remember, also, that the story seen in "Rent" isn't an original one, he cribbed a lot from Puccini's "La Boheme", so that's kind of cheating, in a way, isn't it? Steal from the best, I guess, or am I not supposed to point this out? OK, the songs were original in "Rent" at least, so there's that, but how am I supposed to hold this guy up as some kind of genius if so much of the story was borrowed? They put on Shakespeare plays all the time in New York, and very rarely do any of them get praised for their originality - maybe that version of "Hamlet" they did a couple years ago with a woman playing "Hamlet", but that's still just a twist on an old play, not a new one. Making the next play that's as important as "Hamlet", that's much more of a challenge.
So I feel like I would have preferred to see a film about the making of "Rent", but then of course that film would have to admit that Larson just modernized "La Boheme", which is legalized theft. That was his biggest success, so leaving it out seems like a rather glaring omission - watching him struggle and doubt himself just can't be as interesting, plus I've seen "writer's block" films a hundred times, and I no longer care for them. But showing the struggle, I get it, that's the point - however I think it also MISSES the point. If we don't see the success after the writer's block, then something by definition is lacking. This is why I'm not a writer, because after a decade of failure I wouldn't keep trying, or more likely I would have given up after five years and found a new line of work, something honest like accounting or stocking grocery shelves.
To be fair, Larson worked at the Moondance Diner, for over a decade - yep, that's honest work, especially on busy Sundays in Manhattan, where the brunch line was out the door. But as his character says here, if you haven't made it on Broadway, then after a certain period of time, you're just a waiter with a hobby. His words, not mine - so I argue that Larson was exactly that, but he got lucky at the end and then died in true rock-star fashion, and now he's venerated in much the same way we hold up Jim Morrison and Sid Vicious and Kurt Cobain on pedestals, as if all their work was phenomenal, and all I'm saying is, I'd like to see the proof of that. I've got respect for writers, especially successful ones, and I understand that almost nobody becomes successful overnight, it's a long, tedious process - but still, I wish some writers could find something to write about other than how hard it is to be a writer.
The format here is also quite confusing, especially if you don't know much about Larson's career. The "TTB" musical revue is the framing device, and then all the other scenes from his life leading up to that are peppered in between the songs, but since he's trying to write and preparing for a show during all of those scenes, it took me a while to realize he wasn't writing for the revue that we're also seeing, he was preparing for a sneak peek table read of "Superbia", which was a musical drama set in the future that was about fame and technology...and I'm guessing it was terrible. But the format doesn't really work here unless you go into it with some kind of knowledge about which thing he's trying to write at each particular time.
My guess here is that "Rent" became so huge over time, with its cult following, that the filmmakers here were very limited over what they could use, the songs were obviously out, so they had to go back into Larson's catalog and find other things. Footage - forget about it, there's just a quick clip of one cast member dedicating the first performance (and all future ones) to Larson. And there's probably a whole behind-the-scenes doc on the making of "Rent", so that ground couldn't be re-traveled here. Yet by this film's own admission, that's what Larson was known for, that's the big hit that he was trying for, that's the justification for the years of working in the diner and struggling to make ends meet. But this is the trend now, there's a new online series about the making of "The Godfather", there was a whole film about the making of "The Disaster Artist", there was "RKO-281" about the making of "Citizen Kane", and so on. We can never just have one thing now, eventually there will be a Netflix series that fictionalizes the making of every movie ever made.
Also starring Andrew Garfield (last seen in "Spider-Man: No Way Home"), Alexandra Shipp (last seen in "Shaft" (2019)), Robin de Jesus, Vanessa Hudgens (last seen in "The Frozen Ground"), Joshua Henry, Jonathan Marc Sherman, Michaela Jaé Rodriguez, Ben Levi Ross, Judith Light, Bradley Whitford (last seen in "The Cabin in the Woods"), Laura Benanti, Danielle Ferland, Micaela Diamond, Utkarsh Ambudkar (last seen in "Free Guy"), Gizel Jimenez, Kate Rockwell, Aneesa Folds, Joel Perez, Judy Kuhn, Danny Burstein (last seen in "The Family Fang"), Lauren Marcus, Richard Kind (last seen in "A Serious Man"), Tariq Trotter (last seen in "Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping"), Ryan Vasquez, Joanna P. Adler (last seen in "Down to You"), Jelani Alladin, Chris "Shockwave" Sullivan.
with cameos from Roger Bart (last seen in "The Stepford Wives"), Chuck Cooper, André De Shields, Renée Elise Goldsberry (last seen in "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks"), Joel Grey (last seen in "Cabaret"), Wilson Jermaine Heredia (last seen in "Rent"), Beth Malone (last seen in "Brittany Runs a Marathon"), Howard McGillin, Brian Stokes Mitchell, Bebe Neuwirth (last seen in "Jumanji: The Next Level"), Adam Pascal (also last seen in "Rent"), Bernadette Peters (last seen in "Alice"), Phylicia Rashad (last heard in "Soul"), Chita Rivera (last seen in "Chicago"), Daphne Rubin-Vega (last seen in "In the Heights"), Phillipa Soo (last heard in "The One and Only Ivan"), Alex Lacamoire (last heard in "Vivo"), Marc Shaiman (last seen in "The Wedding Planner"), Stephen Schwartz (last seen in "Love, Gilda"), Christopher Jackson (also last seen in "In the Heights"), Luis A. Miranda Jr., and Vanessa Nadal, archive footage of Anthony Rapp (also last seen in "Rent"), Idina Menzel (last heard in "Frozen II"), Jonathan Larson and the voice of Stephen Sondheim.
RATING: 5 out of 10 books sold back to the Strand.
No comments:
Post a Comment