In The Heights (Jon M. Chu, 2021)

As befits a Broadway property, the film adaptation of In The Heights has some second-act problems; namely, your ass starts to itch. But I loved this corn's-a-poppin' musical for the simple fact that it feels firmly in the classic age of the Hollywood musical even though we're supposed to be (forever stuck?) in  the baroque age according to Henri Focillon's model for the life cycle [editor, please retain the singular] of cultural forms. Sure, In The Heights refines the genre by featuring a mostly Latino cast led by future ex-husband Anthony Ramos with excellent turns by Daphne Rubin-Vega and, in one disquieting scene, an unrecognizable Marc Anthony. Of course, there are some mannerist moments referencing Busby Berkeley and Royal Wedding. But overall, its simple-as-muck story and shameless outbursts of song display the formal transparency, to use Thomas Schatz's words, characteristic of the classic age. 

So I could praise the refreshingly haphazard choreography or the warm evocation of the sounds and atmosphere of my beloved city or my favorite number, the lottery fantasy "96,000," which may be the first ever to explicitly outline both parts of Richard Dyer's dictum that musicals tell us what utopia feels like but not how to organize it. But the genre dork in me loves In The Heights most for making hay of the notion that genres develop in an easy, linear fashion.

And hey, if you didn't like it, no sweat. Watch the incredible films of Antoinette Zwirchmayr instead.

Grade: a hedged A-minus

And can I just:

Mare of Easttown (Craig Zobel, 2021)

Yes, it was gripping. Yes, the acting was superb. Yes yes yes. But if writers/directors continue to indulge in the pitfalls of serial television narratives, then I should be able to review them with a rubber stamp. Mare of Easttown (to paraphrase what I wrote about Breaking Bad) builds up the intensity of single scenes but ignores how those events (especially the violence) impact the characters over the entire story arc. They just absorb the blows and move on. (Mild spoilers ahead but I'll keep it vague.) 

Take the scene in which Becca flies into a rage after seeing her ex-girlfriend Siobhan kiss Anne. Becca storms out of the house, knocking down Helen, Siobhan's grandmother (!), in the process. Helen goes to the hospital despite Mare claiming she suffered just a bump on the head. Mare checks in on Helen for one brief moment and then...the. incident. is. never. discussed. again! Becca completely disappears and it's as if the event never took place. It merely takes up (or, in an unkinder cut, wastes) time. 

And if that scene isn't monumental enough to ponder, then how about the death of a major character in episode 5? Sure, there's a bit of mourning. But by the end of episode six, it's as if that character had never existed. More time has been taken up such that every scene starts to feel like arbitrary filler, e.g., a mother sent on a wild goose chase to retrieve her kidnapped daughter. So then why was Mare of Easttown seven episodes? Why not 70? Why not 70 minutes? Can I get 7 minutes? Great television should be more than taking up time. No? Ok.

Grade (and it's quickly dropping so I better get this in now): B-minus

Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979)/Aliens (James Cameron, 1986)

It seems so easy. A director/writer can prevent family melodrama and the formation of the heterosexual couple from derailing a film's excitement and it still becomes such a gargantuan hit that it sparks a successful franchise. But no, Jurassic Park and The Day After Tomorrow and War of the Worlds and San Andreas and Army of the Dead, etc. have to gunk up the goods with stifling ideology. Alien sticks to the facts which are harrowing enough; no time to discuss romance and heal parent/child divides when a slime monster is popping out of someone's stomach. Most of the deaths are hokey but some terrifying moments remain, e.g., Veronica Cartwright's reaction to the stomach popping or the alien lying down in the escape pod, a reminder that monsters are at their most disturbing when we can observe what they do when they're alone. Overall, it's a refreshingly single-minded ride.

I hear that a backstory about Ripley's daughter was excised from Aliens. Smart move! The film is right at the edge of being too long in its theatrical cut. And Ripley's affection for Newt is perfectly graspable without any further psychologizing. Cameron builds tension in the first half with little action and then pummels us for the remainder, a masterclass in structuring a narrative to intensify an audience's reaction. I'm itchy about the gynephobic view of motherhood in the form of gooey alien birth which deflates the virtuous form exercised by Ripley. But here too, a rigid single-mindedness washes over every event. Neither film a masterpiece, they're both nevertheless the class of the Hollywood genre film.

Alien: A-minus

Aliens: A-minus