Musical

King Richard, Tick Tick Boom, and the Tortured Genius

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
Andrew Garfield in Tick Tick Boom; Will Smith in King Richard

Success stories can’t be simple. Presumably, many gifted artists and athletes achieve their goals through little more than the straightforward combination of labor and talent, without facing any daunting challenges or making any personal sacrifices. But who wants to watch a movie about them? Drama requires conflict, which is why rousing tales of ultimate success must contain moments of intervening failure. (Pictures about sustained failure are far more rare, give or take an Inside Llewyn Davis.) Last week featured the premiere of two fact-based films about obsessive geniuses: Warner Brothers’ King Richard, about the father of Venus and Serena Williams, and Netflix’s Tick, Tick… Boom, about the early struggles of the creator of Rent. One teeters perilously on the border of hagiography, while the other is largely enjoyable on its own artistic terms, but both are steeped in the cinematic wellspring of toil, triumph, anguish, and redemption.

Technically, King Richard isn’t so much the story of a genius as that of the man behind the genius(es), though I’m sure if you posed that framing to Richard Williams, he’d dismiss the distinction as one without a difference. Whether this on-screen version of Richard, incarnated by Will Smith with twinkly charm and bottomless gumption, represents a drastic departure from the actual man is a debate best left to historians and biographers. What matters here is whether this Richard is the suitable protagonist of a predictable, rags-to-riches sports picture—whether he is sufficiently separable from the countless coaches and motivators who have preceded him in the illustrious screen tradition of drilling, aggravating, and speechifying. Read More

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Original Screenplay Weekend! On Annette, Reminiscence, and the Night House

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
Rebecca Hall in The Night House; Rebecca Ferguson and Hugh Jackman in Reminiscence; Adam Driver in Annette

Some original screenplays are more original than others. Last week, for example, I reviewed Disney’s Free Guy, a jumbled, weirdly fascinating action comedy that prides itself on not being based on any existing intellectual property, then spins an entire film from references to (and rip-offs of) other intellectual properties. I was happy to see Free Guy perform well (it’s now spawning a sequel, naturally), if only because I want studios to keep making original movies. As if by magic, this past weekend featured the release of three such pictures, a veritable bonanza of novel #content. (Technically there were four, but I failed to make time for Martin Campbell’s The Protégé.) None is a perfect film—in fact, all three have considerable problems—but my disappointment is tempered by my enthusiasm for their very existence. I didn’t love any of these movies, but I did love that I was able to watch them.

Of the trio, The Night House is the most conventional, which isn’t to say it’s typical. Directed by David Bruckner from a script by Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski, it’s a ruminative ghost story that’s less interested in freaking you out than pulling you in. Its heroine, a high school English teacher named Beth (a fantastic Rebecca Hall), isn’t just the frightened resident of a haunted house; she’s also a little bit scary herself. An early scene, in which she calmly shames a grade-grubbing parent into stunned silence, reveals her capacity for blunt anger, while a night out with colleagues quickly turns into an unhappy hour where busybodies tiptoe around a powder keg. Read More

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In the Heights: Defend the Block

Jeremy BeckReviews
Anthony Ramos and Melissa Barrera in In the Heights

“96,000,” the undeniable centerpiece of Jon M. Chu’s In the Heights, is a dizzying, dazzling musical number, a vibrant and symphonic sequence that opens on a sunbaked street, parades through a crowded neighborhood, and eventually unites what feels like a cast of thousands in a luminous public pool. Yet as propulsive and audacious as it is, the moment the song made me gasp is almost invisible; early on, when rhapsodizing about (and exaggerating) his own talents, a graffiti artist invokes the name of Obi-Wan Kenobi and then—as if from thin air—pulls out a lightsaber.

Not really, of course; as gifted and ambitious as these residents of Washington Heights may be, they aren’t actual Jedi knights. Instead, Obi-Wan’s intergalactic weapon appears as a puff of greyish shadow only to just as suddenly vanish, along with other mentioned objects like a golf club and a sparkling diamond. It’s a mild visual flourish, but it embodies the spirit of creativity that makes this Broadway adaptation sing. In all likelihood, a point-and-shoot version of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s first stage hit would have been entertaining; hell, the Disney+ broadcast of Miranda’s Hamilton was largely delightful, and it was literally just footage from theatrical performances. But while In the Heights obviously can’t approach that masterpiece in terms of writing or depth, Chu’s big-screen vision is nonetheless a robust and imaginative work. And that’s because it’s unashamedly a movie musical—emphasis on “movie”. Read More

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Hamilton, Eurovision Song Contest, and the Strangeness of the Movie Musical

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
Will Ferrell and Rachel McAdams in "Eurovision Song Contest"; Lin-Manual Miranda in "Hamilton"

No movie is literally realistic. People’s actual lives are not filmed by professional camera crews, nor are their conversations scripted. Even adherents of Dogme 95 accept a certain degree of manipulation when they watch movies; it’s the implicit contract between the artist and the viewer. Still, if any genre challenges the assumptions inherent in this contract, it’s the musical. Our preconditioned brains may not immediately perceive that most cinematic dialogue is far more polished than everyday speech, but we damn sure notice when characters suddenly break into song.

It’s this theatricality, I assume, which animates the canard that musicals are unrealistic. Of course they’re unrealistic… and so is every other movie you’ve ever seen. The best musicals—my own list would include A Star Is Born (1954), The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Aladdin, and, yes, La La Land—lean into their heightened stature, using song and dance to emphasize their characters’ emotions; in the process, they turn artifice into art. Nevertheless, it’s fascinating to consider the two most recent musicals to arrive in American theaters on streaming networks, and how they relate to the genre at large. Netflix’s Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga, the new vehicle for Will Ferrell’s outlandish shenanigans, and Disney’s Hamilton, the not-so-new phenomenon that you surely don’t need me to describe, are decidedly different movies—not just in terms of tone, but in how they depict music being performed on screen. Read More

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Rocketman: Breaking Hearts, But Not Molds

Jeremy BeckReviews
Taron Egerton in "Rocketman"

They say a great pop song can lift you up, but at one point in Rocketman, the audience actually levitates, their shared delight elevating them into midair. We’re at The Troubadour in 1970s Los Angeles, and the flamboyant piano player is treating the crowd to an exuberant rendition of “Crocodile Rock”. As he bangs the keys and belts out the tune—about him and Susie, holding hands and skimming stones—you too might find yourself propelled upward, borne on the dynamism of the music and the enthusiasm of the performance.

When are you gonna come down? Soon enough. Every so often, Rocketman—Dexter Fletcher’s occasionally extraordinary but largely straightforward new film about Elton John—taps into that spirit of joyous communion, the rapturous feeling of losing yourself in art. But gravity regularly gets the best of it, and when it falls back to Earth, it reveals itself as yet another product plucked from the biopic assembly line. John was a provocative and often dazzling performer, but underlying his on-stage extravagance was music with real originality and heart. Rocketman, by contrast, tends to feel like a magic trick; its presentation, however skillful and virtuosic, seems designed to disguise its inherent flimsiness and familiarity. Read More

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