A Requiem for 'In The Heights'
#134: "In the Heights," "The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It," "Bo Burnham: Inside," "Infinite," "All That Jazz," "Get Shorty"
Edition 134:
Hey movie lovers!
As always, you can find a podcast version of this newsletter on Apple or Spotify. Thank you so much for listening and spreading the word!
In this week’s newsletter: Sheesh! I’ve been slacking lately. Apologies on that. We’re playing a little catch-up this week with the musical “In The Heights,” a movie which apparently I wasn’t the only one to sleep on. Then I’ll take a spin around the latest releases of the streaming services, though admittedly this upcoming week offers more promising fare. This week’s “Trailer Watch” is another Will Ferrell serious movie, which I don’t remember anyone asking for?
In The Heights
(In theaters)
It wasn’t that long ago that the trailers for Lin Manuel Miranda’s In The Heights claimed it was going to be “The EVENT of the Summer.”
Well, I sure hope not.
A mere three weeks after its release this movie is fading fast from theaters and entirely gone from cultural consciousness, claiming a different title of the biggest box office surprise flop of the post-pandemic era to date.
It’s a baffling case study in movie marketing, a field which analytics and cold hard data has not yet conquered. Nobody knows which movies are going to catch on and which are not, unless of course it involves Chris Hemsworth in a cape or, as we learned this week, Vin Diesel with a bottle of Corona.
The best advice was always just to make a good movie. But if there’s anything the capes and Coronas have taught us, it’s that that advice might be outdated by about 10 years.
In the Heights is a very good movie. And what’s more, it’s good in a way that should be an ultimate crowd-pleaser, in addition to the rave reviews it’s getting from critics.
And still it opened at $11.5 million against a $55 million production budget. The rule of thumb in Hollywood is to double that budget to account for marketing costs, but because Warner Brothers had to market this movie twice — pre-pandemic and now — the break even point could be as high as $150 million, a number that’s almost certainly out of reach.
Why does that matter? Because this was one of the very few movies with a budget above $50 million this year that isn’t a sequel or spin-off, a last ditch effort to toe the line between critical and commercial appeal. Down the drain.
Now comes the far more interesting question.
How did this movie flop so hard?
You can’t blame the pandemic because a week earlier Cruella opened at $20M and a week later F9: The Fast Saga opened at $70M.
You can’t blame Warner Brothers same-day streaming on HBO Max because Godzilla vs. Kong opened at $31M. In The Heights posted a disappointing 693,000 streamers, well below Godzilla’s totals. If anything, the numbers tell us so far that movies either draw a lot of viewers to the box office AND streaming (Godzilla vs. Kong was a hit on HBO Max) or they both struggle.
You can’t blame musicals, because La La Land and The Greatest Showman both cashed big time in recent years, and they weren’t even part of an extended universe!
My theory is that In The Heights lacked a hook.
I discovered this when texting with a friend about how much I liked the movie. They watched the trailer, and the response wasn’t yes it looks good or no it looks bad, they said “I don’t 100% understand the trailer.”
Don’t understand??
What that response really says is that the fate of the universe isn’t at stake here. There isn’t a clear hero or villain. What’s this movie about? And who’s in it? None of these people are movie stars, I don’t recognize them. Is the music even good? I’ve never heard anyone singing the songs.
There isn’t that one thing to point to that makes this a can’t miss proposition to the casual moviegoer. Sure, if you’re like me and a diehard fan of Miranda, or of “Hamilton,” then you’re an easy target. But those aren’t the people you’re trying to convince.
If you don’t know about “Hamilton,” your only exposure to lead actor Anthony Ramos is probably…the two best friend scenes from A Star is Born? Hardly memorable, and he’s by far the most well-known member of the main cast. And unlike the unforgettable anthems of our nation’s founding, the songs in this show are slightly less catchy.
Miranda’s lyrics are so lyrically and thematically dense that it can feel like an overwhelming assault upon first exposure, but the totality of the experience is awe-inspiring in the style of a Robin Williams stand-up rant or a Mike Tyson punch flurry (yikes I really need to update my references).
In The Heights raps and Puerto Rican pops its way through the story of a neighborhood — Miranda’s own home of Washington Heights — in classic ensemble fashion. Each character has a sueñito, a “little dream,” that dominates their character motivations, but their personal lives intersect with the creeping gentrification of New York City.
It’s a rather straightforward story, incredibly endearing and joyful in a way that is pretty irrepressible. My friend who I saw this movie with had zero connection to Miranda or musicals and was surprised by how much he liked it.
Fans of the original broadway show — which debuted pre-“Hamilton” starring Miranda and Chris Jackson (of future George Washington fame) in the lead roles — were a little upset by some significant changes that director John Chu made for the cinematic version. But having read about the specifics, they seem to me to be necessary to accommodate the form.
Basically what I’m saying is that anyone who watches this movie will find it impossible to resist its charms.
But here’s the thing.
You all have to actually see the dang movie! Whether it be on HBO Max for the next couple weeks or, for the full song-and-dance experience, in a movie theater.
Let’s not let one of the best movies of the year so far slip through the cracks.
Something New
Bo Burnham: Inside (Netflix): The 30-year-old was an original internet star, then became a successful stand-up comedian, then surprised us all with his sublime directorial debut Eighth Grade in 2018. As a fountain of angst, autonomy and (performative) authenticity, he might be the world’s foremost translator of millennial and online culture, which would make this “special” his magnum opus. Performed, filmmed and edited in one room during the pandemic, Burnham uses lights and cameras and singing and instruments and effects and other chaos to verbalize the frustrations of 2020 life in fittingly abstract ways. It’s not really something you laugh at as much as empathize with, so self-aware about its own pointlessness that it begs to be loved like a puppy dog. It’s kinda genius, in a weird way. And I won’t lie, some of the songs are very catchy.
The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It (Theaters, HBO Max): The deep well of true-enough demon-fighting stories has made Ed and Loraine Warren the faces of one of Hollywood’s most consistent franchises (watch out, Dom and Letty). But as I’ve talked about many times, sequels mean less mystery which means less tension, which is especially difficult in a genre like horror that relies on fear of the unknown. As a result this movie doesn’t build the existential terror I’ll never forget from the original movie, and relies on a ton of cheap jump scares. The rest of the movie flexes its budget to try to tell a legitimate family drama, which is certainly not the reason I or anyone else came to see it. PASS.
Infinite (Paramount+): Don’t worry guys, I watched this movie so you don’t have to. The Antoine Fuqua-directed, Mark Wahlberg-led action caper was originally slotted for wide release in theaters before Paramount made it a streaming exclusive, which seemed at first like a splashy play for more sign-ups but now seems a lot more like a move to hide an embarrassing flop. Wahlberg is basically like a sci-fi Jason Bourne, except all of the action is incoherent and stapled together with some of the clunkiest voice over I’ve seen in a long time. Yikes, it’s bad.
Something Old
All That Jazz (1979): A movie musical that has very little in common with the joyous communal triumphalism of In The Heights, this late 70s spectacle serves as a kind of reckoning for writer/director Bob Fosse on his own…complicated…life. The thinly veiled autofiction stars Roy Scheider (who you might know as the “we’re gonna need a bigger boat” guy from Jaws) as the Fosse avatar, a drug-addicted, womanizing dancer and choreographer behind the scenes of a big time Broadway production. It’s a dark and unforgiving movie but it’s got a kind of lurid appeal. Plus the quality is undeniable — nine Oscar nominations and four wins in technical categories. It’s a really difficult movie to find right now if you want to stream it, but if you hunt down a copy I promise it is worth it.
Something to Stream
Get Shorty (HBO Max): One of the main reasons I’ve been slacking with the newsletter lately is a trip I made to Chicago, which afforded me the opportunity to do one of my favorite things…which is force my friends to watch a movie that they’ve never heard of and would never watch on their own. Sometimes it bombs, but when it hits it really hits, as was the case last week with this mid-90s neo-noir adapted from an Elmore Leonard novel and starring John Travolta, Gene Hackman, Rene Russo, Danny DeVito, Delroy Lindo and James Gandolfini! Noir my favorite genre of movie — snappy, exciting, funny, complex, mysterious and just a heck of a lot of fun. Also, bonus rec! The first season of the 2017 TV show adaptation of the same story is now streaming on Amazon, and I really love it as well. But fair warning, the second season is complete crap.
Trailer Watch: The Shrink Next Door
Apple’s streaming strategy of handing out blank checks to A-list stars for all the projects nobody else wanted is…interesting. Often the tech behemoth’s unlimited resources are presented as a cheat code to acquiring the best of the best, but if short term success doesn’t matter at all then there’s less motivation to produce great stuff. As Thomas Paine would say, “that which we obtain too easily we esteem too lightly.”
None of that addresses this particular entry, which is an entirely earnest non-comedy built around Will Ferrell and Paul Rudd. It’s Ferrell’s second straight foray into “serious” fare, which feels a bit like Michael Jordan playing baseball. From this trailer it appears there could be some comedy mined from satire, in much the same way Steven Soderbergh did with “The Informant!” But don’t for one minute expect the same level of execution.