In the Heights

 

Fans will hear and see musical and narrative similarities between Lin-Manuel Miranda's "Hamilton" and his earlier Tony-winning work "In the Heights," both now delivered as motion pictures (though Hamilton was a filmed stage production and In the Heights fills city streets).

Both shows blend musical genres (hip-hop, Latin and more conventional theatrical structures) and weave together stories that explore how families (broadly defined) fight for self-identity and validation, albeit against vastly different backdrops.

Hamilton's sweep was grander -- America's liberation from Britain -- and In the Heights covers more intimate ground, the indomitability of the human spirit, represented here by immigrants and Dreamers from the Caribbean living in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan. Audiences will likely be moved to laughter and tears by these denizens and their dicey dilemmas.

Director Jon M. Chu's color palette is saturated; reds, greens, blues and yellows run down the sides of the screen (figuratively speaking) and wash over the audience, as his camera trots along with and flies above the film's wonderfully winning troupe of principals (Anthony Ramos, Corey Hawkins, Leslie Grace, Melissa Barrera and Gregory Diaz IV) and scores of dancers over the course of three steaming summer days in New York, before a citywide blackout.

The film's pacing is vigorous and, like Hamilton, the score is nearly through-sung; long passages have nearly no spoken dialogue. Also, like opera, the songs are heavily expositive, bearing the characters' own stories (Breathe, Paciencia y Fe), rousing anthems for community and solidarity (In the Heights, Alabanza, Carnaval del Barrio) and bawdy romps (No Me Diga).

In the Heights is an unquestionable cinematic achievement, which, as I shared with my screening partner today, will likely sweep during award season. It's biggest competition will no doubt be Steven Spielberg's West Side Story, scheduled to open during the winter holidays.

Cruella

 

Aussie director Craig Gillespie (I, Tonya; Lars and the Real Girl) takes the villainess from Disney's One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961) and turns her into the mad and misbegotten title-heroine of Cruella, and uses a vaultful of cinematic feats and flights of fantasy in doing so.

This high-dollar / high-concept battle of the Emmas (Stone as the ambitious Estella and her devilish alter-ego Cruella and Thompson as the wicked Baroness) is set in the world of haute couture of London in the '60s and '70's. The picture follows Estella/Cruella as she fights to be noticed by the celebrated Baroness but discovers, as it were, the empress was naked.

Cruella is tuneful (huge soundtrack but is not a musical), campy and energetic. And, as one might expect from Disney Studios, the movie contains a bounty of elaborate set pieces, each more daring than the one before. The script contains many clever passages and is well-served by a cast of pros -- Mark Strong as The Baroness's Valet, Joel Fry and Paul Walter Hauser as Estella's grifting mates. But, Cruella, though often delightful, is longwinded, clocking in at two-and-a-quarter hours.

Spiral

 

The Saw franchise of eight (or nine) splatter films (depending on if you count Chris Rock's latest movie, Spiral) were successful because they walked the line between the plausible and implausible in the games of deadly entrapment the homicidal maniac Jigsaw devised to test or punish his victims (again, depending on your POV). Darren Lynn Bousman directed three pictures in the original series and has returned to tweak that winning formula while keeping the ironic sadism front and center. The results are mixed and if the ending is to be believed, this might be the start of another bloody series.

Rock plays an exasperating city detective who is also the son a former chief of police (Samuel L. Jackson). He has found himself on the bad side of nearly every cop in the department because of his renegade, showman ways. Rock's cynical Zeke Banks is teamed with rookie William Schenk (Max Minghella) , whose eager young lawman Banks finds annoying. This allows Comedian Chris Rock to riff on a few of his favorite topics -- himself and his marriage, sex, infidelity, divorce and porn (they are not unrelated). I feel this is the film's biggest weakness: It does not ask Rock to drop the stand up and fully invest in this other persona. This lends the picture an uneven tone. This is not a buddy cop dramedy.

The Banks / Schenk team, a familiar pairing to even casual moviegoers, is assigned the investigation of the contraption murder of a fellow detective, one of the few officers who didn't hate Banks. Soon, the investigation starts to sprawl as other cops are killed horribly and the murderer sends bait to Banks to keep him engaged. It's not just the killings that are messy here. The pacing of this story is strange, the narrative arc pitted with holes and shortcuts. Too much of the story relies on flashbacks and backstory reveals and not enough on actual detective work. That Banks eventually comes face-to-face with the killer is not because he's a skillful detective but because the puppet master knows his victims so well.