In The Heights (2021) Let's deal with the elephants in the room first......
The over-hype - in the midst of the long, agonizing and not-yet-finished pandemic recovery, critics and social media nabobs pumped this movie up as the Second Coming of glorious big screen entertainment. A desperately needed breath of fresh air from the likes of "Nomadland".......
And we'll admit that the trailers for this film and "West Side Story", positioned in the middle of that ghastly, toxic Academy Awards show, looked like long cool tropical drinks in the middle of a desert oasis.
So much singing.....so much dancing.....so much exuberance and energy....so much of everything. And no sign of Frances McDormand and her depressing little mobile home. Thank God.
And now here it is at last, fizzled out. Playing to empty theaters across America.....and maybe in some crowded living rooms that signed up for HBO Max. (which might account for the empty theatres.)
Even worse, within a week of film's release, its principal creator, Lin-Manual Miranda found himself publicly apologizing to the Cancel Culture Woke Brigade.
Huh?
In the sorriest pop culture social media spectacle we've witnessed this year, Miranda groveled before the Wokesters because his movie about the New York Puerto Rican and Dominican Republic community didn't have people whose skin was dark enough for them.
We're not going to discuss the sheer idiocy of that any further, since the Woke Nazis thrive on any public attention given to whatever the latest lunacy their feverish little fingers pound out on Twitter and Instagram.
Now having unloaded all that, let's deal with the movie itself.
We've always kinda loved musicals and we thoroughly enjoyed this one. We would have enjoyed it way more if some common sense and sanity ruled and at least 30 minutes was cut out of its way too long 143 minute running time.
But we're in the age of overkill now and this is the first musical produced exactly like a "Fast And Furious" movie.
By that we mean it's excessively loud and relentless, with every musical number staged like a raise-the-roof showstopper. And there's one hell of a lot of musical numbers that come at you.....well, fast and furious. This movie wants a standing ovation every three minutes.......which tends to come off as exhausting after a while.
As in his masterwork "Hamilton", composer lyricist Miranda once again shows he has almost no equal as a clever gifted creator of rhymed raps. But he's not much a tunesmith. You may find yourself tapping your foot to the pounding rhythms of his songs but you won't remember a single one of them two seconds after they're over.
You won't have to.....a few minutes, there'll be another song popping up, a duplicate of the one you just heard. But they are a joy to listen to and take in the spectacular dance numbers built around them.
Director John M. Chu juices up the pace even further with rapid fire editing and a variety of camera tricks that try to match the musical numbers in pure frenzied enthusiasm. We got the feeling Chu wasn't just directing the film, sometimes we got the feeling he was actively competing with it for attention.
"In The Heights" wants to entertain you with a vengeance and it won't stop until it demands you applaud as the closing credits appear.
We had a load of fun watching it and loved the the entire cast's marathon efforts to emotionally move us, even when the overproduction of the film barely gave them a chance to breathe.....so overall, for a musical fan like us, "In The Heights" took us to the 4 star (****) heights.
It's just a damn shame that the wacky, witless Woke trolls dragged Lin Manuel Miranda into the depths in which they dwell.......
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