Sometimes, we forget that a movie’s main purpose is to entertain. There is nothing binding it to anything else. People often treat narrative films as documentaries for some reason. In the Heights received too much backlash, not because of the execution of the film, but because some people felt left out OF A FICTIONAL STORY!
I mean, when has anyone danced on the side of a building in real life? Shouldn’t that just negate any expectations of reality you have of a movie?
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Transcript for In the Heights
0:00
What was this movie about? You may have been thinking that after you saw the trailer because I saw the trailer plenty of times, trust me I had played before, just about pretty much every movie I went and saw at the theater. But what? No way, what, why would you make a trailer to a movie, if it doesn’t explain the story, it just looked like it was about people hanging out in New York. That is not an interesting story. But I’ll go see the movie anyway, because it’s in the theater. Whether you like it or not, there was a story in In the Heights.
0:44
Now, if you have ever heard of this little dancing man called Fred Astaire, you would know maybe that his philosophy on how his dance scenes are not just his dance scenes, all dance scenes, should be shot in one take, like in you should be able to see the whole body. I really liked that idea. And I wish there would have been a little bit more of that in this movie.
1:09
I mean, [In the Heights] definitely is a different style than the 50s, it is a lot faster, the music is a lot more upbeat. If there’s anything that is impressive, especially since this was an actual musical, it wasn’t this isn’t just a film. So at some point, all of this was done in one take. And it would have been cool if they kind of presented that in the same way for the movie here. But they didn’t.
1:36
But if they weren’t going to do the Fred Astaire style, I wish they would have done more fantasy, because that’s definitely what separates film from theater. With film, you can do pretty much whatever you want in theater, you’re limited to that space. Like when they had Benny and Nina dancing on the side of the building, which they ruined by showing us in the trailer, leading us to think that’d be more stuff like that. But that – that’s kind of that’s a film take on it, you know, like you could do it in the theater, but it’s not going to look nearly as good like it did in the movie.
2:09
That I think was the only time that they really took liberty other than when Abuela died. Spoiler alert. Yeah, it was it was pretty much just shot and straightforward. And use the film to your advantage people.
2:49
Now, I don’t know about you, but if the best days of my life were already behind me, as Usnavy had the pictures of him being in the Caribbean again, with perfect everything. And just basically with the I don’t know if he was saying it, or if it was written down, but it’s just best days of my life. Why would you have that there? I don’t know. I wouldn’t be able to live with myself knowing that the best days of my life, we’re already behind me.
3:20
And they’re talking about how the height – Washington Heights is amazing. You know, don’t forget it. He’s telling the kids, it’s awesome. Everybody loves it here. But with in the same day, who snobby store is both covered in graffiti, and is the victim of theft. That doesn’t sound like a great place to be to me – all in one day.
3:58
Now, there were a few quotes in [In the Heights] that I really enjoyed. So I’m just gonna give you two because they were the two that stuck out the most to me. I even wrote them down. That’s how much they stuck out to me. But Abuela at one point is talking I think she’s talking about her little rags or napkins or handkerchiefs or something in the stitching on them. And she was telling them, “It’s the little details that tell the world we are not invisible.” I mean, we all can look when – we all look human, but it’s those little things about us that separate us and make us unique, and those should be celebrated.
4:37
And another quote is when Nina is arguing with her dad about money because he’s supposedly selling off his business to send her to an Ivy League school, big mistake. At one point, he tells her, “You don’t tell me what we can’t afford.”
4:57
This is like “Dang, did she really think she knew all of his finances?” I mean, it’s it you know this by now I would figure this storyline would be over. The kids don’t want to go to school, but they go to school because the parents forced them to. It just seems, er college not just school, but it seems like it’s 2021. This storyline, it, I’m sure it still happens. I don’t have any kids yet. And in 20 years, or whatever, it still could happen to me. But I just feel like parents not listening to what their kids want. That’s pretty easily solvable. We’re always going to know better than the next generation, aren’t we.
5:42
But the one thing, this movie taught me more than anything, is I hate doing ADR, I hate doing what they call automated dialogue replacement, or looping. It’s where the movie is finished. And then you want really good crisp audio. So you go in and you play the movie, and the actors come in and say their lines over their old lines. So that it sounds perfect, which is important, because audio is more important than the video if you ask me.
6:10
However, I realized something during this movie, and then that is musicals. You don’t have to worry about doing a lot of ADR. And I was like, dang, I need to make horror musicals. Because I’d love to make some real true to life feature length horror movies. But now I feel like they have to be musicals. So I don’t have to worry about all the audio, all the ADR.
6:34
So I, there was one part of [In the Heights] where the dad of Nina, I forget his name, but he’s talking about how his daughter just got back at 3am. To me that I dumped I was lost. Like, it didn’t make sense to me and just tell me if it’s me, that’s not getting it. Because if she flew into JFK, you just take the A train, to where pretty much wherever you need to go, at least the A train will get you to the island. And you can go from there. Actually, I’m not exactly sure where Washington Heights is. Hold on. Let me look.
7:10
Yeah, it’s in Manhattan, that a train goes all the way through Manhattan, and it would have taken like an hour, so she gone in at 3am, it would have taken her an hour to get home. The whole thing confused me. It sounded like it was written by somebody who’s never been to New York. I digress.
7:28
And I’m talking about Nina a lot here. And she wasn’t even a main character. But a lot of what touched me personally is because she went to college and I’m, you know me, I have very strong feelings about people going to college.
7:41
They’re in that restaurant, her and her dad, and they’re talking about, you know, life in school. It was a pretty good scene. I think it was one of the more important scenes in the movie, at least, if people are going to take away a story and configure it to their reality. Because it – I mean, it’s in the dinner scene as well, when everybody’s together and having dinner and Nina talks to us about how she there was no community for her. And she got searched because her roommate lost her necklace. So they thought Nina stole it because she’s a minority.
8:13
But I mean, like I said earlier, it’s like parents are always telling their kids to go to college. Kids don’t always want to go to college, but they go anyway. I mean, if the parents are paying the bill, the kid really doesn’t – it can’t really say no. Maybe you just say hey, the parent, the kids could just tell the parents, hey, what if I want to pay for it? I’m not going unless I pay for it.
8:34
And I think any hard working parent would respect that. But that’s me speaking as a childless person.
8:44
There is one little moment when Abuela was looking at some pictures of – dang it. I forget where Usnavy is from, but there’s rust on some metal and she’s like, “What is that?”
8:56
And he goes, “Oh, it’s rust.”
8:57
And I’m like, “What?”
8:59
But this whole movie falls apart with the simple premise that if Usnavy’s goal is to move back to his Island because those were the best days of his life, but he has this business here, why does he just not sell the business and go back to his island? I don’t understand why it’s so easy to get to where you want to go.
9:23
You just don’t go and he kind of seemed like he had some strings that were holding him there. But no, I mean, of course Vanessa was so the almighty woman is controlling him even if she’s not even trying to control him. I think that he was staying there mainly for her and then there was Sonny. He obviously cares about Sonny but he could – he wanted to bring Sonny with them and Sunday his dad of course is a deadbeat dad and wants to control his son. I spent half the movie trying to figure out why he just did Go.
10:13
So there was one quick little scene where the dad was calling the Ivy League school. I was at Princeton, I don’t remember, we’ll just say it’s Princeton for fun. So, where Nina’s dad is calling Princeton, and he’s trying to figure out how much is owed. Because she is straight up lying to him – Oh, they’d already passed, I can’t go back. And she he called him and go, then you can still pay it. And then as the transition that happens in the scene, you hear from the lady on the phone, “The balance due for fall semester is…”
10:45
And then I was like, because I about 20 to 30 seconds before that, I was like, Oh, my gosh, here we can hear how much the school is. We can hear how much the school is like the to me, that’s a huge part of this movie. Because she’s just not going to some random Community College of the street. She’s flying out of town to attend a prestigious school. And a big part of that is how much the school costs, because half of [In the Heights]…well not half of it, but between Nina and her dad, it’s about how much it costs to go there. Which isn’t the truth. That’s not why Nina really doesn’t want to go there because of how much it costs. But it is a huge part of it. It’s causing so much stress on her dad, and yet, they chose to not tell us how much that is. Because I know when I was looking at going to NYU, this was in 2006. ish. It was like $42,000, just for tuition. I think maybe that included board but $42,000 for half a year. That is a ridiculous amount of money.
11:57
I just I don’t understand why they wouldn’t talk about that. Maybe it’s because the lottery winnings, the lottery that Abuela won was only $96,000. And you’re looking at, you know, the Powerball starts off at 40 million, I think. But it’s kind of crazy that, I don’t know, I would have really appreciated it. Because I think that would have been if, since a lot of people think actual movies are documentaries, I think it would have really spoke to somebody a little, you know, people will think this movies like you’re supposed to take it as real.
12:33
It’s not, I don’t want you don’t get me started on…if a movie is not a documentary. It’s a narrative. So don’t treat a narrative like it’s real life. But you can include real life elements in these movies. And that is the big one. I think if they would have put how much money cost, it was costing her dad to go to this school, it would have like, we raised that we would have risen the stakes on Nina. But we’re supposed to be sympathetic towards Nina I guess, and not her dad, I didn’t really understand where the scene…I was er…where I’m supposed to feel for these characters. If they don’t give me the whole story.
13:26
If I’m not mistaken, when Vanessa goes to Midtown or Downtown to look at apartments or something, we see our first white people in the movie. And they’re bumping into her and they’re being rude. So that’s, I guess what we think of white people. The white half of me is a little confused by that. But to me, it’s it’s like I said, this is this is a movie. I’m not worried about it. But we’ll speak a little bit later about why people are so butthurt over [In the Heights]. And so I just had kind of had to point that out there.
14:00
And there was the shot right here of when Vanessa like she took off running and she took off running in an empty street and it was a great shot. Because I mean, you would never see that in New York.
14:11
And Benny have on the subject of the lottery, he’s talking if he wins, he’s gonna go to business school. And I’m like, this is 2021 – a business school. But when I was recruiting for the army in 2005 to ’07, how many people that I run into that had a business administration degree or business marketing or some sort of business related field degree. It just felt like it was a high school diploma, you know, with a pump of steroids in it. It wasn’t. These people didn’t really seem they didn’t want to go start their own businesses. They didn’t want to do anything really with that degree. It is just “I need to go to college and I needed something easy to do to get through.” Which is weird because you already spent 12 years doing the school system and then you go to school for more years, just to do the school system. As you can tell, I’m not very pro college. And that’s, it’s this movie could have done more to speak to that noise. But it didn’t. But that’s fine, because that wasn’t the story of the movie.
15:17
Now at the pool, Sonny is in the pool, somehow not getting his hair wet. And all of the people are in the pool singing about the $96,000 they’re going to win. And the numbers get brought up after the whole musical sequence and everybody’s reaching in their pockets and pulling out their lottery tickets. I’m like, were are you all in the water with your lottery tickets? who carries their lottery tickets around with them like that all the time? I don’t know. I just, I, I guess I always just pull my lottery tickets out when I get home. So it was just kind of weird to me to see everybody, especially running around in the water with their lottery tickets.
15:56
Oh, and one quick note again on Nina. She said something that was very important. And maybe this was the best quote of the movie. But you basically don’t want to apologize for things that you never did wrong because she said she was apologizing for something going missing that she never stole. Oh, there’s no quote there. Sorry!
16:17
So Sonny. Here we go to college, again, Sonny’s crying about not being able to go to college because he’s undocumented. I’m just like, why are you…don’t be butthurt about things that aren’t good for you! Maybe it is good for you. I don’t think – just me personally after going through college and experiencing all that. Maybe five to 10% of the country is probably would help. It would help that many people. I don’t think it really does anything real for the rest of everybody else. But I’ll stop talking about college.
16:51
So Abuela’s is death. It was very emotional scene. It was good. And at the end of the scene, it we got completely silent in the movie. It was dead silent. And normally you would hear sniffles – I didn’t hear any sniffles in theater. There was a small crowd in there. And I was pretty shocked. I was wondering if this was designed to listen to everybody crying in the theater.
17:21
I mean, I cry. I didn’t cry. But I heard tears and sniffles in Click with Adam Sandler. That was I that confused me. I was like, Oh, okay. But then [In the Heights] didn’t produce them. But it felt like this movie was-was honing in on the fact that these people are going to cry. And we want to exploit that. Maybe they maybe they weren’t. They definitely weren’t. I – maybe they were who knows. But it really felt like the end of the sequence really was meant to show the crowd how emotional they’ve been emotionally impacted they were by this scene.
18:08
Oh, here’s another quote.
18:11
“I’ve spent my life inheriting dreams from you.” That’s how kids feel about parents a lot, I bet.
18:19
So there was a character that just popped up out of nowhere, Mr. Pete. He may have been the guy that was doing graffiti and stealing that I talked about earlier. I mean, I, he, he just because kind of just like a guy that was doing graffiti and stealing. And he was running away fast. And he never got a close up of him. And then all of a sudden, he’s doing more graffiti and inspires Vanessa for something.
18:46
And then we get introduced to Pete and there’s like 10 minutes of the movie left. And maybe he is throughout the movie. Maybe he was more introduced, quote unquote, at the beginning of the movie. But I was just like, “Where is this random character coming from? Where it is? I mean, it’s fine. I guess.” I just I don’t see it too often. I mean, in A Quiet Place Part 2. I mean, the people on the island were kind of introduced last minute, but that you couldn’t shoot that movie any other way. But, but Pete, just boop! there’s Pete playing a very important role in the movie in the last 10 minutes.
19:37
And then if you stayed, we were I was mean, the person I was at the movie theater with were the only two that stayed for the entire credits. And there was a post credit scene where Lin Manuel Miranda was basically saying “I’m a giant capitalist!” which I never thought I would hear from him, but I don’t know where he stands on economics.
19:57
Anyways. So what I was talking about earlier when I said we’re going to talk about something in this movie that kind of upset me about people taking it for real when it’s just a narrative is the fact that I guess the afro Latino community is very underrepresented in this movie. And Lin Manuel Miranda and director John Chu have gone on big giant apology tours and how they need to be more sensitive to other people.
20:29
And I just like, this musical just didn’t come together. And I don’t know if people can understand that. I mean, Lin Manuel Miranda took Hamilton and he stocked it full of minorities. So it’s not like this guy has anything to apologize for if-if in fact, in Washington Heights, there is more Afro Latinos there. I don’t know. I don’t know if there are not when I hear people complain about it. They’re just complaining that they feel under represented. And I’m just like, “Why are you so upset these two and why did these two apologize?”
21:12
It’s not like they didn’t have a million other things to think about. And all the cast did good. I didn’t have any problem with the casting. Any ask somebody else have a different color could have come in and done it. But I just don’t understand. I don’t understand that. Because this is a fake movie. This isn’t real life. Usnavi might be based on a real person, but the story is made up!
21:41
Did you see – Did you not see Nina and Benny dancing on the side of the building? You know, like, people can’t do that in real life. And if you’re expecting real life to come out of a movie, then maybe you should watch documentaries instead. Even movies based on a true story are largely fiction. And people need to stop being so butthurt, especially like John Chu, and Lin Manuel Miranda, and all the other producers and assistant directors even and casting agents….this like, putting these barriers on what they can and can’t do with their art is oppressive.
22:23
And it kind of hurts me that they’re apologizing, because a part of the community was not represented. And I wrote I’ve written a bagel letter to Lin Manuel Miranda about it. And he’s probably going to receive it and go like, “What? Who is this guy? Why is he ranting on and on and on?”
22:44
What do you think? Are movies just movies? Or do movies need to reflect reality? They always say like art is a reflection of reality. Should people really be upset? I don’t even know if these people were from Washington Heights, the ones that were complaining about not being represented in [In the Heights]. All I’ve heard is that there wasn’t enough Afro Latino representation, which I mean, if-if the movie’s goal was to accurately reflect that, then it failed in that prospect, I guess. But both of them john Chu, and man and Miranda seemed like they they are apologizing because they were ignorant to it. And if they’re ignorant to it, then it wasn’t part of what the movie was about.
23:37
I mean, [In the Heights] had won a $50 million budget, and unfortunately, it made only 30 million ish. But if you have $50 million on your hands, and people don’t seem to understand that the director and the producer, executive producer, whoever, they’re not the ones who make every single decision for the movie. Once you start receiving money from somebody, some of that creative control gets out of your hands. And why people don’t understand that I don’t get.
24:12
If this is what makes the movie terrible to you. And your it’s your life is ruined, because you don’t feel you were represented in a movie. And you know, it’s take a step back and just close your eyes and think about, think about what this movie had to go through to even be made. It’s not something that somebody just sits down by themselves, him or herself and writes a book, you know, it this is a whole giant collaboration. I mean, I’m sorry, but if I do become a director one day and I actually have the privilege to make actual movies, if I find somebody for a role that I think that person is going to be perfect for the role. I’m going to use that person. I don’t care what their race or whatever is. I don’t know why anybody would. It’s a movie!
25:02
It’s not real life. And I don’t know I just don’t understand why we treat movies. Some people treat movies like they’re all documentaries. And guess what movies are not documentaries even though I joke around about it all the time on my Twitter @MoviesAreDumbS, they’re not. And I hope one day people will grow up and realize that and that’s my rant for the night.
25:30
Thank you for listening to movies or some dumb now I can’t even say my next show name. Movies Are Dumb Sometimes. Where we talked about In the Heights. What did you think of In the Heights? Let me know at @MoviesAreDumbS Twitter or @MoviesAreDumbSometimes on Facebook or go to bloafx.com/moviesaredumbsometimes And you can see the whole list of where you can go all the podcast outlets you can listen to or just email me there Mads@bloafx.com.
26:02
It was a fun movie, I enjoyed it. But people need to just sit back. It’s like everybody’s so strung up nowadays about everything. And it’s like, I don’t understand how you can go see a movie and then be mad about something because it’s…I mean, yeah, I have my planes but it’s nothing that I’m going to chastise anybody over the director I mean, if the director makes some dumb decisions as far as the movie goes, like objectively dumb decisions, I guess there is really no objective decisions in art, so I’ll take that back. If the story is stupid then be bad about the movie or if some shots are out of focus and they don’t need to be in there’s no reason for them even be mad about the movie. Don’t be mad about the movie because of some casting decisions. Unless I’m if the casting was bad if they did a terrible job, which I don’t think anybody in [In the Heights] really did a terrible job at all.
But remember, when you’re in the movie theater, shut your mouth!
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