Originally published at Cinema Sugar.
Roger Radcliffe is ultimately a supporting player in this story of dogs trying to avoid being skinned for their fur (you know, a Disney movie for kids). But as the hero of his own story, he’s an excellent example of an artist at work.
Here’s what we can learn from this eccentric English musician about a productive and fulfilling creative life.
Roger may be a struggling artist, but he still understands the importance of routine and consistency. You can tell he puts in the hours and treats his craft like the job it is—much to his dog Pongo’s chagrin.
Even a pro like Roger knows when it’s quittin’ time. Once 5 pm arrives (thanks to some sneaky time-turning by Pongo), he’s out the door with his canine companion for some fresh air and a chance to unwind.
While playing around with the melody that would eventually become his hit song “Cruella de Vil”, Roger uses nonsense songs as placeholders, which his wife Anita playfully teases him for. But he insists: “Melody first, my dear, and then the lyrics.” Of course lyrics can come first in the creative process, but until you have a melody for them you don’t have a song. Whatever the creative art, figure out what you absolutely need before adding layers of complexity.
Roger’s journey from struggling musician to successful hitmaker can be traced to one key moment: glomming Cruella de Vil’s name onto a half-formed melody. This bit of improvised whimsy occurred only because he was present and observant of the world around him. Same case with his second single “Dalmatian Plantation”, which, despite the problematic name, emerged out of his natural reaction to dozens of sooty dogs destroying his house.
Cinema Sugar asked on Threads: “What movie do you refuse to watch?” It provoked some interesting responses, the most common by far being Titanic and Barbie.
I get the Barbie backlash since it’s new and somewhat (weirdly) politically charged. Titanic, though, is nearly 30 years old and one of the most awarded and highest-grossing movies of all time. Perhaps that stature is enough to continue repelling people decades later? I get that not everyone is interested in a tragic romance and/or disaster adventure, but those who proudly avoid it as if it’s a badge of honor ought to make like Rose and lighten up, let their hair down, and do a jig down in third-class.
Partially out of spite for those insecure dumdums, I recently rewatched it for the first time in a decade. Some thoughts:
1. It’s a masterpiece. There’s just no way around it. There are cringey elements, sure, but they’re drowned out by the sheer magnitude of the spectacle and drama.
2. Noted this quote from the TV interview Paxton’s Brock Lovett gives:
Everyone knows the familiar stories of Titanic—the nobility, the band playing till the very end and all that. But what I’m interested in are the untold stories, the secrets locked deep inside the hull of Titanic.
This is a key point when thinking about the value of history and historical fiction. Imagined characters like Jack and Rose serve as representatives of all those real people whose stories remain untold, giving us a personal way into grand historical moments that typically erase the everyday folks who don’t end up in history books.
3. I didn’t see it in theaters, so my only experience with it for a long time was with the two-cassette VHS. The first cassette ending with Captain Smith’s line “I believe you may get your headlines, Mr. Ismay” and then a cut to black was an all-time intermission cliffhanger. There were other long movies with similar break lines like The Sound of Music (“It will be my first party, father!”) and Gone With The Wind (“Tomorrow is another day!”), but they just don’t compare in dramatic effect. And since DVDs quickly took over around this time, it might be the last movie with such a built-in cliffhanger.
4. This time around I really felt the weight Mr. Andrews was carrying as he reckoned with the unfolding tragedy and wandered through the mingling first-class passengers who were oblivious to their fate.
5. There’s a stark contrast between the two times the flares were shot off: in the first, they’re up close and seen by the passengers like a brilliant firework display, but in the second they’re in a far-wide shot that frames the mighty ship and its flares as but small flickers of light in the vast darkness of the ocean. Brilliant move to show just how alone and doomed they really were.
6. You know what this would make a great double feature with? Once. A chance encounter of two strangers, one of which inspires the other to escape their melancholic funk and live their life to the fullest. There’s even a lyrical nod to Titanic in “Falling Slowly”: take this sinking boat and point it home, we’ve still got time…
Scheduled to be released in theaters June 2020, the film adaptation of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical In the Heights was in the first wave of movies that were delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic. It got pushed back a full year to June 2021, when as part of a slate of Warner Bros. movies it controversially debuted in theaters and HBO Max simultaneously.
While I did take advantage of the streaming option for several of these movies (sorry, Dune), I knew I wanted to see In the Heights on the big screen. Not only to support it financially but also because musicals ought to be a big-screen experience shared by a crowd of like-minded moviegoers.
But as with the denizens of Miranda’s Washington Heights, my cinematic sueñito soon had a rude awakening: The theater I went to was completely empty. Not just my screening room but the entire multiplex. I appeared to be the only person going to a movie on that particular Sunday afternoon, a time I assumed would normally be bustling with people of all ages.
Part of me was OK with having a screening room to myself as I wouldn’t have to worry about talkers or texters. But this feeling was also tinged with disappointment: it meant moviegoing itself, my beloved pastime, was still fighting the same virus we moviegoers were fighting outside in the real world.
Little did I know that the fictional story I was about to witness on screen about a neighborhood reckoning with a paralyzing power outage would serve as an unintentional parable for a different kind of crisis.
Adapted from Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Tony Award-winning stage musical, In the Heights tells the stories of community members in the predominantly Latine neighborhood of Washington Heights in New York City, with Usnavi (Anthony Ramos) and his bodega as the centerpiece of the dramas and delights that happen during one sweltering summer.
What the core cast of characters share, besides being childhood friends, is the desire for something more—something they hope will propel them out of their limiting circumstances. Usnavi yearns to return to his ancestral home in the Dominican Republic, which conflicts with his feelings for Vanessa, who also aspires to escape the barrio and pursue fashion design. Meanwhile Benny dreams of becoming a business tycoon and being with Nina, a star student but first-year Stanford dropout having an existential crisis.
These rising tensions finally come to a boil one night when the group is out at a packed salsa club. It’s a sweaty and electric scene that’s punctuated by moments of misunderstanding and frustration between Usnavi and Vanessa, who can’t get in the same rhythm with each other—on or off the dance floor.
And then: Boom! Power outage. The club goes dark, and amidst the chaos and screams the crowd stampedes out into the unlit streets.
With no indication of when the power will return, the neighborhood is left to endure the heat however they can. The public pool offers welcome relief, which the epic “96,000” showcases with exuberance. But eventually fatigue sets in and all there is to do is sluggishly waste away outside in the boiling sun.
That’s the scene the fiery salon owner Daniela arrives at when she charges into an apartment complex courtyard in search of a boisterous farewell for her salon relocation. Her attempt to rally their spirits turns into the lively “Carnaval del Barrio” sequence, which features some great song-and-dance but also lets people air out their feelings about the challenging circumstances.
Vanessa and Sonny, Usnavi’s undocumented immigrant cousin, vent about their powerlessness—both literally amidst the prolonged outage, and figuratively against gentrification and discrimination:
Y’all keep dancin’ and singin’ and celebratin’
And it’s gettin’ late and this place is disintegratin’
But Usnavi, preparing to leave Washington Heights for his homeland, argues for a hopeful acceptance of change and makes a plea for solidarity:
Alright, we are powerless, so light up a candle
There’s nothing going on here that we can’t handle
This spurs the group into a raucous, unifying celebration of the barrio’s different ethnicities, with people rallying around the flags of their heritage—Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Mexico—not as jingoistic saber-rattling but as jubilant ethnic pride. They may be suffering, but they’re suffering together.
A sudden crisis with an unknown duration. Increased outdoor interaction with neighbors and friends. Personal and political discontentment spilling out into the public square. Sound familiar?
Despite the Broadway version debuting a decade before—and the movie filming a year before—the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, In the Heights serves as a richly drawn (and sung) synecdoche for that particularly fraught moment in modern American history. You remember: within two days of the WHO’s official pandemic declaration on March 11, 2020, Tom Hanks announced his diagnosis from quarantine in Australia, the NBA shut down, the president addressed the nation, hospitals braced for impact, and businesses everywhere slowed to silence. COVID didn’t strike quite as suddenly as a power outage (hello, toilet paper hoarders) but it sure felt like it in the moment.
The days and weeks that followed were a time when we’d lost everyday powers: to visit elderly family members, to go grocery shopping without fear of contamination, to attend school in front of other humans instead of a screen.
But it was also a time when, like a real-life “Carnaval del Barrio,” pent-up discontentment got channeled outward as thousands of people took to the streets with raised voices—not to escape a power outage but to protest George Floyd’s murder. And the tug-of-war between hope and despair played out on the national stage as the 2020 election ominously approached.
(Even Abuela Claudia fits into the analogy: her health issues combined with the suffocating heat proved too overwhelming, leading to her death early in the pandemic—a tragic analogue to the virus’s high mortality rate among the elderly.)
“We’re all in this together” is something we heard a lot in those dark early days when the masks went on and the infection trend lines went off the charts. Over time, as inequalities piled up and ideologies clashed, it become less inspirational and more cruelly ironic. But its core message stands, in real life and on the screen: communal camaraderie amidst a crippling crisis makes struggle a little easier to endure. As Abuela Claudia always said, “¡Paciencia y fe!”
Back in Washington Heights, the power eventually returns and our friends are left to adjust to their own “new normal.”
Nina has regained her vocational drive and plans to return to college to fight for the undocumented. Vanessa has moved out of the neighborhood and found her creative ambitions reinvigorated. Usnavi is still set to leave for the Dominican Republic until, with a little help from his friends, an epiphany reframes his vision for what home means to him. (Something the large swathes of post-COVID remote and hybrid workers can appreciate.) Though they looked different than they did in the before times, their sueñitos had come true.
I’m very grateful I was in a happy and healthy home for quarantine with my wife and child in June 2020. I also wish I could have been at the movie theater instead, watching In the Heights become the smash hit of the summer. That didn’t happen, but I can still dream…
In January, my Cinema Sugar compadre Kevin and I went on the Baby’s First Watchlist podcast to talk all things WALL-E as a tie-in with Animation Month. It was my first time as a podcast guest and was a lot of fun.
They pulled out a few clips to share on social media that included thoughts from yours truly:
You can listen to the whole thing wherever you get your podcasts, or watch it on YouTube.
If you’ve been to a movie at AMC in the last two years, you’ve seen their now-legendary in-house commercial starring Nicole Kidman where she walks into a theater extolling the magic of movies, moviegoing, and AMC:
It’s sincere, borderline saccharine, and immediately after its debut in September 2021 became a lightning rod for hot takes and memes and parodies—all of which I read and enjoyed.
But a funny thing happened when I went to see a movie for the first time in a while: I realized just how true and meaningful that ad is.
I recently stumbled upon an old writing assignment of mine from 9th grade called This Is My Life, where we had to write a short paper focusing on important aspects of our lives. The title page told the story best, with its grid of posters from Back to the Future, Memento, Unbreakable, Saving Private Ryan, and other favorite movies showing what mattered most to me at that time.
That assignment happened over 20 years ago, though I loved movies long before that, traipsing through the Disney canon as a kid before venturing into more adult fare as I got older (shoutout to my dad for bringing me to Mission: Impossible at 9 years old). In middle school I discovered Back to the Future, my first and abiding cinematic love. And from there my palate kept expanding into almost every genre, era, and region. While I didn’t become a cinematographer or director as I’d planned and indicated in that assignment, I did remain obsessed with movies and continued watching and loving and writing about them ever since.
That includes co-founding Cinema Sugar last year as a place to celebrate the movies we love, why they matter, and how they connect us all. Watching great movies is something I’d be doing no matter what, but Cinema Sugar provides the impetus for contemplating them—and appreciating them—more deeply as we build Top 10 lists and even consider our all-time favorites.
All of that was stewing in my subconscious when I recently got out for a rare trip to the movie theater as an early birthday present. With a full-time job and two young kids at home, I haven’t been able to go as much as I’d like or used to before kids. The entire summer movie season had passed me by: Asteroid City, Indiana Jones, Past Lives, Barbie… all movies I would have gone to under different circumstances.
But at last I was going to Oppenheimer, and deeply grateful to be. I savored the short drive to the nearby AMC on a warm summer morning. After using up the last of a gift card on the ticket, I literally ran up the grand staircase to the second floor. Not because I was late, but because my body just needed to express the kinetic energy I was feeling inside.
I was going to a movie! I thought. It’s something I’ve never taken for granted, even during my single days or child-free phase. Going to the movies is a gift, no matter when, and that felt especially true that day as I sat down just before Nicole Kidman’s entrance.
I knew it was coming. What I didn’t know is that this time around, this video I’d seen many times before would give me goosebumps and suddenly make me feel like I was watching it for the first time. Only now, I saw its sentiment not as cloying but profound: Movies are magical. Moviegoing is important. And all the snark about the ad betrays a tragic lack of gratitude for what it’s telling us.
It also gave me déjà vu, because I’d seen a similar epiphany play out before on screen at the same theater.
Less than a year ago I went to see Damien Chazelle’s film Babylon, wherein Manny (Diego Calva) is a laborer in 1920s Hollywood who happens to make connections with both the ambitious ingénue Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie) and aging film star Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt). He uses those connections to climb the studio ranks as an assistant, producer, and eventually director.
Over time he witnesses a lot: Nellie’s meteoric rise and fall, Jack’s slow obsolescence, an industry struggling to transition from silent movies to talkies—not to mention his own poor decisions gone terribly wrong.
(Spoilers ahead—skip to past the photo if you want to avoid them.)
Decades later, we catch up with him when, long out of the business, he returns to Hollywood and visits his old studio. But it’s not until he ends up in a movie theater showing Singin’ in the Rain when memories start to resurface, the movie’s title song triggering a torrent of flashbacks to his formative times with Nellie and the industry he’d loved—both of whom didn’t quite love him back.
We see those flashbacks intermixed with a time-jumping, fourth-wall-breaking montage of clips from a whole century of cinema. Manny would not live to see most of it, but what he and Nellie and Jack and countless others did make in their time served as the essential foundation for films to come.
“I’ve always wanted to go on a movie set,” he’d told Nellie way back when. “I just want to be part of something bigger… Something that lasts, that means something.” Helpless before the shining silver screen, he breaks down in tears at the realization that he got what he wanted, that what he lived through had transformed into something much bigger than himself—and he was the surviving witness to it.
Sometimes I wonder if all this time and attention I give to movies is worth it. They’re just stories after all, a series of images that flash before my eyes for a short time and then disappear. The world is full of real people who are struggling—what good are movies to them? Dedicating my focus to moving pictures can often feel frivolous at best and morally negligent at worst.
There’s a scene in Back to the Future Part II when Doc discovers Marty’s plan to use 2015’s sports almanac to bet on games back in 1985. “I didn’t invent the time machine for financial gain,” Doc says:
The intent here was to gain a clearer perception of humanity: where we’ve been, where we’re going, the pitfalls and the possibilities, the perils and the promise. Perhaps even an answer to that universal question: Why?”
That’s why movies matter.
Movies are us. They show us our history and our future. They celebrate our wins and illuminate our sins. They beckon us into a reality completely different from—or exactly like—our own, and by doing so tell us more about others and ourselves than we could have discovered alone. They are something bigger than us.
That epiphany is what made Manny weep with bittersweet awe in Babylon. It’s what has for so long drawn me to movies as constant companions on the perilous journey through life. And it’s what I chase every time I press play on a Blu-ray or sit in a dark theater, eagerly awaiting Kidman’s earnest invocation.
So why movies?
One of the great things about running an online magazine like Cinema Sugar is that I can just decide that I want to try to interview someone, and then watch as that dream miraculously becomes reality.
That happened recently in conjunction with Westerns Month. I remembered that I’d read two excellent books about westerns by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Glenn Frankel: The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend and High Noon: The Hollywood Blacklist and the Making of an American Classic. So I contacted him through his website, he got back to me, and we arranged a Zoom call.
Our resulting interview dug into his books, westerns in general, John Wayne vs. Gary Cooper, writing, and more. It was a unique thrill to chat with someone whose work I admire as a cinephile and history nerd, and I’m deeply grateful for his time and his thoughtful answers.
I absolutely love doing these interviews and thinking up questions I hope the subject will enjoy answering. Check out the archive of interviews with actors, directors, authors, and more, including:
Originally published at Cinema Sugar
Josh, you’re in a musical. That’s how musicals work. When you’re too emotional to talk, you sing. When you’re too emotional to sing, you dance.” — Melissa, Schmigadoon
I went through a phase as an adolescent when I didn’t get musicals. Not only that: I actively resented them. They’re cheesy and unrealistic! I reasoned. People don’t randomly burst into song and coordinated dances! There were a handful of musicals I did enjoy (Singin’ in the Rain, The Sound of Music, Newsies), but even they couldn’t escape the weight of my prejudice that they were ultimately frivolous, unserious entertainment.
That is, until one fateful summer when two diametrically different movies accidentally teamed up to convince me otherwise.
It was the summer of 2007. I was back home after my freshman year of college, working for the second year in a row as a counselor at a summer camp. It was a fun gig for that time in my life: decent cash, free meals and lodging, lots of time outside and hanging out with fellow college-aged counselors.
I became fast friends with one of the counselors (let’s call her Kendra) as we enjoyed hanging out together and discovered mutual interests—playing music being a big one. We played together a lot that summer, with her singing and me muddling along on the guitar or piano, both of which I’d started teaching myself to play a year or two before.
She had a boyfriend back home, and even if she didn’t I was too emotionally guarded and scared of the concept of dating to have considered making a move. But I felt a warmth and ease between us, and a platonic bond that could have been mistaken for siblinghood if it weren’t for the faint flicker of a flame beneath it.
Earlier in the summer I’d heard great buzz about this tiny Irish movie that was sort of a musical, featuring the kind of singer-songwriter music I was really into at the time, and that was antithetical to the shiny show tunes of traditional musicals. It was playing at a small movie theater across town, so I figured it’d be worth a watch despite knowing nothing about the director or stars. I suggested to Kendra that we go see it one Saturday afternoon during our off time and she was game.
We’d been cloistered in the camp bubble for a while, so this escape into the outside world, however brief, felt refreshing and special. And since going to the movies itself is a refreshing and special occasion, I think we both were primed for a magical experience as we arrived at the small strip-mall theater and entered the darkness of the screening room together.
Once, directed by John Carney, is fairly easy to describe. An Irish busker (Glen Hansard) meets a young woman (Markéta Irglová) on the streets of Dublin and they grow close as they play music together, discuss their lives and bruised loves, and inspire each other as they enter new phases of life.
But such a tidy description belies the miles-deep emotional undercurrent that runs beneath this story and propels the main characters—who remain unnamed and are credited as Guy and Girl—first towards each other and ultimately onto their individual fates.
Should he get back with his ex-girlfriend in London? Is her floundering marriage worth repairing? That undercurrent flows to the surface not through any melodramatic speeches or contrived conflicts, but through the music they share.
Probably because the film’s core of Carney, Hansard, and Irglová are real musicians, they manage to capture both the tedium and the thrill of creating meaningful music—and, by extension, art in general—better than almost anything I’ve seen.
They do so by paying close attention to moments in the songwriting process that are small and specific but still significant: Haphazardly assembling snatches of melody while taking notes on your laptop. First hearing someone add harmony to your song when you’ve only ever played it solo. Finding replacement Discman batteries so you can finish writing lyrics you need. Nailing a song on the first take in the studio.
These little euphorias add up, in real life and in the movie. And with what Guy and Girl accumulated during their time together, they were able to bestow each other things they couldn’t have imagined before meeting: she helps him record his songs and boosts his confidence for the next step, while he surprises her with a generous gift to reignite her passion for playing.
It was goodbye in the best way, with grace and gratitude for what they meant to each other.
Kendra and I emerged from the theater nearly vibrating from what we’d just experienced. I had no idea a musical could be like that. Sparse. Soulful. Closely observed and deeply felt, with a ragamuffin realism and total lack of the affectation and razzmatazz of traditional Broadway-based film adaptations. It was much more like a Dardennes movie than a musical, despite fulfilling the technical definition of the genre.
Sure, it was bordering on twee and perhaps too appealing to self-serious emo lads like myself at the time. But that feeling of a movie being made just for me was too powerful to deny.
As soon as we got back to camp I hopped on the piano in the empty main lodge so we could try out the songs, which still reverberated through us. We managed our own halting cover version of “Falling Slowly,” its anthemic melody climbing up and down the walls of the lodge with my tentative piano chords in pursuit.
It didn’t occur to me at the time, but while we sang that beautiful music together, what remained unsung was how we were a kind of echo of what we’d just seen on screen. A girl and a guy (a tall, bearded, redheaded one no less) spending limited yet meaningful time together, singing tunes and sharing stories and creating memories? It was too good to be true, and yet it was.
For a moment anyway. As in the movie, time ran out on us when camp ended and we both returned to our normal lives. But what I took with me from this Once experience was how people could come into each other’s lives and share an interlude together knowing that time would end, yet still forge ahead into the moments they had remaining and do something wonderful with them.
That’s what music can do, and what art can do, and what grace can do if we let it.
This summer reverie was still fresh in my mind when I returned to campus ahead of the fall semester and, just a few weeks after seeing Once, encountered another paradigm-shifting film—only this one with a little more razzle dazzle.
I arrived before classes started so I could attend resident assistant training, a two-week orientation for this student-leadership position. I’d applied to become an RA because I thought I’d be good at it and because being an introvert in a typically extroverted role would actually be an asset for serving the less-outgoing undergraduate residents. (The free room-and-board didn’t hurt either.)
One evening a group of RAs went to see the new Hairspray movie. Because I was trying to push myself to get out more and socialize in this new role, I decided to tag along. And as I was still wedded to my myopic view of musicals, despite my recent Once experience, I brought my low expectations with me too.
Based on the Broadway adaptation of John Waters’ 1988 film, Hairspray follows the relentlessly cheerful and dance-loving teenager Tracy Turnblad in early 1960s Baltimore as she joins her favorite local teen dance TV show and, with her plus-size figure and support for racial integration, helps to transform the segregated, traditionalist ways of the show and her community for the better.
On paper this sounds potentially cloying and pat but on screen it’s anything but, honoring John Waters’ delightfully weird sensibility and humor with touches like John Travolta in drag as Tracy’s agoraphobic seamstress mother and Tracy riding a garbage truck to school through the dilapidated streets of Baltimore during the jubilant opening tune “Good Morning Baltimore.”
But it’s the soundtrack that’s the true star. Marc Shaiman’s zesty mixture of period-specific soul, R&B, gospel, and pop tunes elevates the movie into pure, unabashed spectacle. Highlights include the R&B-infused “Run and Tell That,” the bubblegum pop of “Welcome to the 60s,” and the 10-minute finale sequence of “You Can’t Stop the Beat,” which never fails to give me chills.
To say Hairspray changed my perspective is an understatement. It was like a high-wattage electric shock that flicked on a lightbulb for me, and the grainy black-and-white screen through which I’d been watching musicals before suddenly sparked into Technicolor.
I could see things now in other musicals that I couldn’t have appreciated before, like the awe-inspiring athleticism of performers who execute complex and cardio-intensive choreography with a smile. Like the finely tuned plots that elevate story structure into an art in itself. And how a musical is, in a way, the manifestation of all the fine arts into one—dance, design, music, drama, and cinema all magically synthesized before our eyes.
My chief objections to musicals—that they’re cheesy, unrealistic fluff—fell away like a discarded dress during a costume change. I finally saw how downright silly it was to accuse them of being cheesy when a dyed-in-the-wool musical like Hairspray was leaning so hard into campiness that it tripped over its own dance moves.
All my mental finger-pointing did was alienate myself from what the movie wanted to do, which was to grab my clenched fist with a big smile and pull me into a raucous, liberating dance.
(When Corny Collins, the host of the teen dance show in Hairspray played by James Marsden, was faced with the prospect of racial integration on his show, he saw his choice clearly: “You can fight it or you can rock out to it.”)
This isn’t to say Hairspray is beyond critique, or even close to my favorite musical. The acting is often cartoonishly bad, and the story implies a simplistic path of overcoming racial discrimination while centering Tracy, a white woman, as the instigating force of integration rather than her Black peers and local community.
Anytime a work of art speaks on important socio-political issues, even through a historical framework as Hairspray does, it risks looking outmoded or obtuse to future generations of viewers. And that’s OK—we can credit the film’s optimism and inclusive attitude while also acknowledging its limitations as a self-contained cultural artifact.
But I wasn’t thinking about all that when I emerged from the theater with the other RAs. I was thinking about how I’d ever get those songs out of my head, and how every one of Hairspray’s horn blasts and pirouettes and bursts of color were blows against cynicism and subtlety.
Which was, frankly, exactly what I needed.
Hairspray and Once could not be more different as movies or as musicals.
Once is a wisp of a film, a bootstrapped production with a cinéma vérité look, unknown cast, and achingly sincere songs that obliquely supplement the simple story.
Hairspray, on the other hand, is a big, brassy, cheeky joy explosion, with a maximalist attitude about its every aspect—acting, production design, social commentary, and the music above all.
Seeing these movies individually made big dents in my stony resolve against the allure of musicals, but seeing them within about a month of each other shattered it altogether. If I’d just seen Once I could have downplayed it as a unique aberration that departed widely from the conventions of the genre. Not so with Hairspray, which feels like the most musically musical to ever musical.
Having to span and make sense of that distance between them forced me to span the gaps in my own self-understanding and, above all, learn how to surrender. To say yes in spite of myself and show my prejudices who’s boss. And to trust and appreciate the essential elements of an art form instead of treating them as dealbreakers.
The musical has been around a lot longer than me. It has a lot to say—and sing. All you need to do is listen, because you can’t stop the beat.
Well, I finally did it: I finally revealed my decades-old collection of Back to the Future memorabilia.
With it being Sci-Fi Month at Cinema Sugar, I thought the timing was right to show-and-tell such items as:
I had a blast doing this, so please watch, enjoy, and share:
Originally published at Cinema Sugar.
Too many unsupervised teenagers at a fancy house. Red Solo cups strewn about. A couple making out. A skater kid sliding down the stairs into a tower of beer cans. Someone throwing up at just the wrong moment.
Welcome to a high-school movie house party.
Despite seeing this kind of party depicted on screen over and over again, I never actually went to one in real life. I was an introverted and mostly well-behaved Christian lad who considered sex, drugs, and drinking taboo. Which is how I usually found myself on Friday nights hanging out with my church youth group friends.
It was a lot more fun than it sounds! We goofed off, played games, pranked each other, watched movies, and shared an occasional deep discussion.
I’m grateful for those times because they kept me out of serious trouble and proved you don’t need mind-altering substances to have a good time.
But they weren’t very cinematic.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to adopt a deeper appreciation for the high school movie party. The best ones aspire to more than just adolescent revelry; they act as a catalyst for chaotic, dramatic, comedic, or romantic things to happen to the main characters in order to further the story.
Sometimes those things happen away from the ruckus, in a quiet or intimate moment. Think Kat and Patrick bonding on the swings in 10 Things I Hate About You or Josie crushing on Guy while trying to conceal her ruse in Never Been Kissed.
And sometimes the heightened environment of a party can bring simmering conflicts to a boil, as with Seth and Evan’s street showdown in Superbad or Amy and Molly’s bracing blow-up in Booksmart.
Those crucial moments didn’t happen while the characters sat at home dutifully studying for a test or even watching things happen to fictional characters on a screen.
They had to go get into a little trouble. They had to take chances and for once risk not making the safest choices.
If I could share a bit of wisdom with my 15-year-old self—and any other high schooler who’s a little too comfortable with the safe and responsible path—it’s this: Lighten up just a little bit. You can stay true to your convictions (which, by the way, are going to change) while still living your young adult years to their fullest.
So go ahead: join that party. Cheer on Schmidt pulling the knife from his back in 21 Jump Street. Jump into the “Paradise City” mosh pit in Can’t Hardly Wait. Cruise through a moon tower kegger like in Dazed and Confused.
Find ways to make a better story. Because that’s L-I-V-I-N.
I’m very excited to share a new thing I’m part of that’s now live on the internet: Cinema Sugar, a website/newsletter/social media destination for people who love to see, think about, and talk about movies.
Our mission statement:
We are not interested in celebrity culture. We are not interested in hate-watching, takedowns, or tasteless criticism. We believe movies make life sweeter.
It started as an idea from my pal and Chicagoland singer-songwriter Kevin Prchal, with whom I love to nerd out about movies and movie culture. We’ve been building out the brand and website for the last month and a half or so, and are thrilled it’s finally out in the world.
Each month will be dedicated to a different theme or genre, featuring top fives, interviews, curated playlists, movie night guides, personal essays, and so much more.
For September’s theme of High School Movies, I have an essay on what I learned from high school movie parties, which were so alien to my own high-school experience.
We’ve got a lot more cool stuff coming, so please check out the website, sign up for the newsletter, and join us on social media to talk movies with your fellow movie lovers.
