Do I Like Lin-Manuel Miranda Now?

I don't know how to say this, and I still think he is annoying as a human being, but Lin-Manuel Miranda is having a very good year at the movies. Encanto and Tick, Tick... Boom! are both excellent. I loved them both. Encanto is fun and hilarious and colorful. I laughed a lot, and it has some absolutely great fucking songs. "We Don't Talk about Bruno" is a total jam, and when Sebastián Yatra started singing "Dos Oruguitas", Encanto's eleven-o'clock number, I was stunned to realize it was in Spanish and that there was simply going to be no translation. Someone convinced Jared Bush and Byron Howard to have this key song only in Spanish. It's beautiful, and I burst into tears as soon as I realized what was happening. It's a great moment honestly. What a cute movie.

Tick, Tick... Boom! is another beast altogether. This is a film adaptation of the musical Jonathan Larson wrote before he wrote Rent. One of the things I loved about this is that it wasn't a film about him writing Rent. If it had been, I think that there would simply have been nothing to root for. We know that Rent is going to be one of the biggest musicals of the 1990s and is going to be a huge success, so there would be no stakes. But Tick, Tick... Boom!'s subject matter is different.

Instead, this is a movie about being a troubled artist who can't figure his shit out. He's selfish and stubborn and doesn't really know how to live his life, even though he is obviously very, very talented. The movie turns its attention to this aspect of Larson, and it makes the whole thing so much more interesting. I also really liked the songs, I really liked the filmmaking, Andrew Garfield is really excellent, and the entire approach to this musical just worked for me.

I want to say that I found Tick, Tick... Boom! very theatrical. But I thought Miranda dealt with the theatricality in really interesting ways. He reminds us all the time that this is a show – we watch the show being performed onstage at the same time as we watch the movie version of that same show. This seemed to me a really intelligent approach. And he knows when to remove this device, also. There's a wonderful moment in the third act when Larson is thinking about his sick friend and he goes to the park and sings a song by himself, and Miranda never cuts back to the theatre. We stay in this moment with Larson, and the film doesn't undercut its emotional thrust with the kind of editing tricks that were so pervasive in the the film of Miranda's In the Heights.

 Also the cameos! I was particularly obsessed with the appearance of Chita Rivera looking fabulous!