Hamilton: Songs 24-28

On to Act II now – the Revolution’s over, and it’s time to start the business of building America.  Here we go!

“What’d I Miss” – Our fabulous introduction to Thomas Jefferson.  Wonderfully catchy, and it does an excellent job of establishing the conflict that will drive Act II, the clash between Hamilton/the Federalists and Jefferson/the Democratic-Republicans.  Daveed Diggs is terrific as Lafayette, but he’s equally great as Jefferson.

Best lyric:  “Not so fast.  Someone came along to resist him. / Pissed him off until we had a two-party system.”

“Cabinet Battle #1” – I love that cabinet debates are posed as rap battles.  The fantastically clever, intricate rhymes, combined with the high stakes of deciding economic policy and heaps of hip hop swagger, make this a standout number in a show packed with amazing music.  Hamilton absolutely shines here.

Best lyric:  “A civics lesson from a slaver.  Hey, neighbor, / Your debts are paid cuz you don’t pay for labor. / ‘We plant seeds in the South.  We create.’ / Yeah, keep ranting, / We know who’s really doing the planting.”

“Take a Break” – A plotty song, but a really good one.  I love the letters exchanged between Hamilton and Angelica, and the echo of the “Schuyler Sisters” theme is lovely; Angelica and Eliza harmonize like nobody’s business.  Here, we start to see some of the fallout of Hamilton’s dedication to his work above all else.

Best lyric:  “‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow / Creeps in this petty pace from day to day.’ / I trust you’ll understand the reference to / Another Scottish tragedy without my having / To name the play.”

“Say No to This” – An interesting look at one Hamilton’s least flattering moments.  With his family away for the summer, Hamilton finds himself tempted, sucked in, and finally extorted by a working-class woman with an enterprising, unscrupulous husband.

Best lyric:  “Uh-oh!  You made the wrong sucker a cuckold, / So time to pay the piper for the pants you unbuckled.”

“The Room Where It Happens” – An excellent number, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s answer to Sondheim’s “Someone in a Tree.”  Here, we have a historical event in which we know the outcome – Hamilton’s compromise with Jefferson and Madison, trading the location of the nation’s capital for Senate approval of his new financial plan – but none of the particulars of how it went down because “no else was in the room where it happened.”  Burr leads this fine song about the unknown nature of the political beast.

Best lyric:  “God help and forgive me, / I wanna build something that’s gonna outlive me.”

Poem: Event (2012)

Couldn't quite tell you where this poem came from.  It just sort of happened.

*          *          *

 

Event

What were you doing when the sky cracked?

Were you sitting cozy at home

With a good book and a dozing cat?

Were you strolling downtown,

Window shopping

Amidst the cobblestone quaintness?

Were you idling in early evening traffic,

Quietly fuming at those who can’t grasp the concept

Of signaling a change of lane?

Did you hear the roar?

Did it rattle your windows or ribcage?

Did you feel the earth lose its footing beneath you?

Was it a lurch or a stumble,

A tumble through you-don’t-know-what

Into something you’ve never known?

Was it cold on your face

As its strange wind whispered past,

Just for a second?

When it was over,

Could you still see the gash,

Or did you ignore it in favor

Of the sunshine plaster slathered over it?

Did you want to pretend it was never there,

Like all the traffic jammers who kept on inching

And the window shoppers who kept on walking

And the homebodies who kept cozying,

Insisting that the world was just as solid

As it was before?

Or do you see something more?

The Goat (1921)

This is a middle-of-the-pack Buster Keaton short for me, in no small part because he had so many stellar ones.  Although it possesses some really inventive bits and wonderfully funny moments, the cohesiveness is a bit thin and meandering.

A down-on-his-luck Buster (I wonder how many of his shorts start with that description?) is really in for it when a bad case of wrong-place-wrong-time ends up putting his face on someone else’s wanted poster.  All of the sudden, he’s believed to be notorious murderer Dead Shot Dan, with a $5000 price on his head.  We’ve got bread line misunderstandings, creative cop evasion, tricky train maneuvers, a pretty girl with a little dog, and top-notch elevator gags.

Like The High Sign, the throughline of this short doesn’t quite feel organic.  Instead of the gags building and coming effortlessly to a head, it’s a bit willy-nilly.  Very funny – don’t get me wrong – but it feels more like 20 minutes of terrific gags than a well-crafted comedic short.  For instance, it stands to reason that Buster’s life on the lam begins when he’s mistaken for a murderer, but by that point, he already has several cops chasing him for completely unrelated reasons.  It just feels a little haphazard.

But while it’s not put together as carefully, it is packed with excellent humor.  In some ways, this seems to have been Buster’s warm-up to Cops, because he pulls off some fantastic moments in the chase scenes.  The shot of him being dragged away by a moving car is an iconic one, and I love when he springs onto the spare tire of another departing car, only to realize it’s not actually attached.  To facilitate his escape, he also employs a horse-and-cart, a train, and a delivery truck.

The comedic climax comes once Buster’s made it into the crosshairs of the police chief, played by frequent costar Big Joe Roberts.  I previously highlighted the scene in which Buster vaults over Big Joe and through a high window, but the real crowning achievement is the chase that follows.  While Buster (and Fatty Arbuckle) played with elevators in The Bell Boy, Buster’s work with the elevator here is just scrumptious.  I love the sheer number of different ways he concocts to evade Big Joe using both the elevator and the stairs, and the finale elevator gag is a hoot.

The girl this time around is supplied by Virginia Fox, another regular in Buster’s work.  She doesn’t have a whole lot to do here; her most memorable scene, wherein a passerby gets spectacularly tangled in her dog’s leash, doesn’t have much to do with her.  However, there’s just something that tickles me about the fact that Buster is mistakenly wanted for murder and he still takes the time to put the moves on a pretty girl.  That Buster, folks – I tell ya.

By the way, I’ve seen this short a number of times, and I’m still not sure what the title refers to.  Scapegoat maybe, since Buster is being blamed for someone else’s crimes?  Search me.

Warnings

Slapstick violence, including plenty of tricky moves against officers of the law (Buster’s lucky he was a white guy, or this short would’ve been a lot shorter.)

Doctor Who: Series 9, Episode 11 – “Heaven Sent” (2015)

This will have to be a fairly short review, since there’s so little I can say without spoilers.  My overall impressions:  not OMG!!! Best Episode Ever!!!!, but interesting and well-made.  I’m equal parts excited and wary for next week’s conclusion/season finale (well, maybe not equal parts; the excitement is strong in this one.)

So, plot, huh?  Let’s see:  the Doctor is in mundo trouble, thrown headfirst into a creepy, baffling place with a fairly Moffatty monster that is slowly but inexorably coming for him.  It’s a race against both time and death to figure out how to escape.

The episode is stunningly directed.  The visuals and mood are Guillermo del Toro-esque, and the music is absolutely perfect.  It’s a veritable feast for the senses.  Putting aside the fact that it’s a two-parter, the episode feels very much like a complete entity.  By that, I mean that its assorted production elements all come together to create an unsettling but incredibly cohesive viewing experience.  There’s a thoughtful, deliberate feel to the design and cinematography.

The story, penned by Moffat, is a bit more hit-or-miss but still mostly good.  Most of the twists feel earned and well-seeded, and there’s some fine dialogue.  However, there’s one device that (to me) feels a little too much like Sherlock’s “mind palace,” which doesn’t quite work for me, and there are a few points that I’m not yet decided on; I’m going to have to watch the finale before I quite know how I feel about them.  There’s one in particular that I’m really hoping is misdirection.

The real headline here is Peter Capaldi, who gives his blood, sweat, and tears for this episode.  He spends huge chunks of time alone onscreen, but he fills it gorgeously.  He’s admirable, determined, despairing, lonely, smart, flippant, brave, terrified, and fatalistic, often several at the same time.  If this episode had a thesis, it would be, “Peter Capaldi is amazing.”

I’m a bit floored by how much good material has been written for Capaldi this season.  He’s always been phenomenal in the role, but last year, it felt like he was so often in the position of elevating so-so or even shoddy writing and making it work.  This year, though, it feels like the writers are much more interested in actually writing for him and giving him some beautiful scenes to realize.  Between some excellent points in “The Witch’s Familiar,” “Before the Flood,” “The Girl Who Died,” “The Woman Who Lived,” “The Zygon Inversion,” and now this episode, I’m thrilled that he’s getting material that’s up to his level.

Trevor Noah: Lost in Translation (2015)

I picked a good time to discover one of my new favorite funny people; less than a week after I saw my first clips of Trevor Noah on The Daily Show, Comedy Central aired this standup special.  I don’t watch a ton of standup, but I thought this was fantastic.  (Some joke spoilers.)

From what I’ve seen of Noah’s standup, here and on YouTube, I think his sensibilities as a comedian must be very shaped by South Africa’s young (as in recent) standup scene, which didn’t become legal until the ‘90s – along with free speech.  With that in mind, it makes sense to comedy and commentary go hand-in-hand in Noah’s act.  He’s incredibly funny, but he also has some very thoughtful things to say.  A few times, he got applause, not for a joke, but for the statement he was making.  (“You know who’s not a terrorist?  Most Muslims,” comes to mind.)  The special is built around several extended sequences, observations mixed with anecdotes.  If I have a criticism of Noah’s style, it’s that he can go off on a few too many tangents – though his sidetracked stuff is just as insightful/hilarious as his central focus in any given routine, I worried a few times that he’d never come back to his story.  Still, the meandering provides great material and shows off his versatility.  I like how he can go from outrageous to smartass to whacky to sober in the blink of an eye.  (Also, his accents are crazy good – I particularly like the argument he depicts between two Kentucky men that sounds more like dueling banjos than human speech.)

I love the long segment on racially-charged police violence, which is framed by the story of Noah’s utter panic at being pulled over in America for the first time.  Amid the silliness of the cop having to a bewildered Noah off the freeway, he examines four major events of unarmed black men being shot by police officers and the ways the media bent over backwards to explain away the tragedy.  His repeated refrain is, “I don’t know how not to die,” and he looks to these men’s stories to figure out the “right” way to do so.  There’s also a very good sequence on overall racial bias in news reporting.  Any crime committed by a Middle Easterner is “possible terrorism,” and any shooting in a black neighborhood is “probably gang-related,” but when a white man shoots nine people in a church, it’s an “isolated incident” involving a “mentally unstable lone gunman.”  Noah points out how quick the media is to separate this man from the rest of society and wonders why, when a white “lone gunman” kills people in a public place with the intention of inciting fear and spreading a message of hate, he isn’t considered a terrorist.

For me, the best is a story about flying as an African during the Ebola crisis.  It’s capped with some fine commentary on how fear makes people lose their minds and turn on each other, and being treated like a plague-carrier due to your national origin is of course disgusting, but Noah’s anecdote is hysterical.   I think my favorite moment in the special is when he realizes the health officer who’s there to take all the Africans’ temperatures doesn’t think Noah, a light-skinned biracial man with the name Trevor Noah, seems “African enough” to be suspected of having Ebola, and how conflicted he feels about it.  “Don’t get me wrong – I never want anyone to think I have Ebola, but I also don’t want anyone to assume that I can’t have Ebola.”  Too funny!

Warnings

Language (including the N-word a few times) and thematic elements, including discussions of violence, terrorism, and racism.