#not tagging this properly for reasons
The film musical is dead.
For a while I thought that it just needed to be updated. They needed to let go of realism and embrace the narrative possibilities honed by music videos over the years! Indeed, The Greatest Showman seemed to bear out my theory.
However, after watching In the Heights, as well as catching a portion of Spielberg West Side Story, I find the limitations of that approach.
Music videos have indeed been honed. Music, like comedy, offers a way to condense the story, such that an entire movie’s worth of story can be told in 5 minutes or less. See, for example, how the opening music montages of Up and Wall-E outshine the rest of their respective films.
But that exactly means that a music video-ized film musical is too much. Music videos are super-stimulus, and 2.5 hours of it is untenable.
I highly enjoyed watching In the Heights, but not as a singular unbroken cinema experience. The moment that each musical number ended, I wanted to go back and run back over the details several times, until I had digested all of the interlocking parts (including the surrounding setup transitions in and out of them). And some of the longer numbers were even so much that I do not desire to rewatch them in their entirety, only specific parts. The tradeoff is, those specific parts I want to rewatch A LOT.
In other words, the best way to watch the music video-ized film musical was in an extremely internet-age fashion. Release it as a PPV web series instead of a single film!
No wonder In the Heights made like only a quarter of what it needed at Box Office. (Which is a whole other can of worms. If they’re spending movie-sized budgets on making the best music videos today, a fully music video-ized film musical can’t compete on cost to bring the same level of quality to every number!)
The criticism I had of Spielberg West Side Story was that the numbers are so caught up in being Grand and Cinematic that they fail to demonstrate character/relationship, the way the expert original film adaptation of WSS did.
Musical theater works because of their physical limitations. There’s only so much spectacle that can be accomplished in real time, and good directors know not to get in the actors’ way, the most iconic numbers usually being one-person showcases with little to nothing else on stage.
Film musicals need to do either do the same, or become a hell of a lot shorter.
This points to why La La Land’s retro style was more palatable. Like Baby Driver, only the first two numbers are fully music video-ized. In La La Land, the remaining numbers keep increasing the focus on how personal the numbers are, and in fact posited the We Can Start A Fire spectacle as antithesis. For Baby Driver, because it’s not really a musical, songs could be freely chopped up and scenes kept short and sweet to maintain pacing, and the story is actually about how Baby could no longer use music as an immersive shield against the increasingly chaotic environment around him. Obviously, that’s not an approach you want for a musical, where increasing immersion is the goal.
So, the film musical is dead. It can only exist by not taking full advantage of its medium.
Which is exactly why TV musical eps are great! Imposed runtime limit and budget limits, which the audience is aware of, moderating expectations on both sides of the screen, and the longform aspect keeping it all focused on character/relationship. And you even have commercial breaks to necessarily chop it up, building in tension release and reset!
What I’m really enjoying about this is that Karin’s vocal performance is extremely deliberate. She knows what she wants to do with her voice, and it exerts a control over the melody to complement the arrangement. She’s not simply singing notes and dynamics, all of her notes are going somewhere, and her phrases are landing somewhere intended.Oooooh now this is fun! Very throwback to the Takahashi Yuichi days. Would not be out of place at all in Goto Maki’s discography.
This single gives me the impression that Karin is exerting creative control over the music selection, and she’s got excellent taste. (But also, that her music taste is genuinely loving that H!P sound, compare to, say, Riho, who is chasing that Taeyeon forward edge.) Both songs have a strong emphasis of rhythm in the vocal line.
This is rarer than you’d think, especially in idol music.
Sayuki-Karin reminds me of Airi-Miyabi. The former have vocal talents that can make their singing seem effortless, as well as having projection and range that the latter cannot achieve. So, the latter must compete through superior vocal interpretation, optimizing to perfection where the former land in the vicinity with talented instinct.
