Hacker Cinema
Hamilton
2025 · Film · 160 min
Directed by Thomas Kail
Presenting the tale of American founding father Alexander Hamilton, this filmed version of the original Broadway smash hit is the story of America then, told by America now.
5 positive3 negative1 mixed4 neutralfrom 13 commenters
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13 comments on Hacker News
Opera and classical music are simply no longer the popular form of musical theater or music.
Stage musicals (Hamilton) and film musicals (anything from Disney) are still very popular.
Popular music concerts (Taylor Swift) are obviously incredibly popular, and they're usually not symphony concerts.
While popular tastes have largely diverged from classical art music, a good deal of "popular" (and often excellent, in my opinion) symphonic music is still being produced and listened to as film music and game music.
Guess he should know about that, then.
My criticism of Hamilton is usually that the premise, setting the story of the founding of the US to <gasp>rap</gasp> feels like something an edgy high school teacher would do on a 90's family sitcom.
I've long pondered building exactly this, an anti-recommendation engine. You'd go through and mark some favorite films or genres, and it'd come back with something great but totally unlike your usual picks.
Foreign flicks not your thing? Try Parasite.
You don't remember what it's like to be an awkward pre-teen? Eighth Grade will remind you.
Not a big action movie person? Maybe you need to watch Die Hard.
Kids movies are just for kids? Spirited Away!
You can't connect with female protagonists? You've got to see The Invisible Man.
Don't find food interesting? Try Tampopo.
Sick of movies which try to make a statement and fall flat? Promising Young Woman.
Most dramas feel too contrived? Marriage Story.
Musicals and plays aren't really your thing? Hamilton.
> With Bridgerton you get the impression the aristocracy wasn't so bad as long as half of it is black
I think your mistake is reading Bridgerton as utopian political fiction and not a romance film with a fantasy drawn around combining exaggeration of a few specific facts of Regency England with a couple things drawn from modern Western race and gender politics is the context and engine of conflict.
> There's no classism or anything structural in that show
There is fairly intense classism in the show.
> In that sense it's no different than Hamilton, where you had, ironically enough, an almost all POC cast represent not a single POC character.
Minor nitpick: Hamilton, in fact, has a single explicitly-named on-stage POC character, though the part has no lines.
Major nitpick: you...did not understand a few layers of metaphor in Hamilton.
> superficial diversity in place of actually talking about race, class, and so on.
Hamilton rather directly talks about race, class, “and so on”.
I had a video game store when Hackers came out, and one of my regulars, a kid, came in and said he wanted to get a modem so he could start hacking just like in the movie.
I don't know that anyone walking out of Hamilton wants to be Hamilton.
i was never into musicals. but the wife and i were visiting new york and she's a huge hamilton fan -- so i said fuck it and paid more than i should on two good tickets to see it.
it was more than worth it -- it was absolutely beautiful (although tiresome -- it's three hours of music with just a small intermission).
i watched the disney+ version and it's great. but it's not the same due to the angles they chose -- it feels more like a movie, than a broadway play.
Based on the prices at a local theater, $20/viewing is about par for one ticket + snacks, and $30 is generally better than two people + snacks:
n=1: $13+food n=2: $26+food n=4 (2 kids): $46 + food
When you factor in being able to have cheaper food, not to mention intermissions whenever you want (bathroom break, making popcorn, etc), I feel like streaming is still better than theater, price-wise, even at $30/movie.
Unfortunately, it doesn't _feel_ that way. We still haven't seen Mulan yet, though, and I'm not sure if price is a factor in that. I suspect it's a small factor -- we subscribed to Disney+ to see Hamilton, for example -- but it just hasn't come up in months. I forgot about it until writing this comment.
It's hard to convince myself that I should pay $20 or $30 for a screening, when a year from now I can likely rent it on Prime for $10 or less.
Hamilton the 2020 movie?
Going through the list, I noticed a lot of films from the Criterion Collection. For people that love film, I think it's a great subscription. $9.99 per month (US; I signed up before the release, so it might've gone up since then) for a host of film and commentary – probably some of the best ever made. At this point, besides Apple Music, it's the only subscription I've kept (unless you count Amazon Prime Video included in Amazon Prime).
Films that had a great impact on me, however:
1. Lord of the Rings – Lord of the Rings is, to me, the epitome of the epic. It is grand, sweeping, and larger than life. I inevitably compare all movies to the trilogy.
2. Hamilton - Its made me think a lot about ambition and legacy and, to a lesser extent, representation and sanitization of those that came before us.
3. Apollo 13 - I think few films come close to capturing how ingenious some people can be – as well as how many people it takes to get us off the world and back to it safely.
That is 100% correct. Soon as Netflix and Steam became a thing, I pretty much stopped pirating. They are so convenient that pirating is actually a subpar experience. If you download a game, maybe there's a miner or malware in it. Download a movie and maybe it doesn't have subtitles or has visual artifacts aplenty. The only cases where I do that is if it's a media property that I particularly love. I download a copy and store it on an SSD to make sure I never lose it in case Steam loses the rights to the game or Netflix decides the movie isn't popular enough and takes it off streaming, etc. However, now that everyone and their grandma is going into streaming, it's turning into cable. So I'm really starting to eye the idea of pirating series and movies simply because I don't want to pay extra money to Disney just to watch Hamilton.
I've found that if you are using an older phone then you will certainly notice that Flutter is not as smooth as a native app. However, I know the Flutter team have made a lot of progress with performance so it may not be so bad.
Three largish apps you can try are:
1. The Alibaba app:
Alibaba app for Android → http://bit.ly/2NQJcMX Alibaba app for iOS → https://apple.co/2NjVGxf
2. The Hamilton (musical) app - search Hamilton on Play Strore or App Store
3. The inKino movie database app. The source code is available here: https://github.com/roughike/inKino
It's not aesthetics for me as much as sufficiently older movies are a lot closer to stage plays in how they're filmed and storyboarded, and I generally dislike plays and musicals whatever the content is (case in point: I don't have any interest in Hamilton nor Disney movies). Then comes a lot of older movies having pacing that doesn't fit the time and mental energy commitment I am capable of making.
I can appreciate classics like Lawrence of Arabia, Dr. Zhivago, and the Deer Hunter, but I generally don't have 3+ contiguous hours to do anything anymore let alone watch a movie and I feel ashamed I can't honor such works with a proper, conscious viewing either. For "pop" arthouse movies closer to something like Begotten or Valhalla Rising, the effort to get value is even worse because I am not understanding what the symbols are and it becomes more of an exercise in "let's analyze scenes!" than "let's watch a movie to stimulate our minds." Some people don't like video games for similar reasons I feel - they want passive, decision-free entertainment.
It's interesting contrasting American/UK films against other western films.
I'm a big fan of the Hamilton movies, which are basically Swedish James Bond movies. In them, the PLO are actually the good guys, and the Americans are the bad guys. It's an interesting contrast.