Lewis Hamilton - Le virtuose
2015 · Film · documentary
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Hacker Cinema Hacker Cinema2015 · Film · documentary
1 positive2 negative1 mixed1 neutralfrom 5 commenters
No streaming data for this title.
5 comments on Hacker News
I'd be the first to admit that you are basically correct, I dislike a vast majority of broadway musicals. There are some musical movies I like and things like Book of Mormon which I'm not sure if it's considered broadway. I find Le Misrables to be okay.
But I would still have to say, amongst all the broadway that I don't like, Hamilton sticks out to me as especially weird, like one of those 90s educational videos where people would rap when they clearly just shouldn't be.
Anyway, to each their own. More power to you if you like it. Something about it really bugs me though.
Not knowing what makes a hit vs a flop seems... strange.
Familiar actors and stories might help, but also things that are clever and artistically memorable (e.g. Hamilton) have got to help.
I'd also be interested to know how many shows start off-Broadway or off-off-Broadway (100-500 seats and below 100 seats as per this article), and move up to the bigger theatres: test a show in a smaller venue, see if people/critics talk about it, let supply build and keep production costs capped.
Some might argue - especially for musicals - that you can't produce "good" shows without much less in the way of production costs, but I think that could be a fallacy. I've watched enough shows and plays to know when one has good "bones" that could be enhanced with bigger sets, better actors, etc. and which are going to die no matter what you do.
Hamilton would have been getting talked about and supply not meeting demand if it was Lin-Manuel Miranda in a backroom of a bar in a frock coat, a small band and some acting students making up the rest of the cast. The bones are so good on that show - it's clever, musically arresting, compelling story arc, memorable performance from himself - that anybody who would have seen it would have told their friends about it the next day.
Some shows need to be big at the start, but they already have "built-in" audiences: Lion King trades on childhood memories of the film, it's not hard to see why it would be a success.
Spider-Man which the article touches on was always a bit of a gamble: it has built-in audience, but how many people think of the Spider-Man films _fondly_?
Contrast with Back To the Future which I saw premiere in Manchester, UK (the toughest place to test a show in the World perhaps), before lockdown, and it's moved to the West End and I'd predict is going to be huge on Broadway. Great bones, great built-in audience who love revisiting the film and story repeatedly.
Perhaps I'm in the wrong industry, but this seems so, so much easier than software businesses...
> Academic historians are concerned with not just what happened in history, but how we know what happened in history.
No. Academic historians are concerned with maintaining the dominant historical narrative that they themselves have created.
> "Hamilton" is a powerful piece of art--today--but it's not accurate history in an academic sense.
Sure, but academic history is no more "true" or "accurate" than the Hamilton play. The historical concept of Hamilton is fiction created by historians affected by their own biases. History is interpretation. It isn't fact. It isn't science.
> That nuance is going to be hard for a lot of people to understand.
That's true for any "history". Nevermind that almost no historical document/artefact/etc is the "original", but the "history" we know is ultimately manufactured fiction. There are facts and then there is history ( which is what is colored in between the facts by historians ).
There is Hamilton the actual person, then there is the historical adaptation of Hamilton, the play adaptation, movie adaptation, documentary adaptation, etc which are all fiction.
Academic historians are concerned with not just what happened in history, but how we know what happened in history.
Altering primary documents to make them more palatable to modern audiences is great for emotional engagement and attracting attention, but it risks creating false impressions of what history actually was like and how we know what it was like. "Hamilton" is a powerful piece of art--today--but it's not accurate history in an academic sense.
(Well, I should say it's not history of Hamilton's time. It will be studied as an important part of the history of our time.)
The folks running these upscaling operations understand the concerns:
> Antic and Kelley aren’t under any illusions that images treated by DeOldify will come out historically accurate, though their reservations are with the practicalities of training a neural network. Making sure colourised films are accurate is “a literally impossible problem,” Antic says. DeOldify uses modern images to train its AI on, he explains, “and we know that's a big weakness, because, amongst other things, it biases people to wearing blue jeans.”
The challenge is, once they create one of these films and post it for the public, the implications and effects are out of their hands.
You might have millions of people watching an AI-changed film and think that what they are seeing is more accurate than the original, since it transmits more information (detail, color, etc). But if that additional information is made up, it's actually not more accurate, and maybe actually less accurate (e.g. wrong color instead of no color). That nuance is going to be hard for a lot of people to understand.
You're mixing up equal access to educational materials with an equal sensory experience. Giving sighted and hearing people access to educational materials that the blind or deaf can't access is discrimination.
The ADA also covers things like plays (classified as "entertainment"), and plays like Hamilton were sued for not providing audio descriptions of what is happening on stage. Movie theaters have to provide the same service to blind users and this also applies to Netflix movies and shows.
Restaurants probably wouldn't fall into the entertainment category, so they're not covered by the ADA.
For the "deaf and blind" scenario, most litigation is held off by the provision that says the establishment doesn't need to provide an accessible experience if providing such experience would be "unduly burdensome". For example, a blind and deaf man sued Cinemark for not providing tactile ASL interpreters for him (he communicates using sign language and by touching the hands of someone signing to him). The theater said it costs $60 per hour for an interpreter and a movie would require 2 interpreters, so $120 per hour is a bit nuts.
But audio descriptions and subtitles are not considered unduly burdensome - they're not that difficult and are basically seen as a requirement at this point.