June | 2021 | A Screenwriters Perspective: Current and Past Movies.

The new musical “In the Heights” which is based on the stage play created by Linn Manuel Miranda is not for anyone who does not like musicals. Like the musical “Hamilton”, one of the most talked about musicals in recent years, one cannot help but admire the work to turn so many normal spoken sentences into rap music, so all of this takes some getting used to. I thought the best part of this movie was the struggles of Nina Rosario, played by Leslie Grace and her father Kevin Rosario, played by Jimmy Smits with finding the money for her to continue her education at Stanford. Kevin would do anything to help his brilliant daughter and that included mortgaging and even selling his business. There is much more to this story, that did a great job in demonstrating the financial struggles of the insane cost of college.

There is a great deal of singing and dancing within these two hours and I thought that the movie would have been better with more normal talking scenes and less musical rap scenes.

The Rotten Tomatoes ratings for this movie is a very high 97%, along with many celebrities giving their opinions on how good this film is. My rating is in the 85% range, mainly because I am one of those people who does not like musicals. Regardless, I strongly recommend In the Heights.

The Showtime series “The Kings” is about what is probably the most significant period in the history of boxing in the 1980’s when Sugar Ray Leonard, Marvin Hagler, Roberto Duran and Thomas Hearns were all at the peak of their careers. They all fought each other, in some cases like Duran and Leonard (3 times) Hearns and Leonard (2 times) more than once. This period in the 1980’s was the first time in the history of boxing when the heavyweight boxers did not dominate the sport. Several of the fights, especially the one in April 1987 when Hagler fought Leonard were considered at the time, fights of the century. After the 1980’s it was unfortunate that Leonard, Hearns and Duran continued to fight well past their primes. This is a frequent problem with too many fighters, including Ali, who never seemed to know know when it was time to quit. What followed the Kings era was the Mike Tyson era, that reestablished heavyweight boxing as the top of the sport

The Kings is a four part series that can be seen on SHOWTIME or through Hulu. I thought this series did a good job with mixing the news of the day with the major fights of these 4 boxing legends. In March of this year, Marvin Hagler died and what followed were a series of false rumors about the cause of his death at age 66. From my research on the internet, the cause of Hagler’s untimely death is still not known.

I recommend The Kings as a very good series about a time when Boxing was the #1 sport in the world – a time that has long past, unfortunately replaced with MMA (Mixed Martial Arts) boxing.

https://youtu.be/_Smml9BovT0