New York for 24 hours to see 
“Hamilton” 
off-Broadway. 

Sitting in the second row and 
being spat on by Jonathan 
Groff 
dressed 
in 
full 

monarchial garb is still one 
of the best experiences I’ve 
ever had. Thomas Jefferson 
and Alexander Hamilton’s rap 
battle is one that awill live on in 
my heart forever. “Hamilton” 
keeps the audience’s attention 
through its subtle humor and 
quickly executed lyrics and 
presenting a figure of American 
history often overshadowed by 
his presidential counterparts.

I am currently taking an 

English class titled American 
Adolescence, which focuses on 
common themes throughout 
children’s and young adult 
literature, such as revolution, 
rebellion 
and 
friendship. 

“Hamilton” is truly a story of 
America in its adolescence, 
morphing into different ideals 
and setting the precedence of 
what is to come. It speaks to 
and incites youth with ideas of 
uprising and transformation, 
and reminds the world of the 
fragility of the era. Rather than 
staying stagnant as a play about 
the past, Miranda creates a 
story that allows people to 
become deeply nostalgic for 
not only America’s history, but 

their own.

“Hamilton” makes history 

accessible 
to 
a 
younger 

generation and inspires others 
to look into their own past. 
Despite how important we 
may think we are, millions 
have lived before us and 
millions more will live after 
us. In focusing on the life of 
one man and watching his 
impact on history, it forces 
the audience to recognize its 
relationship to others and the 
influence they have on lives 
around them.

“Hamilton” ’s story is one 

that identifies the brutality of 
war, the pain of defeat and the 
glory of success. So … what is 
your story?

Tuesday, September 29, 2015 — 5B 
Arts
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

By BRIAN BURLAGE

Daily Arts Writer

“I grew up in a neighborhood 

that was mostly girls and old peo-
ple,” John Hughes once said about 
his upbringing. “There weren’t 
any boys my age, so I spent a lot of 
time by myself, imagining things.”

Hughes, one of the most pro-

lific and talented moviemakers 
of the 1980s, did what no other 
director before or since has been 
able to do, even with half the same 
heart or reality: tell the stories of 
teenagers.

Let me elaborate.
In the span of years between 

1982 and 1990, John Hughes 
wrote or directed 10 films that 
still run repeatedly on TV and are 
widely beloved today. You know 
them as: Some Kind of Wonder-
ful; Sixteen Candles; Breakfast 
Club; Weird Science; Pretty in 
Pink; Ferris Bueller’s Day Off; 
Planes, Trains and Automobiles; 
Uncle Buck; Christmas Vacation; 
and Home Alone.

Think about that for a second. 

How many of those movies have 
you seen or heard about? How 
many of them can you quote line-
for-line? How many memorable 
scenes or songs immediately come 
to mind?

If Shakespeare created the 

human being, John Hughes cre-
ated the teenager. For better 
or worse, he catalogued those 
pubescent years with a genius’s 

eye for detail and a poet’s sense of 
heart. His characters were jocks, 
nerds, troublemakers and home-
coming queens. They were cyni-
cal (Cameron Frye), irresponsible 
(Uncle Buck), resourceful (Kevin 
McCallister), dedicated (Clark 
Griswold), criminal (John Bend-
er) and larger-than-life (Ferris 
Bueller). We remember them not 
as stars or icons or archetypes, 
but as unrealized versions of our-
selves.

And it all goes back to Hughes’s 

upbringing, a time of imagination 
and introspection. He quickly 
figured out that knowing people 
— knowing what they think, how 
they feel, why they behave the 
way they do — is really an act of 
imagining them as slight varia-
tions of ourselves. 

Take Andrew, Emilio Estevez’s 

character in Breakfast Club, for 
example. As a star high school 
athlete, Andrew has a differ-
ent way of thinking about things 
than, say, Brian, the class brain. 
And Andrew and Brian each have 
different ways of thinking about 
things than Allison, the girl with 
personal issues. But in Hughes’s 
films, these differences don’t mat-
ter because, as Andrew explains, 
“We’re all pretty bizarre. Some 
of us are just better at hiding it, 
that’s all.”

It’s a cliché thing to say, but 

when John Hughes died in 
2009—at the age of 59—he left 
an enormous void in the world of 

Hollywood. The greatest docu-
menter of teenage angst left 
without having taught us how to 
approach the current generation, 
without giving us a blueprint for 
telling the millennial story. And 
that’s a problem.

Of all the generations that 

have come to pass in the world, 
the millennial generation, our 
generation, is the hardest to 
connect with, the hardest to 
pin down. We come from cities, 
small rural towns and suburbs, 
from the East Coast, West Coast, 
Third Coast, from rich and from 
poor, from private schools, pub-
lic schools, boarding schools, 
charter and trade schools, from 
countries on the North Ameri-
can continent and countries 
that aren’t. As young adults 
bombarded with information 
in just about every variety and 
from every screen, we develop 
individualized, highly personal 
opinions. We love to look at our-
selves, but we hate to talk about 
ourselves. 

All this is to say that, well, 

we’re all very different from one 
another. As it stands now, there 
exists no great record of who 
we are as a generation. We don’t 
have our Breakfast Club yet; we 
don’t have our Ferris Bueller. 
Without such stories and char-
acters, we remain faceless in the 
chronicles of history.

So I ask: will the next John 

Hughes please stand up?

‘Limitless’ can’t live 
up to its full potential

By BEN ROSENSTOCK

Daily Arts Writer

CBS’s new series “Limitless” 

is the latest story to build on the 
misconception 
that 
humans 

only use 10% 
of their brains, 
and 
if 
we 

were 
able 
to 

access 
100%, 

we’d 
become 

superhuman. 
Like 
the 

eponymous 
film, and like 
other 
movies 

that utilize this 
same myth, the show rarely 
exploits the moral quandaries 
that naturally arise from the 
premise. At least the film 
“Limitless” 
and 
last 
year’s 

“Lucy” had a lot of stylish fun 
with the wacky ideas, and the 
“Limitless” pilot occasionally 
attains that sense of absurd 
entertainment. Unfortunately, 
the show seems to promise little 
to sustain an ongoing series 
past its premiere.

Jake 
McDorman 

(“Manhattan 
Love 
Story”) 

stars as Brian Finch, the basic 
equivalent to Bradley Cooper’s 
character in the film. When his 
father (Ron Rifkin, “Brothers 
and Sisters”) becomes sick, 
Brian realizes he hasn’t done 
anything in his life to make 
his dad proud. Luckily, Brian’s 
friend Eli has access to NZT, 
a drug that allows its user to 
access the entirety of the brain. 
Now Brian can solve complex 
math 
equations, 
vividly 

remember every moment of his 
life and digest huge quantities 
of information with the quickest 
of glances.

From the beginning, there 

are signs that the show won’t be 
able to match the heights of the 
movie. McDorman works fine 
as a protagonist, but he’s not 
nearly as charismatic as Cooper, 
so when he uses his powers to 
suavely show off and flirt with 
women, he’s not as amusingly 
smug. He’s also saddled with 
the most pointless, annoying 
voiceover 
since 
the 
later 

seasons of “Dexter,” explaining 
every move he makes instead 
of just allowing the viewer to 
watch it happen.

The rest of the main cast is 

mostly uninteresting. Jennifer 
Carpenter as FBI agent Rebecca 
Harris is disappointingly tame 
after her erratic performance 
on “Dexter,” and a third-act 
reveal that her late father used 
NZT fails to make her a three-
dimensional 
character. 
The 

other two agents who round out 
the cast, played by Hill Harper 
(“CSI: NY”) and Mary Elizabeth 
Mastrantonio (“The Color of 
Money”) are stock types, two 
bland agents who serve only 
to question Harris when she 
blindly trusts Brian.

At least most of the pilot burns 

through plot at an impressive 
rate. Brian becomes addicted 
to NZT, solves the murder of a 
friend, faces off against Harris 
on multiple occasions, schemes 
to move his sick father to the 
top of the liver transplant 
waiting list and meets Eddie 
Morra, 
Bradley 
Cooper’s 

character from the film. The 
episode’s kinetic pace keeps it 
entertaining until the last act, 
when Brian and Harris enter 
into a partnership that promises 
a boring procedural structure 
for upcoming episodes. As soon 
as Harris calls Brian’s abilities 
a ‘resource’ and utters the 
world ‘consultant,’ it’s clear 
the show isn’t interested in 
maintaining the fun of its first 
episode. This was all meant 
to set up a standard boring 
formulaic cop show, with the 
‘twist’ being that the consultant 
has pharmaceutically-induced 
superhuman abilities.

TV shows based on movies 

and books often struggle to 
find a way to tell a similar 
story stretched out to the 
format of an ongoing series. 
“Limitless” tries to solve that 
problem by turning the story 
into a procedural, a reliable 
way to have a new plot each 
episode to distract from the 
sluggish main narrative arc. 
Ironically, though, “Limitless” 
would improve by sticking 
more to the plot of the movie, 
having Brian do something 
new and interesting with his 
powers instead of just helping 
out another law enforcement 
agency. 
The 
ending 
of 

“Limitless” was so compelling 
because Morra acted entirely 
in self-interest, using NZT 
to indulge his delusions of 
self-grandeur and ascend to a 
position of power in the Senate. 
“Limitless” would do well to 
have its protagonist be a little 
more selfish and a little less 
noble.

C+

Limitless

Series Pre-
miere

Tuesdays at 

10 p.m.

CBS

‘Reborn’ a heroic but 
unnecessary effort

By DREW MARON

Daily Arts Writer

“Heroes” returns to televi-

sion for the first time in six 
years with the 13-part mini-
series 
“Heroes: 
Reborn.” 
Instead of 
re-intro-
ducing 
viewers 
to 
the 

world 
of 

“Heroes,” 
however, 
“Reborn” 
settles for 
making the 
same mistakes as its predeces-
sor.

The story picks up sev-

eral years after the events of 
“Heroes.” In the years since 
the events of the fourth season, 
those with powers (now called 
“Evos”) have revealed them-
selves to a world that has come 
to fear them. It’s a concept 
we’ve seen thousands of times 
in comics, television, and film, 
and “Reborn” doesn’t improve 
on or reinvent what “X-Men” 
and “True Blood” already 
accomplished years ago.

That 
being 
said, 
the 

series 
opening 
did 
seem 

like an interesting place to 
start for fans: the absolute 
destruction of the Primatech 
building. The fatal incident 
occurs 
at 
the 
beginning 

when, 
during 
a 
peace 

rally held by the reformed 
Primatech, 
an 
explosion 

levels 
Odessa. 
Hundreds 

are killed, including Claire 
Bennet 
(Hayden 
Panettiere, 

“Nashville”), or so we’re told. 
Mohinder 
Suresh 
(Sendhil 

Ramamurthy, “Covert Affairs”) 
has 
claimed 
responsibility, 

and things are becoming less 
and less like we remember 
them: 
invulnerable 
Claire 

dies in explosion? Flawed but 
ultimately noble Mohinder is a 
terrorist? The surprises with 
known characters were one 
of the more welcome aspects 
of “Reborn,” however, killing 
the Haitian, one of the best 
characters of the series, seems 
like the wrong move.

Another unfortunate aspect 

of the series is that like the 

original 
“Reborn” 
lacks 
a 

cohesive storyline. Instead, 
the show gives its audience 
misappropriated, 
unwanted 

new characters that confuse 
and use unearned melodrama 
in a way that devalues its 
already questionable status as 
a serious television drama.

The end product is a show 

that 
frustrates 
fans 
and 

newcomers alike, falling apart 
long before it even comes 
together.

The attempts to combine 

superhero tropes with social 
commentary in the Carlos (Ryan 
Guzman, “Step Up”) storyline 
is admirable and at least at the 
moment, the most interesting 
of the series’ additions. Creator 
Tim 
Kring 
(“Heroes”) 
and 

his fellow writers should be 
applauded for giving us a Latino 
superhero, and Carlos, a non-
Evo, could prove a fascinating 
answer to this world’s Batman.

The other storylines are less 

fruitful, to say the least. Tommy 
(Robbie Kay, “Once Upon A 
Time”) does feel pleasantly 
old-fashioned, something like 
an homage to the teen angst 
of classic Spiderman comics. 

Unfortunately, his home and 
high school life feel much less 
fleshed out than Claire’s did 
back in 2006.

We’re also introduced to 

Luke (Zachary Levi, “Thor: The 
Dark World”) and Joanna (Judi 
Shekoni, 
“Backstrom”) 
who 

lost their son in Odessa and are 
now indiscriminately killing 
every Evo they can find. It’s an 
incredibly disturbing story and 
one that does create interesting 
and 
darkly 
understandable 

villains, but it seems like we 
needed more than just a lost 
son before having the couple go 
full-on “Natural Born Killers.”

But the single biggest sin has 

to be the Kiko story. Her power, 
the ability to transport between 
the real world and a video 
game, is a cool idea, if it had 
been done right. Unfortunately, 
here 
it 
just 
feels 
out 
of 

place, 
under-developed, 
and 

incredibly cartoonish in a show 
whose melodrama constantly 
undermines its aims at making 
quality drama.

We 
seem 
to 
have 
an 

unquenchable 
desire 
for 

superheroes. 
There 
is 

undeniable evidence in comics, 
film, and television that the 
genre can sustain a certain 
level of prestige. “Marvel’s 
Daredevil,” for instance, proved 
to have more in common with 
“The French Connection” than 
the city-destroying madness 
and pretentiousness of “Man 
of Steel.” “Reborn,” however, 
falls far below the genre’s best, 
making the return of “Heroes” 
feel 
neither 
deserved 
nor 

needed.

C-

Heroes: 
Reborn

Series Pre-
miere

Thursdays at 8 p.m

NBC.

John Hughes and the 
value of teen movies

TV REVIEW
HAMILTON
From Page 1B

CBS

Life moves pretty fast.

NBC

You either die a hero, or you live long enough to become a bad show.

FILM NOTEBOOK

We have an 

unquenchable 
desire for the 
superfluous.

Lovelorn? 
Need nurturing?

Write to Gilian for a Cultural Cure and your 
question may be published in her column!

e-mail her at 

deargilian@michigandaily.com

TV REVIEW