#a lot of this is just me wanting bernardo and chino to be done well and respectfully

[svankmajerbaby]

ok i absolutely adored west side story, as i knew i would, but as much as i loved it (and its truly a net positive i think, like its mostly just really damn great) i do have a few tiny complaints i want to air because im annoying like that

good ole US perceptions of what latine is came back. now i dont know the ethnic makeup of puerto rico, but as far as i know, like most latinamerican countries, its probably pretty varied in skin colors. and i guess the movie did a pretty good job at that, with a generally good assortment of types in the crowd scenes, and with the casting of magnificent ariana debose as anita (who is almost invariably a darker-skinned woman than whoever is cast as maria, though this is basically a shitty detail that comes all the way from the beginning of the musical's roots. just to keep that in mind). it did become sort of amusing in a way when theres a good amount of background shark members who are pretty white, or at least "white-passing"... and of course rita moreno herself whos pretty white. theres this little moment in which anybody taunts a jet member for being italian, which like. he doesnt look at all different from either the jets Or the sharks. so its clearly not so much an issue of "race" (until it is, of course, when considering that the jets have nobody "less white" than an italian in their ranks while the sharks are a lot more varied) as a cultural one. not to say that the jets arent motivated by xenophobia and discrimination, because they obviously are. but its more like its once again an example of hollywood and US people in general not really getting that latine doesnt mean "brown", like officer krupke says at one point. then again, hes an asshole and an idiot (even if it was toned down a lot from the original 1961 movie), so it figures he wouldnt know the difference.

its obvious to me that spielberg loved this riff actor, mike faist. apparently everyone does and yknow??? i get it. shit, he was amazing and a delight to watch. his physicality, the way he carried himself, even his rather nasal voice somehow made up this character in such a realistic and interesting way. he was great in this, the best male actor in the movie by far. so my issue is... why oh why wasnt bernardo, my beloved, given as much care? i thought david alvarez, bernardos actor, was pretty good too -even though he was given a lot less of a chance to shine. alvarez is kind of the gene kelly to faists fred astaire, being this heavier, shorter guy who still has this massive energy and lightness to him, and especially at the gym dance scene it really showed how amazing he was. america was really ariana deboses number, and i sort of wish it was a bit more split between her and alvarez. apart from that, while alvarez was definitely better in all senses than the other bernardo actor from the 1961 movie, i feel like he was made all the more... unlikable? what with him being a lot more outwardly sexist and having these expectations for anita and maria to what they must do with their lives -anita to be a housewife and give him six kids, for maria to marry a nice puertorrican boy. and i knooow, theres this belief of a certain amount of traditional/conservative mindset expected of latino men, and the jets get a few moments in which they are shown as sexist pricks as well, especially in regards to anybody (my beloved), but its different with bernardo, in a way?? since hes supposed to be madly in love with anita (also boy these two had amazing chemistry) and i sort of hoped they would show how much they respected the other and felt comfortable with the other. i get that its for the end goal of making maria and anita more defiant and proactive by arguing with him and showing they dont take his shit, but like... i dont know. i always loved bernardo and thought he was the most interesting male character in the musical, as someone who both wanted to succeed and move upwards in society while also being homesick for puerto rico, in a way that maybe chino and anita dont quite get. if only there had been a scene between bernardo (also why did nobody call him nardo??? wheres the cute nickname??????????) and chino, talking about their relationship with being immigrants and their expectations of their lives in the US... i dont know, there ws so much untapped potential, and the fact that riff got the chance to be a deeper character and bernardo not, even being given the role of controlling patriarch in the anita-maria-bernardo household... feels not great. i wish kushner would have given my dude some more scenes to truly shine. the moment in which he taunts tony and claims he only wants to date "a brown girl" felt somehow both very in character and also extremely sexist for some reason. i mean, we dont know if hes wrong, but theres still something icky about it all. maybe im just exaggerating but i think its a shame, especially with how in the original 1961 movie bernardo is portrayed as much more level-headed and a more responsable leader to his community. i wanted more of him, generally, and i feel that especially when comparing his screentime to that of riff he really got the short end of the stick.

i love chino!!! so much!!!! and i adore how he was given this little moment in which he told bernardo that he wanted to join the sharks, that he wanted to defend his barrio from the jets. there was something really interesting in how he helped tony push up the gate to enter the rumble place, showing how he has... Had a certain code of ethics, knows the importance of mutual help, and that he wouldnt just fuck him up for being a jet, not at least until they all get in the rumble. and then theres the super cute moment in which he really wants to dance at the gym dance and does this silly little dance thats not half as showy as the one the other sharks are doing... its super sweet and how he actually does want maria to like him even if it seems like he doesnt actually "love" her and its doing it mostly out to please bernardo.... i loved that so much. and his actor (cant remember his name) was great. i love chino so so much and the first half of the movie was just. chefs kiss. each time he showed up i grinned. but then... when bernardo is killed, he kind of does a one-eighty?? like I Get it. they were best friends. chino wants to join the sharks and protect his community. he has a very rigid code of ethics and that probably means he believes in eye for an eye, so it makes sense for him to think, hey, this dude tony should totally get killed and pay for what he did to bernardo. but still... it felt weird?? like there was so little to suggest chino could really be able to go ahead and kill someone. i dont know if there was meant to be a scene in which this was meant to be tackled but was cut, but i really felt that his murderous side came kind of out of nowhere -or, if not nowhere, at least could have been given more room to develop.

lastly, i think this may make me seem crazy since its the accepted take by almost all critics it seems, but i thought *nsel *lgort was pretty damn spot on casting for tony. this comes from someone who finds tony bland at best, and annoying at most, and who Loathes that actor. but, like in baby driver, *lgort made him at Least understandable. its still a goddamn mystery what maria sees in him, but i guess thats one for the ages. the adding of that tiny tiny scene of maria and tony actually having!! a Date!!!! made wonders for me to actually grow to like him. hes still pretty entitled and more than a little bit of an ass, but actually taking maria out to a date, making an effort to learn spanish, having a conversation with her that isnt only declarations of endless love... it just helped me a lot to see them as actual kids in love instead of just romeo and juliet expys who are going through the motions. his development was pretty good, i think, and the adding of both him almost having killed someone else/going to juvie/that being the reason he split from the jets, and of him having valentina as this sort of maternal figure, and of the Cool scene being rewritten to be about him trying to get riff to "cool down" from engaging in the rumble... it was all just excellent, a reminder of how good tony kushner can be as a writer. it just made me a bit more bitter to compare all of this excellent development when compared to my favorites, bernardo and chino :(

[is-it-mungojerry-or-rumpelteazer]

please, rant about the remake of West Side Story.

Ooooooh boy, this is going to be long.

I actually started a review after I watched the movie in December, and then I never finished it, so let me start by copy-pasting what I wrote then. I'll just continue after.

Disclaimer to everything I say: the original West Side Story is one of the movies I know better ever. Not just because I love it as a movie, but also because when we did it in theatre we didn’t have a script so I went through the movie frame by frame to type down the subtitles. So there was pretty much no chance I was going to see this without comparing it to the original.

That said.

TL;DR: I found that this movie tried to bite way more than it could chew, and in consequence it was bloated, felt overly long, and had tone issues. It has some good scenes and some stuff that is better (the obvious ones that didn’t work very well in the original), but it’s not enough to compensate for the rest of it. In particular, it leans so hard into the “realism” and “grittiness” that it makes the Jets unlikable and kills its own momentum in the process.

Details under the cut. (Spoilers, I guess)

Let’s start with the good things.

The use of language was amazing. I loved how the Puerto Ricans spoke a mix of English and Spanish, and those changes felt deliberate, with Anita (who wants to integrate) pressuring them to speak English at home while Bernardo refuses to, María mixes both and Tony actually tries to learn. It was a great detail and it worked very well.

Rachel Zegler as María shone. She had personality, she worked the camera, she had a great voice, and I actually believed she was a Puertorrican girl arriving to New York (full offense to Natalie Wood).

The romance was a lot less insufferable than usual. I know that doesn’t sound like glowing praise, but taking into account that I normally use “One Hand One Heart” as a bathroom break and/or skip it, it is. Especially considering they are even more extreme than usual (Tony asks her to run away with him before she knows his name and she says yes).

Chino’s character is reworked, and I really like what they’ve done with him.

They completely recontextualized 'Cool' and it worked really, really well. I wish they had done more of that with the rest of the movie. But more on that later.

I appreciate that they left the musical numbers be bright and flashy and Broadway-y instead of going the Les Mis route and making them also “realistic” (and unlistenable). It creates a bunch of tonal issues considering the more serious tone of the rest of the movie, but at least I could watch them on their own and enjoy them.

This probably doesn’t need to be said considering it’s Spielberg, but the cinematography was really good. The sets were impressive, the lighting is good, the costumes are very nice. It’s a well-made movie.

Now, to the not-so-good parts.

First, one thing I need to get off my chest: am I the only one who was extremely surprised that this movie was almost the exact same length as the original?? Because it felt ten hours long to me. Not only it has so much more Plot (I spent the screening going “there is too much movie in this movie”), but also there were several scenes that I felt were just a tad too long. Pauses that lasted too long, scenes that should be cut before they did... I dunno, it felt like it dragged.

Now, to the Main Issue. I spent the entire movie thinking that Spielberg just wanted to make a movie about gang violence in the 1950s and was using West Side Story as an excuse. Almost every single scene that was new or changed was done in the interest of making it “more realistic” and “grittier”. And hey, if you take those scenes out of the context of the musical, they work! They are really good gang movie! The problem, and I’m amazed I even have to say this, is that they are inside a West Side Story musical.

But West Side Story is a gang story, you say, isn’t it? Well, on the surface, yes. But more importantly, it’s a retelling of Romeo and Juliet. It follows all the plot beats of Romeo and Juliet, and it’s supposed to have the same moral, with two groups who are against one another for no real reason and the tragic deaths that result of mindless violence. But the gangs in WSS are not in the same level. The Sharks are immigrants, and on top of everything else they are dealing with all the racism. A lot of people find that to be a dealbreaker in WSS in general, because it can very easily be interpreted as “the victims of racism are as much at fault as the perpetrators”, and that’s a hard pill to swallow. The original movie deals with it by acknowledging that racism exists (especially in the form of Officer Krupkie and in ‘America’), but having the Jets be pretty much neutral in the issue. For the most part, the Jets hate the Sharks for reasons that have nothing to do with racism. Whether that’s enough for your suspension of disbelief, your mileage may vary, but it’s possible.

On the other hand, the new WSS not only doesn’t give you that excuse, but it actively makes race an essential part of the narrative. The Jets are explicitly and brazenly racist. One of the first things we hear Riff say is that “they’ve come to take our jobs”, or something along those lines. Which completely shatters the illusion of them being in the same plane. There is one small attempt to compensate for it, by having María and Tony discuss it, but in my opinion it only serves to make the issue more flagrant: Tony going “oh, but at least you have families that love you!” just feels condescending. On top of, you know, asking me to root for a guy who is spewing alt-right rhetoric, which is already a tall call in itself.

Also, the entire thing is so much more serious?? There are close to no lighthearted scenes, and none of them with the Jets, to the point where ‘Officer Krupkie’ is played completely straight. Yes, the Jets say “my parents treat me rough; with all their marijuana they won't give me a puff” and “it’s not I’m antisocial, I’m only anti-work” in perfect seriousness, as if those were valid reasons to be in a gang, instead of the tongue-in-cheek satire of the establishment’s opinion of them of the original. No wonder so many people had hot takes about them being assholes!!

All in all, it felt like they were writing a completely new story, and from time to time they were like “oh, shit, we were supposed to be doing West Side Story! Everyone back in position!!”

And in my personal opinion, the most flagrant case of that problem is Riff. His character is so changed it’s pretty much unrecognizable. And don’t get me wrong, Mike Faist does a great job with the character he’s given, he’s cold, and detached, and willing to do whatever it takes. He gives me chills.

But... that’s the issue. Because he’s supposed to be the Mercutio stand-in. A fun, happy guy who is too caught up in the enmity to realise it’s slowly killing them. A very good friend of Romeo, enough for his death to flip Romeo into killing Paris. And the movie tells us Riff and Tony are really good friends, but never shows us. Every scene they’re both in, they’re fighting, or at least bitterly disagreeing. So his death doesn’t hit the same way it should. Personal litmus test: I’ve cried with every single version of Romeo and Juliet at Mercutio’s death. The Royal Ballet. The straight-to-DVD one about leprechauns. You name it. All versions... except this one. 2021 Riff’s death left me completely cold. That’s a bad sign.

There is one scene in this, though, that shows the potential of this version, ‘Skimbleshanks The Railway Cat’ style. And that’s ‘Cool’, my favourite scene by far. For one, magnificent scene, they actually make the premise work. They take one song, radically change the context of it and make it work in the context of the grittier, darker version. It opposes Tony’s vision of the world to Riff’s, and ends with Riff pretty much telling Tony that he’s dead to him. All bridges are cut. It’s so good. For a second I was excited and intrigued: how were they going to go forward, now that Riff can’t rely on Tony? Was Tony going to have to fight his own people and end up in no-man’s land because the Jets reject him and the Sharks don’t accept him?? Win back Riff’s trust by trying to kill Bernardo? But no. In the next scene, everything goes back to position. Riff is super happy to see Tony and trusts him to win the fight, even though five seconds ago he was mimicking putting a bullet through his head.

And now, some quick-fire complaints.

With all respect to Queen Rita Moreno, her character actively goes against the themes of the story. “How could an Irish man and a Latina ever live together???” Well, by opening a shop and being deeply respected by both communities, apparently. I love her, and I’m glad she got a role in this, but it felt like a vanity project, especially knowing she refused to participate if she didn’t have an important role in the story.

Acknowledging the wider problems of the world makes the Jets and the Sharks seems extremely short-sighted. You’re already being evicted because the entire neighbourhood is being gentrified, what are you fighting for?? It’s not even a looming threat, it has already happened to multiple characters.

Changing the story to make the police nice people who are genuinely trying to make their community safer and making prison the thing that makes Tony distance himself from gang violence, in twenty fucking twenty-one, is definitely.... A Choice.

My mom remarked that 2021!Tony seemed to be mirroring almost exactly original!Tony’s body language, and now I can’t unsee it.

I’m sure I have more thoughts about this, but I watched this movie in December and I’ve been trying to erase it from my memory ever since, so I can’t think of anything else right now. Please tell me what you think! Do you agree? Do you not agree? I’d love to hear!