West Side Story

This gets half a star bump for the feisty performance of Rita Moreno and the warmth of Natalie Wood and her heart-breaking monologue at the end. Every time these two are allowed to shine, they perform cinematic CPR. Otherwise, this movie is an atrocity. An insult to musicals and to cinema as a whole. Don't want to take my word for it? Ask my wife, whose top ten is half-populated by musicals, and even she thinks this movie is awful. Where to begin ... How about with the story, and how it butchers a literary classic much like John Belushi's samurai character made a sandwich. Instead of two warring families, we get two "gangs", and I use the quotes because these are gangs in the way Boy Scout troops are gangs. They're like the background cast of a Frankie & Annette beach party movie. If this didn't come out in 1961, I'd swear they were sponsored by The Gap. This defanging of the story extends far past the gangs, though. The entire atmosphere has a bowdlerized glossiness to it, like Disney producing an after-school special on street gangs. It is against this backdrop that our star-crossed Romeo and Juliet stand-ins exist, and once again, West Side Story's over-polished cowardice is brought to bear, as the ending -- the only ending that makes sense in Romeo and Juliet -- is cut in half in favor of heavy-handed moralizing, turning the whole thing into one big plea of "can't we all just get along?". I'm all for treating each other as the human beings we all are, but you don't purposefully and with malice of forethought AVOID the ending of one of the greatest tragedies ever written to ham-handedly staple on the kind of moral lesson one would get at the end of a GI Joe cartoon. A lesson, it should be noted, that is undercut by the movie's childish tone; when the gangs finally fight and lives are taken, suddenly these street-toughs turn into marshmallows and run like frightened children. These aren't dangerous thugs, they're idiots thumping their chests in the mirror, trying to convince themselves of their toughness. It's hard to sell a moral lesson of Street Gangs Are Bad when I saw more violence the day in a Toys R Us the day the Dinobots were released, and the lesson is delivered with the simplicity of Brittney’s “Don’t Join A Gang” art on Daria. As if that weren't enough, West Side Story lacks any life to it (outside of the ladies). The acting and dialogue are so corny, I thought it was taking place in Nebraska. And don't give me "it's the style of the time". There were plenty of movies released around and before West Side Story that could tell a story like this without resorting to golly-gee-willikers cheese. But maybe that's as good as they could do, because none of the male cost, and I do mean none, have any life in them, so maybe dorky over-acting is how they attempt to bridge the gap. Spoiler, it fails, hard. You can't expect wooden goobers to inject a pulse into the lifeless dialogue West Side Story features. It's like wanting to get an animal to protect your home, so you get a hamster. And the problems don't stop there either. The music ... good lord, the music. This might be the worst collection of songs I've heard in a musical. "I Feel Pretty" is the only song that even approaches being catchy. I'd like to give "America" credit, but only for the women's side of it. Outside of that? Let me put it this way: I loathe Chicago. Seen it once, when it first came out, and I refuse to ever subject myself to watching it again. And I can still name and hum more songs from it, 24 years later, than I can name or hum songs from a movie I saw, as of writing this, 12 hours ago. I've had to look up the soundtrack just to get names here, that's unremarkable, antiseptic, and forgettable this collection of songs is. If they were just that, that'd be enough, but the directors take a majority of the songs eleven steps too far. Most of them are extended well past their natural termination point by at least a minute and a half. "Gee, Officer Krupke" might still be happening for all I know. As alive as "America" can be, it sprawls out over a length that rivals most prog rock song suites. And when the directors aren't running these songs through a taffy puller, they're butchering the movie's overall pacing and tone by ramming songs into moments that don't need them. Right after the knife battle that sees Riff and Bernardo get killed, the Jets regroup in a warehouse. The lieutenant, Ice, is now the leader, and his gang is hurt and bloodthirsty to the point of irrational and dangerous fury; he needs to take action to prevent an all-out war. Any director worth their salt would know to let this moment breathe, to let the raw emotions sit with the characters and the audience, all while showing Ice taking charge. Instead of doing that, we get "Cool", a tone-deaf number that turns the processing of grief-driven anger and the rise of a new leader into a joke. Just snap your fingers and blurt out "bang" every so often and you'll be fine! Who cares that you just witnessed your friend and leader get murdered? Sing and the pain will go away! They do this again in the closing moments, when Maria reprises an earlier song as she holds her beloved Tony, dying, in her arms; once again, the directors assume the audience has all suffered head injuries in the recent past and can't be trusted to feel the emotion of the moment without musical manipulation. But wait, there's more! Let's discuss the visuals of this movie! I've never seen a Technicolor movie make me wish for color-blindness before this. Why does Maria's door look like it's made out of Starburst candies? This is a problem the entire movie has, from sets to clothing and everything in between. The over-saturation of the color doesn't make the movie feel rich and luscious; it renders the movie a living cartoon, which I guess is appropriate since these clowns feel straight out of a Merrie Melodies short. It's just really hard to take anything seriously when the color palate of the movie is "radioactive Crayola factory". I have never seen a movie quite like West Side Story, where every element is working against every other element. The dialogue exposes the acting. The acting undercuts the script. The set design and costuming undercut the acting. The music undercuts everything. Not a single thing works in isolation, and when combined, creates something even more volatile and broken than it was on its own. This has actually made me re-assess how much I dislike other movies in comparison to West Side Story. I give all the credit in the world to Moreno and Wood for rising above this, because, by all rights, nobody should've been able to. And I will never understand how this is held in anything by anyone but scorn and contempt.