Tag: West Side Story

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Film Features Film/TV

The Best (and One Worst) Films of 2021

Mavis Staples and Mahalia Jackson in the electrifying Summer of Soul

This year was an up-and-down time for film, as audiences cautiously returned to theaters. But even if box office returns were erratic and often disappointing, quality-wise, there was more greatness than could be contained in a top 10 list. Since I hate ranking, here are my personal awards for movie excellence in a weird year.

Vicky Kreips and Gael García Bernal aging on the beach in Old.

Worst Picture: Old

“There’s this beach, see, and it makes you old.”

“That sounds great, M. Night Shyamalan! You’re a genius!”

Annabelle Wallace wonders what it’s all about in Malignant.

Dishonorable Mention: Malignant

WTF was that about?

Bryce Christian Thompson stars as Shah in “The Devil Will Run.”

Best Memphis Film: “The Devil Will Run”

Director Noah Glenn’s collaboration with Unapologetic mastermind IMAKEMADBEATS produced this funny and moving memory of childhood magic. Glenn topped one of the strongest collections of Hometowner short films in Indie Memphis history.

“Chocolate Galaxy”

Honorable Mention: “Chocolate Galaxy”

An Afrofuturist hip hop opera made on a shoestring budget, this 20-minute film features eye-popping visuals and banging tunes.

Puppet Annette

Best Performance by a Nonhuman:
Puppet Annette

This coveted award goes to Annette, Leos Carax’s gonzo musical collaboration with Sparks, which used a puppet to represent its namesake character, the neglected child of Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard, because they couldn’t find a newborn who could sing.

Dev Patel as Sir Gawain in The Green Knight.

Medievalist: The Green Knight

To create one of the strangest films of 2021, all director David Lowery had to do was stick to the legend of Sir Gawain’s confrontation with a mysterious Christmas visitor to King Arthur’s court. Driven by Dev Patel’s pitch perfect performance, The Green Knight felt both completely surreal and strangely familiar.

Cryptozoo is not about Bitcoin.

Best Animation: Cryptozoo

Annette and The Green Knight were weird, but the year’s weirdest film was Dash Shaw’s exceedingly strange magnum opus. Think Jurassic Park, only instead of CGI dinosaurs it’s Sasquatch and unicorns drawn like a high schooler’s notebook doodles come to life.

Bad robot — director Michael Rianda’s The Mitchells vs. the Machines finds one family squaring off against the techno-pocalypse.

Honorable Mention: The Mitchells vs. the Machines

Gravity Falls’ Mike Rianda pulls off the difficult assignment of making an animated film that appeals to both kids and adults with this cautionary tale of the connected age.

Anna Cobb in We’re All Going to the World’s Fair

Best Performance: (tie) Kristen Stewart, Spencer; and Anna Cobb, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair

Both Stewart and Cobb played women trapped in nightmarish situations, trying to hold onto their sanity while watching their worlds crumble around them. For Stewart, it was Princess Diana’s last Christmas with the queen. For Cobb, it’s a teenager succumbing to an internet curse. The success of both pictures hinges on their central performances, but the difference is that Stewart’s one of the world’s highest paid actresses, and this is Cobb’s first time on camera.

Anya Taylor-Joy stars as Sandie in Last Night in Soho. (Credit: Parisa Taghizadeh / © 2021 Focus Features, LLC)

MVP: Edgar Wright

Wright started the year with his first documentary, The Sparks Brothers, an obsessive ode to your favorite band’s favorite band. Sparks’ story is so strange and funny, and Wright’s style so manic and distinctive, that many viewers were surprised to learn it wasn’t a mockumentary. Then, he dropped Last Night in Soho, a humdinger of a Hitchcockian horror mystery which evoked the swinging London of the 1960s. Wright continues to deliver the most fun you can have in a multiplex.

Ariana DeBose as Anita in West Side Story.

Best Director: Steven Spielberg,
West Side Story

I feel like this Spielberg kid’s got potential. Hollywood’s wunderkind is now an elder statesman, but his adaptation of the Broadway classic proves he’s still got it. With unmatched virtuosity, he brings Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim’s songs to life and updates the story’s sensibilities for the 21st century. West Side Story stands among the master’s greatest work.

Sly Stone performing at the Harlem Cultural Festival in Summer of Soul.

Best Documentary: Summer of Soul

The most transcendent on-screen moment of 2021 actually happened in 1969, when Mavis Staples and Mahalia Jackson duetted “Precious Lord” at the Harlem Cultural Festival. Questlove’s directorial debut gave the long-lost footage of the show the reverent treatment it deserves. Thanks to the indelible performances by the cream of Black musical talent, Summer of Soul was as electrifying as any Marvel super-fest.

Riley Keough and Taylour Page are strippers on a Tampa tear in Zola.

Best Picture: Zola

I can hear you now: “You’re telling me the best picture of 2021 was based on a Twitter thread by a part-time stripper from Detroit?” Hey, I’m as surprised as you are. But director Janicza Bravo turned a raw story of a road trip gone wrong into a noir-tinged shaggy-dog story of petty crime and unjust deserts. The ensemble cast of Taylour Paige, Nicholas Braun, Colman Domingo, and particularly Riley Keough is by far the year’s best, and Bravo shoots their ill-fated foray into the wilds of Tampa, Florida, like she’s Kubrick lensing A Clockwork Orange. Funny, self-aware, and unbearably tense, Zola is a masterpiece that deserves a bigger audience.

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Film Features Film/TV

West Side Story

Ariana DeBose, Hamilton alum, stuns audiences as Anita, even as she plays opposite Rita Moreno, who won an Oscar for playing the Shark girl in 1961.

Over and over again in Steven Spielberg’s stunning adaptation of West Side Story, people face off against each other from the opposing sides of the screen. The Sharks and the Jets do it, as you would expect from theater’s dancing-est street gangs. Tony (Ansel Elgort) and Maria (Rachel Zegler) do it, first underneath the bleachers at the high school dance, then in the church where they declare their love. And the men and women of New York’s Upper West Side Puerto Rican immigrant community do it as they sing about “America.”

West Side Story is about the contradictions at the heart of the American experiment. Yes, we’re all created equal and, since we have the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, we are free to love whom we want. But, as lyricist Stephen Sondheim put it, “Life is all right in America/If you’re all white in America.”

Sondheim, who passed away at age 91 just days before Spielberg’s film was released, was the newcomer in 1957 when he co-created West Side Story with composer Leonard Bernstein and choreographer Jerome Robbins. It was Robbins’ idea to set Romeo and Juliet in what was then the poor neighborhood on Manhattan island and transform Shakespeare’s feuding “two households, both alike in dignity” into the Jets and Sharks, two groups of poor New Yorkers separated mostly by the timing of their ancestors’ immigration to America. Tony Kushner, who wrote the screenplay for Spielberg’s adaptation, makes this explicit when he has police Lieutenant Schrank (Corey Stoll) call out the Jets as the last white people who can’t make it in America.

Most of the onus of updating West Side Story for a 21st century America falls on Kushner as the screenwriter, and the Angels in America scribe succeeds beyond all expectations. This film is not a remake of the 1961 Best Picture Oscar winner; it’s an adaptation of the original play. The order of the songs reflect the play, which makes a lot more sense, plot-wise. The difference with the Robert Wise/Jerome Robbins version begins immediately. The camera pans across an urban wasteland of demolished buildings until it lands on a sign announcing the upcoming construction of Lincoln Center. The little square of turf the Sharks and Jets fight and die to control is doomed from the start. Later, in the Gimbels department store where Maria works as a cleaner (another Kushner addition), one of her co-workers expresses the hope that they will be able to stay in the neighborhood and live in a nice, new apartment. Another maid shoots her down — those apartments will be for rich people and we’ll have to move.

Spielberg has never made a musical before, although he has dabbled, such as the opening “Anything Goes” number in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. I figured he would do a good job, but I didn’t think his first foray into the genre would be a perfect film. His staging and camera moves are on another level from everyone else working today. The dance at the school gym where Tony and Maria meet rivals the kinetic action sequences of Mad Max: Fury Road.

There’s not a sour note in the acting. Rachel Zegler is a first-time film actor who was one of 30,000 people who auditioned in an open casting call; her last role was as Maria in a community theater production of West Side Story in Englewood, New Jersey. She is absolutely radiant. Hamilton veteran Ariana DeBose nails the picture’s most difficult role as Anita, the Shark girl caught between love and anger. Just to add another layer of difficulty, DeBose has to play opposite Rita Moreno, who won an Oscar for playing Anita in 1961. Moreno takes on the shopkeeper’s role as Valentina and delivers a showstopper in a show made of nothing but showstoppers. In Moreno’s hands, “Somewhere” is transformed into a paean for an American dream of equality that always seems just out of reach.

Categories
Theater Theater Feature

“West Side Story” at Theatre Memphis

You better run, you better do what you can

Don’t wanna see no blood, don’t be a macho man.

— “Beat It,” Michael Jackson

It has now become quite impossible for me to hear “Beat it,” the opening words of Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim’s Tony Award-winning musical West Side Story, without instantly imagining images from the video for Michael Jackson’s “Beat It,” a 1980s homage to 1957’s Broadway gang-banger.

Read Chris Davis’ review of Theatre Memphis’ production of West Side Story.