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Movies
It's abundantly clear the enthusiasm that Steven Spielberg has for movie musicals, and the whole film is just packed with stunning technical flourishes and choreography in a way that completely eclipses any other attempt to revive the American movie musical in recent memory—like, for once, a modern American musical whose editing doesn't slice it to bits. In terms of sheer spectacle, this is the best Spielberg has been in 10-15 years, and in terms of just this year, this is arguably 2021's most beautiful mainstream release. Giving a major musical to a technical classicist with a penchant for sentimental sweep? Predictably great. I hope Spielberg has a chance to make more musicals (doubtful, given this movie's box office performance—what is wrong with you people??), because I've never been a huge fan of West Side Story, and I'd love to see his talents on a show I actually love. But that said, this is probably the best possible version of the show without major revisions. The central problem that any West Side Story has to deal with is that Tony and Maria are vapid saps—an issue it shares with its Shakespearean source material, it bears mentioning, though Shakespeare seems more aware of the basic emptiness of the romance's impulsive gestures than most West Side Story tellings do. It's an incredibly tall order to write a romance so transparently foolish but also imbued with such powerful pathos that we root for it nonetheless. The traditional West Side Story take on this helps by making the romance a proxy for not just the immediate context of the midcentury NYC slums but also the American Dream itself (foolish, empty, but imbued with irresistible pathos, you say?), so automatically this new version of West Side Story makes the romance just a little more credible by leaning full-bore into the social themes of the play, under the logic that the more we care about the broader sociological import of the setting, the more we care about the romance. Under Tony Kushner's screenplay, this is now a movie explicitly about the forces of white supremacy and bourgeois capitalism conspiring to pit an assimilated European-immigrant underclass against a not-yet-assimilated Puerto-Rican underclass—the movie opens with the announcement that one of Robert Moses's urban renewal projects will demolish the tense slums that encompass the Sharks' and Jets' territory, with the white cops seeding white supremacist conspiracy theories among the Jets to divert their energy against a racial other rather than unite in solidarity with the Puerto Ricans protesting against the forced evictions. I know some people roll their eyes at the way this framing turns an existing subtext in previous versions into explicit text in the movie, but I think it works great, giving the film a sense of urgency and purpose that gives new life to a lot of the play's looser moments. Plus, I do think that such a backdrop does give the Maria/Tony romance a sense of sweeping myth that goes a long way toward helping me feel something about this pair of dopes, though admittedly this thematic approach still struggles when it comes to having to deal with the couple not just as an abstract but also as a pair of psychologically realized individuals—Rachel Zegler is astonishing as Maria and pulls Maria into a compelling character by sheer force of her performance, but the movie still hasn't figured out what to do with Tony, despite revising his character quite a bit (people are going to blame Ansel Elgort, and while he's certainly not an actor skilled enough to conjure an interesting Tony out of thin air, he's also given the much more challenging character to do that with); plus, even as good as Zegler is, even she can't sell the single most incredulous turn in the Romeo and Juliet story, i.e. instantly forgiving Tony for killing her brother. As long as these issues remain, I'm going to have to qualify my relationship with West Side Story, but golly, if this version doesn't come the closest I've seen to fixing them. And enough about Tony and Maria—the rest of the movie is top-to-bottom fantastic, filled with terrific performances (Mike Faist as Riff is especially terrific, as is Rita Moreno as Valentina), which absolutely thrive under the political dimensions of the film and the ways they recontextualize and remixe the songs, choreography, and emotional nuances of the characters. Everything and everyone is just so alive and vibrant and interesting. I loved it. Grade: A-
There's been a lot of talk about how this is a sexy exploitation film about lesbian nuns, and it's not not that. But I'm surprised I haven't seen more discussion about how in addition to that, there's a pretty robust interrogation of church power hierarchies and how they intersect some traditional Christian beliefs about our bodies. Near the beginning of the movie, our protagonist, upon entering a convent, is told that her body is her "enemy," and I'd say that's probably a fair (if a bit provocative) summary of a pretty pronounced strain of anti-sensual tradition within Christianity. I heard it a lot growing up: nobody told me that my body was my enemy, but people did say that the "flesh" is weak, causes you to sin, will rot away before you assume your heavenly form. Nobody was literally self-flagellating, as they do in this movie, either, but it was clear that our bodies' physicality was a barrier in our relationship to God. But then here comes this movie's Benedetta, a wild, maybe serious, maybe charlatan prophetess declaring that the act of physical love is what reveals God to her, and even today such a declaration within some Christian circles wouldn't be any less shocking than it is in the film's version of Renaissance Italy. The Bible never really clarifies what it means that humankind is made "in God's image," but it seems presumptuous to assume that our physical bodies are somehow cordoned off from that imago dei—so what surer way to be closer to God than to be physically intimate with another made in God's image? I mean, sexy nuns are sexy nuns, but what this movie presupposes is... what if that's sacred? Grade: A-
No sense wishing for the movie we didn't get, I suppose, but I really wish this had been more of a concert doc, as the talking head segments range from genuinely moving to VH1-style "let's see what this random celebrity has to say about this" (Chris Rock and Lin-Manuel Miranda both show up, for reasons I'm unsure). That said, what we do get of the concert footage is breathtaking, and I'm glad this exists. Grade: B
Some great atmosphere and scares, anchored by a typically terrific Rebecca Hall who absolutely refuses to sand the sharp edges off her character, which is great. The movie gets a little hokey in execution by the end, but I thought that ultimately it was in service of some fairly serious emotions regarding self-harm and depression—and like, yeah, the "reflexively hates Elevated Horror" crowd probably checked out the moment depression shows up as a metaphor, but there's something about the way in which the movie's central metaphors manifest the dark thoughts and listlessness of grief and depression that I connected with, as silly as this is by the conclusion. And unlike a lot of the "Elevated Horror" people hate, this movie is more than just creepy vibes and metaphors—lots of just plain humanity here. Grade: B+
Very lovely, very French. It peaks early with the ecstatic falling-in-love-with-fireworks sequence, which has got to be one of the greatest "falling in love" sequences in movie history—Romeo and Juliet/West Side Story adaptations, where is this energy for Act 1, Scene 5?? The movie is, by design, a lot less exciting after that, as both we viewers and the characters we're watching come down from the high and reckon with the toxic realities that the early ecstasy was situated within. But problematizing the relationship has the strange effect of making those initial scenes even sweeter, as if the movie is developing a wistful nostalgia for itself as it goes. So by the time we get to the possibly misguided reunion in the film's ending, it reads as a validation of that sense of nostalgia—a weird, complex little coup of sentiment over reason that I dug a lot. Grade: A-
A grimy noir with some absolutely despicable character turns: carnival barker turned con main extraordinaire—so, you know, the Good Stuff. It's hard to imagine what the Guillermo Del Toro remake could add to this, since as is, this movie feels pretty untouchable. Its ending is a little corny, though I can't imagine Del Toro jettisoning that. Grade: A-
Television
It's not quite the profound masterwork that was Season 2, and the show has abandoned all but the faintest pretense of the casually philosophical essay structure of its first season. It feels rude to call something this charming and poignant "a step down," but it's at least less ambitious. This season is focused on some of the more marginal aspects of the show's world—in some senses, Joe Pera himself allows himself to step to the side to focus a lot more on the secondary characters: Gene, the Melskys, Sarah, that random kid from Antarctica who appeared in the final minutes of S2. It's still incredibly thoughtful and sweet, with Pera's trademark left-turn insights. But it's decidedly lower key than the already low-key previous seasons. Still good, though. Still television's best-kept secret. Grade: B+
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