Lists

That. is the raddest thing. I've ever seen. Though, I guess technically it's not the thing; it's the fog. I can't imagine a "thing" action figure. How does one package anyone, as a concept, or paranoia?

My List Summary of 2021 in Film, including my Top 10 Favorites.

There's just so many movies out there these days, with half of cinema no longer cinema as a venue but now existing as media streaming content. I'm sure there's a lot of good movies I missed and certainly many I'm aware of but just haven't had the time for. I'm not really a big "TV guy" for one thing. I'll incorporate a trip to the movie theater in my daily outdoor excursions whenever doable and as I prefer, ideally. Yet I'm also something of a night owl and afterhour downtime does afford me an opportunity to seek out online curious titles. So here's my take...

Annette

Val is a documentary about Val Kilmer. As documentaries go, it's none too biting as a social/historical commentary nor does it string into an epic any sort of grand artistic legacy with rises and falls iconic to the masses, as we get with the Beatles or something. It's neither topical nor some splendor of natural wonders. It's just a video-archival tour of an actor's successful albeit marred career, narrated by Kilmer from within his own headspace, yet whose narration is actually delivered by his son, twenty-something actor Jack Kilmer. The reasons for this are simple, as Val suffered throat cancer back in 2015 and underwent extensive treatment that left him speaking through a voice modulator, though son Jack's narration lends an uplifting familial poetry to the endeavor as well, as if assuming the younger man his father once was. But in truth the doc is relaxingly offbeat. It seems that Kilmer has been a home-videophile his whole life and captured in zoological snippets his childhood home movies, days in theater intermittent with various big studio location shoots, audition tapes, after-wrap parties, Hollywood premiers, the works; or just home life goings-on in general with various dimensions of his family. Evident from the get-go is just how much of a shameless ham Val Kilmer is for the camera, or for that matter anyone in the room, whether paying much attention to him or not.

Across the stretch of the feature, from adolescence to his now fading years, Kilmer a perpetual child with the gift of charisma and skittish humor, and where the presentation doesn't hide the bratty and sometimes alienating and even unprofessional self-absorbed nature of such a personality, on the same token it displays a rather endearing soul of an artist always leaning towards sincere expression. Also fascinating are the career environments. Footage from the set of Top Gun and its gargantuan spotlight success is a showcase for the utterly absurd if there ever was one, while decades later we witness a now feeble Kilmer depressingly stuck fast at a comic book convention, struggling to put on a good face for autograph hounds while fatigued with medical handicaps. We see him with his wife and then ex-wife, actress Joanne Whalley (Sorsha from Willow), and how his journey into the abyss of a Jim Morrison performance strained their marriage. He shares with us regrettable projects: playing Batman clearly sucked and the set of The Island of Dr. Moreau was a nightmare of creative frictions, even if behind-the-scene moments of him playfully bouncing off Marlon Brando offers its own delight. Other movies are regaled with shifting attitude, such as the frivolousness of making Top Secret or the strong admiration expressed for Micheal Mann's Heat. Attending an outdoor screening for Tombstone some 25 years after its release shows us Kilmer drifting back and fourth between the emptiness of past recognition with such a classic Western character as Doc Holiday and in the same instant a plain gratitude that, as a working actor, he was ever given such an opportunity to begin with. As youths, his younger brother, seen in various 16mm footage, drowned in a jacuzzi at age 15 in 1977 and such sorrow is a theme carried through the feature, and his recent years before cancer highlight his traveling one-man stage performance as Mark Twain, perhaps his proudest personal achievement as thespian in the rawest sense. The editing of the documentary is good without being too showy and I simply enjoyed the material as a throwaway string of consciousness from an actor who was once groomed to be another Tom Cruise but has always stumbled along a more Quixotic path.

Mélanie Laurent plays...a woman. She wakes up inside an automated cryogenic medical unit. She knows the tech but, suffering from amnesia, not her own identity or how she got there in the first place. As the audience, we're only privy to what she sees and hears. Problems compound rapidly. While the unit is replete with controls, holo-screens, and a voiced A.I. program called M.I.L.O. (Medical Interface Liaison Officer), a) the very malfunction that brought her out of cryo-sleep is an unexplained damaged oxygen supply failing at a percentile rate, and b) MILO is unable to oblige her command to simply open the unit, as she is lacking the proper administrator code, which of course she cannot remember. She tries to jury rig the unit open at its seal but is met with electric shocks, MILO informing her that the unit must remained closed for protocol reasons. She's able to open instead a radio channel to the outside and makes contact with emergency personnel who try to keep her calm whilst attempting to contact the unit's manufacturer. Exact details of the film's underlying storied premises remain vague. Clearly it's set in the near future and at a certain point early on the woman is able to identify herself from databanks as a cryogenic doctor named Elizabeth Hansen. But things get tricky from there; suspicious at first, then adversarial, then downright existential. All the while, the central problem remains: she's running out of air.

I enjoyed Alexandre Aja's previous genre thriller exercise with Crawl that likewise positioned a blonde heroine at the center of a life-and-death dilemma via a crawlspace maze with Floridian alligators as its minotaurs. But where that film was geographical, Oxygen is about cracking a safe from within. Elizabeth could be in the back of a moving van or at the bottom of the Mariana Trench for all we know, but her physicality is regulated to mere inches. It's a maze of the mind, then, as solving the riddle of the box means navigating her own choppy memory. Aja pulls this off with a 100-minute runtime. That's the entire movie, inside this one unit with a single character trying like hell to manage her own panic. And it works. A ticking clock plot-device affords tension easy enough but the narrative must still achieve dramatic setbacks matched with ingenuitive solutions along the way. Also matched with flare are revelations between the unknown just beyond the cryogenic unit and the fated backstory contained within Elizabeth's psyche. The movie never drags and I dig the irreverent familiarity of 'system errors' and tech-support inanity that often plummet our daily routines into states of ill-proportioned rage, here, serving as actual threats to Elizabeth's survival, and how she too reacts comically with the same frustrations, figuratively and literally banging her head against the same old computer bullshit.

The Matrix: Resurrections is not visionary. Specifically, it's non-visionary. Singular Wachowski, Lana, is in jazz mode with this odd riff of a movie, possibly the most systematically reflexive sequel to a long-since beloved franchise ever mounted. Throughout its runtime footage flashbacks to the OMT (original Matrix trilogy) not only quickly acquire consistency but eventually crosses a line to become diegetic, existing literally within various scenes visible to multiple characters. It assumes a steady heartbeat of the film, and yet diagnosing such as lazy nostalgia would be inaccurate. Rather, the emphasis is on contrast regarding aesthetics and dramatic tone. The septic greens and blues, strict framing regiment and graphic art action choreography of the OMT is has been supplanted with a more nondescript presentation; fight sequences are half-scaled and uniformed in muddled coverage and the once fixed, noirish surrealism inside the Matrix, both in pedestrian terms and action spectacle, is now glossier and more commercial with unfiltered color pop and corporate marketing modernism bathed in magic-hour. The unwavering sense of dread and desperation that anchored the OMT from start to finish is likewise gone, for Resurrections, while maintaining an air of deep meditation, nonetheless does so in a state that ranges form casual to lark.

This is a far more jocular affair. The new version of Morpheus for instance is a bit of an ass-clown and New Smith, once the embodiment of chaotic evil, is now merely a trickster, a Cheshire cat, whose bouts with Neo are without any central dramatic stake. Replacing the all-cerebral Architect of the previous Matrix, this current iteration is under custody of the Analyst (Doogie Howser), a shrink personification who instead of simply organizing humans like an ant farm caters to their emotionality and dream-states that doubles in harnessing more energy for the Machine cities while also better securing humans in their lots, each by their own psychological dependencies, and with Neo being his most prized and emblematic patient. Therefore he's less an alien-complex dispassionately overseeing Mankind as mere batteries than he is a smug self-help motivational conman looking to maintain the status quo of his latest software that's been keeping both sides, Man and Machines, comfortably numb. Precisely by existing outside the tightly sealed envelope of the OMT does Resurrections enshrine as much, as the events of those films seem transmitted from another universe. Here, Neo's journey through a more prescription-friendly Matrix to rekindle with Trinity juxtaposes his Biblical past -- all things prophecies, infernos, wars in heaven etc -- with contemporary romantic dramedy that is more about bucking the trappings of therapy addiction and the anxieties of midlife disenchantment. Midlife Lana Wachowski herself has reappropriated the franchise with more nonchalant Zen per the idea that what was once a realm belonging to the overlords is just another neutral playing field in life with its own pros and cons, opportunity and complacency, that can be negotiated either way.

Resurrections looks back without going back, aware in and of itself that one never really can. Things inevitably change and I found myself at ease with this sequel respecting the totemic gravity of its predecessors by sidestepping as much altogether to unfold in messier, commonplace fashion the restlessness of "living" within the Matrix. And it's still a legit science fiction journey, by my count, where I engaged with the story developments that long after the war in Revolutions have distinctly shifted the goals and attitudes of the A.I.'s upkeeping the Matrix and the humans who reside beyond its borders. Where the super-powered Wuxia edge is gone from this film, its novelty years ago laid to rest, the action climax in particular still affords a grandeur dramatically reliant upon Neo bootstrapping his godlike mojo (there's even a joke thrown it on middle-aged impotence) and Trinity summoning her inner Ducati animal spirit; it is their unity that takes on a greater meaning in this story, with gender-ident metaphorical properties, upon which the future will be cast. If nature's first green is gold then what was once green in the Matrix is, for our vintage heroes Neo and Trinity, now gold.

There's a moment nearing the third act of No Time to Die where Bond toys with his wounded prey using equal parts gravity and an overturned land rover. It's a welcomed, elemental expression of the character amidst all the weighty melodrama that keeps alive rudimentary conceits going all the way back to Dr. No. Much like The Matrix: Resurrections, this final entry in the Craig-era comes with more baggage than is worth unpacking for any one review. I could prattle on indefinitely about how the series post-2006 gained and suffered from its own overreaching ambitions in self-importance while contorting to fit with the times & blockbuster trends, yielding results that go from inspired to insipid and back again, but such atomization doesn't change the outcomes. Brass tacks, No Time to Die is a squarely robust action-adventure that is too dazzling in Bondian-plot mayhem and too photogenically brilliant in spy-travelogue fantasy to be anything less than a satisfying continuation of the 007 ritual. I also must confess, the pathos that has taxed this Craig-era from day one has finally with this film embraced the ultimate counterpoint.

When Bond's tranquil getaway with Madeleine in Southern Italy -- his secluded, seemingly chapter-closing epilogue opposite Vesper Lynd's tomb -- on a dime turns into a shit storm, not only does he brush off ill-fates without a second thought but moreover accepts with callous mockery the always volatile element that is Madeleine's past and his paradise with her as a thing illusory; a far cry from Lazenby's Bond mourning over his murdered bride, "We have all the time in the world," this Bond simply reprimands his femme sitting next to him in the passenger seat, "We all have our secrets! We just didn't get to yours yet!" Bond was never destined for lasting personal happiness, but when life gives him lemons...he annihilates goons with his Aston Martin machine guns—because Bond hasn't the time for such proverbs. Hence the film's title: What does it profit a man to fuss over cosmic cruelties when, during any given moment, time is better spent in the company of hot women for its own sake or simply being a badass spy? And so Bond navigates the last leg of his labyrinthine tragedy that weaves between MI6 company and Blofeld, Madeleine, her ghost, Safin, and her aforesaid secret, yet no longer as a creature of angst. Ironically, he's the 'blunt instrument' once again, just in a manner more philosophical than procedural. Pending the eventual rewatch I am nonetheless ready to consider No Time To Die as my favorite Daniel Craig Bond. It dutifully carries the weight of the two Sam Mendes entries only to roundabout its way back along side Casino Royal, but now matching the world-domination sensationalism of classic Bond. As I've said elsewhere, I'm glad the Craig-era is over, but am just as glad I didn't miss a beat of it.

If the Star Wars Sequel Trilogy did us any one solid, it was the marquee promise of Adam Driver. In both films here under Scott he strikes a low-resonating chord and exhibits considerable morphability between the broodingly handsome Le Gris and the gawky introvert Maurizio. Both characters pivot on their full intentions remaining hidden under lock 'n' key and Driver's stolid internalization never undermines his talent for holding the camera. Irons and Pacino are reliable as ever with their cultivated gravitas and slyly good comedic timing, and for once it's nice to see properly utilized Leto's indulgence as a character actor, whose symbiosis with the remarkable makup design for all intents and purpose creates onscreen a separate human being; his Paolo makes for a strange alchemy of Fredo Corleone and Jar Jar Binks.Yet the canniest of these casting choices is of course the vertically impaired Lady Gaga, all busty and lusty, hairsprayed to the moon and in every third scene filling out a garishly printed tight outfit like a plump grape fitted with shoulder pads. She's kind of amazing to look at for all sorts of reasons not only pleasurable and offensive but somehow both at once. The degree to which Gaga can 'method' is all but beside the point, for she's a creature of vogue and takes hold the reigns of Patrizia Reggiani like it's reality TV—I was too amused to care whether she was believable or not.

Ridley Scott is 84 years old. That he can even still manage such comely productions, alone, is a testament to his filmmaking virility. With The Last Duel and House of Gucci he continues as the darker, Jungian version of DeMille, extracting from history both premodern and 20th lurid intrigues critical of Western mores -- even cynical, perhaps -- but cautionary as well. And entertaining.

This was a fun movie ...real goofy, like The Happening which I also liked. I consider Shyamalan the only fully functional purveyor of the Rod Serling School of Water Cooler Existential Suspense with access to a Hollywood budget, and once again he goes all in on a fixed paranormal premise arguably more linear than anything he's tackled before; simply put, time. Broken down to its basic arithmetic: an undisclosed tropical resort + a secluded beach + a van full of unsuspecting tourists ÷ by an invisible, anomalous barrier that keeps them from leaving − well...time itself, biologically speaking, at an alarmingly rapid rate. Roughly every 30 minutes equivalent to one year of their life, to be exact. A married couple headed for divorce with the concerns of their two preadolescent children that must be squared, a chintzy trophy wife accompanying her middle-aged surgeon of a husband seeking refuge from "mental stress", a women with epilepsy, a spooky hip-hop artist with a blood condition... these are just some of the variables that come to light, yet whether the conditions of this beach are strictly some geographically isolated phenomenon of nature or if there's something Kafkaesque going on behind the curtain is not for me to spoil and, in typical Shyamalan practice, is really only secondary to the ontological questions being asked of this unfortunate ensemble caught in such a [matrix..?] trap. Possibly as a pun on its own title, Old finds a way to reinvent moth-eaten Hallmark sentiments by manifesting them through an extraordinary crisis, for not only do we take for granted the time we're allotted with our family decisions and personal health but, here, such becomes elemental to the plot.   

As a technique-centric filmmaker Shyamalan has fashioned for himself a literal sandbox in which to play, given the setting for Old, a mere couple-hundred yards or so of beach, is inescapably spatial. Shots that roam or rotate on axis remain opaque in their POV while a stereoscopic sound design exceeds the frame to create for the viewer three-dimensional impressions, and it's within this draft that Shyamalan opts for one-and-done single takes and thus a kind of 'actors workshop' style of dramaturgy where many a choices in performance are spontaneous to the moment and bottled proximity of fellow casts. This intones much of the dramatic scenes as feeling unrefined, even a bit silly, but it's also in keeping with the very urgency of the premise -- a fleeting path through horror and despair, sadness and reconciliation, like speeding traffic -- never getting bogged down in overwritten character development plagued by televisual beats. No, Old truly is a short-from anthology exercise in narrative of the traditional kind and one that never outstays its welcome. If its storied conclusion is at once rather tidy and underwhelming, such is at least proportionate to the transient nature of the movie as a whole. For myself, I came away thoroughly satisfied by a conceit that was cleverly mechanized into a cinematic experience and without leaving any dramatic conflict unresolved.       

Herculean is the word to describe Zack Snyder's Justice League. Its meaning goes double. There's the scale of the movie, of course, but also and plainly its mythic implications. Why do we bother with this superhero stuff? For the MCU it's about showrunner accessorization ("Each sold separately. Collect them all!") that believe it or not has since devolved into an inferior version of itself. Elsewhere the genre tends to lean towards pithy postmodern deconstructionalism or an attempt to superimpose itself onto some loftier crime epic or psyche study. Snyder embraces the contemporary, no question, yet his core aim is something neoclassical. Justice League is a goddamn fresco, albeit stupid. Lovingly stupid. It's DC Super Friends writ rock video. If one might regard the plot from the 2017 theatrical cut as a skeletal form -- i.e., recruit the team and revive Superman to stop Steppenwolf -- then Snyder's opus adds the muscle, tendons, organs and skin. Its four hours partitioned into seven chapters is an impressive payload that fucks off any Whedonisms in favor of the Wagnerian.

It's a work of tonnage, with members such as Cyborg and the Flash, the lore of Apokolips and the internalization of Superman post-revival etc. laid out to such an extent that leaves no feasible stone unturned. Is it well paced? Eh, I dunno. Does it really matter? Four hours is four hours. If committing to such a gamut to begin with then, honestly, you're not in it for the economics but rather an absolute zealous immersion into any given minutiae of this 21st-century titanomachy. Snyder certainly maxes out moments of both annotation and tableau such as the high-conceptual breakdown of Cyborg's full potential as a Net-Vishnu illustrated with cyberspace abstractions or Barry Allen's temporal meet-cute with Iris West scored by a breathy cover of 'Song of the Siren' and, concerning the latter, one can scarcely quantify just how unabashedly vulnerable a move it makes; my jaw dropped at Snyder throwing down the gauntlet and hazarding such potential embarrassment, an intersection (literally, within the scene) that separates the flippant and jaded from the rest of us looking to comic book film less interested in denigrating jokes or progressive platitudes than we are for some earnest pop-transcendence, gauche as it may be. It was Sucker Punch all over again.       

I'm also enamored with Snyder's inspired change up to a 1.33:1 open-matte ratio. I've since described his visual style as "slash page" but here it takes on the fullest meaning. Vertical open-matte in the right hands can do wonders for composition and Justice League counterintuitively beams Snyder's MTV hyper-realism across the curvature of the universe and back around to evoke the Expressionistic anti-realism of Fritz Lang's Die Nibelungen and Metropolis. And while "grimdark" as a derogative is all too often associated with Snyder's general visual tone, I feel the color palette here, unrelenting for sure, still deserves a more nuanced appreciation for its love affair with a range of deep blacks raven to graphite contrasted with pallid bronze age, hellfire and electrum, resulting in a style that emphasizes aforesaid Germanic depths. Add to all of it Snyder detailing his subjects in heroic pose with attention equal to Boris Vallejo and you've got a masterwork of comic book gallery brought to life. I contend that Zack Snyder's Justice League is the Spruce Goose of superhero cinema: mocked by many, it's size and beauty design and at-odds ambition being argument enough for its greatness—not for nothing, but Howard Hughes' original name for his seaplane was The Hercules.  

Well shit. That bombed. There's a lot of baggage that has unfortunately been front-loaded onto this movie, this now already infamous commercial flop. Industry insider shoptalk has chimed in almost as damage control with Covid and the commercial viability of musicals being principle factors whereas independent social media commentators have pounced to sight wokeism. I think we can all safely rule out pandemic angst by itself given the massive in play box office success of Spider-Man: No Way Home, even where there might be differences in age/health demographics to consider, which I ultimately deem minor. In the last half of the 2010s, alone, big studio live-action musicals have been capable of either turning considerable profits or at least making back their money. A combination of the two, then? Maybe. None of the other musicals in 2021 have fared much better and a few have done worse. Covid in tandem with online streaming has perhaps widened the box office gap between ensured franchise success and the more general standalone mainstream. You would think that West Side Story would bare minimum draw a respectable holiday family-going crowd of around $90 to $150 million; ten years ago I'd wager it would've made about as much money as Spielberg's War Horse. Three weeks in, it currently stands at $37 million (world-wide) out of a $100 million budget. Not good. As for the film suffering from any overt leftist phenotypes...

Steven Spielberg's West Side Story is not woke. Steven Spielberg is not woke. He's too much of boomer to be woke. Spielberg is woke in the same way Joe Biden is woke ("Hah?! Corn pop!") i.e., he's an old white guy. Courtesy of his career-long Capraesque romanticism, Spielberg as an artist, anyways -- I couldn't care less about his activist views -- has always been more of your traditional pre-60s liberal with a filmmography resting on rather quaint and innocuous national sentiments that virtually anyone can get behind such as a free press, antislavery and neighborly goodwill towards new citizens of a different persuasion, to say nothing of his films tilted with certain conservative angles; Minority Report today edges closer to mirroring the paranoia against state enforced unvaccinated measures and social credit scores, and look to Amistad and especially Bridge of Spies for straight-up Constitutionalist arguments. But Spielberg is not nor ever has been a "political" filmmaker, period, and he's just not hip enough to placate to the always-moving goal posts of SJW neurosis, as is evident by many far left pundits criticizing West Side Story for not being woke enough (shocking, I know).

Wokeism as a point of derision and as an explanation for commercial failure can often be the stuff of Youtube channel laziness; on both sides, pro and against, it's white noise that I for one tend to block out. The only reason Spielberg came under such scrutiny to begin with was for comments made during promotion of the film where he accounted for the omission of English subtitles for Spanish speaking scenes because he didn't want one language "owning" the other. Yeah, it's kind of a post hoc dopey virtue signal but Spielberg, ever the pathological crowd-pleaser, has often been a dopey PR pushover, groveling a bit in response to the critical finger-waving against Temple of Doom or playing socially sensitive by swapping out guns for walkie-talkies in E.T. only to bend over backwards the other way when fans cried foul by restoring the original version in later video releases. Bottom line, I didn't even know about the omission until after the fact, it first being revealed to me while watching the film on the big screen, so I doubt it played any decisive role against the film's favor with general audiences who don't obsess over such internet clickbait.   

But enough of the bitter...

Steven Spielberg's 2021 West Side Story is dazzling. It is an instantly justified reimagining of a med-20th-century artwork that is truly American, particularly the kind of Americana that can go on speaking relevantly while remaining in its time capsule. It's also a chance for one of our great pop-auteur filmmakers to find new artistic purchase with the equal measures of magic and fidelity innate in the Broadway musical and its history on film. In hindsight the 1961 original seems so much more a work of stage artifice that seized for its own purposes and under its control real-world locales. That film opens like a travelogue documentary with an aerial macrocosm of New York City before closing in on its titular Manhattan borough as if piercing reality itself to then proceed within a paradoxically on-location concrete fantasy. Spielberg was smart to invert this interpretation to degree. His opening, roving shot recalls that of the original's with skycam simulacrum only now a mere foot above rubble, rising up to fourth-story levels, snaking around vacant lots and wrecking sites before closing onto some Jets for the first opening number. It's a flip that does well to establish this film's distinct identity: a grittier and more atmospheric concrete reality, moving fast and accented with cinéma vérité energy, while the element of stage fantasy remains distant, a vague backdrop of creamy sky colors. Moreover does this bruise up themes of lower class hardship, delinquency, bigotry and violence that long ago became antiquated characteristics of the Broadway production in general and particularly of its 1961 adaption; that film remains a masterpiece of its time but, yes, it has some outdated aspects.

Oh, you all now the plot. Even if you've never seen any rendition, after nearly 75 years of pop-cultural osmosis everyone gets the basic gist of it. There's the Sharks vs. Jets, with Maria on one side and Tony on the other. Done. Crucial casting has always come down to the five leads, Tony and Maria, older brother Bernardo and his girlfriend Anita, and then Riff as the de facto leader of the Jets. All five cast members acquit themselves nicely, in my opinion, furthermore with young Rachel Zegler's starlit countenance giving rise to an ideal personification of the saintly innocent Maria and Mike Faist practically stealing every other scene as the scrappiest and most deeply torrent Riff ever committed. If Zegler and Ansel Elgort's chemistry is better assumed than affecting, I'd argue that such has always been a facet of Tony and Maria, whose amour should remain first and foremost the product of a heightened duetic expression; what is between them is only for us to feel through the music. Beyond these five Spielberg populates the feature with an array of animated personalities and even finds a singular spotlight under which veteran Rita Moreno (Anita from the original) as an elderly shopkeeper can gracefully muse over the melodrama as it unfolds.       

The very science of a traditional musical number is correspondent to Spielberg's instincts as a set piece storyteller where nearly everything he's done with physical drama has been in allegiance to the 'Rube Goldberg Machine' laws of causality, and with timing either melodic or structurally comedic. He is. arguably. the best cameraman director ever. The ability to edit in-camera by shifting perspectives through staging and blocking -- effortlessly, without the audience conscious of changing shots minus any actual cuts -- has been the staple of his much celebrated visual language from day one. Here, that language becomes one-half of the dance choreography and yields a synthesis of stage theater clarity and close proximity that feels like the next, subsequent and respectful step forward from the technical sophistication Robert Wise brought to the original 1961. In that film Wise was careful to articulate camerawork beyond the fixed master shots of older musicals while never feeling too invasive of the dance, bringing audiences out of their seats and up to the stage, free to walk its peripherals for a more dynamic view. Spielberg not only puts you dead center in the middle of the choreography but with the storyboards and timing memorized as well, as you would turn every which way, your eyes naturally adjusting to the right movements at their most impactful. It's interactive without suffering from disorientation, to be sure, but also never falling into a bland fragmentation of cutesy shots/close-ups comparable to, say, this year's In the Heights, which as a string of musical numbers was little more than a glorified Sprite commercial. In short, Spielberg intuits as one scale and intimacy so that neither is compromised. 

Every musical number in the film could be broken down as its own unique example, but sufficing with just one would be 'Tonight', the famous back alley balcony scene between Tony and Maria where, again, comparisons with the original highlight striking differences. Wise presented the scene as a living portrait with reserved blocking until he finally settles on a medium master of the two veiled in soft-focus. Spielberg puts Tony into action, climbing up and over, back and fourth, along the railings of the fire escape with his gaze never losing Maria's; at one point they sing opposite a steel grating and then inches apart between bars or through the spaces of a ladder, with the camera gliding in and out in single movements. The physical structure within the scene acts as an emotional conduit between the two. Spielberg's is not a living portrait but rather a graphic art in motion. Lastly is the film's cinematography, first with the saturated paints of the 1961's Technicolor -- all those ceramic primaries -- having been left alone to remain a signature look of that film. As Spielberg's collaboration with Janusz Kaminski always ensues, here color is more coolly yet radiantly light-filtered with extreme bloom and lens flare that matches verisimilitude elsewhere with an atmosphere of photographic artifacts. This is a very "brilliant" looking motion picture in the plainest sense. Light permeates throughout even when it is ghostly pale and undeniable is the flexibility in which it adorns this period New York setting that has to meet the two ends of whimsy and tragedy.

West Side Story is among Steven Spielberg's finer films. I'm confident that long remembered beyond any financial narrative will be its wide-appeal artistic merits.

'Kay. That's it.