Monday, February 10, 2014

West Side Story (1961)

Today's film is West Side Story.  I don't care for live action musicals because they are so fakey.  Randomly bursting into song is really fake, even in animations, but I accept them because they are cartoons.  I have never liked musicals.  And here I am watching one.


Everyone knows the story of Romeo and Juliet.  This is the same story, but instead of rivaling families, they are replaced by ballet dancing gangsters, the white Jets and the Puerto Rican sharks.  Tony is a Jet who falls in love with Maria at a dance party.  Incidentally, Maria's older brother is Bernardo from the Sharks.  Their love is doomed from the start.

The songs weren't anything special.  Normally if I watch a musical I get the songs stuck in my head, and that didn't happen this time.  My daughter liked the dancing and danced along with them.  Both of the Romeo and Juliet characters didn't die, but one of them does. That didn't surprise me.  I would have liked this better if I would have seen it off-Broadway as a play, but it loses something on the screen.  This is true of most musicals.

Even though this is an award-winning musical, it did nothing for me. I will give it a 6/10.

2 comments:

  1. I caught up with this in 2012 and enjoyed some of the songs, but the story just sat there. I don't have the same negative feelings about musicals, but this one wasn't a favorite. Good production values, but not too exciting for me.

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    1. The story just sat there - that is a perfect way of describing it.

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