Tag: Steven Spielberg

West Side Story

Posted on by victorfraga

Two months on from its release, nothing about Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story seems to make sense. A vague marketing push seemed to reflect the fact that nobody knew who this remake was for – those who hadn’t heard of the original 1961 adaptation probably won’t care, while those who had heard of it will have impossibly high standards for anything that follows a cinematic classic.

This confusion resulted in a box office bomb. However, those who did show up came out with good things to say. A positive critical response was coupled with a surprising seven Oscar nominations, including Best Picture. So, as the film attempts to make a second impression next week with its debut on Disney+, is it worth watching?

For those unaware of the story, it’s Romeo and Juliet with hair grease and big skirts. We go to 1957 Manhattan, a place where economic ambition lives side-by-side with harsh reality. In the ever-changing West Side, two male gangs fight for their turf – the Caucasian gang The Jets, and Puerto Rican gang The Sharks. In the midst of this bad feeling, reformed Jet Tony (Ansel Elgort) falls for Maria (Rachel Zegler), the young sister of Shark leader Bernardo (David Alvarez). The pair are smitten and determined to be together, but the escalating feud between their respective communities makes that union fraught with danger.

There’s a lot to discuss here, both in terms of past and present. The 1961 version has well-known issues regarding diversity, as well as many issues relating to a film from a different era. Nevertheless, it is still considered one of the greatest Hollywood productions ever – from the choreography, to the singing, to the staging, it is the gold standard by which screen musicals are set. So, it is to the director’s credit that this new version lives up to that prowess. The retro, dream-like vision of New York is remarkable, with careful attention to period detail and performance.

There are changes, such as an increased emphasis on relatable issues like gentrification and the sense that economic progress will render this turf war meaningless in a matter of months. The racial barriers are sensitively handled, and Spielberg corrects the issues of the past with Latinx casting on the jets side, and tweaks such as making ‘Tomboy’ character Anybodys a Transgender man, played by Iris Menas. The changes are refreshing, while still feeling true to the spirit of what came before.

And yet, therein lies the problem. The shadow of the ’60s’ film looms large, and in making something that stands up to the original, it challenges you to find a reason for its existence. Yes, performing signature number America in the neighbourhood streets is superbly filmed and vibrant, but it isn’t the remarkable rooftop celebration that occurred in Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins’ film. The school dance, where Tony and Maria meet, is a spectacular recreation of what came before, but then why not watch the inspiration? It’s an unfair bar to set, but ultimately an accomplished imitation of a landmark work only makes you yearn for the original.

The main element that seems to surpass what came before is Zegler. A remarkable discovery, having been found via an open online audition, the first-time actor shines both in her acting and singing.

Her Oscar nomination is well-deserved, and this stands as one of the great cinematic debuts. Her co-star Elgort is solid, lending a Rat Pack swagger to his singing to cover up an inability to hit the high notes. Whether or not you root for him is dependant on whether you can put the recent abuse allegations out of your mind, a reminder that problematic casting isn’t a preserve of the past.

Elsewhere, the great Rita Moreno, who played Anita in the ’61 version, is wonderful as new character Valentina, replacing original character Doc as a mentor figure to Tony. Ariana DeBose is filled with passion and charisma as the new Anita, while Michael Faist gives pathos to the role of Riff, Tony’s best friend who can’t escape the gang life.

West Side Story is a bright, energetic ode to the musicals of the 50s, proving Spielberg can still muster the kind of wonder that made his name. However, the hallowed status of his inspiration means those efforts may be sacrificed at the altar of comparison.

West Side Story is on VoD on Wednesday, April 21st.

Ready Player One

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Spielberg has long been happy to move between big-budget spectaculars like Jurassic Park (1993) which push the boundaries of what’s possible in film and culturally significant stories like Schindler’s List (1993) which rely less on special effects or reshaping the blockbuster medium. Following Bridge Of Spies (2015) and The Post (2017), Spielberg now brings audiences Ready Player One which represents something he’s been trying to make for years – a movie which gets into the heads of gamers.

Among his earlier forays, The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997) felt like a funny mixture of a sequel and an attempt at realising the gamer world (think: racing through fields in vehicles surrounded by numerous running dinosaurs). Subsequent films A.I. (2001) and Minority Report (2002) both boast futuristic environments that might not look out of place in a state of the art video game. Further, the experience of watching The Adventures Of Tintin (2011) recalls the process of actually playing a computer game. Ready Player One is, however, Spielberg’s first film to use gaming and Virtual Reality as its primary subject matter. Here, he finally puts his long-gestating gamer flirtation onto the big screen in all its virtual glory.

Ready Player One opens in 2045 in the futuristic environment of the rapidly developing and overcrowded Columbus, Ohio where trailer park meets high-rise architecture. These strange structures literally stack caravans on top of one another recalling Brazilian favelas. Inside the caravans, people eke out their days playing in a virtual world on headsets to escape the horrors of the real world. What people do inside the virtual world known as The OASIS determines their wealth in coin; a bad move can cost them everything they’ve worked for up ‘til then.

The OASIS’ late designer Halliday (Mark Rylance) decides prior to his death to issue a challenge to his gamers, hiding an Easter egg inside his creation. The finder of the egg will inherit The OASIS to do with as he or she chooses. Ordinary teenager Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan from Detour, effectively Spielberg’s avatar here) is determined to win this contest to escape the oppression of his life. His own avatar Parzival who drives the Delorean from Back To The Future (Robert Zemeckis, 1985) faces friendly competition from the beautiful Art3mis (Olivia Cooke) who rides the bike from Akira (Katsuhiro Otomo, 1988). More perilously perhaps, ruthless antagonist Nolan Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn) runs the Innovative Online Industries (IOI) corporation which will stop at nothing to beat all other players and win control of The OASIS. Their evil plan involves monetizing and privatizing the system for political gain.

Borrowing the iconography of the blue creatures from Avatar (James Cameron, 2009), Spielberg introduces Wade firstly as a real-world person, then as an avatar. Wade/Parzival’s friends are, however, introduced primarily as avatars so that you don’t know who they are in the real world – their avatar could be concealing an entirely different age or gender in real life. Some characters do indeed turn out to be very different from their online profiles.

There are some dirty settings in the real world too. Aside from Columbus’ seeming attempt to cram as many people as possible into small living spaces, IOI offers a corporate headquarters populated with helmeted minion employees known as Sixers – denoted by six-digit numbers and not names – where gamers work not for their own enjoyment but to increase the company’s profits. IOI’s Loyalty Centre provides the equivalent of a debtor’s prison wherein individuals are incarcerated and shackled. Locked into parts of The OASIS where they must work off their debt, being charged for the privilege of being housed there so that they can never break the cycle.

Captured and held in the Loyalty Centre, Art3mis finds herself forced together with other unfortunates to plant explosives at regular intervals within a section of The OASIS. People are expendable in IOI’s plan: witness the queue in a frozen wasteland of hopefuls required one by one to play an Atari game on an old-fashioned TV only to descend through breaking ice into the freezing depths below when they lose (as they invariably do).

The majority of the action takes place inside The OASIS where Spielberg stuffs his film full of multiple, largely 80s cultural references from King Kong and, yes, Jurassic Park’s T.Rex to The Iron Giant, MechaGodzilla and Mobile Suit Gundam. Many of these characters live and breath on the screen as impressively as elsewhere in pop culture or moviedom, if not more so. One sequence even enters the world of The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980), which one of Wade’s friends has never seen and thus falls prey to both the flooding blood outside of the lifts and the woman in Room 237. On one level all this is very playful, yet the whole has a deep mythological underpinning as the tale’s lone everyman, helped by an underground resistance movement of like-minded individuals, takes on a vast, profit-oriented organisation.

While it’s hard to believe 2045 will actually look and feel like this, Ready Player One is undeniably timely with the world of Virtual Reality just around the technological corner. It’s a film to see on as big a screen as you possibly can with as much digital detail as that screen will allow thanks to breathtaking, rapid-fire visuals. It’s loud, flashy and moves along at an incredible pace. Still, while that could simply denote the latest vacuous Hollywood blockbuster, there is a lot more going on here beneath the slick and frenetic surface. Moreover, once the narrative leaves the impressive enough futuristic real world for the virtual gaming environment, Spielberg finally pulls off that movie which he has been trying to make for years. Welcome to The OASIS, truly.

Ready Player One is out in the UK on Thursday, March 29th. It’s available on digital streaming on Monday, August 6th. On Netflix in October (2020).

The Post

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

In 1971, The New York Times broke the story of the Pentagon Papers. These documents detailed how the incumbent Nixon administration and its predecessors had increased the scale of the US involvement in the unwinnable war in Vietnam for political gain rather than the national good. The administration’s response was swift and repressive: within two days, a legal injunction prevented the paper from publishing further details. The Washington Post (often shortened to The Post, as in the film title), at the time more a local paper than a national one, stepped into the breach with its reporters hunting down the New York Times’ source so that it could publish more of the story as it emerged. Having just floated on the New York Stock Exchange, the paper found itself in the tricky situation of being accountable to conservative shareholders who didn’t like the idea of exposing their investment to risks with the potential to close the paper down for good.

The two main players in this story, as envisaged by Liz Hannah’s original script, were The Post’s editor Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks) and publisher Katherine Graham (Meryl Streep). Bradlee is the hard-nosed newshound gutted that The Times has scooped The Post and determined to make the most of the story once his rival is prohibited from further publication. Graham is the former housewife and mother who, having inherited The Post from her late husband, is determined to make a success of it at a time when women didn’t do things like publish newspapers because their place was unquestionably in the home.

With Josh Singer, the writer of Spotlight (Tom McCarthy, 2015), brought in by producer-director Spielberg to further research and beef up the screenplay’s journalistic element, The Post feels solidly grounded in the world it purports to represent. Spielberg augments the script by finding visual ways to tell his story. His opening has Streep wake and sit up in her bed causing files of paperwork to drop off the coverlet onto the floor. We immediately know Graham is a woman who prepares thoroughly for her work.

Spielberg mines extraordinary performances from his two leads and his excellent supporting cast. An almost unrecognisable Hanks convinces as the quick-witted, determined and conscientious editor who more than meets his equal in his quick-to-learn, publisher colleague. Streep’s role is arguably the more challenging one: Graham finds herself in a place where women simply weren’t found back in the 1970s, in a world of men feeling her way through tough business situations as they present themselves. Moreover, she’s on friendly terms with the powerful likes of Defence Secretary Robert McNamara (Bruce Greenwood) and realises that she will have to choose between looking out for old friends and sticking up for the truth by publishing facts and stories which may run counter to those friends’ best interests.

Comparisons will be made with classic journalistic thriller All The Presidents’ Men (Alan J.Pakula, 1976) which takes up the story at the Watergate break-in at the point where The Post leaves off. Indeed, Spieberg’s film ends with almost identical shots to those which opened Paluka’s. However, the latter was primarily about two reporters chasing a story whereas the former is more concerned with what makes a newspaper tick in terms of the differences between an editor’s mind and a publisher’s. Pakula’s conspiracy thriller takes place in an all-male environment where women are never more than minor players, whereas Spielberg portrays a part of that all-male environment having to deal with a smart and savvy woman engaging with them on her own terms, something it really isn’t used to.

Moreover, whereas Pakula’s movie only dealt with events from a few years before, Spielberg’s retelling of history from over 40 years ago speaks volumes to the present day when the incumbent President wants the media to regurgitate his own, often contentious version of events rather than seek to present objective truth. Two images stick with the viewer long after the film has ended: typesetting printing blocks spelling out “freedom to publish” in the ready-to-roll newspaper presses and the President as a distant figure glimpsed through a window barking angry orders into his phone. This pre-digital US of the 1970s echoes the present day.

The movie reminds us that the US news media exists for the benefit not of the governors but the governed. Because this is a Spielberg movie and therefore by default popular entertainment, that notion will be widely seen by a mass audience both at home and abroad – as indeed it deserves to be – and that’s a pretty big deal.

The Post is out in the UK on Friday, January 19th. It is available for digital streaming from May.