West Side Story 4K 2021 Ultra HD 2160p

Storyline
Manhattan, Upper West Side, 1957. Against the backdrop of the decaying tenements in the San Juan Hill neighbourhood and the constant threat of the wrecking ball, two warring gangs--tough Riff's Jets and swaggering Bernardo's Puerto Rican Sharks--fight for supremacy. Now, with a once-and-for-all, winner-takes-all rumble on the cards, an unexpected whirlwind romance at the high-school dance between former Jet brawler Tony and Bernardo's delicate little sister María sets the stage for an all-out turf war. But what's a gang without its territory? Above all, when the future is uncertain, what's hope without love?

User Review
I hope there's no need for me to synopsize the plot: it's Romeo and Juliet, transferred from Renaissance Verona to 1950s New York's Hell's Kitchen, where the Puerto Rican Sharks are fighting with the Irish Jets in a turf war that is scheduled to vanish, replaced by Lincoln Center. Ansel Egort is Tony, the equivalent of Romeo; Rachel Zegler is Maria, standing in for Ethel the Pirate King's daughter, I mean Juliet, and so forth. For us sentimentalists, 'Doc', played by Ned Glass in the original movie version, is replaced by Rita Moreno -- who won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her role in the 1961 version. How nice I saw it on her 90th birthday.

For his third remake and first musical, Seven Spielberg chose a difficult project. The first version solved the tricky task of bringing a Broadway smash to the big screen. Spielberg and his team of regulars -- writer Tony Kushner, cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, editor Michael Kahn -- have made a movie out of it, and a movie to reintroduce the film musical to an audience that has forgotten that the stage musical and the film musical are two entirely different animals. For the first half, Spielberg makes the camera move like a crab dolly, adjusts the light to show we're in the characters' heads, and varies the cutting pace to let us see, for example, that the dance the Jets perform in the opening is cock-o-the-walk strutting, that Tony and Maria see no one else when they're together, and that "Officer Krupke" is not a funny song, but a frightening one. After that, we are in the musical space, and so the dancers invade the street without leave for "America".

I was delighted. I also think I noticed something else about this movie: Spielberg has been making movies about "This is the way the world used to function. It's good to know this," in movies like BRIDGE OF SPIES, THE POST, and arguably LINCOLN. Spielberg will turn 75 in a week. You get a bit contemplative at that age, willing to put together the pieces inside the edges of the jigsaw puzzle. In 2021, the satire of the original show, written by a bunch of Jews kvetching about how the rich Whites are about to kick out the poor Puerto Ricans and Irish, whittle down Hell's Kitchen so they can walk to the opera, is as sharp as ever, if not more so.