Thread by @Steve_Sailer

Just as Shakespeare didn’t take sides between the Montagues and Capulets, the 1961 West Side Story portrays the two groups as rumbling over turf because that’s what young males like to do. Today, though, objectivity like that is felt to be immoral.
takimag.com/article/when-y…

You can now tell who deserves to win and who deserves to lose in West Side Story just from the color of their skin. So, Spielberg and Kushner make clear that the Sharks and Jets fight because the browns are the good guys and the whites are the bad guys.

takimag.com/article/when-y…

In Spielberg's West Side Story, the Puerto Rican Sharks are no longer even juvenile delinquents, but instead are grown family men with jobs defending their graffiti-free vibrant community from the nihilistic Trumpist Jets.

But this means the Sharks don’t seem very cool anymore.

In contrast to the noble (if dull) Sharks, the new Jets are an isolated lumpenproletariat vastly outnumbered by the BIPOC masses of 1957. You might think that would make the Jets not very scary, but they are presented as horrifying because in the current year white men bad.

Interestingly, in Spielberg's "West Side Story," the Jets don’t even seem to have any territory anymore. My guess is that the filmmakers worried that giving the Jets turf to defend would make Today’s Youth sympathize too much with them.

takimag.com/article/when-y…

The new West Side Story begins with a talky section offering Kushner’s dysgenic theory of why the Jets are so poor despite all that sweet white privilege: Nature and nurture have made them white trash, urban Jukes descended from a long line of drunks and crooks.

The better whites, the ones with identity, “the Irish, Italians, Jews,” have moved up and out, leaving behind these deracinated losers, who can't even claim the mantle of identity politics. Although (apparently) ethnically Catholic, there only identity is the forbidden one: white

To sound relevant, Spielberg portrays gentrification in 1957 as a massive threat to the magic dirt under industrious yet idyllic Puerto Rican neighborhoods, although in reality slumification was then the main trend.

takimag.com/article/when-y…

The actual problem with the urban renewal projects of that day is that they robbed the future of beautiful old architecture to someday gentrify, knocking down 19th-century buildings in favor of unlovable Modernist hulks.

In 1961, dashing George Chakiris played Bernardo, gang boss of the Sharks, as the epitome of purple-shirted sharkness.

But Spielberg wants his Bernardo to be an honest working man leading a neighborhood self defense militia of grown family men with jobs against the Jets.

More minor changes in Spielberg's West Side Story:

Anybodys, a tomboy who wants to join the Jets under the name Buddy Boy, is now a transgender super-herox who can fight a half dozen of New York’s finest at once.

takimag.com/article/when-y…

Graziella, the grieving girlfriend of the Jets’ leader Riff (Mercutio), displays a newfound sense of female solidarity by trying to rescue Anita, the girlfriend of Riff’s murderer, from the rapacity of the Jets.

Women 4 Women!

Spielberg is praised for realism for having much of the dialogue in Spanish without English subtitles. But it’s a musical so who cares about realism? Dancing on sidewalks and singing on fire escapes isn’t realistic either, so why should PRs speaking English be beyond the pale?

The real reason Spielberg leaves out English subtitles of scenes Spanish in his "West Side Story" is of course to signal that it’s not your country anymore, gringo.

takimag.com/article/when-y…

But Spielberg's no-English-subtitles ploy ends up with the white kids, especially Riff (an insidious Mike Faist), getting even more of the best lines. Also, this lets you zone out more from Kushner’s high IQ but tiring talk-talk and relax until the next glorious song and dance.

More changes from 1961 to 2021 West Side Stories:

Instead of Chino just going and getting a gun to avenge Shark boss Bernardo's death (1961), Spielberg now has the Jets introduce the gun into the rumble with massive Chekhov's Gun emphasis, which somehow winds up in Chino's hands

Despite Spielberg's anti-gun activism, he personally is a gun lover (John Milius taught him skeet shooting) with one of the world's best shotgun collections. Each time he finishes a movie, he rewards himself with a new $100k Italian custom-made shotgun: unz.com/isteve/hollywo…

These plot contortions are forgiven because they set up the most dynamic newly invented scene in Spielberg's "West Side Story:" Tony and Riff struggling for the pistol on a decaying dock to “Cool.” The old "Cool" (below) is great, but the new one tops it.

But Spielberg’s swirling camera makes an incoherent mess of the Jets’ complex role-playing in “Gee, Officer Krupke.” (Or perhaps the filmmakers feared letting Sondheim’s satire of 1950s soft-on-crime liberal theorizing come across clearly in the Black Lives Matter era.)

Spielberg's remake of West Side Story's bravura gym dance is too crowded compared with the lucidity of the original.

But after a talky first twenty minutes, the superb score takes over and the movie winds up fine. Spielberg is much too great of a showman to mess with the music.

Consider the opportunity cost of Spielberg spending $100 million to remake the terrific 1961 West Side Story film when there are instead several classic musicals without satisfactory Hollywood versions, such as Camelot, Guys and Dolls, or South Pacific?
takimag.com/article/when-y…

A reason for West Side Story's slow start at the box office is the vast Hispanic target audience mostly doesn’t identify with Puerto Ricans, being more nationalist than racialist, seeing themselves more as, say, Mexicans than as members of a Latinx race.
takimag.com/article/when-y…

Nonetheless, despite all its annoyances, Spielberg’s West Side Story is still West Side Story, which is a very good thing to be.