Dismayingly, Spielberg didn’t have the courage or the insight to imagine it.
Throughout the whole article, Brody has been stating that Spielberg was not creative enough. By stating this as the last sentence he is leaving his readers with one last opinion from him that tries to prove his point.
Spielberg didn’t open up the story to involve new ideas and experiences, nor did he reckon with the cultural and political forces that gave rise to “West Side Story” in the first place.
He is stating his claim again to make a point and leave his audience with this bit of information and opinion left in their heads.
He leaves no loose ends, no ambiguities, no extravagances, no extremes.
Brody creates parallelism here by starting each thing with no and having each word end with an S. This creates a list of ideas.
Spielberg, by contrast, delivers the very kinds of diagnoses that the song is meant to mock—he himself Krupkifies the film.
Brody makes Spielberg seem as though he wanted to mock the original movie in the newer movie, but the lyrics of the song were very similar to the old ones.
The change is emblematic of Spielberg’s failure, because it isn’t only visual imagination and fantasy that he can’t match.
Richard Brody states that he is the only person right in this sentence to make it apparent and what the movie was lacking.
In Wise’s version, the very walls of the gym are hot with passion, painted a furious red, and the dancing itself, unlike that in Spielberg’s film, is blatantly erotic
He uses more sophisticated ways of saying the walls were very red he states, "are hot with passion, painted furious red." Instead of focusing on the argument he distracts you with the word choice and different senses.
if Spielberg were interested in Tony’s life rather than his checklist of motives,
Brody is purposely making it seem like Spielberg didn't really care about certain issues of the movie and decided to just do his own thing, but fails to provide evidence as to why Spielberg was interested in other things.
Yet Spielberg directs her to act like a Disney princess, with oversimplified facial and vocal expressions reflecting a single unambiguous emotion at a time.
Brody makes the Spielberg seem like he didn't do a good job with the character and how she should act which doesn't get to the point of the argument but rather is arguing that the actor didn't do well.
with a voice both powerful and delicate.
Brody is distracting you with how Zegler's voice sounds with words like "powerful" and "delicate."
whose mother is Colombian.
Saying that Maria's mom is Columbian has nothing to do with the next sentence where it talks about singing.
Natalie Wood, of course, had no business playing Maria in the original film, and her irrepressible presence couldn’t salvage the dismally narrow role.
Again, Brody is making the character of Maria seem lesser than what it is to distract you from the real argument of what is going wrong in the movie.
but even here Spielberg relies on her presence to justify his superficial and reductive choices.
Brody is attacking the Spielberg for putting a character in the moving making it seem like the only way he got the movie to be popular was from Rita Moreno.
In the original film,
Richard Brody uses the same beginning structure to start these three sentences to contrast ideas from the original movie to the remake.
Indeed, Spielberg’s film radically, woefully transforms the one scene in the original that conveys a sense of Maria and Tony’s family histories,
He acknowledges that Spielberg used one scene, but then goes on to explain how the scene was not recreated very well.
In the new film, she has been in the city for years, caring for her father (it’s hinted that he died), and she expresses, in a single line, a desire to go to college. Bernardo is now a boxer just beginning his career. Chino, an undefined presence in the original, is now in night school, studying accounting and adding-machine repair. But nothing comes of these new practical emphases; the characters have no richer inner lives, cultural substance, or range of experience than they do in the first film. Maria still has little definition beyond her relationship with Tony; she remains as much of a cipher as she was in the 1961 film.
The writer is purposely making these characters seem way different while ignoring that the movie was made in a completely different era to relate more to today's problems rather than problems in 1961. The speaker fails to recognize that the movie is going to have a different look because it is a new producer.
Maria has a fuller life in New York than she did in the 1961 film. In the original,
Comparing characters from the new movie to the original movie.
Whatever Spielberg and Kushner may have had in mind, what they deliver with this simplistic backstory is an endorsement of incarceration: the movie makes clear that Tony came out of prison a better person than he went in.
The author tries to attack Spielberg and Kushner to make it seem like they did not make Tony the right character.
By contrast, the Tony of Spielberg’s film is a convict who has spent a year in Sing Sing because of a fight in which he nearly killed another young man. He avoids the Jets because he doesn’t want to jeopardize his parole. When Riff tries to persuade him to take part in the “rumble” with the Sharks anyway, Tony explains that he’d spent his time in prison examining himself ruefully and resolving to live differently.
The writer is trying to make it seem like Tony was not a good character in the film in order to prove his point that they misrepresented many characters.
The original Tony,
Another comparison.
For all of its faults, the original film doesn’t rationalize aggression—or racism—away or reduce its characters to single motives.
The speaker addresses one of the major problems with the new movie; however, doesn't give much reason to back it up.
In the original,
The writer tends to compare the original to the new movie often by saying "in the original."
Whereas once the area was sufficient for both sides, there’s now only room for one. (There’s no hint of the fact that San Juan Hill was, in fact, a predominantly Black neighborhood.) The filmmakers’ attempt to pin down a cause for the Jets-Sharks rivalry reflects their more general shift, in the new film, toward facile psychologizing.
The speaker is mostly just talking about a specific topic here and why the filmmaker has not done a great job with the racial problem.
They’ve made ill-conceived additions and misguided revisions. In the process, they’ve managed to subtract doubly from the original.
The word choice the speaker has used here is having to do with adding and subtracting which strings to making a metaphor by making the movie seem like a bad equation.
But, instead of reconceiving the story, they’ve shored it up with flimsy new struts of sociology and psychology, along with slight dramatic rearrangements.
Here the writer is stating that the remake of the movie was "flimsy." This is a claim of value because the writer is stating that the movie is bad.
This is not the plot of the latest horror film from A24 but the unfortunate tale of Steven Spielberg’s efforts to remake “West Side Story,” the movie musical about love and ethnic rivalry among New York City gangs.
this is the classical oration structure where the speaker is stating his opinion and will give further reasons as to why he is correct.
rich and famous artist spends a hundred million dollars to revive a corpse with the blood of young people
Here is the introduction statement, followed by paragraphs with evidence and reasoning, and closed with a conclusion stating Brody's opinion.