Free Republic

Natalie Wood/Maria feels pretty:))

Former President Donald Trump has warned about the potential of "death and destruction" should he be charged as part of the Stormy Daniels hush money investigation. In a post on Truth Social, Trump denied any wrongdoing while hitting out at Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg amid strong indications that a potential historic arrest is forthcoming. Last weekend, Trump called on his supporters to protest his apparently upcoming arrest, which he claimed was due to take place on Tuesday, March 21. The arrest never occurred, but Democrats accused the former president of attempting to rile up his supporters to carry out...

I am watching the show... I have watched some of the movies nominated for Best Picture...BELFAST...DUNE...WEST SIDE STORY... NO TIME TO DIE song was nominated...I want to see if that Bond song wins Oscars... BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS...Won by Ariana Debose...WEST SIDE STORY...She was fine in the movie...

Despite rave reviews, Steven Spielberg's "West Side Story" has failed to gain traction with audiences at the box office...In its first three weeks in cinemas, the film has captured just $36.6 million in global ticket sales. Its production budget was around $100 million, not including marketing costs.

All hope for Steven Spielberg’s racially divisive West Side Story remake died in week two, plummeting 68 percent with a humiliating take of just $3.4 million. After ten days in release, which includes two weekends, this historic box office bomb has grossed just $17.9 million. The hope had been that word of mouth would give Woke Side box office legs. Sorry, nope. No legs. Just two little stumps. Between production and marketing, this stinker probably cost close to $200 million. As a result, Disney’s going to lose a fortune.

I had serious reservations about the Steven Spielberg version of the film classic West Side Story. Rumors of wokeness haunted the new movie from the first casting call through to its dismal opening weekend. I expected to wince throughout, but Spielberg did something brave and unexpected. He gave the Jets a rationale for their existence and their resistance. The 1961 original did not. As a 14-year-old living in a "transitional" neighborhood very much like the one the Jets and Sharks inhabited and not far away, I fully identified with the white gang, the Jets. My friends, even my black friends,...

Director Steven Spielberg’s woke West Side Story remake is a box office catastrophe expected to open in the $10 million range. How awful is that? Well, do you remember that previous woke catastrophe, In the Heights? It opened to $11.5 million. West Side Story is projected to bomb harder than In the Heights, lol. Even so, the In the Heights’ production budget was only $55 million.

Former President Barack Obama has given his official seal of approval to Steven Spielberg’s woke box-office disaster West Side Story, naming it as one of his favorite movies of 2021. In what has become an annual Obama tradition, the 44th president tweeted a list of his top movies of the past year. And as usual, the list is a precisely calibrated mix of indie darlings, prestige foreign titles, and woke Hollywood fare — all seemingly designed to further ingratiate him with the elite tastemaker crowd, as if their political fealty was ever in doubt.

The new “West Side Story” is, so far, a box-office flop. Steven Spielberg’s much-anticipated remake of the landmark 1961 musical received rave reviews and has been called a masterpiece. Yet its first weekend theatrical release yielded only $10.5 million, which Variety called “a dismal result for a movie of its scale and scope.” --- It’s not woke, it’s wonderful. “America,” that most American of songs, so knowing but not jaded, is done differently from the original but better, more communally, and it’s just as joyous and comic. The Journal’s Joe Morgenstern used exactly the right word to describe this movie:...

Full disclosure: I despise Steven Spielberg movies and dislike both Romeo and Juliet and the 1961 West Side Story (WSS) movie. For that reason, I take particular delight in noting that Steven Spielberg's remake of WSS may have enthralled critics, but no one is rushing to see it. And no wonder, given that it's so darn woke that parts of it are in a language most Americans don't speak, but Spielberg refused to include subtitles.Let me quickly get through my biases. I hate Steven Spielberg movies because I find them overblown, predictable, and incredibly boring. I also dislike the way...

NEW YORK (AP) — Despite critical acclaim and two years-worth of anticipation, Steven Spielberg’s lavish “West Side Story” revival made little noise at the box office, debuting with $10.5 million in ticket sales, according to studio estimates Sunday — a worrisome result for a movie industry struggling to recapture its finger-snapping rhythm. A dazzling widescreen adaptation and Spielberg’s first musical, “West Side Story” was one of the year’s most eagerly awaited titles. With a script by Tony Kushner and Rita Moreno returning to her breakthrough film 60 years later, the $100-million “West Side Story” epitomizes a grand-scale prestige film that...

"West Side Story" had little to sing about this weekend. 20th Century Studios' remake of the 1961 classic musical brought in an estimated $10.5 million for its opening in North America this weekend. This total was below expectations, which projected the film to make closer to $15 million in its debut weekend. The total is a bit surprising considering that the film had a lot working in its favor. For starters, it is directed by Steven Spielberg, one of the most recognizable and blockbuster directors in history. His name alone appeared to not be enough to get people to buy...

A woman tried to stab a Hartford detective this week, police say, in the second such attack on a Hartford officer in two months. Surveillance video shows a woman police identify as Sheila Calderon walking, then running, toward three officers talking on Taylor Drive Tuesday. With an outstretched arm and a large knife in her hand, she tried to stab the detective in the head and neck, police said. The detective was a fraction of a second away from being stabbed when he was able to get out of the way while flinging the woman to the ground. She was...

Dear, kindly Sergeant Krupke you gotta understand. It's just our bringin' up-ke that gets us out of hand. Our mothers all are junkies, our fathers all are drunks. Golly Moses, naturally we're punks. Gee, Officer Krupke we're very upset. We never had the love that every child oughta get. We ain't no delinquents, we're misunderstood. Deep down inside us there is good. There is good, there is good. There is untapped good. Like inside the worst of us is good. Oh, that's a touchin' good story. Oh well, lemme tell it to the world. Just tell it to the judge....

Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of the beloved musical “West Side Story” finally began to screen for awards voters over the weekend ahead of its Christmas Day release. First reactions are pouring out as the film’s official premiere at the El Capitan Theatre in Los Angeles gets underway. Early reactions are offering praise for Spielberg’s direction and high marks for Rachel Zegler as Maria in her film debut. The musical premiered mere days after the death of Stephen Sondheim (who wrote the lyrics for the original production, with a book by Arthur Laurents and score by Leonard Bernstein) at the age of...

For many years I’ve avoided writing about “West Side Story.” As a Puerto Rican critic, I resent the expectation that I have something to say about a musty old musical from 1957. Just as the U.S. government bestowed second-class American citizenship upon islanders in 1917 without popular consent, “West Side Story” continues to recruit us as extras even when we never intended to audition for the show. The Puerto Rican writer Nelson Rivera once recalled studying abroad in Paris, where he was greeted by “Oui, ‘West Side Story’!” at every turn, as if collecting stamps in the passport of an...

We are just over a month into the new Disney/Fox status quo. The Mouse House has become the industry’s first mega-studio by absorbing one of its biggest competitors in a deal that has had massive repercussions, already, with thousands losing jobs and films suddenly finding themselves without a studio. But there is a lot more at play in the merger than what many were probably considering, such as Disney’s morals. Everyone knows that Disney doesn’t make films the same way that everyone else does. The films under the Disney banner have a certain limit on how far they can go....

Kent State University has cancelled its fall musical production of “West Side Story” following complaints that too many white students landed lead roles. Bridgett Martinez, a musical theatre major who is of Puerto Rican descent, tried out for her “dream role” of Maria, but she said “it all just got screwed up” when “it was given to a white female,” KentWired.com reported. Martinez was instead cast as her understudy, and the other three leads that portrayed Latino characters were given to non-Latino students. The outrage to the casting led to a September schoolwide town hall meeting, in which Eric van...

Hot off directing back to back pictures in the Oscar contender The Post and the upcoming Ready Player One, Steven Spielberg is now figuring out his next two directorial vehicles. There are several percolating, but sources say he is eyeing Indiana Jones, and then would either precede or follow quickly with another pic. I’m hearing that one might be his dream project, a new version of West Side Story. Spielberg’s camp had no comment on his plans. Deadline revealed back in 2015 that Spielberg had his eye on his Jurassic World star Chris Pratt to be a central part of...

Marni Nixon, the American cinema’s most unsung singer, died on Sunday in New York. She was 86. The cause was breast cancer, said Randy Banner, a student and friend. Classically trained, Ms. Nixon was throughout the 1950s and ’60s the unseen — and usually uncredited — singing voice of the stars in a spate of celebrated Hollywood films. She dubbed Deborah Kerr in “The King and I,” Natalie Wood in “West Side Story” and Audrey Hepburn in “My Fair Lady,” among many others. Starting as a teenager in the late 1940s and continuing for the next two decades, Ms. Nixon...