Films This Week 12/17/21
by admin | 17th December 2021 | Gary's Corner
We’re continuing our current lineup of Virtual Cinema through the holidays, including several titles that figure in various awards season conversations: Hive, Luzzu, and Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy.
This Sunday’s (12/19) “West Side Story New Plaza Talk Back“ will focus on the 1961 Robert Wise-Jerome Robbins version — including a live appearance by Richard Barrios, author of ‘West Side Story: The Jets, the Sharks and the Making of a Classic“ — and I imagine some of our viewers will also weigh in on the new remake.
I haven’t yet seen it, but I’m concerned about how its opening weekend box office was widely interpreted in the press and on social media. As my old friend and astute industry analyst Tom Brueggemann wrote in Indiewire:
“In legal circles, there’s a saying that big cases make for bad law, meaning that misinterpretations of high-profile situations can lead to the wrong conclusions. That may apply to early reactions to the opening grosses of Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story.
The opening weekend $10.5 million gross was considered at the low end of studio expectations — In the Heights performed slightly better in its debut last June — but as Brueggemann notes, “this is a time when nuance is essential. It could be the difference between a film being killed off that still has a chance to emerge from its box-office dead zone” — just before adults typically start going to theatres, on Dec 25, when it can take advantage of strong reviews and word of mouth to start building a bigger audience.
We all know how our world has involved into an instant-reaction, snap-judgement arena where seemingly everything — movies, politicians, athletes — are judged for posterity in a single weekend, primary or season.
Here’s hoping this is one film that can dance past that syndrome, that ‘there’s a place” for it in this all-important, closely-scrutinized 2021 holiday movie season.
Gary Palmucci, Film Curator
New Plaza Cinema