The Sound Of Music Is A Musical Anyone May Enjoy (Even Those Who Don't Like Musicals)!

The Good: Nice scenery, Funny, Good character development
The Bad: Direction, Somewhat predictable.
The Basics: A worthwhile Best Picture winner, The Sound Of Music tells a timeless tale of love, music and Nazi occupation set to a wonderful score.


It is amazing that for all of the movies I have watched, there are astonishing gaps in my cinematic education. As I sat down to watch The Sound Of Music for the first time - a somewhat astonishing feat given how many parodies I have seen and understood of the film - I realized two things. The first was that the film's director, Robert Wise, was best known to me for his film Star Trek: The Motion Picture (reviewed here!) and the second realization I had was that I've not seen Julie Andrews in anything save The Princess Diaries (reviewed here!). Yet, I approached The Sound Of Music with a fairly level temperament and few expectations.

Thus, it was a true delight to discover how much I came to enjoy The Sound Of Music. In terms of storytelling and character development, The Sound Of Music is remarkably tight and well-developed. Amidst the instantly-recognizable songs, the story develops as a fairy tale of sorts set in the 1930s as the Germans exert more influence over Austria. In addition to a very classic sense of storytelling - man falls for woman, villain pops up to challenge the lifestyle of the heroes - The Sound Of Music features an optimistic view of the world amidst changing times when innocence was hard to come by. The Sound Of Music is almost deceptive in its apparent simplicity and the true complexity of it only comes out in the later half . . . when the wartime story intrudes upon the love story.

Maria is a nun who has a musical obsession and a true delight in life. However, this leads her to be somewhat reckless and not truly fit in with the other nuns. She is given leave from the abbey to become the governess for the Von Trap family in Salzburg, Austria. There, she discovers five girls and two boys who need her guidance in the wake of their mother's death. The children of a sea captain, the children have lived a rigid life without his attention or affection. After gently chiding them for playing a prank on her, Maria begins to bond with the children by refusing to treat them like animals. Despite their various ages and needs, Maria makes the children feel loved by paying attention to them and offering them opportunities outside the rigid structure their father, including making them clothes from the curtains when the Captain refuses to get her fabric.

As the Captain and the Baronness work on their relationship, the Baronness becomes catty and eliminates Maria's position in the house when she suspects the Captain may have feelings for Maria. Maria leaves the household, but soon returns when the children are inconsolable without her. Soon after, the Nazis move in on Austria and the Von Trapp family is put into real peril.

The Sound Of Music is delightfully colorful and energetic, with wonderful color contrasts for the scenery that instantly transport the viewer to an enchanting world where it seems perfectly natural that the characters would break into song at any moment. And yet, the movie does not live in denial of the music that the characters break into. Captain Von Trap is characterized as a man so broken by the loss of his wife that he has lost music and the house has fallen quiet as a result. Maria, then, is the ideal character to come and rejuvenate the household and she fills exactly that role.

Despite the sense of simplicity that much of the film has, the characters actually develop and there is a decent sense of tension, especially at the climactic moments. Despite using young actors (and actresses), the acting is homogeneously wonderful, despite the unreality of characters breaking into song at a moment's notice. While the movie focuses on Maria and the Captain, characters like Lisle and her German boyfriend have integral roles and the relatively minor character of Ralph ends up having an important role.

What are more disappointing are the stylistic problems with the film. The realistic lighting in the dance number that puts Lisle and Ralph in the gazebo is problematic. It is not until it is lit with lightning occasionally that the scene is easy or enjoyable to watch. Instead, director Robert Wise trades realism - which leaves characters' faces obscured - for style and the comfort of the viewer. Similarly, during the classic song "Doe A Deer," the viewer is treated to the backs of all of the kid's heads to focus on Maria. Despite the beautiful backdrop, the movie has stretches where it is awkward to watch because of how Wise frames or lights the film. This is worse than the usual conceits of inorganic movement that comes with making characters dance in musicals. The movie has that, too (the children rocking back and forth on their knees in "Doe A Deer" comes instantly to mind), but the basic filming problems are worse in The Sound Of Music than the musical conceits.

On DVD, elements like obvious bluescreen shots are accented. Ironically, in cleaning up the print for DVD, shots like the background when the Captain is driving the Baroness back to his property look terrible.

Even the Captain has a decent character to him. He has moments when he is actually wit, like when he excuses himself from the company of Max and the Baroness and urges Max to step out of character and be charming. Despite his rigidity, the Captain has a sense of irony to him which is both refreshing and real. He is hardly monolithic and while he is stern, he clearly loves his children, he just does not know how to manage them (I suspect if I had ever been saddled with children, I would have ended up treating them like the Captain treats his . . . well, maybe without the whistle).

On DVD, the bonus features are surprisingly sparse. There is an audio commentary track and the option to play the film with the isolated score (without dialogue). This is remarkably lackluster DVD bonus features for such an acknowledged great film. No doubt as the film becomes re-released on Blu-Ray there shall be more robust DVD bonus features.

Unsuspecting as I was that I could enjoy The Sound Of Music, this becomes one of the few musicals I would ever want to see again (and not just for the flirtatious rendition of "Sixteen Going On Seventeen"). The movie is fun and a worthy addition to the cultural collective unconscious that great films have created.

[As a winner of the Best Picture Oscar, this film is part of W.L.'s Best Picture Project, here! Please check it out!]

For other musicals, please check out my reviews of:
Repo! The Genetic Opera
The Runaways
Corpse Bride

9/10

For other movie reviews, please visit my index page on the subject by clicking here!

© 2011, 2009 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.


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Blase Musicals That Mortgage The Original Intensity (Vol. 1): West Side Story.

The Good: Good music, Moments of direction, Some inspired performances, Moments of plot
The Bad: Long stretches where little/nothing happens, Lackluster resolution, Some vocal performances, Light on character.
The Basics: Long in getting into the main narrative, West Side Story sings and dances its way around having actual substance.


I, honestly, am not a huge fan of musicals. Truth be told, there are very few that I get excited about enough to see more than once, though I do enjoy one or two. I tend to like them more in person than in cinema, though, which is probably why I liked Spamalot and have been dreading the potential to remake Spamalot back into a movie. But my current project for the year demanded I take in a few musicals and tonight's was West Side Story. I had seen West Side Story back when I was in elementary school and I remember enjoying it quite a bit.

I wish I could say the same about how I feel about it now. What once seemed creative now seems ridiculous, what once passed for edgy now appears as sloppy and the part of me that thrilled as a child to the less nihilistic ending than Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet (West Side Story is a modern-day Romeo & Juliet) now just seems like a cop-out and a letdown. While West Side Story has some decent songs, it has some cringeworthy performances as well and there is an erratic sense to the movie. This is exceptionally easy to say about a movie that spends the first six minutes with a slow color change on a drawing while playing music.

On the West Side of New York, two rival gangs, the Jets and the predominately Puerto Rican Sharks get into some minor scuffles. This draws the attention of Officer Krupke who tries to put both sides in their place. Riff, the leader of the Jets, and Bernardo decide that they are ready to end the street fighting through one battle between a selected champion for either side. They plan on meeting after a dance at a neutral location to have a meeting to determine the exact nature of the fight. So Riff goes to the slightly older Tony to try to bring him out of retirement (of sorts) and back to the Jets. After much cajoling, Tony agrees to help Riff out.

However, at the dance, Tony spies Maria and the two almost instantly fall in love. They see one another and while Tony resists Riff's repeated requests to take on Bernardo, who happens to be Maria's brother, the Sharks and Jets meet for their planned battle. In that, Riff is surprised by Bernardo's knife and Tony arrives at an inopportune moment to witness his friend getting killed and he kills Bernardo. As the gangs spiral out of control, Maria and Tony try to keep their love together and secret, lest it endanger them more.

West Side Story is a musical and much of the film's violence actually happens through elaborate dance numbers. The music is generally light and poppy with songs like "When You're A Jet" and "America" defining the backstories and views of the primary characters. For the first ten minutes, though, the movie is just Jets like Riff dancing around, interrupting a basketball game at a local park only to give the ball right back to the kids who they took it from and the like. In other words, the Jets seem more random agents of chaos than any sort of group that stands for something. The animosity toward the Sharks seems to be largely over the ethnic differences and here is where the 1961 film truly falls down.

While thematically the point of West Side Story rightly ought to be that there are no fundamental differences between the Sharks and the Jets, cinematically it becomes an exceptional problem that both gangs looks so much alike. While the initial scenes feature the Jets as primarily blonde youths and the Sharks as tanned black-haired young men, the movie becomes jumbled quickly. First, Tony is a tanned young man with black hair and second in many of the scenes at night, the lighting washes the Sharks out so they look pretty much caucasian like the Jets!

The love story between Maria and Tony is truly a "love at first sight" experience and here directors Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins actually use the medium well. After establishing the section of the City in dispute by the Sharks and Jets through wonderful aerial shots, when Tony and Maria meet for the first time, the directors blur out everyone else in the dance hall. Thus, they clearly show that the characters only have eyes for one another. The love story is (mostly) modeled on Romeo & Juliet and it was adapted from a book by Arthur Laurents. Laurents and screenwriter Ernest Lehmen replace the famous balcony scene from Shakespeare's play with a scene on a fire escape and it works. Substantially there is a similar emotional resonance and it works.

The love story between Tony and Maria also leads to one of the film's best songs, "Somewhere" which is repeated a few times, at least instrumentally. But outside the romantic couple, the characters are largely monolithic and archetypes more than characters. Krupke is a stereotypical racist cop, Bernardo is the parody of the Puerto Rican who lives in the U.S. but pines for "home," and Riff is the typical aimless youth. While Anita and Maria wonderfully counter Bernardo's strange sense of not being American, the others go unchallenged and from a character point of view, the film is very unsatisfying as a result.

Instead of developing the characters, West Side Story tries to distract the viewers with long dance numbers filled with a lot of movement, music and long breaks from singing in favor of just dancing. After waiting for the movie to begin - the DVD offers a similar intermission which was part of the original theatrical release as well - the long dance stretches just seem like filler. The movie is padded out in all of the worst places and not developed in the ones that actually matter.

Finally, the resolution to the film is not as dark or emotive as Romeo & Juliet and those going into it looking for a modern version of that tragedy will be left unsatisfied. Sure, there are casualties, but in the end the resolution comes more through a sense of random chance than either tragic flaws or actual love.

On DVD, West Side Story is available in a pretty lush two-disc special edition which will please those who like bells and whistles. In addition to having the full theatrical version (intermissions and all) the movie includes a commentary track. As well, there is an entire bonus disc of extras, mostly featurettes on the making of the movie and the music within it, which will please anyone who likes West Side Story or musicals in general.

Alas, that is not me and as I returned the disc to its case, all I felt was a sense of relief that my tastes have grown since I was in middle school and that I could recognize the flash from the substance. West Side Story is more of the former than the latter.

[As a winner of the Best Picture Oscar, this film is part of W.L.'s Best Picture Project, which is online here! Please check it out!]

For other musicals, please check out my reviews of:
Corpse Bride
Repo! The Genetic Opera
Tangled

5/10

For other movie reviews, please visit my index page by clicking here!

© 2011, 2009 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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A Pan In Glowing Clothing: Star Trek: The Motion Picture Is A Good Idea, Poorly Executed.

The Good: Character development, Moments of acting, Good blend of new and old effects
The Bad: Slow pace, Emphasis on the wrong aspects of the story, Cluttered
The Basics: With Star Trek: The Motion Picture, the attempt to make a cerebral film fails, burying real explorations of human condition in special effects and a plot of one of the least successful episodes of Star Trek.


Right off the bat, if you have to watch Star Trek The Motion Picture, the version to watch is the 136 minute, 2 DVD Star Trek The Motion Picture - The Director's Cut. On the topic of the bonus c.d., this is a must for a fan of "Star Trek. It's packed with deleted and reworked scenes from Star Trek The Motion Picture and includes documentaries and commentaries on the making of the film, the impetus behind the director's cut and the whole idea of what Star Trek was trying to accomplish. For the die hard fan, I'd recommend the DVD solely for the extra features because they are informative and fun to watch. The truth is, for the primary material, I didn't enjoy the film enough to recommend it and I think, for a change, my reason is different than most everyone else's.

The fault of Star Trek The Motion Picture is not entirely in its pacing or in its multiple storylines or even that it's poorly written. The problem with Star Trek The Motion Picture is that it's not original. It is not going anywhere that Star Trek hadn't already gone before. How can I say that?

The Enterprise crew encounters an ultra-powerful force that is threatening a vital Federation interest. The Enterprise investigates and discovers an entity that seeks to become more than it is, believing misguided information. It becomes apparent that the threat is a machine; quite powerful and quite logical. Captain Kirk bluffs the powerful being until it reveals its most basic form at which time the resolution becomes simple.

Sound familiar? If you're a fan of the original Star Trek, it ought to. Star Trek The Motion Picture is a combination of two episodes: "The Changeling" and "The Corbomite Maneuver." If you're a casual watcher of Star Trek or not a fan at all, there's a reason you've probably not heard of either one of them: they're not terribly good episodes. In fact, the true killing blow to Star Trek The Motion Picture is it decided to steal from some of its weakest links. As a general rule of film making for a franchise, it always helps to go with your best ideas, not your most shaky.

The plot is killed by being a weak combination of places Star Trek has gone before. The reason it fails is because of the tack they take on it. "The Changeling" is a fast-paced, "figure out the alien of the week and defeat it" episode. Star Trek The Motion Picture, on the other hand, takes a higher road and that's what nails the coffin. Rather than spending a lot of time figuring out what the threat (V'Ger) is, much of the film is spend on exploring the human condition.

At the end of the film, the line "The Human Adventure Is Just Beginning" appears and it's true. That's the downfall of the film; it's a philosophical journey, not a special effects trip. The journey is about characters, not about creature threats. The real nuts and bolts of Star Trek The Motion Picture is in the characters. The promoted Admiral Kirk returns to the Enterprise because there is a lack in his life, Spock leaves Vulcan because what he's searching for isn't available for him there. The new first officer, Decker, clashes with Kirk because they believe they want the same things. The essential story in Star Trek The Motion Picture is about humanity's need to find what is lacking, to understand their own purpose.

The only fault of Star Trek The Motion Picture is that it tries to be something else then. The film is a character study buried in a special effects film. Star Trek The Motion Picture is exploring the same caliber of emotion as Magnolia. What saves Magnolia is that it is what it is trying to be, not attempting to conceal that exploration of humanity as a special effects film. The combination of the heavy character aspects with the attempts to be a special effects story with the intruder, make for a feeling that the film doesn't know what it wants to be.

Surprisingly, the acting is competent. From the supporting cast through William Shatner, everyone reprises their roles as if they had not left the set of Star Trek. And yet, there is a sense that each of the characters has been busy and that is as it ought to be. In the new director's cut, there are some pleasant special effects additions that work quite well.

I want to be able to recommend Star Trek The Motion Picture; it's a philosophical film that does what Star Trek The Next Generation did in its first season and what it tried to get to at the end of the series. It's refreshing to see a film where violence isn't the solution, where it isn't simply: Our Heroes arrive to destroy the bad guy. Instead, it's about attempting to understand the unknown. As McCoy notes, "Why is everything we don't understand called a thing?"

Had the plot been borrowed from any other combination of original Star Trek episodes, perhaps it would have had a chance. Had the focus remained more on the character development that is present but constantly glossed over for effect shots, the film would have been worth recommending. As it is, on a razor decision, I cannot recommend Star Trek The Motion Picture The Director's Cut to anyone but the serious fan of Star Trek and then preferably to those who haven't seen "The Changeling." 

For the whole Star Trek cinematic collection, please click here!

For other cerebral journey films, please check out my reviews of:
Inception
The Imaginarium Of Doctor Parnassus
The Red Violin

4/10

For other Star Trek episode and film reviews, please be sure to check out my index page!

© 2010, 2002 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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