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Support us on Patreon.com/filmsuck for bonus episodes and more perks! A weekly podcast hosted by Eileen Jones, film critic at Jacobin magazine and recovering academic, and Dolores McElroy, diva enthusiast and lecturer in film and media at UC Berkeley. In this podcast for the people, we bring you the truth about the rotten state of cinema, its often odious or ham-fisted relationship to politics, and its occasional wondrous bursts of courage and brilliance. We consider the glories of cinemas past, and wonder about lots of things: what’s the role of contemporary film in a time of bad art and worse taste; popular entertainment in a time of fragmentation, generalized disaffection, and PTSD; and media in a time when it seems to have lost its power to get us off our asses? In short, what is to be done when film sucks?
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Tuesday Dec 14, 2021
Tuesday Dec 14, 2021
In this week’s Filmsuck episode, our co-hosts throw down over which version of the great musical West Side Story reigns supreme. Eileen backs the 1961 version directed by Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins, while Dolores pulls for Steven Spielberg’s new version. That being said, co-hosts join forces to shake their fists at such Spielberg choices as overly CGIed and desaturated cinematography and some of the more egregious “social issue” scenes, like the lengthy one devoted to the purchase of a gun in order to point up the dangers of gun violence in a work that’s already taking on gang mayhem, racism, class hatred, abusive and corrupt policing…
Though Spielberg avoids the worst sin of the musical form, plugging in a random non-musically-gifted star and expecting them to pretend that they’re pulling off the singing and dancing you (don’t) see onscreen. Spielberg went for relatively unknown leads to at least secure good singers and dancers.
We hope you enjoy the latest installment of our “Favorite Film Genres” series with this wild series of rants on the musical!
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