Mythic, epic, timeless

There are certain films which absolutely demand to be seen in an actual movie theatre, toweringly majestic films that are profoundly diminished without the contribution of the big screen experience - films such as Gone With the Wind, Lawrence of Arabia, The Ten Commandments, Ben Hur, and more recently, films such as The French Lieutenant's Woman, The English Patient, Peter Jackson's remake of King Kong, The Lord of the Rings trilogy, etc. I've watched movies on my TV screen at home, in fact, that made me wish I had experienced them in a theatre - The Unbearable Lightness of Being springs to mind; I remember watching it and imagining the entire time what it would have been like in a theatre. Fortunately, one of the films that I did have the thrill of seeing the way it was meant to be experienced, in all its larger-than-lifeness, on the big screen, is West Side Story.

This movie changed my life, plain and simple. I was born and raised in NYC, where the film takes place, but I was never a fan of musicals, on screen or in plays - it just seemed ridiculous to me when people would burst into song at the laundromat, say, and while it's true that yer basic street gang doesn't exactly perform brilliantly choreographed dance numbers in their neighborhood playground, today or at any other time in history, in West Side Story it works, it makes sense, you're swept along into the reality of the piece effortlessly. Because of the dazzlingly flawless execution of the material, West Side Story transcends.

I was fortunate enough to see the film in an actual theatre, more than once, and I've seen it at home as well - when I first broke down and bought a DVD player a few years back a friend of mine, knowing of my deep connection to this movie, got me a copy (widescreen, of course). It took me weeks and weeks to finally put it in and attempt to watch it because I didn't want my memory of the experience to be tarnished - in fact I secretly thought it was almost blasphemous to watch such a exquisite masterpiece on a TV screen. I was pleasantly surprised, then, to find out that the film actually plays very well in this format.

It's the story, the overwhelming emotion of the story, that comes through, ultimately, and while it obviously doesn't have the added dimension of the movie theatre experience, this timeless classic can be seen and appreciated at home. Allow me to rephrase an old adage : 'Tis better to have seen it small than never to have seen it at all.