Reviews and More

My husband and I are huge fans of all forms of motorcycle racing, so it’s always been a dream of ours to visit Daytona for Bike Week. We won’t be able to make it this year, but we think that there’s a real possibility that we’ll be there in 2008. Of course, with an event as huge as this, we’ve got to start making our plans right now, so we’re already looking at different lodging options.

Hotels are usually booked way in advance and are extremely expensive during Bike Week. I can’t bring myself to pay $300 per night for a room that usually goes for $89, so renting a condo might be a better bet for us. I was looking at some Florida vacation rentals today and saw that weekly rates for condos are pretty much in line with what we’d have to spend on hotels. Of course with a condo, we’d be able to cook our own meals, which obviously would save us money.

I think this particular Daytona Beach condo looks nice, and is certainly a viable option. I’m going to show these to my husband later and see what he thinks. I’m sure we’ll end up renting when we go to Florida — it just seems like a much better deal!

I don’t watch musicals very often, but I usually end up loving the ones I see: My Fair Lady and The Sound of Music are two of my favorite films of all time, and I’ve also enjoyed Oklahoma, Camelot, and Hello, Dolly!. So it might come as a surprise to hear that I’d never watched even a single scene of West Side Story until last night, seeing as how it’s one of the most famous musicals ever made. But I just never really had the desire to watch, so I never got around to it until recently. Here’s what I thought of it.

West Side Story is based on Romeo and Juliet, but instead of the Montagues and the Capulets, the warring factions are two New York street gangs called the Jets and the Sharks. The Jets are young Caucasian males, while the Sharks are made up of young Puerto Rican males (disparagingly referred to as “PRs” throughout the film). Tony (played by Richard Beymer), a former Jet who is currently out of the gang scene, fills the role of Romeo, while Maria (Natalie Wood), the Puerto Rican cousin of the Sharks’ leader, is Juliet.

It’s pointless to give a more detailed recap than that because if you’re at all familiar with Romeo and Juliet, then you can pretty much guess how the story plays out.

I know that I’m going against popular opinion here when I say that I thought West Side Story was a terrible movie, but what else can I do? There were no redeeming qualities at all, and nearly every aspect of the film grated on my nerves for the entire two-and-a-half hour running time. To wit:

• I couldn’t stand the opening sequences. Do viewers really need to be subjected to nearly five minutes of a blurry image on the screen while the overture plays? There wasn’t a spoken line of dialogue until the 7m20s mark, and that was just a single word. Ugh. An inauspicious start that only gets worse.
• Who in their right minds would believe that these two gangs made up of finger-snapping, prancing, twirling guys posed an actual threat to each other? The whole premise of these “tough” hoods getting into a “rumble” was laughable. Utterly ridiculous.
• There wasn’t enough time for the two leads (Tony and Maria) to fall in love. They basically fell in love at first sight, which didn’t give me a chance to get to know them and root for them. I didn’t care if they ended up together or not.
• The musical numbers weren’t that great and weren’t well placed. I recognized a few of the songs (who hasn’t heard someone using “I Feel Pretty” in a mocking way), but most of them were forgettable. And that whole performance of “Cool” was unnecessary. It really brought the already agonizingly slow plot to a halt.

Based on a combination of all these factors, I give West Side Story just 3 stars out of 10. Yes, I know that’s low and I know I’m in the minority here. But, really, you couldn’t pay me to sit through that schmaltz again.

Since I shop online so much, I’m in the habit of looking for websites that offer coupon codes and other discounts for the merchants that I like best. There are a lot of coupon sites out there, but they’re not all equally useful. For example, some sites get updated only once in awhile and feature discounts that everyone already knows about. So when I look for coupon sites to use, I filter for both fresh content and great deals.

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