Disney’s recent string of live adaptations of their animated classics have been a bit hit or miss; I thoroughly enjoyed “Cinderella” and the first “Alice inWonderland”, however “Maleficent” left me utterly disappointed and I didn’t bother seeing the Alice sequel (disagree with me at your leisure).
When “Beauty and the Beast” released last week, I didn’t quite know what I would get. The ads and teaser trailers made the film look amazing, and the snippets that Disney had released via social media were promising. But then again, the same could be said for Maleficent, and you already know how I feel about that film.
Beauty and the Beast is by no means a “perfect movie;” there was enough for my theater companion (in this case my girlfriend) and I to discuss.
Beauty And The Beast' Movie Review
First and foremost, I struggled with some of the music. Actually, not so much the music as it was the voices – and that’s not a bash on any of the actors.
At times, the singing sounded blatantly auto-tuned. I’m not naïve to deny that practically every voice in the entertainment medium (if not all) has had some kind of technological help along the way. In some moments however, two specific characters – Emma Watson’s Belle and Josh Gad’s Lefou – sounded extremely unnatural and almost robotic, despite having decent if not lovely voices naturally.
My only other complaint with this film is that at times the story seemed to drag on at an excruciating slow pace. While the animated film may not be my first pick for a Disney movie anyways, I never found myself wishing for the film to “move along already.”
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On the plus side of the movie, let’s start with the obvious: it looks absolutely gorgeous. The costumes are stunning, the sets and scenery are breathtaking, and Dan Stevens’s Beast doesn’t strike me as obviously CGI.
I also enjoyed the smaller individuals that make up the castle’s cursed inhabitants. These characters translate well in cartoon form, but I was skeptical at how convincing they would be in live action. However, everyone from Lumiere the candelabra to Chip the Tea Cup was charming in their own unique ways, save perhaps Mrs. Potts who I personally found a bit creepy.
While Belle has always been a strong minded, intelligent character who didn’t need to rely on her beauty, Emma Watson provides an attitude and spunkiness that gives the lead protagonist even more strength, power, and integrity.
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Due to the very nature of his character, Gaston is over-the-top. Despite this, Luke Evans maintains his characters massive “machismo, ” keeping Gaston just as cocky and masculine without being overly corny.
Josh Gad also does well at Evans’s side, providing just enough humor to keep Lefou entertaining without – again – becoming overly corny. The addition of what seems to be (minor spoiler) a bit of a conscience also adds a great balance to the duo.
Beauty and the Beast is an elegant film that will please all generations, regardless of their familiarity with the original animated movie. Its strong characters and beautiful design make for a wonderful evening out at the movies.This is, as the voiceover has it, “a tale as old as time” – or pedantically one that goes back to 1740, when the French fairytale was first published – so maybe it was time for a modernising reboot.
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The stars – Emma Watson as Beauty and Dan Stevens as the Beast – have been keen to dismiss any psychology 1.01 readings of this
As a presentation of Stockholm syndrome, but the film’s makers, Disney, have been more than keen to trumpet it as having the first openly gay character. Of the latter, more later.
So what is it? Well, foremost it’s a wonderfully lavish live action/digital effects animation retelling of the tale, with the film bookended by lengthy song-and-dance scenes. In between, the tale is told with no great urgency but a lot of wit, both in the script and the animation of the humans cursed to live in the Beast’s castle as his helpmeets. They are all trapped until true love releases them and the Beast, after being cursed by an old woman whom the young, charmless prince (Stevens) denied refuge to on a dark and stormy night.
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When young Belle, an independent young woman who lives with her widowed father (Kevin Kline), comes into his life, will true love win the day? Under director Bill Condon, with a script by Stephen Chbosky and Evan Spiliotopoulos, Belle's bookishness is underlined (she’s the only girl in the village who can read) and it’s books that Beauty and the Beast bond over.
Watson gives Belle a nicely determined air, and she’s not simperingly silly in this version – I'm not afraid, she tells her father after she tricks him into taking his place as prisoner in the Beast's castle – while Stevens, under all the make-up and prosthetics, is a memorably haunted and melancholic figure.
The supporting cast are very good. There’s some fine interaction between Belle’s admirer (when he’s not admiring himself) Gaston (Luke Evans) and his sidekick LeFou (Josh Gad, both pictured above); while the animations – Ian McKellen as Cogsworth the clock, Ewan McGregor as Lumière the candelabra and Emma Thompson as teapot Mrs Potts – are often laugh-out-loud funny. Perhaps because we can't actually see them on screen, they all outrageously ham it up. The actors all get their moment as humans (after the curse has been lifted) in the final set piece, when it all ends happily for everyone, except the dastardly Gaston of course.
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And to the “gay” character; well, it’s a kerfuffle over nothing. LeFou is certainly camp, but then so is the rampantly heterosexual Gaston, all preening manliness and slapping of thigh in best panto tradition in the song-and-dances numbers in the tavern. LeFou’s blink-and-you-miss-it dance with a male courtier in the final scene is hardly transformative. But politics - real or imaginary - aside, this is a fine entertainment.
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Isabelle Huppert and director Jean-Paul Salomé: 'Cinema is about a little trade, a little business' La Syndicaliste's star and director discuss misogyny, ambiguity and the quest for perfectionTo quote a lyric from one of the songs in “Beauty and the Beast, ” “there may be something there that wasn’t there before.” The familiar elements are all in place, of course. It’s “Beauty and the Beast, ” for goodness’ sake: a tale as old as time, a song as old as rhyme and all that. And there are inspired flights of nostalgia as well, visual evocations of the predigital glory of Busby Berkeley, Ray Harryhausen and other masters of fantastical craft.
But this live-action/digital hybrid, directed by Bill Condon and starring Emma Watson and Dan Stevens in the title roles, is more than a flesh-and-blood (and prosthetic fur-and-horns) revival of the 26-year-old cartoon, and more than a dutiful trip back to the pop-culture fairy-tale well. Its classicism feels unforced and fresh. Its romance neither winks nor panders. It looks good, moves gracefully and leaves a clean and invigorating aftertaste. I almost didn’t recognize the flavor: I think the name for it is joy.
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This was by no means a foregone conclusion. The reanimation of beloved properties — to use the grim business nomenclature of Hollywood — often leads to hack work and zombie-ism, as old archetypes are shocked to life and arrayed in garish, synthetic modern effects. That might easily have happened here. Look (I mean: don’t look) at the horrors that have been visited, in recent years, on Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan and the Wizard of Oz. And even if Disney had done a more convincing upgrade, on the model of last year’s “Jungle Book, ” a new “Beauty” could have offended fans of the 1991 animated feature simply by existing. That movie, a high point of the ’80s and ’90s Disney revival, is close to perfect. What singing teapot would dare to challenge Angela Lansbury?
The only possible answer is Emma Thompson, whose Mrs. Potts is joined by other household objects with the voices (and, briefly, the faces) of movie stars. Stanley Tucci and Audra McDonald are the excitable harpsichord and the operatic wardrobe; Ewan McGregor and Ian McKellen are the suave candelabra and the anxious clock. Gugu Mbatha-Raw is the lissome feather duster. Young Nathan Mack is Chip, Mrs. Potts’s son. Their singing and banter is so vivid and so natural that you almost take for granted that they appear to be mechanical objects clicking and whirling in physical space, sharing the frame with human characters.
“Beauty and the Beast” is the live action re-telling of the animated Walt Disney classic. In his review A.O. Scott writes: This live-action/digital hybrid, starring Emma Watson, is more
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