Official "Beauty & the Beast" Film Adaptation Thread — Page 60

BEAUTY AND THE BEAST -- dear God.

Believe it or not, I want to love every movie I see. Really, truly. I don't ask for much, I don't think -- I'll forgive a whole lot as long as I don't feel that my intelligence is being insulted 24 frames a second for two hours. Bill Condon's CGI with humans version of Disney's BEAUTY AND THE BEAST can't manage that basic requirement. I'm in something of a state of shock here -- how could they have ****ed this up this badly?

So the good stuff. Luke Evans, as the merry macho chauvinist ****head Gaston, is actually pretty good. He's charming and funny and mean as ****, and he's so much fun that I was getting disappointed when Gaston's true villainous colors start to emerge. Emma Watson as Belle plays her role well enough, despite a strange stiffness in her upper body that made me wonder if she'd suffered some serious back injury right before production. Her singing is perfectly adequate for contemporary live action big budget movie musical -- she doesn't disgrace herself, which is more than can be said for others in other films. She's the least of the movie's problems.

OK, the bad stuff. Where to begin. I feel like it would take a vast tome of Tolstoyan dimensions to number every gross offense against basic movie-going decency committed by this piece of dreck. Here are some of the more prominent horrors.

1. The criminal waste of an overall pretty good cast. Director Bill Condon had the good sense to hire some great people in front of his camera and to pose for his motion-capture technology. Stalwarts like Ewan McGregor as Lumiere, Ian McKellen as Cogsworth the talking clock, Kevin Kline as Belle's father. Alas, they're all pretty dreadful. McGregor's Lumiere speaks with a nearly impenetrable French accent that renders his one big song, the heavily CGI'd Be Our Guest, simply unintelligible (check out the vocal by Jerry Orbach in the original for a performance that actually seems to acknowledge that those sounds are supposed to be words that actually, you know, have meanings). McKellen and Kline do the easiest hackwork of their careers -- Kline in particular seems more than a little embarrassed by the whole enterprise. And Condon went to the trouble of casting Audra McDonald, one of the great artists currently occupying space above ground, and reduces her to a Joanne Whorley impression.

2. The Beast. I just can't imagine what on earth possessed them to put Dan Stevens in the movie in the first place, unless it was the notion that they'd get some crossover PBS fans just dying to get even a heavily CGI-ed glimpse of their long-lamented Downton Abbey dreamboat. He's a pretty low-key actor, to put it politely, but his low-key performance is buried under the frankly bargain-basement CGI used to turn him into the Beast. He smiles and frowns and glowers and grimaces on cue, but there's just no real life there, no magic to animate the ones and zeroes into something interesting or memorable. Think of Andy Serkis and Peter Jackson's accomplishment with Gollum in the Middle Earth movies, and you'll get an idea of what isn't happening here. It's a colossal failure, weirdly apparent than during the resolutely un-miraculous transformation from Beast to Prince. Whatever else can be said of the Beast, he's broad-shouldered narrow-waisted and conspicuously well-muscled, and there's nothing more ridiculous than the way he dwindles into that chinless little twerp embodied by Dan Stevens wearing what looks like one of Brad Pitt's leftover wigs from that vampire movie. Garbo is supposed to have exclaimed, at the end of the Cocteau film of the story when the Beast turns into a rather effete Jean Gabin, "Give me back my Beast!" Garbo today would be saying, "Give me back my Beast's motion-capture body double!" Which brings us to:

3. The CGI. Cheap. Cheesy. To be fair, the animated furniture is pretty well done -- there's a walking piano and a pugilistic hatstand that I kinda dug on. But too much of it calls too much attention to itself as being CGI, in that "every shot has to be a showstopper" kind of way, where a character hits a high note at the end of a song and is of course standing at a window so the camera can pull out through the window and go all the way back so we can see the whole landscape to show off how much money they spent on the CGI. There's just no real flavor to it -- look folks, here's a big castle, here's a sunset, here's a forest with snow, here's a ballroom. For all the display on display, it's just ones and zeroes.

4. Holes in the story --

So the movie begins with the pre-Beast Prince refusing charity to a homeless person who turns out to be a Very Powerful Magical Person, and who then curses the Beast for having no love in his heart for not giving her shelter, and all that. Well, okay, putting aside for now the fact that it turns out that the VPMP actually lives in the woods under a fallen tree anyway, it has to be pointed out that this same VPMP, who starts the story going by Punishing Those With No Love In Their Hearts, is shown standing not five feet away from the film's real villain, Gaston, as he demonstrates Trumpian levels of brutality and hate-mongering -- and she does exactly nothing. Nada. Zip zero zilch. WTF? And remember, this character doesn't appear in the original animated film outside the opening plot exposition -- her reappearance later was added for this version, which means that Condon & Co. have actually added a major plot hole to a story that didn't have one.

And there's more -- the cynicism of the whole enterprise, in taking a movie and remaking it purely for the cash, and making such a hash of the whole thing. And the cynicism extends to Disney's trumpeting of the its First Gay Character, clearly a PR stunt to provoke religious boycotts of the film over it's Gay Character, which lets us all hate on bigots (fine by me, of course) but also deflects criticism from the frankly offensive Gay Villain sidekick stereotype, where there's a pathetic queer in love with an out of his league straight hunk.

Roscoe said: "Emma Watson as Belle plays her role well enough, despite a strange stiffness in her upper body that made me wonder if she'd suffered some serious back injury right before production. Her singing is perfectly adequate for contemporary live action big budget movie musical -- she doesn't disgrace herself, which is more than can be said for others in other films. She's the least of the movie's problems."

Compared to the les Mis film, where the literal approach of the live-bleating and constant switching of speaking one word and use a 5 minute vibrato bleat on the next drove me mad and makes the film completely unwatchable, and took away every for of emotion or persuasiveness and completely killed the language of sung thoughts and this artform. Emma Watson is indeed not as off-putting, but what she does is the extreme opposite. The other characters in the film create emotional magic and lift the scenes with their pre-recorded tracks. If only Belle had that same level or higher, this film would really have been something special.

I think it's the main problem of the film. Because I would like to watch it again, as long as I can fast-forward her moments.



Edit: Another thing that bothered me slightly was the fact that many songs (Be our guest, Gaston, Beauty and the Beast) had very strange and unncecessary and a-musical count changes all the time, and strange pauses between lines. Like: Be our guest, be our (2 bars rest) guest. Which made it difficult to follow the flow of a song. It was especially bad in the title song. It gives me arrhythmia. It was really far fetched at times.

Updated On: 3/30/17 at 02:45 PM

Roscoe: "Unrequited love is an offensive stereotype? I haven't seen the movie, but from all reports the gay subtext is barely even noticeable. What made it offensive or stereotypical?"

It's not about "unrequited love." In the movie, LeFou is presented as a slimy little sidekick to Gaston, with actual smirking sexual designs on him, and he's a vile little collaborator in Gaston's schemes -- it's a tasteless throwback to 1970s Gay Villain schlock. It doesn't even have the comparative class of Philip Seymour Hoffman's character in BOOGIE NIGHTS -- Le Fou can't summon the sympathy, despite a last minute change of heart that comes too late to really amount to anything at all.



^ see I don't agree with that. His change of heart did not come too late. He was constantly protesting Gaston's stupid things (like leaving Maurice out to die, and then lying for him later). Those things did not happen near the end of Le Fou's character. He became slowly disillusioned. Changing your heart is not an easy "I just saw the real him" moment kind of thing, and I'm glad they didn't treat it like that. Yes, the innuendos were grossly exaggerated, but there's nothing a gay character can do which will be universally acceptable. Let's choose our fights wisely. I'm more than happy to own that character, choices and all, as a part of my community.


I saw the movie last night finally, and my only complaint is that the very last scene when Le Fou dances with a guy is less than a second long. You blink and it's gone. I wanted it to be a real moment so it doesn't seem accidental or even comical.

just saw it tonight

great adaptation and loved the new songs...

did miss one of my favorite songs If I cant Love her

Josh Gad is just plain wonderful in his sidekick roles!!!!

more musical movies, please!

Threads are so much nicer without cheap little shills coming in. God bless the block function.

Scarywarhol said: "I'm listening to these new numbers. Tim Rice has been on autopilot for years, and was certainly never half as good as Ashman, but I'm still surprised. Good LORD, are these embarrassing lyrics! It's a joke to put them next to the original songs."

I felt pretty much the same way. "Evermore" was really generic, but the absolute WORST was in the reprise to 'Beauty and the Beast' where Emma Thompson actually sings the lines "Nature points the way/Nothing left to say/Beauty and the Beast."

Seriously? "Nothing left to say"???? You're wrapping up a story about a cursed prince discovering love and his own humanity and unjudgmental love and all that and you actually wrote a line that basically says, "I give up, I got nothin', let's just end this song right here!"

I mean, *I* could have come up with 20 better lines on the spot, and I don't even write musical lyrics!

The absolute worst. Lazy, terrible writing. Yech.

sarahb22 said: "Scarywarhol said: "I'm listening to these new numbers. Tim Rice has been on autopilot for years, and was certainly never half as good as Ashman, but I'm still surprised. Good LORD, are these embarrassing lyrics! It's a joke to put them next to the original songs."

I felt pretty much the same way. "Evermore" was really generic, but the absolute WORST was in the reprise to 'Beauty and the Beast' where Emma Thompson actually sings the lines "Nature points the way/Nothing left to say/Beauty and the Beast."

Seriously? "Nothing left to say"???? You're wrapping up a story about a cursed prince discovering love and his own humanity and unjudgmental love and all that and you actually wrote a line that basically says, "I give up, I got nothin', let's just end this song right here!"

I mean, *I* could have come up with 20 better lines on the spot, and I don't even write musical lyrics!

The absolute worst. Lazy, terrible writing. Yech."

Well I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news but those are actually Howard Ashman lyrics that never made the original movie. Though were he alive today he may well have kept them being aired here too. I suspect he'd have quite a few opinions on the direction/performances/screenplay tbh...

Restored Howard Ashman lyrics in the "live action" Beauty and the Beast