Cataline Does Not Recommend: Beauty and the Beast

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Having a daughter the right age comes with a price tag.

Let’s begin.

I suppose we should start with…this isn’t a terrible movie.  There I said it.

That said it isn’t a good one either.

Cinderella for example was a good movie, Branagh threw in a few homages to the original animated film but he wasn’t enslaved to them.  Cinderella The Motion Picture was it’s own thing.  You knew the entire plot from the start but there were still surprises.  It was well crafted and the ball scene was everything little girls want a ball to be.

Beauty and Beast on the other hand is about the worst thing it can be while still being competently made.  Namely, a shot for shot remake.

Albeit there are a few new things.

There is a sub-plot about the town being under a curse to forget about the nearby castle and the beast.  This plot device wasn’t well thought out and served only to create plot holes. If Mrs Potts husband and Belle’s father couldn’t remember anything about the castle despite having loved ones there.  How the hell did the village mob hang on to it?  Why did the writers throw that in there?  In the original it was implied that the village was so provincial that they didn’t get out enough to find out about the castle or the beast.  Hell, Belle even sang a song about it. Apparently modern SJW types couldn’t imagine such a thing and felt a need to tie themselves in knots to try and explain it.

 La Fou being gay was a stupid add on but in a film where the producers felt driven to cast Emma Watson, SJW embellishments were bound to show up.

And speaking of Watson, that was something new as well.  A lead actress in a musical…Who. Can. Not. Sing.  Her voice was so autocorrected it was difficult to tell if it had ever belonged to a human being in the first place.  Although I now have respect for the Rock as a crooner.

Watson’s casting was the real shadow over this entire production.  She started off as a child actor and child actors just aren’t that good.  She was chosen at ten to play Hermione Granger because she could come across as an annoying swot before she even hit puberty.  So at the age of twenty six she was chosen to play…an annoying swot.  She does have a gift.

From an artistic stand point the decision to cast Watson was risible. From a business stand point, it was fucking ingenious.  Harry Potter fans have been pining for more for the last six years. And for reasons known only to Harry Potter fans this one pushed all the right buttons for them.  They may as well have called it Hermione and the Beast because that is what these women want.  Yes this audience is almost entirely female and no, it not just women with daughters that are going to see it.  It’s huge clumps of “grown-up” women who know each other and need to experience this thing as a group.

I won’t bother to comment on the other performances, they were competent but hardly Oscar worthy, except for Emma Thompson.  The direction she got was so heavy handed that for once she turned in a bad performance.  I don’t blame Thompson.  She was clearly being forced to try and turn in a mimicry of Angela Lansbury.  She’s not a mimic, it was about as believable as Dick Van Dyke’s cockney accent.

So barring a catastrophic drop off in the second week, this thing is going to be a monster.  But this monster will carry deformative genes on to it’s off spring.  Disney has tragically become SJW convergent.  Consequently,  they will convince themselves that SJW politics are what made this movie such a success.  I can already see the disasters rolling in over the next few years.

Coming soon!  Lena Dunham as the Little Mermaid costarring Alec Baldwin as the most fabulous Sebastian the Crab you’ve ever seen.