Beauty and the Beast (2017)

It’s a tale as old as time, and it’s certainly one we’ve seen before. But for the first time in Disney’s ongoing project of remaking its animated classics into live-action big budget fairy tales (with or without a healthy dose of revisionism), Beauty and the Beast both makes the case for another retelling of the story and manages to be a compelling and potent riff on the original.

If you’re like me, you probably have vast swathes of the 1991 animated film committed to (or seared into) memory, and you’ll likely be singing along in your head to the musical numbers, which get a few bonus verses here and there but are otherwise largely unchanged. So too is the plot translated fairly directly to live-action: bookish villager Belle (Emma Watson) finds herself imprisoned in the castle of the Beast (Dan Stevens), a prince turned monstrous by a curse, in order to save her doddering father Maurice (Kevin Kline). While local ape-man Gaston (Luke Evans) pines for her, to the consternation of his compatriot LeFou (Josh Gad), the castle’s lusty candlestick Lumiere (Ewan McGregor), fussy clock Cogsworth (Ian McKellen), and maternal teapot Mrs. Potts (Emma Thompson) conspire to bring beauty and the beast together to lift the spell.

In the case of Disney’s continued remake renaissance, I wouldn’t say there’s been a complete win. Maleficent was at once too distant from its source material while simultaneously pulling its punches on that difference. Meanwhile, Cinderella and The Jungle Book were visually stunning but ultimately more of the same as far as the originals were concerned. With Beauty and the Beast, however, I recall thinking several times during the film, “Oh, so that’s why they remade this!” Between its new characters and its patched-up plot holes, elucidated backstories and added lyrics, this Beauty and the Beast is a lot like a new brand of your favorite flavor of ice cream. There’s a lot that’s recognizable and reminds you what you love about it, but there are added nuances that gives this incarnation a life all its own. (It’s like the time I discovered they made cookie dough ice cream out of monster cookies and M&Ms.)

Perhaps the greatest strength of the film is its cast, which is positively bang-on from the word “go.” Watson and Stevens are well cast as the star-crossed lovers, in a romantic plotline that doesn’t feel obligatory and includes a few very well-crafted turns of character that give believability to the courtship plot. (That one such moment revolves around a library is perhaps preaching to this bibliophile’s choir, but I’d fall in love with a beast too if he had a library of his own to make Alexandria blush.) That McGregor, McKellen, and Thompson are note-perfect is right up there with “Water Wet” in terms of headlines, nor should one be surprised by the frankly stunning special effects work. What’s genuinely surprising is that Evans and Gad create something really quite special in Gaston and LeFou. Though it’s by no means sympathy for the devil, the script gives Gaston a refreshing amount of psychological depth, and Gad plays LeFou with an understated tenderness that gives LeFou a few legitimate reasons to hang around a specimen as deplorable as Gaston.

Indeed, what Beauty and the Beast does quite well is clarify a few of the nagging details and polish up the bits that work in order to present a fresh version of the story to an audience who is a little older, a little wiser, and a bit more sophisticated. This is hardly an “adult” version of the story, but it does feel a bit more grown-up, more willing to go to places the original didn’t – the question of Belle’s mother, for one, and the aforementioned update to Gaston: neither of which changes the characters or the plot but brings them into sharper focus.

Perhaps most importantly for this moviegoer, Beauty and the Beast never forgets to embrace with exuberance the playful weirdness of a film that includes a talking wardrobe, a barking footstool, and a boisterously romantic candlestick who turns a dinner invitation into something out of Busby Berkeley. It is the kind of film that touches the heart in the right places but isn’t embarrassed to leave you with a big dumb grin on your face as a talking clockface excretes gears in alarm. It’s a film that has more emotional range than we have any right to expect from a remake of an animated fairy tale.

But it’s also a film that, as the song goes, may have something there that wasn’t there before. I’m reticent to call it a brain or a heart or something so reductive, nor do I want to chalk it up to je ne sais quoi, though one character actually does. But unlike some of Disney’s more recent live-action updates, it has an unflappable demand to exist and ends up a worthy successor to the original.

Beauty and the Beast is rated PG for “some action violence, peril, and frightening images.” Directed by Bill Condon. Written by Stephen Chbosky and Evan Spiliotopoulos. Starring Emma Watson, Dan Stevens, Luke Evans, Josh Gad, Kevin Kline, Ewan McGregor, Ian McKellen, and Emma Thompson.

Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith (2005)

The road to Episode IV has been paved with disappointment, bogged down as it is by bizarre narrative flights, bad writing, and even worse acting.  By the time we reach Revenge of the Sith, the final prequel, it’s difficult to tell why the film feels like a success – has it truly accomplished what the prequels set out to do, or are we just weary and relieved to see Darth Vader on screen?

As the Clone Wars conclude, Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor) pursues the villainous cyborg General Grievous while Anakin Skywalker (Hayden Christensen) comes under the wing of Chancellor Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid).  But Palpatine’s intentions are less than noble, and his promise that he can save the life of Anakin’s pregnant wife Padmé (Natalie Portman) leads the young Jedi inexorably toward his dark destiny.

There’s a point in the film, the moment when Anakin Skywalker becomes Darth Vader, when it almost feels like this is the prequel we’ve been waiting for – the film totally dispenses with all the cartoon chicanery and gives us, in fairly rapid succession, (spoilers?) the fall of the Jedi order and a climactic lightsaber duel between Vader and Obi-Wan on a volcanic planet, which explains the necessity of the suit.  I’m certain that a large degree of the third act’s success is the John Williams score, which carries us through the emotional trauma of the scene and bludgeons us with “The Imperial March” as the Empire rises.  The action is really quite impressive, as the Vader/Obi-Wan duel is juxtaposed with Yoda’s fight against Palpatine.

Unfortunately, there’s a pervading sense that this is a moment the trilogy has not quite earned.  It’s remarkable as a tonal shift, a third act that really feels quite out of place for a series that began with a cartoon fish-rabbit version of Stepin Fetchit.  And it draws into stark contrast all the things that the trilogy has done wrong – as Darth Vader cuts down all the political conspirators from the previous two films, one feels a sense of frustration that all those machinations had distracted us from what should have been a compelling yet inevitable tragic fall.

It’s even more painful that Revenge of the Sith, rather than focus on this first-rate third act, introduces a whirlwind of new plot elements – including General Grievous – before realizing quite quickly that the trilogy has done next to nothing to set up the Original Trilogy – the pregnancy that will bear Luke and Leia is a passing subplot, and the characters who need to die because they don’t appear in the Original Trilogy are shuffled off with little fanfare.  Notable exception – the Jedi Order itself, killed off during the aforementioned third act during a beautifully grim montage.  It’s not that Grievous and company are uninteresting material, but they’re perhaps better suited in some of the Expanded Universe material.

The greatest pain in the midst of the third act is that it throws into sharp relief just how poor of an actor Hayden Christensen is.  He has his moments, to be fair, though I wonder how much of the work is actually being done by Williams’s score and the special contact lenses Christensen wears.  Revenge of the Sith is really the only prequel where any acting actually gets done; McGregor embraces the showboat nature of Obi-Wan’s character, Portman does a good bit of emoting, and McDiarmid really chews up the scenery as the snarling Palpatine.  But Christensen continues to yell without much emotion, leaving the characterization work in the hands of the other elements of production.

But I don’t want to take away that sense of accomplishment from Revenge of the Sith.  It’s holding 80% over at Rotten Tomatoes, which might be an overestimation.  The third act, however, is fully worth that, if only because it finally takes the audience where it wanted to go all along.  That’s a little bit funny, actually; usually we criticize prequels for merely setting up the original film, but in this case the world built in the Prequel Trilogy is so poorly misjudged that we’re glad finally to be rid of its ill-advised detours and distractions in favor of the more familiar – and more successful – elements of the Star Wars universe.

Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith is rated PG-13 for “sci-fi violence and some intense images.”  Two characters are burned alive in surprisingly graphic detail; others, including several children, die bloodless and off-screen deaths (including an implied decapitation).  Palpatine’s transformation into the wrinkly-faced Emperor is a bit disturbing.

We’ll be back in two hours with Star Wars (also known as Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope)!

Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones (2002)

Compared to The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones is a little more of what I’m looking for from a Star Wars prequel, delving deeper into Anakin Skywalker’s fall from grace into the throes of the Dark Side.  But while Clones rectifies some of its predecessor’s excesses and missteps, it’s not an unequivocally good film, hampered as it is by bad acting and deliberately opaque plotting.

Ten years after the events of the previous film, Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor) and his apprentice Anakin Skywalker (Hayden Christensen) are assigned to protect Senator Padmé Amidala (Natalie Portman) after an attempt on her life.  The search for the assassin leads Obi-Wan to the bounty hunter Jango Fett (Temuera Morrison) and an army of clones, while Anakin and Padmé attempt to avoid the romance burgeoning between them.

I’m not sure if George Lucas or his newfound cowriter Jonathan Hales is to thank, but Attack of the Clones improves on The Phantom Menace in two ways that are guaranteed to facilitate an enjoyable moviegoing experience – less Jar Jar Binks and more action.  Everyone’s least favorite CGI character is virtually absent from this film, and in his place are more action sequences, including a great battle between Jango Fett and Obi-Wan, a gladiator-style arena scene, and an opportunity for Yoda to throw down in a duel with, of all people, Christopher Lee.  As setpieces, these are good fun and quintessential Star Wars, even if the end gets a bit messy with so many lightsabers flying about that the plot becomes somewhat indistinguishable.

As for the plot, Lucas and Hales do commit the cardinal sin of cinema – abandoning mysteries.  In the Star Wars universe, this is especially problematic when the work of addressing plot points is relegated to the Expanded Universe of novels and comics – where, I’m told, the mystery of Sifo-Dyas and the clone army is explained.  But this instance crosses the line between immersive multi-platform storytelling and, honestly, lazy writing.  It’s introduced with some fanfare – this is essentially Obi-Wan’s major plot thread, and he makes some to-do about how the mystery defies reason, but it’s dropped.  (The answer, according to the Internet, is more complex than need be, though I could think of several easier options right off the bat.)

The biggest problem with Clones, though, is Hayden Christensen’s performance as Anakin.  Although the prequel trilogy is supposedly anchored by Anakin’s fall to the Dark Side, Christensen’s portrayal is entirely unconvincing.  In the moments when he’s not blatantly underperforming, his scenes of intense anger often come across as a petulant child shouting in order to get what he wants.  That statement, however, does a disservice to child actors, who could actually muster up plausible emotion.  To be fair, much of the romantic dialogue in the film is astoundingly hamfisted, and many of the finest actors might be stymied by lines like “I'm haunted by the kiss that you should never have given me.”  But whether we blame the poor writing, the languid direction, or a simple inability to emote, the film’s emotional center feels somewhat creepy with Portman – who’s trying, you can really tell – inexplicably falling for a man who seems to admit he’s been stalking her.

Christensen is just one example of just how drastically this film lacks any human soul.  Lucas likes to boast about how much of the film is not real, how much is computer-generated – but it’s not something of which to be proud.  Much of Clones feels artificial and sterilized because it’s all so very unreal; while the CGI effects on Yoda and R2-D2 allow the characters to transcend their stodgier incarnations and literally fly around, one senses that it comes at a price, the loss of (if nothing else) a Benjamin-ian aura of authenticity.  It doesn’t help that some of the effects – mainly the ones to do with backgrounds – have not aged quite well and are very apparently the work of green-screen filming.  (You’ll understand Ian McKellen’s lament when you see just how synthetic some of these shots appear.)

But there are things in Clones that work, so I’ll rattle them off briefly.  The John Williams score is, again, top-notch, especially his “Across the Stars” piece that underpins many of the romantic scenes; in fact, put the dialogue on mute, and the score alone could carry the plot better than the acting.  McGregor starts to own Obi-Wan beyond a mere Alec Guinness impression, though he’s still more a slave to the logic of the plot than a full character in control of his decisions.  It’s a real treat to see Samuel L. Jackson swinging a lightsaber (purple, no less), and I’ll never say no to the distinguished pedigree of Christopher Lee, who manages to circumvent the clunky opacity surrounding the mystery of his character’s allegiances.

While Clones is still a far cry from the Star Wars prequels you really want to see, it’s a few steps closer to the right direction, perhaps due to some degree of delegation on the part of George Lucas (it’s no surprise that The Empire Strikes Back, certainly the best of the series, is the film with which he had the least to do).  Its greatest flaw, though, is reducing the greatest villain in the galaxy to a whiny lovestruck 20-something who misses his mommy – played, I might add, rather unsuccessfully.

Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones is rated PG for “sustained sequences of sci-fi action/violence.”  The film contains lots of blaster fire (droids against clones), lightsaber battles (including one decapitation and one arm amputation, both bloodless), and a trio of scary beasties, one of whom mauls a character’s back, drawing blood.  Oh, and the occasional kissy-face.

We’ll be back in two hours with the final prequel film, Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith!

Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999)

The Star Wars prequels should have been a trilogy to match the scope of the original, heralded as new classics to stand proudly beside the old in telling the story of the fall of Anakin Skywalker as he becomes Darth Vader.  Instead, the trilogy begins with The Phantom Menace, a cartoonish mess of a movie littered with creative missteps, shoddy screenwriting, and an apparent stubborn insistence on annoying the audience.

Here’s what we know, though you’ll have to muddle through some truly murky exposition to get there:  Two Jedi Knights, Qui-Gon Jinn (Liam Neeson) and Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor), are sent to Naboo to mediate a trade dispute between the Trade Federation and Queen Amidala (Natalie Portman).  When negotiations go sour, the Jedi and the Queen escape to Tatooine, where they meet young Anakin Skywalker (Jake Lloyd) while the power of the Dark Side gathers around them...

Perhaps The Phantom Menace was a case of superlative expectations; the promise of the untold story of Darth Vader, arguably the most recognizable character in all of cinema, is a tantalizing one.  Perhaps we asked too much?  Unfortunately, no:  on rewatching the film with my ambitions severely lowered, I still found myself disappointed by The Phantom Menace.  The film is cluttered with dispiriting indications that George Lucas had lost his touch.  To begin, the film has no central protagonist, nor a clear antagonist (we never learn, for example, what “the phantom menace” actually is).  There’s a sense that Darth Sidious, master of the Dark Side of the Force, is the primary villain, though his motives and behavior are baffling.  It seems that his plan is to guarantee that he becomes the Emperor in time for the events of the Original Trilogy, which doesn’t actually make logical sense since these are prequels.

I could stop the review right there, because that sentence tells you everything you need to know about The Phantom Menace.  This film, and indeed the entirety of the Prequel Trilogy, proceeds very much like a paint-by-numbers series of events designed to set the stage for Episode IV, with little to no investment in the narrative itself.  There is no passion, no enthusiasm, no attempt to engage the audience beyond the superficial and frankly alienating special effects.  Little in the film seems real (more on that later), and consequently nothing seems to matter; Darth Maul aside, the film’s villains provide no threat to its heroes, and the whole movie proceeds like a very thinly written cartoon designed to sell toys rather than advance a plot.

If there is any passion in the film, it’s in Lucas’s love affair with his computer.  One senses that Lucas is truly astonished by the technical capabilities available to him – and rightly so.  As foul a character as Jar Jar Binks is, the digital effects used to create him are really quite amazing, even fifteen years after the fact.  He remains, however, the film’s greatest sin, an entirely useless character who exists solely to annoy the audience.  Jar Jar Binks serves no plot function and stumbles through the film via sheer dumb luck; more problematic in a narrative sense, he’s very close to an invisible friend, because most of the characters seem irritated by him and often choose to avoid him.  You could digitally erase him from most scenes and not tell the difference.

There are, to be fair, a few things that The Phantom Menace does defensibly well.  The first of these is the stellar score by John Williams, which I’ll argue throughout the day is the real star of the Prequel Trilogy.  When the film falls flat, as it often does, Williams’s music comes in to give us a sense of humanity, of breathlessness, of the personality the film so desperately lacks.  Williams creates a musical universe with plenty of new elements but with enough leitmotifs from the Original Trilogy to be recognizable.  In fact, that’s the template the entire Prequel Trilogy should have followed.

The film also includes two solid and memorable action sequences – the podrace and the climactic lightsaber battle.  The former shows a successful use of the CGI technology to create an engaging setpiece – which, to be sure, it is, being largely tangential to the plot but finally a relief after all the political posturing that precedes it.  The lightsaber duel is probably the best part of the film, though you’ll have to wade through nearly two hours of plodding politics; it’s exciting, it’s something we hadn’t seen before (Darth Maul with the double-bladed saber especially), and the Williams track “Duel of the Fates” is first-rate.

But a few good pieces aren’t enough to make The Phantom Menace a success.  In fact, it’s really only required viewing for the completist, and at any rate it’s certainly not the Star Wars film with which to introduce the franchise.

Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace is rated PG for “sci-fi action/violence.”  There are explosions, laser blasts, lightsaber fights (with two deaths, seen clearly but not graphically), and a thrilling chase sequence in which several racers are presumed to die in explosions.  Most of the violence deals with robots.

We’ll be back in two hours with Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones!

Monday at the Movies - February 10, 2014

Welcome to another edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ve got another musical on the docket, but how does it compare to High School Musical 2?

Moulin Rouge (2001) – I’m really not the target audience for this. I’m quite certain of that. Having said that, my reaction to Moulin Rouge is really quite lukewarm. In Moulin Rouge Baz Luhrmann invents the velvet-vomit aesthetic with a rock opera take on fin-de-siècle Paris starring Ewan McGregor as an aspiring playwright and Nicole Kidman as the cabaret courtesan who loves him. The film might have made a bigger impact had I seen it earlier; thirteen years after its release, it feels like a lot of what I’ve already seen, especially in the wake of Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby (about which I felt similarly ambivalent). Both films opened with their protagonist/narrator on a typewriter, the words zooming across the screen. As for the central conceit, the gimmicky pastiche of pop tunes and prewar visuals, it’s clever initially, and the use of Elton John’s “Your Song” is actually quite perfect for a romantic film. After a while, though, it gets tedious and at one point – the moment at which Jim Broadbent, otherwise engaging in the movie, is forced to sing Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” – quite demoralizing. Throw in John Leguizamo’s brutal caricature of Toulouse-Lautrec and a runtime that feels much longer than its two hours, and Moulin Rouge will have you seeing red. Unless of course you’re into this sort of thing. If you surrender to the chemistry Kidman and McGregor clearly have between themselves and overlook the fact that the film tries to compensate for its lack of substance with an overabundance of style, you’ll have yourself a blast. As for me, I’ll be over here with the more convincing flicks.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you here next week!

The Men Who Stare at Goats (2009)

It’s refreshing to see an Army movie that isn’t politically charged. There’s no hidden agenda at work in The Men Who Stare at Goats” - just hippies, psychic powers and goats. Lots of goats.

Grant Heslov (co-writer of the Murrow biopic Good Night, and Good Luck) directs Jon Ronson’s book of the same name, profiling reporter Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor) as he begins to investigate and uncover a top-secret military research program on psychic abilities.

If it sounds like an intrigue-laden espionage thriller, it’s not. Bob’s top contact is Lyn Cassady (George Clooney), a dishonorably discharged serviceman who still insists that he’s a Jedi warrior but who can’t seem to drive a car for more than two scenes without horribly wrecking it. Lyn’s mentor, Bill Django, is even more ridiculous; Jeff Bridges is perfectly cast as the innovator of the Army’s new program, more Jeffrey Lebowski than Sgt. Hartman.

That Clooney and Bridges cut their comedy teeth in films directed by Joel and Ethan Coen is a fascinating coincidence, because if there’s one word I’d use to describe The Men Who Stare at Goats, it’s Coen-esque. Heslov is borrowing more than a page from the Coen book here, playing up the absurdity and playing down conventional techniques of cinema (like character development or chronology). It doesn’t matter that the characters don’t really grow or that the storyline oscillates back and forth in time like an episode of Lost on LSD.

What matters is the ridiculous nature of the story unfolding before our eyes. This is a movie driven more by personality than by plot, more by narration than by narrative. The personalities in the film - McGregor as the piece’s Doubting Thomas, Clooney playing dead-on deadpan and Bridges as a doped-up hippie holdout, with Kevin Spacey as a smarmy mentalist - successfully carry the picture from its low-key opener to its unabashedly hokey high-note ending.

What’s even more fun than the Star Wars metafictional subtext (McGregor, lest we forget, played Obi-Wan Kenobi from 1999 to 2005) is that the film keeps pretending to take itself seriously. Even though the narrative throughline is grounded in Bob’s quest for an identity, let’s not forget that isn’t the opening scene of the film. The first scene finds Gen. Hopgood (Stephen Lang) running headfirst into a wall he thinks he can pass through.

Similarly, The Men Who Stare at Goats never really tells us if the Army has developed psychic weaponry. For every bent spoon, there’s something like the death touch - the dim mok - that doesn’t kill you right away but could take effect at any time years later. For every cloud that Lyn Cassady disperses with his mind, there’s a giant rock he rear-ends with the car he’s driving.

But none of that matters. The film’s much more of a throwback to the old Bob Hope and Bing Crosby buddies-on-the-road pictures of the mid-20th century. As such, then, the film doesn’t break a lot of new ground; the laughs are more than amusing, but they aren’t anything we haven’t seen before. There’s nothing new, for example, about Major General Holtz’s (Glenn Morshower, TV’s Aaron Pierce on 24) exclamation of “Holy (you-know-what)” upon seeing Lyn kill a goat with his mind, but the Southern drawl delivery, not the uniqueness of the moment, is what elicits the biggest laugh in the scene.

But what The Men Who Stare at Goats lacks in ingenuity, it makes up in execution. The cast have spent years climbing to the top of the Hollywood ladder, but it’s pictures like these that prove they’re not too good to make us chuckle.

With Oscar season right around the bend, The Men Who Stare at Goats isn’t cerebral drama or even brainy comedy, but it’s just right for (to paraphrase a line from Cyndi Lauper) girls - and boys - who just want to have fun.

These goats are rated "R for language, some drug content, and brief nudity." Language is run of the mill F-bombs, but the drug content is heavy although played for laughs. As for nudity, there's a fleeting glimpse of two rear ends from a distance.