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.

Last Vegas (2013)

We’ve come to regard The Hangover as a kind of golden standard which at least perfected the “weekend gone wrong” genre (if not kickstarting it).  And Last Vegas, with its all-star cast of Hollywood’s golden-year’d actors, has been marketed as a kind of Hangover for the over-50 crowd (or, unintentionally, 20-somethings like me).  But where Last Vegas sputters in places The Hangover soared, the film ultimately entertains on the sheer ethos of its A-list, A-game stars.

Last Vegas finds Michael Douglas on the eve of his marriage to his early-30s trophy girlfriend.  After convincing the reluctant Robert De Niro to join in spite of his “unresolved issues” with Douglas, Kevin Kline and Morgan Freeman fly to Las Vegas for the big reunion and the bachelor party for their perennially single friend.  Hijinks, of course, ensue.

Where The Hangover was innovative in the unexpected relentlessness of its rolling-in-the-aisles laughs, Last Vegas is the victim of its own marketing campaign, which tragically blew some of the best gags in the film (the rotating bed and Morgan Freeman’s window escape, to allude to a few).  And having seen the trailer more than once (the consequence of being a too-frequent moviegoer), these truly funny moments didn’t elicit much more than a weak chuckle – less than they deserved, but all I could muster.  There are a few genuine laughs (i.e., the conceit that a misogynistic “bro” mistakes the four friends for mobsters), but the best, to rework the old Browning poem, has already been.

Last Vegas never really surpasses the brilliant idea of “let’s get all our talented old people in one movie” (see also Red, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel).  And not every movie needs to surpass convention, so if I dial back my standards of grandeur Last Vegas ends up being a pretty successful film.  The “Flatbush Four” are all reliably gifted performers and play to their strengths – Douglas the charismatic bachelor, De Niro the crochety East Coaster, Freeman the polysyllabic golden-throat, and Kline the goofy sidekick.  We know their work well enough to know what to expect, though a nice surprise comes from De Niro’s more heartfelt moments; from an actor who sometimes seems to phone it in, it’s nice to see a performance that (while not Oscar-worthy) still plucks a heartstring or two.  In fact, any one of these actors is worth the price of admission, and the combination of four can’t help but succeed, even in a bad movie (which, fortunately, Last Vegas isn’t).

The other nice surprise about the film – which, decently, the trailers didn’t spoil – is Mary Steenburgen’s lounge singer Diana, a keen counterpart to the testosterone-heavy cast.  (Sidebar:  I just realized she’s for this film what Heather Graham was for The Hangover.)  She won’t be passing any Bechdel tests any time soon, and I can’t say I was a fan of the predictable “older woman course-corrects girl-crazy bachelor” plotline, but at least the film keeps us guessing on which bachelor she’ll land.  Diana is a different brand of character than the competitive machismo fleshing out the rest of the cast, often calling out characters on their self-deceptions; it’s a clever storytelling technique which allows the film to be smarter than a less rigorous draft of the screenplay would have been.

Ultimately, Last Vegas didn’t knock me out like I wanted it to, but 90 minutes in the company of four of Hollywood’s finest is, to quote one of my professors from my first semester of graduate school, “as good a choice as any.”

Last Vegas is rated PG-13 “for sexual content and language.”  There’s a seduction scene in which nudity is implied, though we see nothing more than bare shoulders; there are a few unenthusiastic and brief innuendos, as well as (according to IMDb) one F-bomb and a few weaker profanities.  Quite tame, particularly compared to The Hangover.

The Pink Panther (2006)

Steve Martin’s done it again. I don’t mean that he’s made another comedy classic – to the best of my recollection, his last great film was 1987’s Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. By “done it again,” I mean he’s remade an old favorite (as he did with Spencer Tracy’s Father of the Bride) and turned it into a degrading spectacle worth less than the film on which it’s printed.

When it was announced that the Peter Sellers comedy classic The Pink Panther would be given the prequel treatment, I was mortified. Sellers was inimitable as the bumbling French Inspector Clouseau, and I feared that Steve Martin was all too American to play the part.

My fears were justified.

After a famed soccer coach is murdered and the Pink Panther diamond goes missing from his finger, the race is on to catch the killer before he – or she – strikes again. Chief Inspector Dreyfus (Kevin Kline) wants to put the bumbling Clouseau (Martin) on the case for one of the most hackneyed reasons in film history; while Clouseau stumbles through the case, Dreyfus will investigate and (presumably) solve the case first and become a hero.

In the original Pink Panther, Clouseau didn’t even solve the theft of the Pink Panther diamond. In fact, he fumbled the case so much that he was convicted of the theft himself! One of the funniest moments of the original was when Clouseau, mobbed by shouting women asking how he had become such an attractive cat burglar, told his adoring public that “It wasn’t easy.”

It certainly wasn’t easy to sit through Martin’s interpretation. Whereas Sellers had a naturally exaggerated French accent, Martin’s seems forced, especially in a protracted “English pronunciation” class, where Martin is unable to correctly pronounce “hamburger.” I sat through this feeling like a convicted man waiting for a pardon from the governor.

And, as good of an actor as Kevin Kline is, he doesn’t come close to Herbert Lom, the actor who played Dreyfus in the original movies. Lom’s over-the-top frustration with Clouseau was unrivaled by Kline’s almost too cool for the room sangfroid. Yes, it’s a prequel, but it might have been better served if Kline had played an altogether new character.

Most of the movie felt like an extended episode of “America’s Funniest Home Videos,” replete with hits to the groin and embarrassingly predictable pratfalls. After a while, the dumb humor got to me, and I actually chuckled.

That’s not to say that the movie is entirely without any positives. Emily Mortimer plays the part of naïve secretary Nicole well, and her comedic delivery makes me wonder why I’m only just now hearing about her.

By far the highlight of the movie was a surprise cameo by rejected Bond-frontrunner Clive Owen. Owen has a sum total of two scenes as British Agent 006, “one away from the big one.” I’m not sure if this is a jab at Owen’s rejection for the Bond role or a tease for fans of the genre, but I know that after seeing The Pink Panther, I’m less optimistic about Daniel Craig’s upcoming Bond debut in Casino Royale. “You could have done a lot better,” I said after seeing Owen as 006.

“You could have done a lot better” was a recurring theme, as I continually thought the movie could have been improved. Throughout the movie, we’re told that Clouseau is an idiot, and his stupidity is rammed down our throats with gaudy displays of imbecility. In the end, though, Clouseau figures it all out with sangfroid that would make even Sherlock Holmes envious. This character flaw destroys our impression of Clouseau, a man who (in the original film) was not able to tell that his wife was complicit in the Pink Panther theft.

Notice that I’ve not mentioned Beyonce Knowles. That’s because she’s playing the same part she always plays: a foxy singer with something to hide. And she doesn’t play it well, either.

While it’s nowhere near as abominable as the waste of space Son of the Mask, The Pink Panther is just one of those movies that comes early in the year in hopes of turning a profit. Don’t be surprised if the movie’s up for a few Razzies, because it’s certainly not the gem of celluloid that the Blake Edwards-directed original was.

In the words of Inspector Clouseau, “Zis is an outrage!