BEFORE: Got to Atlantic City yesterday afternoon, went out for a big dinner at a steakhouse, between two sessions of gambling on the slots at Bally's and Caesar's. I was up $54 after the first round of play, then lost some at night to finish at a $18 profit for Day 1. I should have stopped playing in the afternoon if I wanted to make some money, but then I wouldn't have much to do last night and today.
Ewan McGregor carries over from "Beginners", to a film that I can fortunately watch on Netflix on my phone, while I'm away from home.
Here's the schedule for tomorrow, February 27, on TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" with more Best Picture nominees and winners:
5:45 am "42nd Street" (1933)
7:30 am "The Letter" (1940)
9:15 am "Captains Courageous" (1937)
11:15 am "The Ox-Bow Incident" (1943)
12:45 pm "The Sundowners" (1960)
3:00 pm "Anatomy of a Murder" (1959)
5:45 pm "Kings Row" (1942)
8:00 pm "On the Waterfront" (1954) - winner
10:00 pm "All the King's Men" (1949) - winner
12:00 am "Hamlet" (1948) - winner
2:45 am "Around the World in Eighty Days" (1956) - winner
This time, it's 5 more seen: "Anatomy of a Murder", "On the Waterfront", "All the King's Men", "Hamlet" and "Around the World in 80 Days", so another 5 out of 11 brings my total up to 116 seen out of 301. Up to 38.5%
THE PLOT: An adaptation of the fairy tale about a monstrous-looking prince and a young woman who fall in love.
AFTER: I'm not a huge fan of the original 1991 animated film "Beauty and the Beast", I saw it once, and didn't ever feel the need to see it again - but I was 23 then, and busy with a lot of things, obviously too old to properly enjoy a Disney film, and too young to be nostalgic about them. The Disney Renaissance was going on then, and I was aware of it, but not really caught up in it. So I understood the hype at the time, but I also saw myself as distanced from it.
Now I know WHY they went ahead and made a remake, because the modern remake of "The Jungle Book" did so well at the box office, and they're also now moving ahead with a similar remake of "The Lion King", and obviously it's all about money. (But all of these drive me crazy, because even on Wikipedia the modern remakes are called "live-action versions", and nothing could be further from the truth. Like the 2016 "Jungle Book" remake, this one is VERY heavy on the CGI, so the term "live-action" only tells part of the story, describing only part of the process. They SHOULD be called, at all times, "live-action/CGI" and to do otherwise is inaccurate and short-sighted.)
That being said, this remake is an astonishing visual achievement. While I could endlessly rant about how unnecessary it was to make a new version of "Beauty and the Beast", now that they have, it's a feast for the eyes, particularly on the "Be Our Guest" number, the high point of the film for sure. It really looks like they spent $160 million to make the film and got their money's worth - now that seems like the GDP of a large European country, and it is, but considering the film took in $174 million in just the first weekend, and $504 million gross in just the U.S., I'd say that Disney probably made their money back. So now we can look forward to more live-action/CGI versions of all of the Disney classics, probably.
Three new songs were composed for the 2017 version, it seems there was some interest in using songs that were written for the Broadway musical version of the 1991 film, but I can see the logic in writing new songs for the new film, because only new songs are eligible for Oscar nominations in the Best Original Song category. I, on the other hand, forgot that there WAS a Broadway musical adaptation, even though it ran for 13 years, it seems like I ignored it. Boy, DisneyCorp just keeps inventing ways to take your money while they tell you the same story again and again in different mediums, right?
I also didn't remember the wardrobe, harpsichord and hat-rack characters from the original animated film, but maybe they were in there somewhere - again, I saw the film once and that was a long time ago. I do want to track down a list on-line of other differences between the 1991 film and this one, I'm sure that can't be hard to find. The most obvious is making Lefou's character quite obviously gay, but I don't have a problem with that - you can't say that there weren't gay people back in 18th century France, they just didn't talk about it. Similarly there probably weren't so many people of color in your average French palace, obviously some concessions were made to reflect the culture as it is NOW, not then.
As for the changes in Belle, they made her more of an inventor here (over-seeing the intricate watch- and clockwork of her father, but also someone who may have created the first washing machine. While this is a welcome addition to her character - she's not just someone who reads books, she also finds practical applications for the stuff she learns from them - I'm not sure it's really a bold feminist move to just create a better way to do laundry. Plus, her technical skills never really come into play, so why add them? In the end she learns that there's nothing more important than being a pretty girl and redeeming a male character with love. Is that "on message" with feminism? I doubt it.
They changed some details about the way that the Beast's curse works, and for the most part those seem to track and make things a little easier to understand. It seems that in the 1991 film the Beast's castle is very close to the village, yet no one there seems to be aware of it, or how to get there. The 2017 film, on the other hand, reveals that when the Prince was turned into the Beast, a spell of forgetfulness was cast on the villagers, so they would not remember about the cursed castle or their loved ones who were turned into furniture there. Makes more sense this way, I guess.
Also starring Emma Watson (last seen in "Noah"), Dan Stevens (last seen in "A Walk Among the Tombstones"), Luke Evans (last seen in "Dracula Untold"), Josh Gad (last heard in "The Angry Birds Movie"), Kevin Kline (last seen in "Orange County"), Ian McKellen (last seen in "The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies"), Emma Thompson (last seen in "Burnt"), Audra McDonald (last seen in "Ricki and the Flash") Stanley Tucci (last seen in "The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2"), Gugu Mbatha-Raw (last seen in "Free State of Jones") Nathan Mack, Hattie Morahan (last seen in "Alice Through the Looking Glass"), Rita Davies (last seen in "The Trip"), Adrian Schiller (last seen in "Victor Frankenstein"), Gerard Horan (last seen in "Cinderella" (2015)), Haydn Gwynne, Michael Jibson (last seen in "Star Wars: The Last Jedi"), Ray Fearon, Zoe Rainey, Clive Rowe, Thomas Padden, Tom Turner, Harriet Jones, Adam Mitchell.
RATING: 7 out of 10 white wolves
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