BEFORE: I've still got a lot of paperwork to do, here at the Movie Year, stuff that comes along with, or after the turning of the calendar and the start of a new chain. I totalled up all the appearances from 2023 and posted them in the Year 15 wrap-up post, but now with the new chain planned out for the first two months, I've got to re-sort my IMDB files so THOSE films that I'm going to watch in January and February are at the top of the watchlist, or, rather the back-up watchlist, to make them easier to delete after I view them. Then I got my monthly e-mail from IMDB telling me which films are newly available on the main streaming services, so I've got to go through those and find films I want to add to the watchlist for future months. I've also got to re-do the watchlist's back-up back-up, which is a written list of the movies I have on - what's that old stuff - paper? Yeah, in a composition book, just in case the computer goes down. And then I have to go through all the films I've seen but don't have on DVD to see which ones are newly available on cable, to see if I can burn any of them to DVD. Then I really have to start scanning the cable listings again, looking for new films, I've been derelict in doing that these last few months. Now that the winter break is over and I'm back watching movies again, I'm going to need more material on my lists to replace the films I'm watching, that's just math. Then I have to find a list of the 300 most popular films of 2023, to keep track of films released that year which I've already seen, and cross off the ones I have seen once I've seen them. After that I think I can take a break, unless there's a new version of that "1,001 Movies to See Before You Die" list, but I'm not sure if that's getting released at the end of 2023 or a few months into 2024. Either way, it's a lot of work and a lot of lists for me to keep track of.
Jonah Hauer-King carries over from "The Song of Names".
FOLLOW-UP TO: "The Little Mermaid" (1988) Movie #2,129
THE PLOT: A young mermaid makes a deal with a sea witch to trade her beautiful voice for human legs so she can discover the world above water and impress a prince.
AFTER: It's only been 7 or 8 months since this remake of "The Little Mermaid" came out in theaters, and I managed one screening of the film, hosted by the Visual Effects Society, back in May. And it was nearly a disaster, as I checked in with the projectionist before a 2 pm screening, only to find that someone had loaded the non-3D-version of the film from the DCP, and I had a crowd showing up in the lobby to watch the 3-D version. It was going to take about 20 to 30 minutes to upload the 3-D version, which meant the screening was going to be delayed - and I couldn't let anyone take their seats because the projectionist had to test the film once it got uploaded. So I had a crowd standing around in the lobby for over 20 minutes while he uploaded and tested the film, but in that crowd was one of my bosses from the theater with her kids, and also my other boss from my other job, with his kid. This was not my fault, which I made clear to them, and I just had to keep a big group of parents and kids calm and organized while we all waited for the "technical problem" to be fixed. Sure, everybody got to see the film, for free, it just started 20 minutes later than planned, and nobody got angry and again, this was not my fault.
Anyway, since I worked that screening, I knew exactly how long this Disney remake is - 2 hrs and 15 minutes, with credits. That is WAY TOO LONG for a kids movie. Kids today have attention span that's about 90 seconds, although they will sit still for a movie IF THEY LIKE IT for a time not over 90 minutes. And I think the first Disney version of "The Little Mermaid", the one from 1989, was a little over 80 minutes long, that's PERFECT for the kids today, who all have ADHD or are somewhere on the spectrum or have those peanut allergies and need to get epipen shots every half hour. (Remind me again, why do people have kids? Really, we have enough people on the planet already, we don't need MORE.)
I peeked in on the film a few times back in May, like I'm supposed to do - you know, just to make sure that the sound and picture are at optimal levels, and that nobody is causing a ruckus in the theater, or worse, smoking or vaping. (We had a screening for a foreign film from a particular country in Europe, and I won't disparage an entire country for the acts of a few, but there were a LOT of secret smokers from a country that rhymes with Schmalbania.) Anyway, since the film was screening in 3-D and I wasn't wearing 3-D glasses, it was impossible for me to tell if the picture was fine, let's assume it was. But the underwater scenes seemed way too dark, and that problem persisted, even last night on Disney+. Now, I think it is very dark when you get deep down in an ocean, but I think a little more liberty would have helped here, maybe some bioluminesceny CGI fish, just so we could all tell what was going on.
I think I see the problem concerning the film's length, simply every little story point is fleshed out here to the point of absurdity - the wind blows a character's hat off, and in the old "Little Mermaid" film that probably took 15 seconds of screen time, and here the camera follows the hat for what feels like five minutes. It's called editing, guys, please look into it. Similarly, Ursula explains the deal with Ariel, how she's got three days on land to get a loving kiss from Eric, or she turns back into a mermaid. OK, done, get out of here, move along. But here Ursula OVER-explains all the twists and turns of the spell, and then adds a few more, like Ariel won't REMEMBER the terms of the deal, so now how's she going to succeed? Also then there's another spell that kicks in down the road if this one doesn't work, and by that point, who the hell cares? I've lost interest because she keeps explaining something that wasn't complicated in the first place.
Ugh, and this is such a DISNEY film, there's a talking fish and a singing crab and a seagull with a very annoying voice, and they gave that actress the most annoying things to say, so everything from Scuttlebutt was now SUPER annoying. They did the same thing in Disney's "Pinocchio" live-action disaster, except the seagull there was voiced by Lorraine Bracco instead of Awkwafina. If I liked seagulls I would wonder what the Disney animators have against them, but who really cares? It's just odd that they went out of their way to find two actresses with gravelly voices to play gulls in two separate films. But really, isn't Disney's business model right now to just keep stealing ideas from themselves, and their own previous films? What was the last Disney movie that was truly original? Yes, I will accept "none of them" as a valid response.
They re-made "Aladdin", "The Jungle Book", "The Lion King", "Pinocchio" and now this one, and I think there's something about a law of diminishing returns. They're getting worse and worse, and it's just not 1957 any more, the world's sensibilities have changed, and I thought maybe fairy tales would be on the way out by now. Case in point, Ariel in "The Little Mermaid" feels like her father doesn't listen to her, so she seeks out a way to go to the surface world and fall in love. She COULD have done this on her own, but that might have been dangerous, so since she's afraid to ask her father for help, she gets help from a Sea Witch to turn her human for a few days, but the magical spell is a terrible deal, she has to give up her singing (and now also speaking) voice while the spell is in effect. Now, you could say she learns she has to sacrifice something, overcome obstacles, to find Prince Eric and win him over, but you could also say that the message from Disney appears to be "She didn't feel heard, so she had to give up her voice." which makes no sense. A shorter version could be "Women need to talk less to get ahead," and that's a terrible message to send out to little girls. For shame.
The other implied message, of course, is "if your father won't let you do something, it's OK to go behind his back, strike out on your own in a dangerous place and you don't have to tell him anything about it..." Which, of course, is also a terrible message to send out to little girls in the audience. Hey, I'm all for taking down the patriarchy, and loving whomever you want, but you have to be at least 18 for all of that.
Melissa McCarthy and Javier Bardem are just fine as Ursula and King Triton - this film implies they're related, like brother and sister or something, and I never knew that was part of the story. It doesn't really make any sense, since he's a sea god and she's like half-octopus or something. For that matter, it doesn't make any sense that King Triton has seven daughters who look like they come from very different ethnic backgrounds. Did they all have different mothers from different mermaid countries around the world? Because that's a bad message, too, that King Triton played around and had seven different baby mamas. But of course I'm overthinking it, Disney only cared that the seven princesses were ethnically diverse as a group, because that's what they're trying to be right now, a super liberal PC storytelling company. Look, I don't care if the Little Mermaid and the Blue Fairy are African-American now, they can be that, and we can have black Santa Clause or gay LeFou in "Beauty and the Beast", it doesn't really matter, but I would prefer if this race-based affirmative action casting made sense in the story, and for all of King Triton's daughters to be a different race, that does not make sense, story-wise.
(The decision was also made to make Prince Eric adopted, and the new character that is introduced as the Queen, his adopted mother, is also black. In a way, this takes some of the novelty out of the pairing of him and Ariel as an interracial couple. You could imagine that he falls in love with her because she reminds him of his mother, and that really just lessens the impact of it, doesn't it? But I guess it's still an interspecies couple, man and mermaid, and no, that's not weird at all. Proceed.)
There are parts here that I think are STRAIGHT duplications of the 1988 "Little Mermaid", and those made me think, "Well, then WHAT was the point of doing the remake?" and then there are other parts that were added, and those made me think, "Well, then WHAT was the point of trying to fix something that wasn't broken?" So yeah, they can't really win here, they're going to either hem too close to the last version, or go way far off the reservation with the new stuff. May I suggest maybe trying to make a new film that doesn't just copy a previous one at all, because that's the way people used to make movies? It sure seemed to be a tough row to hoe, even with regards to the music, like they kept in "Under the Sea" and "Part of Your World", of course, but they had to update the lyrics to "Kiss the Girl" because, well, it's not 1988 anymore and you can't just show a man trying to make a move on a girl in a film these days, it's not proper any more.
But since the film made like half a billion dollars and became the latest film to "save Hollywood", I bet nobody's going to take anyone to task for all the mutli-culti casting decisions, or the liberal PC anti-white dude sensibilities, or the messages sent out to our nation's young girls by yet another spoiled cinematic princess, all is forgiven when you're counting so much money, right?
NITPICK POINT: I don't really understand the whole mermaid thing, which I guess is fine because they're not real to begin with. But are they magical beings, or just aquatic humans? Are they really half fish or just people who have a big fin instead of legs? Do they breathe with lungs or gills or both? If they have lungs, why can't they just go to the surface world and breathe there, and if they have gills, why don't we see them? Lots of questions here about how this whole crazy thing works, but again, not real so it doesn't matter.
Also starring Halle Bailey (last seen in "Quincy"), Melissa McCarthy (last seen in "The Starling"), Javier Bardem (last seen in "The Gunman"), Noma Dumezweni (last seen in "Dirty Pretty Things"), Art Malik (last seen in "John Carter"), Jessica Alexander, Martina Laird, Emily Coates, Christopher Fairbank (last seen in "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3"), John Dagleish (last seen in "Judy"), Matthew Carver, Jude Akuwudike (last seen in "Beasts of No Nation"), Lorena Andrea (last seen in "Papillon" (2017)), Simone Ashley, Karolina Conchet, Sienna King, Kajsa Mohammar (last seen in "Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga"), Nathalie Sorrell, Russell Balogh (last seen in "Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania"), Adrian Christopher (last seen in "Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves"), with a cameo from Jodi Benson (last heard in "Ralph Breaks the Internet"),
with the voices of Daveed Diggs (last heard in "DC League of Super-Pets"), Jacob Tremblay (last heard in "Luca"), Awkwafina (last heard in "Raya and the Last Dragon")
RATING: 4 out of 10 fishing nets
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