Beauty and the Beast 2017, Part I: Every Frame, Like the One Before...
WARNING: All the warnings from my treatment of Maleficent apply.
Remakes.
Let’s talk about remakes.
(This is God’s judgment on me. I deserve this. I’ve done things.)
In general, when we hear that a film widely regarded as a classic is being “remade” or “rebooted,” the response from the moviegoing public is usually, on average, to roll their eyes. Except for the people at either end of the bell curve who really love the movie in question and either squeal with delight or groan with dread, most people understand that your average remake is going to be goofy, glitzy, inferior to the original, and largely forgotten within a year or two.
I am not a person to whom this level-headed understanding comes easily. I hate remakes. Remakes make me angry. Not all remakes, but most of them, because most of them suck and not in a particularly entertaining way. Please, settle in, because I can explain:
Anyone who has ever taken a class on fiction, or read more than two stories, knows that no story is truly original. All stories can be linked together; all stories share common sources; there’s a wiki dedicated to the most common “tricks of the trade” used in fiction. When we talk about remakes, we’re usually grouping into that category any film that re-uses the basic plot, story, characters, and images of a previously made film. Strictly speaking, that would classify Beauty and the Beast, the beloved 1991 animated feature by the Walt Disney Company, unprecedentedly nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture back when that actually sort of meant something, as a remake, since the first Beauty and the Beast film - and the first live-action Beauty and the Beast film - was Jean Cocteau’s celebrated 1949 film. But unless you’re Armond White, who has often unorthodox opinions on films, the 1991 Beauty and the Beast (henceforth Beauty ’91 for the purposes of avoiding confusion and because the thing I’m about to spend a couple dozen pages discussing is forcing it) does not feel derivative; it feels fresh and unique, as though one is hearing the story for the first time even if one is not. So it behooves us to distinguish between a few different types of remakes.
When I debase myself enough to watch a movie remake, there are a couple of questions I ask myself about it, related to both its technical quality and its quality as storytelling:
· Is the film well-made? Or, in even simpler terms, is it a good movie? Is the plot coherent? Are the characters well-imagined and well-acted? Is the dialogue believable? Are the cinematography, art direction, and effects technically proficient? Is the music, if it exists, good? If the original did not exist, would it be good enough as its own thing?
· Is the film excessively derivative of the original? Is the film putting a new spin on the story, or is it basically rehashing the same steps that the original took, hoping to carry you on the strength of your nostalgia? Is it, we might say, doing its own thing with the story and the characters?
If the answer to the first question is yes and the answer to the second is no, those are your best remakes, the ones that can hardly be considered remakes at all. We might think of them instead as re-imaginings or re-adaptations of the same source material. The Werner Herzog/Klaus Kinski Nosferatu of 1979 is both a respectful homage to F.W. Murnau’s silent classic and an updated take on the Dracula character in its own right (and has spoken dialogue!). The Disney Hunchback of Notre Dame, not just my favorite Disney film but one of my favorite films, is a (usually) great example of this - we would hardly call it a remake of the 1927 Lon Chaney Hunchback, but they’re both unique-feeling takes on the same source material, tweaking the same story for film and building approximations of the same characters. The Klaus Kinski In terms of something that is more a pure remake, the recent Pete’s Dragon has little in common with the original Pete’s Dragon except a boy named Pete and a friend dragon, and is generally agreed to be the best of the largely inexplicable crop of live-action remakes that Disney plans to puke out over the next several years.
Then, you get the various forms of bad remakes. Note that seventy-five percent of the total remake categories encompass bad remakes, and I’m sorry to report that the movies themselves fall into the categories roughly proportionally. The good but excessively derivative ones, like the 2016 all-female-but-otherwise-not-very-different Ghostbusters, tend to be enjoyed as throwaway popcorn flicks and then get forgotten until someone brings them up again. The bad but not excessively derivative ones, like the 2006 The Wicker Man and Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, can be infuriating if you harbored a particularly passionate devotion to the original films, but they do us the service of at least being fucking hilarious. My last target of mouth-foaming movie rage, Maleficent, was a turd painted to look like a movie, but at least it tried to do something a little different - the problem was that the different thing was stupid and needlessly complicated and poorly executed, but still, one cannot accuse it of being overly attached to its source material.
And then, there are the bottom-of-the-remake-barrel remakes, the ones that are neither well-crafted nor original, the Gus Van Sant Psycho-style remakes, that offer nothing new and contribute nothing to the world of film. They retread all the steps of the original film and manage to make all of them appear clumsy and slightly off-kilter, like the movie consumed a few too many martinis on the way out of post-production.
Eric D. Snider, in a review of the movie I am going to talk about that is far more forgiving than my own will be, calls this the “why am I watching this version?” test, which is as good a name for it as any. Are you watching it because it’s genuinely good? Great. Because it’s hilariously inept? Fine. Because you just want to see animated eye candy rendered in live action? I don’t get it, but okay. But there must be some reason for it to exist that isn’t green and doesn’t have a president’s face on it. It must be doing something that the original did not do that contributes positively to the movie’s net quality.
So what I’m saying is, in not so many words, is: you’re damn right I pre-judged the 2017 live-action remake of Beauty and the Beast, feather in the cap of the Disney Renaissance and one of the all-around finest animated films ever created. I pre-judged the hell out of it. I was predisposed to hate it. When the trailer came out, I hated it. I went in expecting to hate it - in fact, I spent thirteen fucking dollars on a ticket expressly for the purpose of being able to say I hated it, because that’s the kind of masochist Debbie Downer sicko I am (and because people apparently enjoyed my way-too-long-way-too-angry review of Maleficent and I like attention). If that bothers you, go read someone else’s review.
And yet the film defied my expectations: I hated it even more than I expected to. I hated it so much that it crossed over the bi-phasic curve of hatred past the peak where I felt kind of high on it down to the point where I couldn’t even muster up the energy to hate it properly. By the time we plodded our way through the cinematic muck to “Be Our Guest,” one of the many scenes from the animated version that has had all the charm and joy sucked out of it, I just wanted the vile thing to be over already.
Fuck this movie. Fuck it. Fuck me for giving it money when I knew damn well that was a mistake. Fuck every single person who contributed to it. Fuck its phony faux-progressive grab for the approval of whatever Hollywood’s equivalent of the Assistant Dean of Diversity and Inclusion is. Fuck its gaudy, garish, tacky production design and fuck its nausea-inducing cinematography. Fuck its dreary expressionless Uncanny Valley CGI. Fuck its dull, charmless new Oscar bait songs that take giant dumps all over Howard Ashman’s grave, which will be resoundingly ignored by the Academy if there is any justice in this world. This is the worst kind of remake by far, the kind that is not only bad enough to be insulting both to the original film and to the audience, but manages to impoverish both the world and the original film just a little by making the story, characters, and action all appear a little bit dumber. The filmmakers decidedly followed the “more is more” school of storytelling and decided they could improve on the elegant, flawlessly-paced simplicity of the original by packing it full of pointless filler. On the other hand, it really hit home for me just how good Beauty ’91 is, so, um, thanks for that, I guess.
Now, I do want to stress: if you enjoyed the movie, and I know that a lot of you did for some reason, it does not lessen your worth as a human being or as a friend or trusted family member in my mind. You like what you like and that’s fine. Chances are I already didn’t trust your taste in movies because I’m an asshole about these things. But I do want to ask you: was there something you considered to be wrong with Beauty ’91? Or, put a different way, was there something in Beauty ’91 that you’d really, really been itching to see re-rendered in either live action or CG gritty realism? Did you have a real bee in your bonnet about what happened to Belle’s mom, or what happened in the Beast’s past to make him kind of a dick, or what the Beast’s fabulous castle shindigs used to look like before he got all beastified, so much so that you could not wait to see it explained? If so, perhaps you can provide some balanced counterpoints to some of the outraged howls that are going to follow in installments to come.
In our next installment, we will cover the introductions of the various characters and how the movie manages to make me hate all of them who have not been turned into housewares within ten minutes of their appearance onscreen, which I guess is a dubious achievement of sorts.
PS: I want to get this out of the way before we launch into reviewing the movie: Belle does not have Stockholm Syndrome. She does not have it in the original story, she does not have it in the 1991 film, she does not have it in this film, and Stockholm Syndrome is questionably a thing in the first place. That is a lazy, unfounded, irritating criticism of the story that unfairly diminishes the very adult relationship that it portrays, and better critics than I have already explained why it is total bunk. If you want to hear more, go watch Lindsay Ellis’s video on the subject, or read this. This is all the space I wish to devote to that topic.
Remakes.
Let’s talk about remakes.
(This is God’s judgment on me. I deserve this. I’ve done things.)
In general, when we hear that a film widely regarded as a classic is being “remade” or “rebooted,” the response from the moviegoing public is usually, on average, to roll their eyes. Except for the people at either end of the bell curve who really love the movie in question and either squeal with delight or groan with dread, most people understand that your average remake is going to be goofy, glitzy, inferior to the original, and largely forgotten within a year or two.
I am not a person to whom this level-headed understanding comes easily. I hate remakes. Remakes make me angry. Not all remakes, but most of them, because most of them suck and not in a particularly entertaining way. Please, settle in, because I can explain:
Anyone who has ever taken a class on fiction, or read more than two stories, knows that no story is truly original. All stories can be linked together; all stories share common sources; there’s a wiki dedicated to the most common “tricks of the trade” used in fiction. When we talk about remakes, we’re usually grouping into that category any film that re-uses the basic plot, story, characters, and images of a previously made film. Strictly speaking, that would classify Beauty and the Beast, the beloved 1991 animated feature by the Walt Disney Company, unprecedentedly nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture back when that actually sort of meant something, as a remake, since the first Beauty and the Beast film - and the first live-action Beauty and the Beast film - was Jean Cocteau’s celebrated 1949 film. But unless you’re Armond White, who has often unorthodox opinions on films, the 1991 Beauty and the Beast (henceforth Beauty ’91 for the purposes of avoiding confusion and because the thing I’m about to spend a couple dozen pages discussing is forcing it) does not feel derivative; it feels fresh and unique, as though one is hearing the story for the first time even if one is not. So it behooves us to distinguish between a few different types of remakes.
When I debase myself enough to watch a movie remake, there are a couple of questions I ask myself about it, related to both its technical quality and its quality as storytelling:
· Is the film well-made? Or, in even simpler terms, is it a good movie? Is the plot coherent? Are the characters well-imagined and well-acted? Is the dialogue believable? Are the cinematography, art direction, and effects technically proficient? Is the music, if it exists, good? If the original did not exist, would it be good enough as its own thing?
· Is the film excessively derivative of the original? Is the film putting a new spin on the story, or is it basically rehashing the same steps that the original took, hoping to carry you on the strength of your nostalgia? Is it, we might say, doing its own thing with the story and the characters?
If the answer to the first question is yes and the answer to the second is no, those are your best remakes, the ones that can hardly be considered remakes at all. We might think of them instead as re-imaginings or re-adaptations of the same source material. The Werner Herzog/Klaus Kinski Nosferatu of 1979 is both a respectful homage to F.W. Murnau’s silent classic and an updated take on the Dracula character in its own right (and has spoken dialogue!). The Disney Hunchback of Notre Dame, not just my favorite Disney film but one of my favorite films, is a (usually) great example of this - we would hardly call it a remake of the 1927 Lon Chaney Hunchback, but they’re both unique-feeling takes on the same source material, tweaking the same story for film and building approximations of the same characters. The Klaus Kinski In terms of something that is more a pure remake, the recent Pete’s Dragon has little in common with the original Pete’s Dragon except a boy named Pete and a friend dragon, and is generally agreed to be the best of the largely inexplicable crop of live-action remakes that Disney plans to puke out over the next several years.
Then, you get the various forms of bad remakes. Note that seventy-five percent of the total remake categories encompass bad remakes, and I’m sorry to report that the movies themselves fall into the categories roughly proportionally. The good but excessively derivative ones, like the 2016 all-female-but-otherwise-not-very-different Ghostbusters, tend to be enjoyed as throwaway popcorn flicks and then get forgotten until someone brings them up again. The bad but not excessively derivative ones, like the 2006 The Wicker Man and Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, can be infuriating if you harbored a particularly passionate devotion to the original films, but they do us the service of at least being fucking hilarious. My last target of mouth-foaming movie rage, Maleficent, was a turd painted to look like a movie, but at least it tried to do something a little different - the problem was that the different thing was stupid and needlessly complicated and poorly executed, but still, one cannot accuse it of being overly attached to its source material.
And then, there are the bottom-of-the-remake-barrel remakes, the ones that are neither well-crafted nor original, the Gus Van Sant Psycho-style remakes, that offer nothing new and contribute nothing to the world of film. They retread all the steps of the original film and manage to make all of them appear clumsy and slightly off-kilter, like the movie consumed a few too many martinis on the way out of post-production.
Eric D. Snider, in a review of the movie I am going to talk about that is far more forgiving than my own will be, calls this the “why am I watching this version?” test, which is as good a name for it as any. Are you watching it because it’s genuinely good? Great. Because it’s hilariously inept? Fine. Because you just want to see animated eye candy rendered in live action? I don’t get it, but okay. But there must be some reason for it to exist that isn’t green and doesn’t have a president’s face on it. It must be doing something that the original did not do that contributes positively to the movie’s net quality.
So what I’m saying is, in not so many words, is: you’re damn right I pre-judged the 2017 live-action remake of Beauty and the Beast, feather in the cap of the Disney Renaissance and one of the all-around finest animated films ever created. I pre-judged the hell out of it. I was predisposed to hate it. When the trailer came out, I hated it. I went in expecting to hate it - in fact, I spent thirteen fucking dollars on a ticket expressly for the purpose of being able to say I hated it, because that’s the kind of masochist Debbie Downer sicko I am (and because people apparently enjoyed my way-too-long-way-too-angry review of Maleficent and I like attention). If that bothers you, go read someone else’s review.
And yet the film defied my expectations: I hated it even more than I expected to. I hated it so much that it crossed over the bi-phasic curve of hatred past the peak where I felt kind of high on it down to the point where I couldn’t even muster up the energy to hate it properly. By the time we plodded our way through the cinematic muck to “Be Our Guest,” one of the many scenes from the animated version that has had all the charm and joy sucked out of it, I just wanted the vile thing to be over already.
Fuck this movie. Fuck it. Fuck me for giving it money when I knew damn well that was a mistake. Fuck every single person who contributed to it. Fuck its phony faux-progressive grab for the approval of whatever Hollywood’s equivalent of the Assistant Dean of Diversity and Inclusion is. Fuck its gaudy, garish, tacky production design and fuck its nausea-inducing cinematography. Fuck its dreary expressionless Uncanny Valley CGI. Fuck its dull, charmless new Oscar bait songs that take giant dumps all over Howard Ashman’s grave, which will be resoundingly ignored by the Academy if there is any justice in this world. This is the worst kind of remake by far, the kind that is not only bad enough to be insulting both to the original film and to the audience, but manages to impoverish both the world and the original film just a little by making the story, characters, and action all appear a little bit dumber. The filmmakers decidedly followed the “more is more” school of storytelling and decided they could improve on the elegant, flawlessly-paced simplicity of the original by packing it full of pointless filler. On the other hand, it really hit home for me just how good Beauty ’91 is, so, um, thanks for that, I guess.
Now, I do want to stress: if you enjoyed the movie, and I know that a lot of you did for some reason, it does not lessen your worth as a human being or as a friend or trusted family member in my mind. You like what you like and that’s fine. Chances are I already didn’t trust your taste in movies because I’m an asshole about these things. But I do want to ask you: was there something you considered to be wrong with Beauty ’91? Or, put a different way, was there something in Beauty ’91 that you’d really, really been itching to see re-rendered in either live action or CG gritty realism? Did you have a real bee in your bonnet about what happened to Belle’s mom, or what happened in the Beast’s past to make him kind of a dick, or what the Beast’s fabulous castle shindigs used to look like before he got all beastified, so much so that you could not wait to see it explained? If so, perhaps you can provide some balanced counterpoints to some of the outraged howls that are going to follow in installments to come.
In our next installment, we will cover the introductions of the various characters and how the movie manages to make me hate all of them who have not been turned into housewares within ten minutes of their appearance onscreen, which I guess is a dubious achievement of sorts.
PS: I want to get this out of the way before we launch into reviewing the movie: Belle does not have Stockholm Syndrome. She does not have it in the original story, she does not have it in the 1991 film, she does not have it in this film, and Stockholm Syndrome is questionably a thing in the first place. That is a lazy, unfounded, irritating criticism of the story that unfairly diminishes the very adult relationship that it portrays, and better critics than I have already explained why it is total bunk. If you want to hear more, go watch Lindsay Ellis’s video on the subject, or read this. This is all the space I wish to devote to that topic.