Beauty and the Beast (2017) Review

rating: ***

summary: Belle meets and falls in love with a beast.

review: These Disney live action remakes have been such hit-and-miss affairs, it always depends on how much the director really wants to revisit the material.  Beauty and the Beast is at once a worthwhile and listless effort in the series.

It's a constant struggle to breathe free from its confines, to be the lively kind of movie it wants to be and hopelessly devoted to play-acting the animated film it's based on.  If this had been made, say, fifteen years earlier, it would've fit right alongside the Pirates of the Caribbean movies.  At heart that's what it desperately wants to be.  Obviously having to be a musical puts a damper on such ambitions.  Bill Condon, who staged such a brilliant adaptation of Chicago, seems incapable of bridging the divide, staging a series of karaoke scenes instead, the songs lost to the soundtrack as they seem stubbornly unmoored from the screen material.  It begins to feel more like a tribute than anything.

One of the great signifiers of all this is Josh Gad, not because of his overblown gay element, but that he can't compete, in live action, with the voice work did as Olaf in Frozen.  Luke Evans, if he didn't have to sing, might be able to sell his part, too.  If it had been Russell Crowe (how interesting would that have been!), no critic would've thought twice to mention it (although Crowe almost certainly has more credentials than Evans on every score).  Evans is constantly being undercut by the material he chooses; in most other eras besides the ones he keeps popping up in, he'd have been a much bigger deal.

I'd be lying if I said I decided to watch for any other reason, really, than seeing Emma Watson in another big story and a role other than Hermione Granger, but she'd swallowed whole, too, by the intended pomp, and like Evans has no answer to the jukebox playing around her.  Dan Stevens plays well as the Beast, but as the Prince isn't given anything at all to work with, the very embodiment of how hollow all this is.  Ewan McGregor is barely recognizable either in voice or when we finally see him, a wasted opportunity.  Emma Thompson, let's face it, is no Angela Lansbury (although the kid voicing Chip is great, even if he doesn't get much to do, and once transformed back into a human is thoroughly undermined by the production).

The two shining lights are Kevin Kline reimagining the father and Ian McKellen as Cogsworth.  McKellen's career has been one constant string of frustration for anyone expecting any kind of consistent interest from the industry.  For every Gandalf or Magneto or Da Vinci Code, there's really almost total silence, which is a terrible shame, even when he makes it clear he outclasses everyone and thing around him in something like this.  

Stanley Tucci and Gugu Mbatha-Raw show up in undercooked supporting roles, more examples of what might have been.  I guess they can't all be David Lowery's masterful Pete's Dragon.  Well, I suppose, of course not...

Archive (2020) Review

rating: ****

summary: In the near future, memory can be downloaded in an archive for loved ones.

review: Sometimes you just don't know what's worth discovering, since these days there's very little interest in collating these things beyond "everyone seems to like it" or "everyone seems to hate it," which also demolishes the old model of cult discoveries, since you never really know if the people who hate something or love something are themselves a cult , especially if it doesn't have obvious metrics like box office results behind it.  Archive might be the last interesting find I discover on Redbox (which seems to be in death throws after a seemingly-in-hindsight ill-advised sale to new owners a few years back, not necessarily just because its model still relies on physical media).  It's the kind of movie I probably would have had no idea even existed if it weren't for Redbox or, say, the credits of an actor or two I might browse absently (Theo James, from the Divergent movies, or Rhona Mitra).  The fact that it was released in the dead zone of the pandemic in 2020 would also help account for this, although in earlier years it might've been able to enjoy a little more publicity.

Director Gavin Rothery came up with the idea when he was in the production pool for Moon, one of the great it's-probably-at-least-a-cult-classic-but-it-really-doesn't-get-enough-attention movies of the past dozen years or so, and visually it's really not much of a surprise, another lone science type trying to unravel what increasingly seems like a conspiracy against him.  There's a considerable twist at the end about just what the circumstances really are, and robot companions who are responsible for filling out the atmosphere, but Archive depends much more than Moon did on the lead character's greater narrative than just the story playing out on the screen.  He's trying to download his dead wife into a robot capable of more or less helping her live again.  His third attempts seems like it'll work out, but all three are basically incapable of reconciling to new circumstances, so it's really how any of them are willing to cope with the results.

James is in a much more mature mode than the Divergent films; this is the first time, I think, I've seen him outside of them, so it's a good way to confirm he has some actual worth as an actor, although depressingly he doesn't seem to have become any casting director's favorite.  Toby Jones, one of film's great character faces this era, shows up, Mitra, Stacie Martin as the wife.  It's immediately apparent that Rothery is more than competent directing all this.  With Redbox you just never know.  Much of it is dreck with no discerning ability to know what good filmmaking looks like.  He has yet to tackle a follow-up, but I'd certainly be interested.

A great discovery.