disappointing | Joy Reviews Movies

If you’ve been reading my reviews for pretty much any amount of time, you’ll know that I am a Disney fan. Beauty and the Beast has never been one of my favourites, but that isn’t to say I don’t like it. When the first teaser trailer came out for this film, you know, with Lumiere and Cogsworth saying “it’s a girl…” and the rose and the music and… well, I was excited. For some reason I thought, how could this possibly go wrong?

I’m currently halfway through and I am, how do I say this? Bored. It doesn’t have nearly the same magic as the animated version. It doesn’t pack the same emotional punch. I do not care that Belle and the Beast are falling in love. I don’t care. I want to see more of Gaston and Le Fou to be honest. Where are they? I miss them. And that Wardrobe? She’s fricken terrifying. The music is lackluster at best. Emma Watson is even falling flat for me and I typically really enjoy her acting.

I see what Disney has tried to do – they’ve tried to take a classic and modernize it, make it a more detailed “masterpiece,” but it’s fallen oh-so-flat. The added effects and added details look like just that – add-ons tacked on to make the movie something “original.” It feels so… cheap and tacky. Why do we need to keep taking classic, wonderful animated films and making garish, distasteful karaoke versions of them? If you’re going to remake a film like Beauty and the Beast, you have to at least breathe some fresh air into it. Keep that aroma of familiarity, but make it something better, not something… like this.

Not to mention, they took this opportunity to create a very openly homosexual character… and that character was who?? Le Fou – a bumbling fool, an idiot, the villainous sidekick of Gaston. That’s just depressing. You could choose any character in any reimagining and make them gay, and you chose Le Fou. We have better LGBT representation in Paranorman (“You’re gonna love my boyfriend!”) Just… wow.

To be honest, unless you’re a mega fan of the original film, I’d skip this one. It left me feeling as though I need to watch the original as “eye bleach” and feeling resentful that I had wasted not only $4.99 on the Google Play store to rent it, but also two-and-a-half hours of my life that I could have spent watching something with actual substance and style. This is not a film I want in my collection. This is not a film I want to see again. I’ll stick to the tried and true, thank you very much.

I am a huge fan of Kevin Smith’s. I am also a fan of Justin Long’s, but more so Kevin Smith. From Clerks (1994) to Red State (2011), including his stand-up Q&A sessions and books, he is just awesome. He’s apathetic when he speaks about his films, but he cares about what goes into them. So it goes without saying that I’d be dying to see Tusk since the day it was released. I don’t think it was shown in my local theatre, I checked many times only to find it wasn’t there, which was really disappointing so I’ve been waiting and waiting, but I found it at Ye Olde Movie Network!

It’s hard to describe what Tusk is about without sounding like a lunatic, but that’s really not that different from any other Kevin Smith film. How do you describe Clerks without sounding like you’re talking about the most boring home movie ever? It’s really difficult. “So you have this guy, Dante, right? And he works at a convenience store… and he gets called in even though he’s not even supposed to WORK that day… and so he and his good friend Randall goof off pretty much all day and then his ex-girlfriend accidentally bangs a dead guy.” ………yeah.

To be perfectly honest, Tusk felt like it was way longer than it needed to be. There was a lot of pointless dialogue between Justin Long and… well, pretty much everyone.

I mean, because I know it’s Kevin Smith’s film, I expected what I received excluding the overdrawn length. I expected a horror comedy starring slightly awkward but very funny Justin Long, Michael Parks, child star Haley Joel Osment and of course, the fantastic Johnny Depp. And we can’t forget the stars of the show, a brief appearance by Kevin Smith’s daughter, Harley Quinn Smith, and Johnny Depp’s daughter, Lily-Rose Depp.

Michael Parks’ performance is actually pretty creepy at points. His character is sort of reminiscent of his character, Abin Cooper, in Red State (2011), except a little less religious. Other than that, I felt like the concept of Tusk was pretty ridiculous. I mean, it was like… The Human Centipede but with walrus and only one human. I found myself zoning out during many conversations and scenes…

I did really enjoy Johnny Depp’s character, Guy Lapointe, but only because he was so ridiculous, not in spite of it. The whole film was spent wanting to be creeped out and to really be immersed in the experience, but instead I had trouble even focusing on the story. It wasn’t realistic enough to be engaging. I mean, you expect it to be ridiculous, but at the very least it has to be just believable enough to be scary, right? The walrus suit Justin Long was wearing looked like a suit… it definitely didn’t look like his formerly human body was crafted into that of a walrus. It looked hokey.

This is the first time I’ve really been disappointed by a Kevin Smith film (and no, I have not seen Cop Out… yet) and it’s a really depressing experience. I will continue to watch Smith’s future films of course, but I don’t think I’ll rewatch this one. Sorry Kev, it feels like I wasted an hour and 42 minutes of my day…

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Beauty and the Beast (2017)

Tusk (2014)