reimagining | 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.

This is a film I wasn’t ever really that interested in seeing. I figured, how could they possibly improve on the original which had everything anyone could ever have wanted in a film about a bunch of people literally bustin’ ghosts. And the whole “now with women” thing wasn’t all that intriguing either. I’m all for equality and I’m totally all for feminism and empowering women, but that doesn’t mean we need to remake classically male-casted films with women. It’s fate was pretty much already set as “not as good as the original.” Despite that, though, it did an okay job of being it’s own movie. It was entertaining enough and it had it’s moments.

The star of the show, by far, was Chris Hemsworth who played the lovably stupid receptionist, Kevin. I found myself pretty much just waiting for his appearances because they were just downright hilarious. Of course, Kristen Wiig is always funny too, but I was really living for Chris in this one.

But to be honest, the story was lacking – it lacked originality, it lacked depth, and it lacked intrigue. I didn’t honestly care what the outcome was and I didn’t care about any of the characters’ fates. They weren’t fleshed out or given much backstory at all. Okay, so Kristen Wiig’s character is a professor at MIT up for tenure when her friend from yore decides to publish their book about paranormal activity which pretty much asserts that she believes in ghosts over the scientific method. I don’t care if her character gets tenure.

Clearly they had fun filming it and it’s an entertaining time, but it just wasn’t enough to captivate me and I’m sorry to say, but I simply wouldn’t watch it again.

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Browsing Tags reimagining

Beauty and the Beast (2017)

Ghostbusters (2016)