{"id":5872,"date":"2017-03-29T17:06:43","date_gmt":"2017-03-29T23:06:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.delirium.org\/?p=5872"},"modified":"2017-03-29T17:06:43","modified_gmt":"2017-03-29T23:06:43","slug":"beauty-and-the-beast-2017","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/?p=5872","title":{"rendered":"Beauty and the Beast (2017)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Fun fact: I only saw the Disney animated Beauty and the Beast once, theatrically, 26 years ago. I had the soundtrack CD, so I know it pretty well, but I only ever saw<\/em> it the one time. (Less fun fact: Twenty<\/em>\u00a0six<\/em>\u00a0years ago. I was in high school, which is even less fun still.) Between that dimness and the 30+ minutes of new footage, the original live-action Beauty and the Beast<\/a> that Disney traced the animation from but then kept locked in a vault all this time was pretty close to watching a new movie; at the least, it was like watching a familiar movie where all I could remember was how it ended. And, I mean, fairy tale, so I would have \u201cremembered\u201d that part either way.<\/p>\n

The artificiality of the thing faded sooner than I expected it would. Like, there\u2019s the artifice of most musicals in the first place. Why are they singing? Why does it not bother them that they\u2019re singing? Especially, why does it not bother them that they\u2019re singing in groups?! But that\u2019s not even what I mean. The part where you know all the words and these people should be animated, and they\u2019re moving like the animated people moved in your memory, but they\u2019re real? That was weird. Until it wasn\u2019t, which was my original point, so I guess I\u2019m glad it faded. All the same, there are things in animation that do not translate well in live action. Like, the snowball fight. The girl who has no real options in the world because it\u2019s the 1700s, but even worse, she\u2019s smart enough to understand\u00a0she has no options, plus everyone dislikes her for being smart enough to know such things, or really any things, so she has even fewer options than that? That girl, and the prince who was such a failure of a human being that a witch cursed him so that his outsides would be more capable of the destructive rages and petulant angers that his insides were already wracked with, that girl and that prince get in a snowball fight. Well, she throws a snowball at him playfully. And, to be fair, he playfully throws one back, only his outside form has not yet caught up with his gradually bettering insides yet, because that\u2019s only just started to happen, so he\u2019s a hulking beast throwing a snowball that fits in his hand and is therefore roughly the size of Emma Watson\u2019s head, and my point here is that Emma Watson getting laid out flat on her back and unconscious from one playfully intended snowball maybe plays better when it\u2019s the animated version of Emma Watson than it does when a 400 pound hairy asshole just nearly murdered Hermione Granger. Y\u2019know? Unless the point of live action fairy tales is to demonstrate just how exceptionally patriarchally bent they are, in which case, nailed it<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The sad part is, I\u2019m not even saying I didn\u2019t like the movie. It was pretty well executed, and he really eventually isn\u2019t an asshole, and probably wasn\u2019t even for the snowball thing;\u00a0I just twitch at the idea that she had to fix some asshole, as that was her only path to a reasonably good life. I\u2019m sure things have improved since then, though. I mean, not the part where everyone in the village hates Belle, that part is still true. Just ask Hillary Clinton. But the part where it\u2019s possible to have a good life despite being hated for it, that\u2019s an improvement!<\/p>\n

I may have gotten off topic? But the truth is, probably not. Anyway, super-awesome coda: there is a drive-in theater like 4 miles from my house! And that is where I saw this. Downside: a hybrid car is not the right car to take to the drive-in. It kept turning itself off to save battery that honestly did not need saving. So, small tweaks. It\u2019ll be better next time.<\/p>\n

Also, the back end of the double feature was Rogue One<\/a>, which I\u2019m happy to report is still good.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Fun fact: I only saw the Disney animated Beauty and the Beast once, theatrically, 26 years ago. I had the soundtrack CD, so I know it pretty well, but I only ever saw it the one time. (Less fun fact: Twenty\u00a0six\u00a0years ago. I was in high school, which is even less fun still.) Between that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[1308,106,1249],"class_list":["post-5872","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-film","tag-drive-in","tag-fantasy","tag-musical"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5872","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5872"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5872\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5874,"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5872\/revisions\/5874"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5872"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5872"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5872"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}