Beauty and the Beast
Following all Disney properties, this is a completely safe film, all the rough edges sanded out, which turns a supposedly magical story into an anodyne cultural artefact. A mere husk, dead on the inside.
Instead of trying to emulate the simple drawings, they went the gritty reboot way, which coupled with candlelight makes so that the candlestick and the clock could be replaced with a completely black rectangle on screen and it would make no difference. At least the voices remain recognizable.
There are songs, but they seem to be disjointed from the rest of the story. Hardly a fair criticism to make to a musical, but that’s all I got. This film is so average it sucks creativity out of every pursuit. It has negative creativity.
Another note to the preposterous marketing gimmick about “gay characters!” when it’s a blink-and-you-miss-it comic relief character doing a song that might or not be interpreted as coming out of the closet. From the marketing you might get the impression this was a family-friendly Brokeback Mountain and that the corporate entity known as Disney was the Rosa Parks of LGBT people.
My quest continues for a musical that improves over Repo The Genetic Opera. Disney can’t compete with a film starring Paris Hilton.
I give it 7/furries.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.