by
Julien Faddoul
Beauty and
the Beast
A remake of an
animated film made and released by The Walt Disney Company in 1991.
A critic-proof
film through and through. To those who follow my writing, what is there left
for me to say about a concoction such as this? Would it affect you for me to say
that transposing an animated masterpiece to another medium and recreating it,
at times shot-for-shot, is utterly pointless? Maybe. Would it do the world any
good for me to point out how unethical that is for the hundreds of artists who
spent years generating said masterpiece frame-by-frame whose work has been plagiarized?
Perhaps. Would it sway you for me to state that the filmmakers behind this
version have justified such behavior by adding another 40 minutes to the
runtime with additional songs and plot elements that are all uniformly bad? It might.
Would you find any point in my impression that in a full-scale musical
containing some of the best songs ever written, no actual singing is ever heard
outside of the audio processing provided by Auto-tune? Possibly. But judging
from the box-office receipts that have collected after only a month, it is
clear that you, dear readers, have already decided whether to participate in
such solecism or not (as well as the rest of Disney’s plan involving the
live-action appropriation of their own animated classics). All I can do is
provide my perspective of the experience in question. For me, this film is disgusting,
cynical, anti-audience and anti-art, and it saddened me deeply.
d – Bill Condon
w – Stephen
Chbosky, Evan Spiliotopoulos
ph – Tobias A. Schliessler
pd – Sarah Greenwood
m – Alan Menken
ed – Virginia
Katz
cos – Jacqueline
Durran
p – David Hoberman, Todd Lieberman
Cast: Emma Watson, Dan Stevens, Luke Vans, Josh
Gad, Kevin Kline, Hattie Morahan, Ewan McGregor, Ian McKellen, Emma Thompson,
Nathan Mack, Audra McDonald, Stanley Tucci, Gugu Mbatha-Raw
