Crisp Criticism - "Beauty and the Beast", "The Boss Baby", "Power Rangers"

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

The Boss Baby **

A story about how a new baby’s arrival impacts a family, told from the point of view of a delightfully unreliable narrator, a wildly imaginative 7-year-old boy.

A clever idea and the typically first-class animation of DreamWorks provide the most pleasure here. But the evident tactic of the studio to execute all their current films toward the youngest demographic possible is unnerving.

d – Tom McGrath

w – Michael McCullers   (Based on the Book by Marla Frazee)

pd – David James

m – Hans Zimmer, Steve Mazzaro

ed – James Ryan

p – Ramsey Naito

Cast: Alec Baldwin, Steve Buscemi, Lisa Kudrow, Jimmy Kimmel, Tobey Maguire, Miles Christopher Bakshi

Power Rangers

A group of high-school kids, who are infused with unique superpowers, harness their abilities in order to save the world.

An aimless movie that accomplishes nothing. Its plot is not too dissimilar to Fantastic 4 (2015).

d – Dean Israelite

w – John Gatins, Matt Sazama, Burk Sharpless, Michele Mulroney, Kieran Mulroney   (Based on the Series Created by Haim Saban)

ph – Matthew J. Lloyd

pd – Andrew Menzies

m – Brian Tyler

ed – Martin Bernfeld, Dody Dorn

cos – Kelli Jones

p – Haim Saban, Marty Bowen, Brian Casentini

Cast: Dacre Montgomery, Naomi Scott, RJ Cyler, Becky G, Ludi Lin, Bryan Cranston, Elizabeth Banks, Bill Hader