Sunday, April 30, 2017

Beauty and the Beast: I'm FINALLY caught up on my Disney pop culture

1. This is perhaps the most visually gorgeous movie I have ever seen. I hereby volunteer to abandon my aging father, don a yellow gown and pretend that romance is somehow a legitimate theme in "Romeo and Juliet" in every beast-related literary discussion I have for the rest of my life just to live in that castle.
2. Speaking of the yellow gown, it's stunning. But why does Belle's hair look like it was combed by a distracted squirrel the whole time she wears it?
2.5. And what's that weird, distracting thing in her ear the whole time she wears the yellow gown? Is it some kind of wireless earpiece she had to wear because she couldn't learn her lines?
3. I love how this movie fills in some of the backstory that's not in the animated version. But if Belle was born in Paris and whisked away at a young age to what she herself describes as a French "provincial town" where she's so unworldly that she repeatedly sings in the abstract that "there must be something more than" it, WHERE DID SHE GET HER BRITISH ACCENT?
4. All the animated characters teeter precariously on the creepy side of the creepy/enchanting fence.
5. Speaking of, why doesn't Chip have a gaping head wound when he turns back into a human kid?
6. Yes, LeFou is played as a gay stereotype. And even though we've come a long way and we as a culture should have evolved past that blah blah blah yawn yawn yawn, the movie is a live-action cartoon of what was already a cartoon filled with clichéd, silly, delightfully entertaining stereotypes. It takes place in a cartoony version a none-of-us-was-there-to-even-know-for-sure-what-it-was-like historical culture where the men are fey and the women are helpless and this movie elevates the Zeitgeist with colorblind casting where black people are courtiers and interracial couples love and kiss each other so it's a world where everyone has a place and an existence and I can totally go full-stereotype sometimes and I'm a gay man with an unrequited and unacknowledged crush on a straight friend and it happens all over the world to all kinds of people so SHUT UP.
7. Meanwhile, back in the real world: We HAVE come a long way and we as a culture HAVE evolved, so if you think you are in possession of any anti-gay opinion about the movie or anything else that you're still desperately failing to justify with logic, reason or laughably-hypocritical-to-anyone-who's-actually-read-a-bible religion, SHUT UP.
8. Seriously. Did nobody notice through the entire process of auditioning and filming that Emma Watson has a British accent?
9. Best line: "Keep calm and think back to the war. And the widows."
10. Seriously. I call bullshit on the entire movie because Chip doesn't have a gaping wound in his head at the end.

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