Disney sure knows how
to squeeze the most out of its original properties: “Disney on Stage”, “Disney on Ice”, “Disney
on Toast”…
… cannot be far
behind…
And then they cycle
back to the beginning, Beauty and the Beas, with actual people. (And a new
idea is mercifully spared production.)
Okay, here we go.
It began with a phone call from my now thirty-four year old
daughter, Anna.
“Dad, let’s go see Beauty
and the Beast.”
(Which I had taken her to when she was eight and I was
younger. Not younger than eight. But you probably knew that already.)
We make a date, she comes over to the house and we walk to
the multiplex at nearby Santa Monica Mall. Seriously pressed for time, we wolf down our
“Fast Food” teriyaki chicken, its preparation taking frustratingly longer than
expected, possibly three to four minutes.
I felt like I do around the fifteenth second, microwaving a 24-second hot
dog.
“Come. On!”
One unhealthily consumed lunch later, we head to the 12:20 screening of Beauty and the Beast. Anna imagines two other people in the theater, a divorced Dad who let his kid stay home from school so he could be the most liked parent.
It turns out, there are four
people in the theater, none of them a misguided Dad and their absentee
offspring.
I don’t know why they made Beauty and the Beast over again, this time with (more or less) live
actors. A quick peek at the film’s cumulative
grosses edging towards five hundred million dollars may, however, offer an
illuminating insight. Still, I’m sure that
if I ran Disney I’d have definitely said,
“Why make it again?”
There’s something wildly euphoric about being really, really
wrong about something. Especially when
nothing’s on the line but your personal judgment and professional credibility. I feel viscerally giddy about it, a Buddhist
monk, delirously erroneous.
“Oh, I made a big boo-boo.
Hee-hee-hee-hee-hee!”
To be honest, although I enjoyed Beauty and the Beast – the 1991 computer animated version – it was
never my favorite of the post-Dumbo Disney
oeuvre. Of the (now not so) new crop of animated
features, I substantially prefer The
Little Mermaid, although intelligent minds may differ on that account and
there shall be no necessity of resorting for fisticuffs.
Beauty and the Beast belongs
to the Hunchback of Notre Dame school
of fictional imaginings, except that, although the pairing of
opposites-in-prettiness is identical, the hunchback remains a hunchback to the
end and, if memory serves, the hunchback never gets to dance.
The songs in Beauty
and the Beast, with one towering exception, are structurally adequate –
okay, “Be Our Guest” is pretty good, but “No
one’s slick as Gaston, no one’s quick as Gaston”? Are you kidding me?
The musical kicks off with an obligatory “I want” song, in
which the protagonist reveals her motivational hopes and dreams, the vaunted granddaddy
of the genre being, “Over the Rainbow”, Dorothy explaining, “I want to get the
heck out of Kansas!” an intentional sentiment more literally conveyed in The
Little Mermaid’s “I want to be where
the people are…”
Here it’s “There must be more than this provincial life”,
implying “I want to be someplace more interesting… though not necessarily a
creepy castle with a scary beast in it who keeps me a prisoner until he has a
fortuitous change of heart. Although at
least it’s different.”
The film’s “price of admission” is richly delivered in the
film’s evocative “Title Song”. I have
written elsewhere of how exhilarating it was, sitting in a darkened theater, watching
splendidly gifted practitioners stepping up to the plate with the game on the
line and knocking it prodigiously out of the park.
At moments like that, I feel soaringly honored to share a
species with such people.
Well, so.
The new Beauty and the
Beast dawdles along, at a pace daring audiences over six not to frequently yawn
and audiences under six not to fall asleep in their seats. Whoever thought it was a good idea to add
half-an-hour’s running time to a primarily “children’s movie”? I mean…
“Four hundred and
eighty million...”
Okay, fine.
Sometimes you’re wrong even when be right. The iPhone
5 is definitely cuter.
So anyway...
We are watching the movie which it’s not terrific but so
what? We are in the theater, reliving a
childhood connection.
Finally, they get to “The Song.”
The two characters get up from the table to dance. The mellifluous intro begins…
“Da-da-da-da dun dun
Da-da-da-da dun dun…”
And before they get to “Tale
as old as time…”
I totally lose it.
And then she does.
It was embarrassing.
Two ostensibly mature grownups, bawling their eyes out at an
unnecessary remake.
It was the high point of my seventies.
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