Beauty and the Beast (2017)

Beauty and the Beast (2017)

IMDB Rating : 7.1/10

Disney's animated classic takes on a new form, with a widened mythology and an all-star cast. A young prince, imprisoned in the form of a beast, can be freed only by true love. What may be his only opportunity arrives when he meets Belle, the only human girl to ever visit the castle since it was enchanted.

Director: Bill Condon

Writers: Stephen Chbosky (screenplay), Evan Spiliotopoulos (screenplay)

Stars: Emma Watson, Dan Stevens, Luke Evans

PG | 2h 9min | Family, Fantasy, Musical

IMDB link Here

Emma Watson dazzles in Disney's show-stopping chocolate box of a remake  

Twenty six years ago – yes, yikes – Beauty and the Beast rolled out the red carpet for a second golden age of Disney. It was the first animated film ever to be nominated for the Best Picture Oscar, and won, quite rightly, for Alan Menken’s score and one of the three nominated songs.

It’s the music that makes it particularly special, and appreciating that is entirely the point of the live-action remake. It’s hard to imagine a case for this film’s existence without the songs – without, say, that five-note “Tale as Old as Time” motif, which rivals the one from Close Encounters of the Third Kind as a call-sign for a entire shared past of filmgoing.

Easily the best move of Bill Condon’s generous update is to grasp the nettle and make an out-an-out, bells-and-whistles musical: something none of Disney’s other refurbishments of its back catalogue lately, from Maleficent through Cinderella and The Jungle Book, have quite had the gumption to attempt.

Menken’s score, and the evergreen lyrics of Howard Ashman – the genius of his art who died before he could even see the original film – are the pulse, the purpose and headline draw.

Not that the design team, headed by the Atonement duo Sarah Greenwood (sets) and Jacqueline Durran (costumes, including that yellow one) have taken a back seat. The Beast’s castle is a triumph – a gnarled, craggy seat of foreboding, with acres of winter garden laid out before it like some frozen-over Versailles. Inside, it’s a darkly sumptuous Gothic dream, with Belle’s bedchamber fit for Marie-Antoinette, and the library… well, just you wait.

What’s changed? A running time that’s 45 minutes longer than before allows scope for expansion, including three new Menken songs, which hit character beats and fill in backstory elegantly enough: he’s not trying to bowl us over with these. A prologue now tells us of the Prince (a powdered Dan Stevens, formerly of Downton Abbey), the curse, and the red rose with its dropping petals; there’s more later on Belle’s dead mama, and a deeper relationship with her dad (Kevin Kline), too.

But the core of the story is blissfully intact. It’s fitting, for a tale about gradually discovering inner beauty, that the Beast is tricky to know at first: withheld from our sympathy, hard to recognise as Stevens through the digital fur.

Scene by scene, the film takes its time with him, and we get the hang of the character at the same pace that Belle does. Once he’s belting out baritone laments from the blackened eyries of his home, we’ve understood his soul.

Emma Watson isn’t a flawless Belle. However overawed the character should be by her surroundings, there’s a lack of confidence in her gait – she sometimes seems to be hitting marks obediently rather than owning each moment. But she’s good: that girl-next-door winsomeness and a sweet, clear singing voice see her through.

She’s ideal in close-up, a charming reactor in that trickiest aspect of her craft – feigning delight at dancing crockery. Perhaps Harry Potter gave her an inside track at doing this so well.

 Resurrecting some of his Moulin Rouge! va-va-voom, Ewan McGregor is especially delightful as Lumière, the affable candlestick-MC. Menken-Ashman’s Be Our Guest, in Condon’s hands, flings out a show-stopping kaleidoscope of state-of-the-art dazzlement, with perfect licence to get as trippy as it damn well chooses. It even tops the original – talk about throwing in everything and the kitchen sink.

It hardly needs saying that this is not a film for cynics, or anyone with the remotest Disney allergy, or anyone hostile to the whole idea of jukebox revamps. If you’re ticking any one of those boxes, stay away, and if it’s all three, what even are you?

Condon has done virtually everything in his power to make this film work, down to a sugar-rush finale which makes the star cameos pay off like bonus punchlines – or those “very special guest” appearances for 10 seconds at the end of a panto. Gorging all at once on this chocolate box of a picture feels almost greedy, but why stop at once? A large chunk of its audience will be straight back in line for seconds.

Read full review at Telegraph

Movie Rating ★★✭☆☆  

 A beautiful tale, but was it necessary?  

Tale as old as time, true as it can be. You know the song, you know the rest. The live-action remake of Disney’s 1991 animated classic is a fulsome ode to its predecessor, lush in its design, joyous in its execution, solemn in its acting, and soulful in its premise. But is it necessary is the question. The answer: maybe not. Bill Condon, whose oeuvre ranges from Gods and Monsters and Chicago to the last two Twilights (you know, the one-into-two Breaking Dawns), could have used the opportunity to make something of our obsessions with beasts, and our obsessions with beauties — what better time than now? But Beauty and the Beast remains safe and secure within its Disney-defined dimensions; its infantile proclamations about a gay character and mixed race couples even further underlining what goes for risk-taking in that world.

The film differs from the 1991 version in not just giving Belle (Emma Watson) a love of books (sigh!) but also seeing her try use the knowledge to fashion a washing machine of sorts and to teach village children. Which only confirms the suspicions of Belle’s “provincial village” that she is a “peculiar girl”. Gaston is a cad in that village of the worst sort possible, and in his pursuit of Belle, Luke Evans lends the character hilarious and remarkably believable pompousness.

This here is where Condon, working on a screenplay by Stephen Chbosky and Evan Spiliotopoulos, is at his best. From the smallest of characters to the largest of them all, the Beast (Dan Stevens), the film etches each credibly, with personality, and establishes a genuine relationship between them.

Watson, for as long as we have known her, is just the kind of Belle the film is looking for — the beauty with sensible brains. She is good here. Stevens as the Beast/Prince is touching in his melancholy, reluctant in his charms, and rare in his tempers.

Yes, you can do worse than watching them come together.

You can also do better.

Read full review at Indian express

Movie Rating ★★★☆☆  

Emma Watson makes a perfect Belle in sugar-rush romance  

The world’s most notorious case of Stockholm syndrome is back in cinemas. Disney now gives us a sprightly, shiny live-action remake of its 1991 animated musical fairytale, Beauty and the Beast. Everyone warbles the classic 1991 showtunes by composer Alan Menken and lyricist Howard Ashman, and there is a sugar-rush outbreak of starry cameos at the very end, from A-listers who are given full status in the final curtain-call credits. The whole movie is lit in that fascinatingly artificial honeyglow light, and it runs smoothly on rails – the kind of rails that bring in and out the stage sets for the lucrative Broadway touring version.

This movie is allegedly updating its assumptions to include a gay character … while leaving the heterosexual politics untouched. Beastly ugliness is symbolic of tragic male loneliness even as the imprisoned pretty woman submissively redeems her captor’s suffering. The Shrek twist on this scenario has more of a sense of humour: the woman becomes ugly as well.

The gay character is Le Fou, played by Josh Gad — he is the nerdy sidekick to Belle’s caddish and malign suitor Gaston, amusingly played by Luke Evans. But Le Fou’s homosexuality is only definitively revealed as he pairs up with another man in a blink-and-you-miss-it moment at the final dance. Otherwise, his character is no different from the cringing sidekick in the 1991 version; whether Le Fou is the only or the most gay thing about the film is up for discussion, and it is the celebratory and witty connoisseurship of musical theatre in the gay community that has historically kept this genre vital.

Emma Watson is a demure, doll-like Belle, almost a figure who has stepped off the top of a music box; she never gives in to extravagant emotion, or retreats into depression, but maintains a kind of even-tempered dignified romantic solitude. She doesn’t set the screen ablaze, but that isn’t quite the point: she is well cast and it is a good performance from her.

But the hills are alive with spells, and the poor Beast is miserable up in his crumbling castle. He is a bad-tempered old bachelor, yearning to be freed from his mask of ghastliness. (Weirdly, the movie reminded me of Jean-Pierre Melville’s movie The Silence of the Sea, in which the well-meaning francophile German officer, billeted with a French family during the Nazi occupation, earnestly suggests that they might yet find a kind of mutual regard, like the beauty and the beast.) It is a decent performance from Stevens, although as ever with this story, the moment when he is transformed back to handsome prince is a strange anticlimax. Somehow the handsome face is more boring and insubstantial than the great big animal face in which we’ve been encouraged to find something adorable. But it’s an efficient BATB, machine-tooled for sweetness, with flashes of fun, destined to be the centrepiece of a million teen sleepovers.

Read full review at The guardian

Beauty and the Beast’ Revels in Joy and Enchantment  

To quote a lyric from one of the songs in “Beauty and the Beast,” “there may be something there that wasn’t there before.” The familiar elements are all in place, of course. It’s “Beauty and the Beast,” for goodness’ sake: a tale as old as time, a song as old as rhyme and all that. And there are inspired flights of nostalgia as well, visual evocations of the predigital glory of Busby Berkeley, Ray Harryhausen and other masters of fantastical craft.

But this live-action/digital hybrid, directed by Bill Condon and starring Emma Watson and Dan Stevens in the title roles, is more than a flesh-and-blood (and prosthetic fur-and-horns) revival of the 26-year-old cartoon, and more than a dutiful trip back to the pop-culture fairy-tale well. Its classicism feels unforced and fresh. Its romance neither winks nor panders. It looks good, moves gracefully and leaves a clean and invigorating aftertaste. I almost didn’t recognize the flavor: I think the name for it is joy.

This was by no means a foregone conclusion. The reanimation of beloved properties — to use the grim business nomenclature of Hollywood — often leads to hack work and zombie-ism, as old archetypes are shocked to life and arrayed in garish, synthetic modern effects. That might easily have happened here. Look (I mean: don’t look) at the horrors that have been visited, in recent years, on Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan and the Wizard of Oz. And even if Disney had done a more convincing upgrade, on the model of last year’s “Jungle Book,” a new “Beauty” could have offended fans of the 1991 animated feature simply by existing. That movie, a high point of the ’80s and ’90s Disney revival, is close to perfect. What singing teapot would dare to challenge Angela Lansbury?

The only possible answer is Emma Thompson, whose Mrs. Potts is joined by other household objects with the voices (and, briefly, the faces) of movie stars. Stanley Tucci and Audra McDonald are the excitable harpsichord and the operatic wardrobe; Ewan McGregor and Ian McKellen are the suave candelabra and the anxious clock. Gugu Mbatha-Raw is the lissome feather duster. Young Nathan Mack is Chip, Mrs. Potts’s son. Their singing and banter is so vivid and so natural that you almost take for granted that they appear to be mechanical objects clicking and whirling in physical space, sharing the frame with human characters.

There are a few moments — a climactic high-elevation fight scene that looks like every other climactic high-elevation fight scene; a chase through the forest involving wolves — where the digital seams show, and you’re aware of the cold presence of lines of code behind the images. Most of the time, though, you are happily fooled. More than that: enchanted. The most dazzling visual flights are matched to the best of Howard Ashman and Alan Menken’s songs. “Be Our Guest” in particular is a choreographic extravaganza that enfolds decades of Disney history (all the way back to “Snow White” and “Fantasia”) in contemporary cinematic craft.

But the tradition of Disney features, both live action and animated, rigorously places spectacle in the service of plot. The audience needs to be, by turns, reassured and surprised, guided through startling and suspenseful events toward a never-in-doubt conclusion. The new “Beauty and the Beast,” written by Stephen Chbosky and Evan Spiliotopoulos, smoothly modernizes — and to some degree sanitizes — a story with a potentially thorny psychosexual subtext, a tale of male animality and female captivity. He’s a beast and a prince. She’s his prisoner and his therapist. It’s a little kinky if you stop to think about it, and also (to use a more responsible word) a little problematic.

Ms. Watson, already something of a feminist pioneer thanks to her portrayal of Hermione Granger in the “Harry Potter” movies, perfectly embodies Belle’s compassion and intelligence. Mr. Stevens, blandly handsome as a human prince, is a splendid monster, especially when the diffidence and charm start to peek through the rage. The awkward business about imprisonment turning into true love is handled smoothly. If you want a hot and haunting “Beauty and the Beast,” check out Jean Cocteau’s version, or the fan-fiction-inspiring television show from the 1980s. This one is chaste and charming.

 Read full review at New York Times

A rococo confection featuring fiendishly intricate production values, a bravura, coloratura-rich musical score and whizz-pop state-of-the-art effects, Disney's latest iteration of the fairy tale Beauty and the Beast is more than just eye candy. It's a Michelin-triple-starred master class in patisserie skills that transforms the cinematic equivalent of a sugar rush into a kind of crystal-meth-like narcotic high that lasts about two hours. Only once viewers have come down and digested it all might they feel like the whole experience was actually a little bland, lacking in depth and so effervescent as to be almost instantly forgettable.

Paradoxically, despite all the palpable budget spend on fancy computer effects, it's the cheaper, old-school, real-world bits — like the big ensemble dance sequences or the moments when the actors interact directly with each other rather than with greenscreen illusions — that pack the biggest wallops.

Indeed, all credit should be due to Disney for canny planning on a meta level, one of the trademarks of its success over the years. This remake of the company's 1991 animated hit tracks closely to the earlier version's plot and story beats, includes revamps of all the old songs and arrives just in time to exploit generational nostalgia — to lure viewers who loved the last version as kids and are just becoming parents themselves. Since the 1960s, Disney has been rereleasing in roughly 25-year intervals their classic animated features, either theatrically or on home entertainment platforms. Now that all the old films are out there in the public domain, live-action remakes are the best way to keep the story brands alive, starting with Maleficent in 2014, Cinderella in 2015 and now this.

The film's weakest link is the look of the digital characters. While the effects deployed to render the Beast and his various enchanted servants — Lumiere (Ewan McGregor), Cogsworth (Condon regular Ian McKellen), Mrs. Potts (Emma Thompson) — are marvels in terms of texture, especially as their digital fur, brass or ceramic surfaces react to the environment around them, the faces are too often stiff and lacking in expression.

Maybe it's just the presence of Watson (who's OK, but not great), but there may be an intentional touch of Hogwarts, too, in the impossible, M.C. Escher-like staircases that also evoke the gloom of Frankenstein's laboratory — a realm that played such a key part in Condon's breakthrough work, Gods and Monsters, another story about a gay man (McKellen) in love with a straight guy and lovable "freaks."

Condon also brings his experience to the table for the big musical numbers, which are among the best bits of the film, especially "Gaston," the LeFou-led tribute to our boastful villain (containing the immortal line "I use antlers in all of my decorating") that adds punch to the first part of the film. Filmed refreshingly straight, in a series of wide, stable shots that eschew the fidgety editing of most pop videos in favor of an old-fashioned, MGM-style proscenium space, it's a delicious moment, traditional in all the right ways. That said, it's hard not to wonder how much of the singing throughout really is entirely the work of the actors credited in the final roll and how much was refined by Auto-Tune-style software (or even ghost singers, like in the old days when the late Marni Nixon sang for Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady, among others). It's easier to believe in talking teacups than in the notion that this really is Dan Stevens' singing voice.

Read full review at Hollywood Reporter

Movie Rating ★★★☆  

 Remake of ‘Beauty and the Beast’ convincingly springs to life  

How Does a Moment Last Forever” is one of several new songs composed for Disney’s live­action adaptation of its animated classic, “Beauty and the Beast.” It’s also a subtle nod to the baggage that this production brings with it. How indeed to take a cartoon loved to the point of obsession, flesh it out with actors who can’t be expected to live up to the two-dimensional protagonists of fans’ imaginations, and open it up to lived-in realism, without losing the pure fantasy of the original? How does a movie last forever, even as it’s deconstructed and reinvented over time?

The answer is: with a mixture of careful deliberation and boldness, both of which are on full display in this pleasingly all-out but reassuringly familiar take on a story that might not have started with Disney’s 1991 movie but, for many, seemed to end there. Emma Watson delivers an alert, solemn turn as Belle, the French country girl with a penchant for reading and inventing. Although Dan Stevens — best known for his recurring role on “Downton Abbey” — is heard more than seen, he lends the Beast the right ratio of soul to raffish misanthropy.

The fact that it’s the damsel doing the saving in “Beauty and the Beast” — not once but twice, if you count Belle’s kindly father, Maurice (a sweetly affecting Kevin Kline), who runs into trouble midway through the film — gives extra verve to the presence of Watson. The actress has become a feminist icon, thanks to her days as Hermione in the Harry Potter movies as much as her off-screen political activism. Like another Emma in last year’s “La La Land,” Watson may not possess a killer set of pipes, but her singing (which sounds like it’s been technologically sweetened here) is serviceable enough to get the job done. It’s her solid, capable persona that takes pride of place in “Beauty and the Beast,” which is as much about its lush French provincial costumes and settings as it is about story and character. Belle’s opening number, during which she sings of longing and intellectual restlessness while swaying through her village’s market, is an eye-catching mélange of flowers, fabrics, textures and riotously bright springtime colors.

McDonald’s and Tucci’s characters — a wardrobe and harpsichord — have less to do but are on hand for the grand finale, made all the more gratifying by the emotions that have been plumbed before. By beefing up the presence of Belle’s father — and the absence of her mother — the filmmakers have given Belle as much shadow material as the diffident Beast, who starts out as her captor and winds up her soul mate.

This “Beauty and the Beast” isn’t predicated on starry-eyed romance or animal attraction, but the solace of mutual loss and understanding, which makes it all the sweeter. Although the Beast is an entirely digital creation, based in part on Jean Cocteau’s groundbreaking 1946 silent film, Stevens imbues his hauteur and fanged hostility with pathos and arch humor. Joining Heath­cliff and Mr. Rochester as yet another handsome dude in a bad mood, Stevens’s Beast provides the right kind of foil for Watson’s spirited, courageous heroine, who in one of two seriously frightening sequences fights off a snarling pack of wolves. The blink-and-you’ll-miss-it meet-cute moment for two gay characters is part of this “Beauty and the Beast’s” larger sense of expansiveness, wherein exteriors fall away, inner essences come to the fore and true love ensues.

And what in this big, boffo, ball-gowned world could be wrong with that?

Read full review at Washington Post

First there was Kenneth Branagh’s beautiful adaptation of Cinderella in 2015. Then there was last year’s masterful live action-meets-CGI The Jungle Book from Jon Favreau. Disney’s latest attempt to rejuvenate its old classics for a new generation of children is Bill Condon’s Beauty and the Beast starring Emma Watson in the lead role of Belle.

Beauty and the Beast’s feminist reimagining is empowering for the millions of young girls who will fill theaters around the world to see it. Less commendable is the way Condon tackles gay characters. The film was heralded by gay magazine Attitude this week for featuring Disney’s first major gay character, Gaston’s sidekick LeFou, played by Josh Gad. In fact, at least three characters here could be considered gay—including Ian McKellen’s talking clock, Cogsworth. But references to the characters’ sexuality are innocuous enough to go unnoticed by children and leave conservative sensibilities unoffended.

Young people are increasingly aware of the world around them with all its different shades—from children as young as four deciding they are not the gender they were born, to sitcoms like Modern Family working to normalize gay relationships and families with same-sex parents, so this mitigating portrayal of queerness is troubling. Condon’s intention to include queer characters is honorable. But the failure to overtly identify any of the characters as gay feels like a faint-hearted step from Disney towards greater inclusion of LGBT+ characters. The result is that queer audiences watching Beauty and the Beast will leave the theater feeling underrepresented and as though their sexuality is still something which must be downplayed to be considered palatable to the heteronormative masses.

Watson, taking on her first major role in a blockbuster since the Harry Potter franchise ended in 2011, is well cast and likable as Belle, as is Stevens as the Beast. Evans enjoys a breakout moment as the pompous Gaston and Gad, as his friend LeFou, brings humor to the film. The supporting cast in Beauty and the Beast is its biggest strength: McKellen, Stanley Tucci, Audra McDonald, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Ewan McGregor and and especially the marvelous Emma Thompson are wonderful additions as the voices of the Beast’s talking castle subjects. Thompson voices talking teapot Mrs. Potts with a Cockney accent that is both authentic and as warm as a cup of rosy lee.

The adaptation manages to do justice to famed Disney composer Alan Menken’s songs, although Watson falters at times. The key numbers are performed by more accomplished singers: McDonald, Thompson and Gad. The standout scene is “Be Our Guest,” the number in which Lumière the candelabra (McGregor) and his inanimate friends prepare a magical feast for Belle. Condon’s direction of this CGI-heavy scene is spellbinding as crockery and utensils fly across the vast dining room. The reprise of title song “Beauty and the Beast,” led by Thompson at the end of the movie, is also a rousing ensemble number. There’s an additional treat over the credits as Celine Dion—who sang the title track with Peabo Bryson for the soundtrack to the 1991 animation—applies her distinct vocal acrobatics to a new song written by Menken for the movie, "How Does a Moment Last Forever.”

 “A tale as old as time;” yes. But Disney and Condon have found a way to breathe some new life into it.

Read full review at News week

Movie Rating ★★★★☆  

I’LL level with you — I was not looking forward to this film.

On the face of it, there seemed little to offer this middle-class, middle-aged man, especially as I was crammed into a screening surrounded by massively excited Disney princesses (of all ages).

But 129 minutes later, you may as well have passed me a tiara.

I was completely sold. What a lovely film.

If this is where we’re heading with live-action remakes then we are in for a plethora of delights.

Disney’s new take on its 1991 animated version is ambitious, confident, charming and while not without faults, pretty much the perfect family film.

First off — let’s talk about Emma Watson.

Her casting as Belle was controversial, but within ten minutes you can’t think of anyone better.

Dan Stevens is perfectly beastly (the CGI beast is pleasantly expressive), there’s a terrific double act in Luke Evans as Gaston and Josh Gad as LeFou, and any film with Ewan McGregor, Ian McKellen, Stanley Tucci and Emma Thompson in support roles can’t do much wrong.

Forget the furore over its gay character, the interracial kiss (between a candelabra and a feather duster FFS) and accusations of Stockholm Syndrome — just enjoy the spectacle.

The songs are lovely, the sets breathtaking and the whole package is a delight.

I walked in with trepidation — yet skipped out singing Be Our Guest.

Read full review at The Sun