In an honestly disconcerting happenstance, pretty much all of these movies clock in at 89 minutes. Like, exactly. WTF?
Beauty and the Beast (1987), 10 June 2021, streamed via Tubi
I hunted around for a few adaptations that weren't Disney, and this one popped up! Turns out it is a pretty straightforward telling of the de Villaneuve version from the 1700s, which all the others are not.
We start off with Beauty's siblings (the traditional two sisters, but also two brothers) being annoying as crap and pleading with Beauty to make all their lives easier. She's very cheerful about it, though she also notes she doesn't have any time to herself, for herself. The family counters that she'd have no purpose in life if she didn't have anybody to care for, which is pretty gaslighty. (They aren't awful so much as benignly self-centered, though.) At the same time, their father loses a ship, a clerk steals the cashbox, and one of his storehouses burns to the ground. Maybe, Beauty suggests, we'll be better off if we don't spend so much money. The rest of the family isn't quite so sanguine. (Given that all the siblings seem to be in their mid-30s, it's difficult to feel a lot of sympathy for them.)
We're already past the 30-minute mark when the Beast finally comes into the picture.
As Beauty lives in the castle, she starts having dreams of a human Prince. He asks her to love him and not desert him and there's a whole duet about "seeing with your heart." Beauty doesn't actually twig to what's going on, alas. She assumes it was her own subconscious that conjured him up (there's a portrait of him in the castle), or that Beast is keeping him prisoner somewhere. Sigh. As she declines Beast's proposals, the Prince vision repeatedly tells her she's made him unhappy, like a total dick.
Hilariously, Beauty tells Beast she had become tired of people, as they "are a bit of a bother, aren't they? Always needing all kinds of attention and care." Despite her cheer, Beauty does not give a damn, it seems. There's also a runner about Beauty being able to bring the artwork in the castle to life? It's pretty creepy.
Nobody in this movie speaks with any sort of intonation at all. It is unclear why Beauty falls in love with Beast OR the Prince vision. It is all rather bewildering.
Beauty and the Beast (1991), 25 June 2021, streamed via Disney+
That this was Oscar-nominated for Best Picture still boggles me--not that it isn't good, but that it broke through the weird prejudice against animated and genre movies for the awards.
The intro is a nice throwback to the telling-the-tale intros of the earlier movies. There's also a certain interesting flip in having the prince (or duke or whatever) being the one under enchantment, now that I think of it.
I'm not the first one to notice this, but are you seriously complaining, "There goes the baker with his tray like always, the same old bread and rolls to sell," Belle? Daily bread is his frickin' job. Stop being such a snob. (NGL, as a reader in a community of not-as-much-readers as myself, I was probably about as annoying as Belle at that age.)
As far as I've read/watched so far, Gaston (or an equivalent thereof) is unique to the Disney version of the story, which is...geez, it's not even an actual love triangle. The only thing I can think of is they thought they needed an external antagonist for the story, rather than letting it just be Beast being a once and future jackass.
And they removed Belle's siblings! And they made Belle's father, uh, Leonardo da Vinci from Ever After? Did they want to leave out the whole runner on class and culture? And Maurice doesn't even steal a rose! WTF. Removing that single bit of the story robs the Beast of even a semblance of decency.
I would dig a version of this story where there's a series of wanderers who decidedly don't find Beast charming at all, but I guess that would start feeling kind of Scherezade, wouldn't it?
It's a shame they started out with Beast being THE WORST, because his otherwise dorkishness would be pretty endearing.
Also, the attack on the castle? All those villagers should be dead by now, bc that enchanted furniture is not playing around. Anyway, I appreciate they've at least kept the tradition of Beauty being ready to run if the handsome stranger turns out to be an actual stranger. Because I guess she really loves the whiny, broody, ill-mannered dude. For some reason.
Blood of Beasts, 27 June 2021, streamed via Tubi
Given this one's supposed to be set in Viking times rather than medieval France, I thought it worth a watch. Freya is our Beauty, her father is Viking king. She is being courted by some paragon of Viking-hood named Sven. Her father, Thorsson, is in ill health and just wants the, uh, throne to be secure. (Is this how it works with Vikings? I feel like it's not.)
Sven and Freya. Sven = Gaston.
The king declares they're going to attack Gundeer, which is where Odin's accursed beast once killed all of Ragnar's folk. Sven announces, "If the king wishes to walk in Hel, I'll set the course and clear his way." (In a flashback, we find out Agnar, Freya's old sweetheart, was one of those the beast slaughtered...OR WAS HE.)
The nature of this tale, which I do appreciate for originality, does mean we spend an inordinate amount of time with Viking dudes obsessed with their Viking dude-ness. Then the beast kills most of them. Sven escapes, propping up his injured buddy Eric, even though Thorsson might have survived the attack. He does--the beast puts Thorsson in a cage filled with children's bones.
Sven defies everybody who demands they go back by declaring he won't waste more lives. I think we're supposed to view Sven's POV as that of a power-hungry coward but he seems to have the only reasonable reaction. Am I Team Sven? (Sven is 100% trash later, but still.) Upon their return, Freya is pissed that some survived when her father didn't. Geez.
Eric confesses he last saw her father alive and "sensed that the beast would not kill him." So Freya, Eowyn-ing it up, heads out with her friend Ingrid to rescue her father. Freya Viking-shames the beast into fighting, but he, AGNAR, soon recognizes her and releases Thorsson and Ingrid. (We find out later that he's been kidnapping for company ever since he was cursed. Jeepers.)
Is he a bear or is he dressed like a bear? Both!
Yadda yadda yadda, the beast battles Sven for Freya's hand and Freya breaks the berserker curse by being accidentally killed by Sven. (She kills Sven right back.) Yup, you read right: Freya straight-up dies. That is the end of this story.
Beastly, 29 June 2021, streamed via Amazon Video
And here we have our CW-ish version of the tale. (CWish having come to mean "young, preternaturally pretty people who are likely to be ethnically ambiguous.") Vanessa Hudgens is our Beauty AKA Lindy. Our Beast is Alex Pettyfer AKA Kyle. And hey, Mary-Kate Olsen is in this! All by her lonesome! No sisters in evidence at all!
MKO plays a witch who curses the shit out of Kyle and it's delightful. (He gives a campaign speech for "Green Committee" president that includes the statement, "Should you vote for me because I'm the rich, popular, good-looking guy with the famous news anchor dad? And the answer is, 'Hell yeah!'")
The problem with oh-so-earnest Lindy is, well, she likes Kyle when he's an asshole. It sort of makes her falling in love with beast Kyle not very significant? Also, given that Kyle's own father gets the kid an apartment so nobody can see them together, a little teenage romance seems insignificant. BUT Lindy's the only person who has a nice thing to say about asshole Kyle (he was a "shot of life"), so he stalks her. When her drug addict father puts her life in danger, Kyle is there to provide a safe haven by, uh, blackmailing her father with pictures of him murdering his drug dealer's brother.
Ah, romance.
Anyway, NPH plays Kyle's blind tutor, and while I love me some NPH, it is 100% a role that could have been filled by an actual blind person. (Don't get me started on the "cure" later.) And his Jamaican housekeeper, Zola (LisaGay Hamilton), teaches him how to care about people in a pretty blatant Magical Negro role. Oof.
I did laugh aloud when Kyle desperately tells his tutor, "I Googled 'modern poetry impress girls.'" So there's that.
Beauty and the Beast (2017), 30 June 2021, streamed via Disney+
Try as I might, she'll always be Hermione to me. Also, after a run of 90-minute films, this one clocks in at 138, like, what?
I appreciate the attempt to give the prince, pre-Beast, a bit of depth, except they dove all the way into foppish and it's excessive. Even the late-breaking news that he'd had some extremely bad role models doesn't quite make up for the prince's general ughness.
THAT SAID, I do really dig how they played with the curse a bit--Beast and his folks are forgotten by the town, but conversely, the town is trapped in a loop without the folks from the castle. It's a nice little play on Belle's plaintive song about everything being cyclic and monotonous.
I'm pretty sad they kept Gaston in this. When he's not a caricature of toxic masculinity, he feels waaaay more like a frat boy who gets out of assault charges by having his father call an old friend who happens to be a judge. "It's the ones who play hard to get that are always the sweetest prey." Ugh.
I'm glad they put the rose-stealing back into the story. It's such a tiny thing, but it emphasizes how the magic is tied to exchange (think of Rapunzel being traded for some lettuce), rather than the Beast being an all-purpose dick. Also, let's avoid talking about the CGI they did for the Beast.
There's some stuff going on about Belle's mother dying of the plague and a recent war fought by the French Royal Army. (Gaston is a veteran so that's what his TV show will be about, I guess.) I stopped keeping track. But I guess that's why all the new songs feel like they've been spun off from Les Mis?
Anyway, the best part of this version is during the castle attack. In the original, the wardrobe clads one of the attackers in women's clothing and he shrieks and runs. In this version, it happens to three attackers, and one is fully appreciative of how fierce they are now. (The other two still freak out, though.) Rock on, friend.
What an incredibly messed-up story this is.
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