Beauty and the Beast (Trousdale, Wise, 1991)

An enchanted beast falls in love with the youngest daughter of a hapless inventor.

The Disney version of the original Cocteau version is delightful to watch, but obviously lacks the political allusions of the earlier rendering. I cannot really decide which one reverberates more in my mind, but I am confident in assuming that the black-and-white version will stand the test of time much better.

Still there was a lot to like in the Disney version: the playfulness of the supporting cast and the very original animation is always a delight to watch - the overly cautious butler and the stupid happy stable master make a great team, and although their dialogue might have been wittier in a more "adult" script, it still made me grin here and there.

The ballroom sequence which - if I remember correctly - was the first foray into the realm of 3D for Disney is still beautiful to watch. The camera movement seems a bit unmotivated, maybe because the vocabulary for the weightless rig imagery hadn't been established yet.

Kommentare

Beliebte Posts aus diesem Blog

Time of the Gypsies / Dom Za Vesanje (Emir Kusturica, 1988)

A supernaturally gifted boy from a Gypsy community is forced to survive in the world of crime. The intriguing qualities of Kusturica's films I've seen is his relentless depiction of basically crazy communities. Not just agreeably potty, they're usually outright interstellar-nuts. Here, he follows the fate of the rather harmless boy Perhan, that leaves for Italy in hope of a better future for him and his loved ones. There are some enormously interesting images in the film that kept ringing long after. The ritual in the river and the last scene in the church ruin (with a horse standing somewhere far back in the image...). After sketchily mapping out the scenes it is surprising how rigorously three-acty the screenplay is constructed. The first act seems quite long in terms of time and number of scenes, but there is also a lot of imagery spent on depicting life in this crazy universe, which makes the second part in Italy much more believable. And there is a certa...

The Bank Dick (Cline, 1940) #DTC #848

The grumpy family head and hobby sleuth gets hired by the local bank. I have never (gasp) watched a WC Fields movie before, so it took my pretty long to get used to this - in its time well known - personality that is quite a misanthrope. The pacing of the actual film felt slow and the scenes had not a lot of connection to the grand story, basically just setting the stage for the gags Fields was performing. It is quite interesting if you start to sympathize for such a thoroughly unsympathetic character on screen. Maybe because the man basically just wants to be left alone - everything that happens to him, even under the most contrived circumstances doesn't affect him in the least. It doesn't even look like he is interested in the money. Except for the money part, the disaffectionate personality seems like a rather modern rendering of the hedonistic generation Y, despite all vintage look-and-feel. I wonder about the other films, hope to get around to see them soon.

Detour (Ulmer, 1945) #TSPDT #390

A hitchhiker is picked up by death and then picks up his personal tormenting devil. The plot looked fairly straightforward, but the magic of this gem is that the story strand convolutes until it tightens into a strangling gordic knot - which is pretty much exactly what happens towards the end. The flashback structure are very noir-ish, so was the plot - everything straight down, right from the beginning. I really rooted for the guy to get out of this situation, but every time he takes a decision it actually gets worse - so in the end I was just hoping he might die and get relieved. Most striking was the jaw-dropping performance of Ann Savage. She pops out about a mile and her character is rendered so immensely unlikeable that I wondered that she has not been called the godmother of a new type of acting school (maybe she was?) This is definitively a film worth studying again. Its shortness does nothing to diminish the impact and it is rich on details.

Yogi's Movie Consumption Blog

Dieses Blog durchsuchen