Tag: Luke Evans

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Beauty and the Beast

Disney’s 1991 production of Beauty and the Beast was a success by any measure. It was a huge box-office hit, earning 16 times its budget, a fact made even more remarkable because it was an animated musical with an original score. Those songs, including classics “Be Our Guest” and “Beauty and the Beast,” swept the musical categories at the Academy Awards. But one scene in particular stands out as historic. When Belle and the Beast waltz together for the first time, the camera swooped and soared through the beautiful, cavernous ballroom with a freedom never before seen in animation. The ballroom was modeled by a computer in 3D, using techniques and technology developed by Pixar, which at that time was a technology company started by Steve Jobs. The scene signaled a seismic shift in animation away from hand-drawn images to increasingly sophisticated computer renderings. Four years later, Pixar’s first feature, Toy Story, which was entirely 3D-rendered, closed the door on the classical era of animation.

In a way, Disney has come full circle with its “live-action” remake of Beauty and the Beast. I used the quotes because there is very little in this beast that hasn’t felt the touch of the cursor on a monitor in California. The CGI modeling techniques introduced in 1991 have become so sophisticated that they are virtually indistinguishable from “live-action” images. The production’s most astonishing accomplishment is Cogsworth, the fussy old head of the Beast’s household who has been transformed by the Enchantress into an ornate clock. Voiced by Ian McKellen, the incredibly detailed creation features layers upon layers of moving clockwork, and yet has enough expression and movement to do physical comedy with Lumière, the enchanted candelabrum voiced by Ewan McGregor.

Cogsworth is just one element in a rush of onscreen visual wonders, and it would be easy to miss his awesomeness. And that’s the biggest problem with this Beauty and the Beast — if I had to choose one word to describe the movie, it would be “cluttered.” The 1991 version often exploded into a riot of movement, especially in the centerpiece “Be Our Guest” dinner party sequence, but the minor abstractions introduced by traditional animation tempered the visual impact of those sequences. This time around, when the army of china comes whizzing at you, they’re fully rendered plates glinting in meticulously modeled candlelight. Beauty and the Beast is a frequently beautiful film, but it’s also sometimes hard to watch.

Fortunately, Emma Watson’s Belle is never hard to watch. Of the group of exceptional actors who came out of the Harry Potter franchise, Watson is the most talented. For the generation who grew up with her as “The Brightest Witch of Her Age,” she has come to represent millennial feminism. She’s the perfect choice for the live-action adaptation of the heroine who inspires the simple townspeople of her not-very-French village to sing “what a puzzle to us is Belle.” Seeing as she was about 18 months old when the original movie came out, she likely grew up watching the cartoon version of the bookish commoner who is ultimately wooed by the size of the Beast’s library. Her singing voice, while not the equal of Paige O’Hara’s work in the original, is more than adequate to the task. She commands the screen without ever really seeming to break a sweat.

Watson’s Beast is Dan Stevens, who gets considerably more screen time in this version of the story, which leans heavily on the Broadway adaptation. His shutter-rattling, no doubt enhanced baritone serves to flesh out the motion-captured character. Even better is Luke Evans as the anitheroically square-jawed Gaston. He is the very picture of toxic masculinity, ready to go full demagogue at the drop of a hat and lead the torch-waving visitors to go all Frankenstein on the Beast.

Much better than last year’s Jungle Book remake, Beauty and the Beast almost justifies the enormous expense poured into it. It reinforces the contention that Disney is the only contemporary studio that knows how to make a good movie. With her effortless brush-off of Gaston’s boorish advances, Watson’s Belle is coded as appropriately woke. But one wonders at the feminist subtext of a kidnapped woman who falls in love with her captor and changes the brute into a handsome prince by sheer force of her womanly charms. Amid all the ballyhoo and singing, its corporate perfection often feels flat. With all rough edges rounded off, this version of Beauty and the Beast is just another girl meets anthropomorphic water buffalo, girl loses man-buffalo, deus ex machina makes everything OK story.

Beauty and the Beast
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The Hobbit: Battle Of The Five Armies

There’s The Hobbit that is, and The Hobbit that might have been. Let’s talk about the latter first.

Far back in the mists of time (read: the mid-1990s), Peter Jackson and his screenwriter/producer/significant other Fran Walsh wanted to do a film trilogy based on the work of
J. R. R. Tolkien. Their original plan logically started with The Hobbit and condensed the events of the three Lord of the Rings novels into the remaining two films. But getting the fantasy movies financed was an uphill battle, so they cut costs by excising the “short” prequel of The Hobbit and pitching only the two darker and more action-packed Lord of the Rings movies. But when an exec at New Line finally saw the light, he wanted three movies, all based on The Lord of the Rings. Jackson agreed and made history with his now-classic fantasy trilogy, which culminated with 2003’s Return of the King winning 11 Academy Awards.

Naturally, New Line wanted more and set about an epic quest to bring The Hobbit to the screen and thus earn another dragon’s hoard’s worth of gold. They partnered with MGM, who then promptly went bankrupt, to make two movies out of the book that established Middle Earth. Jackson, Walsh, and screenwriter Philippa Boyens were back, and they brought in Guillermo del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth, Pacific Rim) to direct. The actual book Tolkien wrote is much lighter in tone than The Lord of the Rings books and is the shortest of the four volumes. But the chance to make a single, tight adaptation of The Hobbit had passed, and so Boyens and company brought in some material from Tolkien’s notes, short stories, and appendices to flesh out the story. But after years of delay, del Toro reluctantly moved on, and a recaptialized MGM demanded three movies to ensure steady cash flow as it emerged from bankruptcy. Professor Tolkien’s pastoral fantasy about dwarves who loved to sing, dragons who loved gold, and a pathologically honest hobbit burglar was now budgeted just shy of half a billion dollars.

The Battle of the Five Armies

Which brings us to The Hobbit that is. Boyens and Jackson worked from the two-movie plan they had developed with del Toro to expand the material even further and, with 2012’s The Unexpected Journey and 2013’s The Desolation of Smaug, have now crafted three financially successful films. But were they artistically successful?

The short answer is no; the long answer is yes with a but. There are shots, scenes, and whole sequences of The Battle of the Five Armies that are as riveting and beautiful as anything in Jackson’s oeuvre. When the elf Legolas (Orlando Bloom) tries to cross a bridge made from a fallen, crumbling tower while dwarven king Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage) fights the orc champion Azog at the top of a frozen waterfall, it is a virtuoso display of action movie choreography worthy of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Martin Freeman does an excellent job of holding down the trilogy’s center as Bilbo Baggins, and Armitage brings a stately, tragic air to Thorin, the penniless dwarf who risked it all to reconquer his rightful throne as King under the Mountain from the dragon Smaug, only to lose his soul in the process.

As a work of epic fantasy to be binge-watched on HD flatscreens over a weekend, The Hobbit will hold its own against Game of Thrones, provided you’re not just in it for the HBO series’ extensive nudity. But as a filmgoing experience in its own right, The Battle of the Five Armies is erratic and unsatisfying. The opening sequence, where Bard the Bowman (Luke Evans) confronts the dragon Smaug (voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch) as Laketown burns around him should be edge-of-your-seat thrilling. But even a dyed-in-the-wool fanboy like me, who first read The Hobbit when my age was still counted in single digits, had trouble working out who was who and why I should care until the old guard of Cate Blanchett’s Galadriel, Ian McKellan’s Gandalf, and Christopher Lee’s Saruman slip on their Rings of Power and mix it up with Sauron on the top of a mountain. But even that incredible scene isn’t part of Tolkien’s book, and it’s the plague of additional subplots that keeps the entire trilogy from achieving greatness. There’s a great movie buried in the almost eight hours of The Hobbit trilogy, and I’m sure Jackson, Walsh, and Boyens, know it. But as the dwarf Balin (Ken Stott) says, “Don’t underestimate the evil of gold.”

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Dracula Untold

I blame Ann Rice.

It’s probably not her fault that her 1976 novel Interview with the Vampire and its sequels would spawn the Vampire Good Guy Industrial Complex, but here we are. Sure, Angel and Buffy’s tragic TV tryst presaged Bella and Edward’s romance the way Led Zeppelin presaged Warrant, but it was Rice’s idea to make the vampire into a tragic, sympathetic character in the first place. To hear him tell it — he doesn’t really want to hunt humans in the night and drink their blood to gain eternal life. It’s not his fault he’s an evil monster.

But Dracula wasn’t like that. He was a post-human predator who took pleasure in killing. Even though his name’s on the poster, Dracula is not the hero, he’s the monster. This is why Interview with the Vampire was so radical and Dracula Untold is such a bad idea.

The year is 1442, and the “hero” of Dracula Untold is Transylvanian ruler Vlad Tepes (Luke Evans), better known in the history books as Vlad The Impaler. Vlad is often cited as being one of the inspirations for Dracula because history records him as a bloodthirsty maniac whose idea of diplomacy was nailing the Turkish ambassador’s turban to his head. But as Dracula Untold tells it, Vlad doesn’t really want to torture prisoners of war. He just wants to hang with his wife Mirena (Sarah Gadon) and son Ingeras (Art Parkinson). That whole impaling thing was just a passing phase he went through. You see, it was the Turks’ fault that Vlad has got some impalement-related impulse control problems, because he was kidnapped by them as a child and forced to serve the sultan as an elite child warrior. But now, years after Vlad and his dad drove the Turks out of Transylvania, they’re back, led by Mehmed (Dominic Cooper), and they want to enslave little Ingeras and 1,000 other kids. There are too many of them for his crappy army to fight, so Vlad has the first of Dracula Untold’s many bad ideas: He will go to a cave where an ancient Master Vampire (Game of Throne‘s Charles Dance) lives, in the hopes that he will be granted vampire powers to fight the invaders. For a minute, it looks like Dracula Untold might make something cool out of its bad premise. But then the Master Vampire’s catchphrase is revealed (“Let the games begin!”) and things spiral into absurdity.

This is not a monster movie, it’s a superhero movie. Dracula’s vampirism grants him super strength, super speed, and invulnerability. You know, like Superman. But instead of kryptonite, his weaknesses are sunlight, silver, crosses, and getting staked in the heart. The script is a pastiche of Batman Begins, The Mummy (Brendan Fraser, not Boris Karloff) The Lord of the Rings, and 300.

I love a good antihero as much as the next critic, but Dracula’s just not hero material. Even when he’s awkwardly crammed into a heroic role, he doesn’t behave heroically. He behaves like Vlad The Impaler, and we’re supposed to cheer his brutality. In Dracula Untold‘s world, the real bad guys are the ones who won’t transform themselves into vampires and drink their wives’ blood in order to save them.

Dracula Untold
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