Tale Retold in Time: BEAUTY AND THE BEAST

Disney’s latest attempt to spin box office gold out of affection for their old masterpieces is Beauty and Beast. Less alive and animated than the 1991 drawings, which added up to a film of lovely, romantic elegance, this new live-action effort nonetheless fashions its own charms. The foundation is sturdy, and the elaboration is vivid, in the grand old Hollywood tradition of lavish widescreen song-and-dance epic spectacles. It has the same ornate backlot flavor, the voluminous colorful production design, the matte paintings (albeit now as CG swooshes), the masses of extras, pokey pace, and earnest sentiment that the lumbering musicals of the 1960’s accrued. Here, like in, say, Gene Kelly’s 1969 Hello, Dolly!, is the charmingly stiff sweetness of eagerly putting on a show, of making sure every penny of a massive budget glitters on screen as famous faces sing their hearts out and dance as best they can, while the soaring score and witty lyrics make up for any doubts you may have about their performances. It’s easy enough to get caught up in the big-hearted gleaming nostalgia factory on display.

Differing from other recent Disney remakes, they haven’t enriched (Cinderella), reshaped (Maleficent), tinkered with (The Jungle Book), or overhauled (Pete’s Dragon). They’ve simply brought it back to the screen in new fashion. Despite the evident charm and ageless brilliance of the old music and lyrics, I remained skeptical that we’d be seeing anything other than an expensive reiteration, an animated classic unnecessarily elaborated into a glittering live-action repetition. The music bursts to life with the performers’ joy, and yet what is it but corporate karaoke at the highest level? And then, the real magic happened. I got totally swept up in the experience. The filmmakers rise to the challenge, using their evident love for and serious approach to the material to make something at once old and new, a concoction that hardly bests, and certainly never replaces or improves upon, Disney’s original telling, but instead finds a fine widescreen compliment to it.

Director Bill Condon, whose energetic and affecting Dreamgirls is one of the best theater-to-screen musicals of recent memory, invests in the heart and the spectacle, swooping the camera as its characters swoon and yearn. There’s poignancy and melancholy here, and even a touch of playfulness to its phantasmagoric romance, which contains a touch more backstory than its streamlined inspiration. Unlike the much-performed Broadway adaptation, this hugely crowd-pleasing film is never lethargic and rarely ridiculous in transposing the original’s vibrant visuals into something approaching live-action visualization. It’s loaded with glamorous visions decked out in resplendent production design and slathered in CGI accoutrements, real people and photo-real(ish) talking dishes and knickknacks investing in the emotion to this fantasy.

As the movie begins, past a brief prologue in which an enchantress’ curse turns a callow prince (Dan Stevens) and his servants into a Beast and his castle’s objects, respectively, it settles into the familiar rhythms of its inspiration. Small-town French girl Belle (the bookish beauty is played by Emma Watson, her casting surely a wink to cinema’s other great recent bookish charmer) laments her provincial life. The villagers chime in “Bonjour” for the big ensemble opening number that so quickly and wittily sketches in their small-minded attitudes and stuck-in-a-rut-routines, even bull-headed Gaston (Luke Evans), who mistakenly thinks Belle will fall for him.

Soon enough, Belle’s eccentric father (Kevin Kline) is stuck in the forgotten castle in the wild forests outside their town, a captive of the beast, and she trades her freedom for his. This becomes the slowly thawing story of connection as empathy and romance as understanding that you’d hope to see. Belle and The Beast (here a CG-assisted buffalo man, not as crisp as his drawn counterpart or as haunting as Cocteau’s makeup version in the forties, but nonetheless the right balance of handsome and perverse) come to realize they’re both outsiders. Yearning for acceptance they fear the town will never give them, they therefore have to find it for themselves. A great added detail to the curse has made explicit the townspeople’s lost memories of the castle and its inhabitants, lost to suffer alone. Crisply making sense of the simple emotional beats, the movie plays nicely in the familiar while providing an emotional texture that is different enough without distracting.

The story of the curse and the potential for true love’s kiss to life it is told through the usual boisterous musical brio – “Be Our Guest” and “Something There” – and the soaring title ballad, the late Howard Ashman’s lyrics as sparklingly clever as ever. Composer Alan Menken returns to the mix as well, stirring in lovely additions to the score and terrific music-box gentle numbers that add to the film’s emotional underpinnings. Now Belle gets a chance to sing mournfully and wistfully of her childhood, and her dead mother. The cast of animate inanimate objects (French period detail speaking with the great voices of Emma Thompson, Ian McKellen, Ewan McGregor, Audra McDonald, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, and Stanley Tucci) laments their lost “days in the sun.” And, most moving of all, The Beast thunders out a ballad brushing up against Brief Encounter depths to what he sees as a bittersweet potential end to his story.

Sturdy, solid, industrial-strength studio craftsmanship, the film stretches out with a reliably enjoyable and transporting balance of faithful recreations and sweetly subtle new grace notes (an extra sigh, an added look, slightly richer subplots for the objects and the villagers). These moving considerations serve up exactly the movie its audience of pre-sold fans expects while noodling around the edges for new emotional terrain on the margins. It's doesn't all work. A few of the classic numbers are a touch clumsy as reimagined, usually through awkward attempts at rooting it all in gravity and probability. Did we need to know where the spotlight in “Be Our Guest” came from? Not really. We’re already buying a talking candlestick. So the movie loads up the airy fantasy with some over-explaining. But in other ways, the film’s core is strong, and the intoxicating tug of fairy tale logic is embroidered with appealing new embellishments, and the production is lavishly phony, a blend of theatrical fakery and computerized production design melded in velvety cool blues and gold cinematography. It borrows its best moments, but pulls off a likable, even transporting, new entertainment, with the music magnificently flowing, the images a picture book theme park, every big emotional beat landing, and the moving finale misty and warm in the best way.  You’ve seen it before, but, oh, how it works again!

Drift Away: RICKI AND THE FLASH

Ricki and the Flash is a humane family drama, warm and sympathetic, and without easy answers or cheap dramatics. It’s low-stakes and character-centric, attuned to relationships shifting slowly, in which an emotionally constipated family’s mostly buried grievances burble up and quiet back down again. When the credits roll, there’s no simple sense of closure. I don’t think this family has fully reconciled their disagreements, but I do believe they’re a little closer to happy than they were at the movie’s start. It’s comfortable mainstream entertainment smart about the way big life changes happen not through momentous milestones, but through small decisions that recalibrate mood and intention. Some of the characters are vaguely defined, and the ending is rushed, but there’s a solid center.

The film’s mostly focused on Ricki (Meryl Streep), a intermittently rude, barely solvent rocker who long ago was poised to be a Big Deal. Now she’s working in a grocery store by day, playing in a bar band, The Flash, by night. Decades earlier she left her husband (Kevin Kline) and children behind in the Midwest to pursue her rock and roll dreams in California. Ever since she’s been on the periphery of their lives, watching from afar as they’ve moved on while dreams of stardom passed her by. We see her getting some enjoyment out of playing with the band, filling a bar with the sounds of Tom Petty’s “American Girl” in the opening scene. But next, with a sarcastic look to her bandmate/hookup (Rick Springfield), she reluctantly launches into “Bad Romance,” tweaking her set in an obviously ill fitting attempt to stay relevant. An opportunity to regain her relevance as far as her family is concerned comes in the form of a bad-news phone call.

Her ex tells her their daughter (Streep’s actual daughter Mamie Gummer) is getting divorced, the husband having cheated. This left the young woman understandably distraught, so in flies Ricki to bring a mother’s touch to loosening depression. This causes all sorts of long-settled feelings of resentment, abandonment, and inadequacy to get unsettled once more. Ricki’s a source of well-intentioned messiness, an uneasy fit with a straight-laced family that has thrived without her. Though fighting, her daughter and ex find themselves reluctantly drawn into her charisma, while her other children (Sebastian Stan and Nick Westrate) and their stepmom (Audra McDonald) find themselves drawn into testy discussions. The family’s dynamics are sketched in with patient blocking and lengthy shots that breathe with the sweetly barbed dialogue.

Director Jonathan Demme is attuned to the hurt feelings behind their conflicts. But he’s most acutely aware of the issues of class at play. Ricki, a leather-wearing, heavily made-up bar singer, is on the precipice of declaring bankruptcy. She could barely afford the plane ticket. Meanwhile her bourgeois polos-and-khakis ex-husband’s incredibly successful job has gotten him a mansion so deluxe establishing shots could’ve been filmed at a golf resort. This contextualizes feelings, but Demme doesn’t denigrate any character or their position. No one is in the right, or in the wrong. He brings a collaborative spirit, allowing the actors a relaxed rhythm. It doesn’t have the snap of his early comedies (like 1986’s Something Wild) or the ensemble depth of his most recent family drama (2008’s Rachel Getting Married), but it has a comfortable feeling despite a screenplay that treats everyone as background to Ricki’s narrative.

Supporting characters are thinly developed, but filled with such pleasant, instantly appealing, performances. So good with what little they’re given, I wished Kline, Gummer, McDonald, and Springfield had more. They’re solid presences holding down predictable arcs, the better to draw attention to the character work Streep’s doing, I suppose. Screenwriter Diablo Cody shows fine detail in filling out Ricki’s life and the effect her decisions had on those around her, but also the ways in which she’s held to a double standard based on her gender. Cody’s writing typically shows a sharp observation of women’s lives. In Juno, Jennifer’s Body, and Young Adult we see specificity in varieties of female experience beyond typical Hollywood fare. That’s what’s best about Ricki and the Flash, in the end a small, sentimental, and even slight comic drama that isn’t nearly as interesting as an ideal confluence of its three main talents. (Demme, Cody, and Streep have all been better.) But it has a warm affection, inclusive and quiet, that puts it in a cozy place multiplex fare all too rarely finds. When Ricki steps on stage, able to express through her covers what she can't as herself, it hits all the right notes.

Bucket List Hangover: LAST VEGAS

Far and away the funniest thing about Last Vegas, a comedy about a bunch of old guys reuniting for a weekend in Las Vegas, is something that’s not intended to be a joke. It’s a movie about guys trying to recapture their better days that hopes the audience remembers its cast’s. Michael Douglas, Morgan Freeman, Robert DeNiro, and Kevin Kline have been on the big screen since before I was born and in their many decades of work have been in some of the best movies of all time. Last Vegas is not among their better efforts, but at least it’s not a total embarrassment. It’s certainly not any more than not an embarrassment, but that’s not nothing. The movie is built only to capitalize on their likability derived from all their time spent building up loads of audience affection. It’s counting on it, in fact, to fill in generic jokes and slight plotting. The movie is pleasant, undemanding, and flimsy.

It’s an old person hangout movie in which likable and wrinkly familiar faces sit around and enjoy each other’s company while working through some old tensions that are saddled upon their characters in a mostly doomed attempt to differentiate them from the actors’ personas. The story starts when the guy played by Michael Douglas calls his old pals and tells them he’s getting married in Vegas that weekend. They, being retired and not particularly busy, make the appropriate travel arrangements and head off for a septuagenarian bachelor party. It’s The Bucket List by way of The Hangover, but not nearly as schmaltzy or raunchy as that comparison suggests. There’s all the gentle geriatric humor you’d suspect such a premise would invite.

Talk of surgery, pills, and doctors’ orders mixes freely with misunderstanding slang, fumbling around gadgets, shouting over pounding nightclub music, and talking to the much younger partiers around them. One young lady tells Kline he reminders her of “Grandpa Lou.” The concierge tells them their suite was previously booked by 50 Cent. “Fifty people in here?” Freeman marvels. A nice lounge singer played by Mary Steenburgen shows up from time to time, and she’s a nice break from the borderline sleazy montages of poolside bikinis and showgirls. It’s nice to give the guys someone closer to their own age to interact with.

Director Jon Turteltaub, who as of late has been making tame action movies like National Treasure for Disney, and screenwriter Dan Fogelman, of Crazy, Stupid, Love and The Guilt Trip, keep the proceedings loose and mellow. They don’t spend too much time insisting on their movie’s funniness, which makes it easier to take the fact that it isn’t all that funny. It goes down smoothly since it’s not spending its time being obviously unfunny. It’s just watchable and friendly. Even the prerequisite mistaken identity crossdresser gag is relatively kind and free of shame or awkwardness, as a more casually hateful comedy would stoop to. No, here all are welcome to relax with the old guys, have a few drinks, reminisce, play some blackjack, and party till it’s time to take more Lipitor. It’s too somnambulant to work up the energy for more than a handful of moments that even threaten to be in bad taste.

Without being in a hurry to get much of anywhere, Last Vegas simply shuffles along through rote comic beats and unrushed sightseeing. Someone’s going to fall into the pool. Someone’s going to either win or lose a great deal of his pension on the casino floor. Someone’s going to try to use that little blue pill before the weekend is over. It’s a film that lazily lollops its way to pretty much exactly where you think it’ll go. There’s not much inherently funny about any of this – no, not when Kline puts on his reading glasses to ogle a pretty girl, or when Freeman busts a disco move, or when DeNiro is grinded upon by LMFAO’s Redfoo. It’s barely even worth a chuckle when 50 Cent turns up as himself, asking the guys to keep the noise down because he’s trying to sleep. It’s supposed to be funny because he’s 50 Cent, much like the rest of the lame jokes are supposed to be funny because of the cast of legendary actors who also happen to be old. It’s a bland, vacant experience. I’d rather see a movie about what these guys did between takes. Over the credits they could roll footage of whatever they’ve bought with their paychecks. 

There's Always a Catch: NO STRINGS ATTACHED

It could just be the recent drought of good romantic comedies that is affecting my judgment, but I found No Strings Attached to be a surprisingly solid effort in the genre. It’s no great thing, and of course it falls back on cliché more often than it should, but the movie is stacked with a talented supporting cast and a likeable lead in Natalie Portman, all of whom are far too good to sleepwalk through what could otherwise have been a mediocre project. It’s not much, but its good enough.

It almost goes without saying that Natalie Portman is considerably more relaxed here than in Black Swan. She’s believable as an ambitious young professional who prefers one-night stands to commitment, believing relationships to be too complicated to mess with. This is the one small change screenwriter Elizabeth Meriwether brings to the genre, making the woman the lead who is afraid to commit to the relationship and the man the dewy-eyed heart-on-the-sleeve romantic who really, really wants to settle down with the right person. It seems like that should be an awfully trivial change for a 2011 rom-com, hardly worth mentioning, except that it points out how awfully retrograde recent efforts have been, especially if they starred Katherine Heigl.

But now that I’ve brought up the flipped genre-dictated gender roles I may as well mention the actor’s name. He’s Ashton Kutcher, every bit as bland as ever. Kutcher and Portman play characters who briefly met as kids at summer camp, saw each other years later at a University of Michigan frat party, and then bump into each other after a few more years, discovering that they both currently live in Los Angeles. After quite a bit of set-up, the two of them decide to start a relationship but keep it purely physical. This is treated in the advertising as an edgy, sexy plot development, but in reality the movie plays out as if this is merely a brief stop on the road to true love and happy endings. Or rather, it’s just a minor complication in the route of boy gets girl, boy loses girl, and…I won’t spoil the ending, will I? It feels much safer and much more comfortably ensconced in genre convention in practice than it sounds in theory. The end, for better or worse, upholds all conventional romance norms.

Portman and Kutcher have some nice chemistry. Luckily, the movie proves that Kutcher isn’t necessarily an inherent source of irritation, especially when much better performers surround him. Per rom-com dictates, each lead gets a group of loveably goofy friends and family. In this case, these characters are a group of comedy ringers who attempt, and often succeed, in wringing humor from even the stupidest of punchlines. Kutcher gets a goofy semi-celebrity father (Kevin Kline), a dotty co-worker (Lake Bell), a ditzy ex (Ophelia Lovibond) and two drinking buddies (Jake Johnson and Chris “Ludacris” Bridges). Portman’s even better off in the funny friends department, rooming with The Office’s Mindy Kaling and indie darling Greta Gerwig, Between the three of them, Portman, Kaling, and Gerwig have such a wonderfully warm and amusing relationship I almost wished the movie could have dumped Kutcher and followed these ladies into far funnier places.

Anyways, the plot’s awfully conventional – it’s gears turn far too slowly in the third act – but its pleasantly charming cast is committed to their roles. The tone of the movie is not hard-R raunchy, but more of a barely-R sweetness. After early attempts with uneasy crudeness, it settles down nicely. The romance at the core is believable, the actors are likable, the score by John Debney is quiet and pleasant, and the time passes by rather smoothly under the slick, professional direction of Ivan Reitman. I had long thought that we had left him in the 80’s, back when he made comedy classic Ghostbusters. After all, his output since has been spotty to say the least with such forgotten flops like Six Days, Seven Nights and My Super Ex-Girlfriend. He had aged out of his window of relevance and couldn’t recapture what made his own work good. No Strings Attached is a nice surprise, though I hesitate to call it a return. It’s a simple, predictable effort, and not nearly as edgy as it thinks it is, but it finds a nice tone and plays to the strengths of its cast.