Tag: Hattie Morahan

Wow, how do you introduce a tale as old as time? Something as true as it can be? You just gotta speak from the heart.

I do love the animated Beauty and the Beast film. It celebrates intelligence! It has one of my favorite introduction songs. Gaston is fascinating, with his own great song. But I have always had issues for it. So I better get it off my chest now:

The main takeaway from Beauty and the Beast is bullshit. The prince was punished for not seeing someone’s true beauty, so he was turned into an ugly creature. To learn his lesson, he needs to fall in love and be loved in return, with a nice kiss too, before he turns 21. (Which of course means he was punished as a kid, joy). So how does it eventually happen? By getting the perfect person in his life. She is smart, kind, but also the hottest chick in the village. To really drive the point home, she should have been not matched the perfect standard of beauty. It is kind of crap. Shrek and Shallow Hal end up driving the point home better.

Okay, no more of that. I also appreciate that Gaston is set up as a typical old school Disney Prince, who just wants love because they are beautiful, so it sort of shows Disney going away from their older film tropes.

What I am really getting at is that I am excited for the live action version of Beauty and the Beast. I was not excited for the live action Cinderella, because the plot of Cinderella is shit and celebrates obedience to mean people and doing chores until a prince can take you away. Fuck that.

Give that bitch a book. Bitches love books.

In some nondescript village in old timey France, there was a castle. None of this is Paris, we know that for certain. There was a prince (Dan Stevens), who lived in the castle, and he was mean. He was so mean to some haggy bitch, that the haggy bitch turned him into a really hairy dude and all of his servants into utensils and shit. What in the fuck!

Now years later, they have almost given up hope at becoming human again. The Beast has to not just fall in love, but have someone love him back. They are depressed, cold, and a spell was put on the area for people to forget about their existence. So that doesn’t help either.

Thankfully, there is a really freaky girl in that poor provincial nearby town. Belle (Emma Watson), a girl who was trained to use that brain of hers, an inventor, a girl who likes books and is somehow still decent looking. Some shit goes down with her dad (Kevin Kline). He finds himself locked up in this castle forever. Thankfully, their horse was also trained to use its brain and he is able to take her to the castle and HOLY FUCK, A BEAST!

Using that goddamn brain of hers, she is able to trick her dad into taking his place, planning to escape in the future. You know, because she is so youthful. But then she falls in love. Oh, way too early. A lot of strife happens. But after a good old fashioned food orgy, she starts to love the place, and thinks about calling it home. Plus, it can clean itself, with the magical slave item army and all.

Also starring Ewan McGregor as a candelabra, Gugu Mbatha-Raw as a duster, Ian McKellen as a clock, Emma Thompson as a teapot, Stanley Tucci as a piano, Audra McDonald as a dresser, Luke Evans as a tall, dark, strong, handsome brute, Josh Gad as his miniature life mate, and also Hattie Morahan as a begger.

Gaston’s face cannot be shown because Gorgon Reviews is not a big enough website.

Remember Cinderella? That film I already mentioned? Again, it was okay. It was colorful. Shit story. Good dresses. A terrible idea for a first run. It was like the Universal Monsters series trying to give us Dracula Untold as the start of their shared Universe. But now they gotta get The Mummy to save their asses. Yes, I recognize we have had a few other live action films since Cinderella, but this is the first one since then to be about a Disney Princess!

Beauty and the Beast delivers, and it delivers hard.

Of course, we get the best parts from the original. Bonjour is fascinating, with a village of real people, and we still get the “Please Let Me Through!” line. Be Our Guest is an explosion of extravagance. The Gaston song starts off awkward for me, but grows into its own, feels like a giant party, and has a few surprises. (Although, the chorus of that song is also almost impossible to understand)

But we also get a whole lot new! An expanded introduction, more backstory on the Beast and Belle’s lives before the film and their parents, bigger connections to the castle and the village and why it is a big surprise, Belle being a stronger female character, and more. AND! Alan Goddamn Menken, the Disney musical genius, came back to rewrite some of his songs from two decades ago, plus a few new ones. Three at that. Day in the Sun and Evermore are great additions to the film and Evermore had me crying. And don’t worry, the Human Again song added to the animated film does not take place in this movie.

I am annoyed that at the timing of this review, I have to wait a week to hear some of the newer songs again, just to see if I like them as much as I am writing.

Beauty and the Beast is not just a remake. It is also a re imagining. With more backstories, more lines for side yet important characters, everyone feels more fleshed out. Even Gaston and especially LeFou. We get some good call backs, and good changes to match the times. It was an incredible job done by the team, who treated their source material with respect, and really matched what made the first film great 26 years ago.

Ian McKellen and Michael Fassbander have an interesting thing in common. Fassbender has played two different roles that McKellen has more famously played before him. They were both Magneto and they were both Macbeth.

This is all technically irrelevant, since Fassbender has never played Sherlock Holmes. But Benedict Cumberbatch has played him! And they are basically the same person.

This is a bad intro, in that I am now going to hope that Ian McKellen will play a second role that Cumberbatch had famously played before him. We can’t see McKellen as an older Alan Turing, unfortunately. That’d be preferable. Honestly, most of Cumberbatch’s roles are not super famous, so we might have to wait for McKellen to play a very old Julian Assange. I assume time travel will be involved to get this done.

Either way, that nonsense aside, I think Mr. Holmes is the first time anyone has looked at the Holmes character, super old and near death. The only one attempting to give a closer look into the man behind the myths, the man without a Watson.

They meant a literal closer look of course.

Sherlock Holmes (McKellen) is now very old, in his 90s, and living far away from Baker Street. Watson had finally left him after getting married, leaving Sherlock to continue work on his own. But something happened that caused him to retire from detective-ing altogether. He instead wanted to move to the coast, in a nice house alone, to become a beekeeper and read books all day long.

He isn’t alone though. No, he is too old to be alone. He has a housekeeper (Laura Linney) and her son (Milo Parker) living with them to take care of the day to day needs. And of course he has regular doctor (Roger Allam) visits for his ever declining health. Did you know he is losing his memory? He can’t remember simple things, such as the names of people he used to interact with or even just interacted with. He even forgot the boys name at one point!

Thanks to his failing memory, he has to do things before it goes away. Like stalling, with plot of him going to Japan to meet basically a stranger (Hiroyuki Sanada) to eat a flower to help with his memory. And finally reading all those damn books that Watson wrote about him, turning him into a caricature of his actual self. He sets off to write one of the famous mysteries down in his own words, one without all the pomp and circumstances, because he himself can’t remember how it ended, just that it was important. All the while passing on some wisdom to the boy in his home and hopefully stop being such a smart asshole to everyone he meets.

Also featuring Hattie Morahan and Patrick Kennedy.

I assume he is actually telling the kid about his inherent X-gene and how to exploit others.

If anything, Mr. Holmes gets points for trying something different with a character who has had dozens of film and TV iterations. We don’t even have a Watson in this film! No Watson at all! It is just one guy losing his mind. I can always appreciate it when they take an established work or character and give it a completely new flavor.

That being said, despite its originality the story ended up being a weak point. There were two stories being told through flashbacks while Holmes is hanging out in his cottage trying to remember them. The Alzheimer based plot allowed for things to take their time and force the stories to pace themselves out. It just felt lazy though watching it. It is not interesting to watch someone slowly remember events, especially if the events aren’t life threatening in any way. Memento was about a guy slowly remembering events, and it was a well done crime thriller. This one the stakes were no where near as high, so it made me wonder what the point was.

The good news is that it was for the most part well acted. Everyone played their parts well, even though it felt like McKellen was literally dying in front of the camera as the movie went on. Playing an old and enfeebled person will not get you on the cover of any magazines. It was also a gorgeous movie with its set pieces, costumes and cinematography. It just also featured a mostly forgettable story with only a bit of the wit I have come to know and love from a made up detective character.