The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Written at the time of the film's release...

Something from Nothing
or
No Man is an Island of Misfit Toys 

Charlie (Logan Lerman) is starting his first year in High School as a freshman and he has a lot to learn. He's shy, introverted, and fragile the result of some trauma we know not what going in. He walks the corridors friendless, a punching bag for the cool kids and their posses. His parents (Dylan McDermott and Kate Walsh) are lightly caring, and his English teacher (Paul Rudd) reassures—"If you make one friend on your first day, you'll do good." "If my English professor is the only friend I make today, that'll be sorta depressing."

But Charlie does have one friend, writing to him about his experiences, pouring out his frustrations and observations in letter after letter about his "trying not to be a loser." The friend is anonymous, may not even exist, or once existed, but those letters keep Charlie going and serve as his avenue of expression, rather than having his day pulled out of him at the family dinner table. It's an uphill battle from some valley that isn't discussed, but Charlie is self-aware enough to know some perspective. "My life is officially an after-school special," he grouses.

At a football game, he meets Patrick (Ezra Miller), a senior and the subject of some casual bullying, but Patrick has a wicked sense of humor that he throws out with no hesitancy as a shield. Charlie gravitates to him, and meets Patrick's step-sister Sam (Emma Watson), also a Senior, but who is coming back from "having a reputation." After the football game, the three hang out at a diner and compare notes of commonality, which involve a distinct lack of fitting in with the high school social structure, and Charlie is introduced to more of the group, who hold fast, hang out, and provide safety in numbers and a fresh perspective on the puerile benefits of normalcy.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower (written and directed by Steven Chbosky from his own novel) is a fine quirky example of a "Coming of Age" movie, that sub-set of the teen flick where lessons are learned (his life really is an after-school special) and is not so much a film about growing up, as growing out. Growing out of the insular self-inspection, narcissism and selfishness that is comfortable and has no risk, it's dark and warm and safe in that little "black cave of the psyche." But is it? That cave only echoes one's own thoughts back to us, providing no perspective and no horizon to reach to or for.

Yeah, it's pretty safe in there...if there aren't any demons or other creatures of the nightmare lying in wait to strike when you're most vulnerable. And we all have those. And even if we don't, the echoes of our own thoughts are only phantoms and zephyrs, not sustaining, and if that's all we cling to, they become echoes of echoes, distorting, becoming less clear, and often impenetrably undecipherable—a feedback loop. 

And feedback loops, uninterrupted, can become weapons.

Charlie is scared. And ashamed. And that limits his choices, when he does make a choice. Most of the time, things are just foisted on him and he has to make a decision: like this, or don't? Comfortable or not? Aware, or comatose? And by the time, he makes a decision, it's usually too late, putting him a tail-spin, and another trap. His fellow wallflowers are in traps, too (isn't that what High School is all about?), but one thing he learns is that they're not the only ones and the traps, self-made or imposed are universal.

It's a good film, with good imagery, but a neophyte director's tendency to hit things a little too square—the shot from the communion wafer to the LSD tab, please—but the performances feel real, Emma Watson is a helluva dancer, and it's a good trip down memory lane, now that it's gone and out of our lives. "See ya, wouldn't wanna be ya"

For the truth of the matter is, we all grow out. We couldn't survive if we didn't. Yes, "we are infinite" as the movie's tag line wants to be sure we know.  

But not individually.

And not by ourselves.

Out of the black cave and into the light

Little Women (2019)

Lady Bard
or
"Who Wrote 'Little Women'?"*

It's the umpteenth remake of "Little Women" (Let's catalogue and differentiate them by "Jo's"- there's the 1917 and 1918 silent versions, 1933—the Katherine Hepburn version directed by George Cukor, 1949—June Allyson's directed by Mervyn LeRoy, CBS-TV musical version in 1958, 1970 BBC version, 1978 TV version, 1994—Winona Ryder's directed by Gillian Armstrong (a woman, fancy that!), PBS Masterpiece did one in 2017, 2018—a "modern re-telling", and that's not even counting the handful of TV series and an opera based on Louisa May Allcott's 1868-1869 classic novel about the March sisters, growing up and surviving love, war, societal pressures, class disparities—not to mention inherent entrenched sexism—during the U.S. Civil War and its aftermath. Pa March is a pastor by profession and away during the war and the March women have to fend for themselves in times of privation in a small rural town in Massachusetts...with no man in the house.

Despite that last part, the book became a classic, much to the surprise of Alcott and her publisher, who only went forward with its publication when his niece found and read the uncompleted manuscript and asked him "What happens to the little women?"

What doesn't? The daughters of Marmee March (Laura Dern in Greta Gerwig's new 2019 version) are as different as could be: oldest Meg (Emma Watson) is a beauty and is the most responsible of the girls, graceful and who should be an actress if she had such frivolities in mind; next is "Jo"—Josephine (Saoirse Ronan), the drama queen and tomboyish, who wants more to be a writer than a wife, writes plays for her sisters and holds aspirations outside the home—she is closest to the author in spirit; next is Beth (Eliza Scanlen), shy, domestically skilled and musical—she plays the piano—she is the most tranquil of the March girls, serves as the voice of reason in their squabbles and has no aspirations for a future career or husband and lives in the moment; the youngest is Amy (Florence Pugh), mercurial, vain and selfish and in a perpetual up-hill battle to make herself noticed apart from her sisters. She has a constant sense of being handed down and, to escape the shadow of her sisters, aspires to painting and achieves a new found maturity when she is taken by her Aunt (Meryl Streep) as a companion on a trip to Europe.

The film is familiar in incident if you've seen any film version or read the book. The Marsh's are taught to be empathetic to their neighbors and are rewarded by the attention of neighbor Mr. Laurence (Chris Cooper, never sentimentalizing) and his charming "black-sheep" grandson Theodore—who prefers the less formal "Laurie"—played by a brilliant Timothée Chalamet.  The Laurence's will rotate in and out of the Marsh's orbits during the course of the story, if not impacting them at least having a gravitational influence on their actions. There will be squabbles and jealousies and defiance and regrets, some that are quickly resolved and others that will forever simmer. One of them will die of scarlet fever. Two of them will travel and grow in the process and the survivors will find love but not in the places they (or the readers) expect.

What has always intrigued about "Little Women" is Alcott's subversive way of answering the publisher's daughter's question of what happened to the little women. And the versions that have been presented previously have gone down the path of a regular timeline following the Marsh women from adolescence to adulthood in the same way Alcott presented it in the story. If it's good enough for the author, after all...

But, I think Alcott would have been intrigued by Greta Gerwig's version just for its defiant way of trying to find a better means to tell the story, and in so doing, taking the book and making it an experiment in literary quantum mechanics.

Yeah, I know. Stay with me here.

When we first see Saoirse Ronan (and she's terrific in this but nobody's not), it is later in the timeline. She's in New York at a publisher's, screwing up her courage to present a story that she has written and the appointment that she has with the fellow in charge is not going well. What she's writing is not to buyers' tastes she is man-splained: "Morals don't sell these days. Make it short and spicy and if there's a woman in it make sure that, by the end, she's married...or dead." How Brönte. But, not entirely daunted, she goes back to her boarding house and is so distracted by her putting notes to page that she has to be told that she's on fire as she's standing too close to the grate.

At the same time, youngest March, Amy, is in Paris accompanying her dowager Aunt when she runs into Laurie all the way from Conchord, Mass. where he is drifting and she invites him to a party to which, as he has tended to be with one exception, noncommittal. Meanwhile, Jo, back in New York, is struggling with her writing and seeks the opinion of a Frederich Bhaer (Louis Garrel), a professor and fellow boarder, who has expressed interest in her work. His opinion, to Jo, is damning with faint praise. Another man, another set-back. But, a telegram from Conchord informs her that younger sister Beth is sick and not improving, and Jo sets her mind to returning home to help her sister's recovery. After all, she's done it before.

It is only then that Gerwig begins the story of "Little Women" in a semi-chronological and traditional manner, but she will interrupt that chronology at optimum times of contrast to deepen how things have changed between the girls' past and their present situations, providing back-story and insight as the Marsh women go through the toughest life-and-death situation of their lives, the one that will impact them the most, the repercussions of which effectively ends their childhoods and set their futures on a more sure track.

To my mind, this is the best version I've seen of "Little Women," and the best version of a "classic" since the Ang Lee-Emma Thompson version of Sense and Sensibility. It adheres to the times and constraints of the period in which it's based—no one goes around saying they're going to "throw someone under the bus" or some other hogwash-anachronism to satisfy contemporary audiences. It doesn't pander to modern audiences to buy cheap currency, and it does make sure that "the stakes" of the story conform to the limited status of women in the 1860's, almost out of desperation. There is no goal of emancipation shining at the top of the hill for the characters to reach. They are stuck with their lot and must make the best of it. At one point, Pugh's Amy comes right out and says it at a moment of desperation—she has been challenged by young Master Laurence over the man she has been seeing and from whom she expects a proposal (it is his way of worming his way into her affections after being turned down by Amy's older sister Jo):

Amy March: Well, I believe we have some power over who we love, it isn't something that just happens to a person.

Theodore 'Laurie' Laurence: I think the poets might disagree.

Amy March: Well. I'm not a poet, I'm just a woman. And as a woman I have no way to make money, not enough to earn a living and support my family. Even if I had my own money, which I don't, it would belong to my husband the minute we were married. If we had children they would belong to him not me. They would be his property. So don't sit there and tell me that marriage isn't an economic proposition, because it is. It may not be for you but it most certainly is for me.

Meanwhile, half a world away, Ronan's Jo ("I can't get over my disappointment at being a girl!") is arguing the other side of the coin (although she has always been the more independent of the two), is weakening, and is reconsidering young Master Laurence, more because she has been on her own and she misses her childhood and its possibilities rather than her lot as an adult and merely "being":

Marmee March: What is it?

Jo March: Perhaps... perhaps I was too quick in turning him down.

Marmee March: Do you love him?

Jo March: If he asked me again, I think I would say yes... Do you think he'll ask me again?

Marmee March: But do you love him?

Jo March: [Tearing up] I know that I care more to be loved. I want to be loved.

Marmee March: That is not the same as loving.

Jo March: Women, they have minds and they have souls as well as just hearts. And they've got ambition and they've got talent as well as just beauty, and I'm so sick of people saying that love is just all a woman is fit for. I'm so sick of it! But... I am so lonely.

And her choices are few. And within her own family there are limited options. To quote her publisher, end up either married or dead. Jo comes back to Conchord because her next-youngest sister Beth has had a reoccurrence of the scarlet fever she'd had years earlier, and Jo, thinking her singular care and devotion helped her previous recovery charges back. "You can't stop God's will," says Beth. "God hasn't met my will yet," she imperiously shoots back. "What Jo wills shall be done." And it's here where Gerwig's back and forth story-telling has its largest pay-off, emotionally and directorially and moves the story to its best gambit.

To help Beth's condition, she takes her to the seaside, where this exchange takes place: 

Beth March: I love to listen to you read, Jo, but I love it even better when you read the stories you've written.

Jo March: I don't have any new stories.

Beth March: Why not?

Jo March: Haven't written any.

Beth March: You have pencil and paper. Sit here and write me something.

Jo March: Uhh. I can't, I don't think I can anymore.

Beth March: Why?

Jo March: It's just, no one even cares to hear my stories anyway.

Beth March: Write something for me. You're a writer. Even before anyone knew or paid you. I'm very sick and you must do what I say. Do what Marmee taught us to do. Do it for someone else.

And she does. In a weeks-long effort, she writes, re-writes, edits, and organizes her story—which is a semi-autobiographical account of the life of the March family, her family, and submits it to her publisher who is less than enthusiastic, but it is found by his daughters who are enchanted and ask the question of him—"What happens to the little women?" And so the publisher takes a gamble—hedging the bet with some (of course) editorial suggestions, but Jo gets her book published and watches as the inks are mixed, the pages printed, folded and cut, the binding stitched and the title etched: "Little Women by Louisa May Alcott."

And that's what the cover of the book says: "Little Women by Louisa May Alcott." It's not the character of "Jo." It's Louisa...and Gerwig, by doing that, explodes her "Little Women" adaptation, not just telling the story of Jo and the March sisters and Marmie and Laurie and all the others, but providing the inspiration—as Alcott's life truly was—for the story, for the publication...and for the classic, before it became a classic and a "must-read" and then atrophied to be part of a list on someone's syllabus. 

It was a life. And it's publication as fiction changed things, not only in the prejudices of publishing, but what could be written of, what could be appreciated by children (and adults) and in the aspirations of women (even if the story ends in either marriage or death). Gerwig not only makes the best adaptation of the novel in her Little Women, she also shows how the book that she has adapted nudged things just a bit forward in a patriarchal society—even if the patriarch isn't present—and how women could be more than just fated to be the ingenue in a romance, but rather the vehicle of her fate. That's big. That's revolutionary. And it's been missing from other versions.

It's an adaptation made with considerable love...and considerable respect.

* This is a running gag they used to do on the old spy-comedy television show"Get Smart!", where they had rather insane passwords and call-signs, one of which was "Who Wrote 'Little Women'?" the contact usually said "The book or the picture?" or "The book or the Broadway musical?" and Maxwell Smart, Agent 86 of CONTROL would inevitably blurt out, incredulously "It was a BOOK?!" But, then, when the head of CONTROL first introduced the call-sign "Who wrote 'Little Women?'" to him, 86 replied "Lonely little men...?" Of course, he would.

My Week with Marilyn

The Battle of Mrs. Miller ("Whose Side Are You On?")
or
"What Becomes a Legend Most?"

"We are such stuff as dreams are made on" says Prospero in "The Tempest." Prospero and Shakespeare run through My Week with Marilyn (the latest confection of young love and fictionalized reality—with appearance by Judi Dench—from the Weinstein Company) like Caliban, a spirit of confused form and intent in Shakespeare's play. All the revelers in Simon Curtis' film (written—especially well by Adrian Hodges) are real, based on real individuals and events, but how true they are to the source is questionable, given as they are to interpretation and expectations, and to the dreams of the participants, for whom the movies and fame is a business, an art, as well as personal obsessions.

None more so than Norma Jeane Baker, who inhabited our world and our dreams as Marilyn Monroe, a free spirit trapped in prison bars formed of klieg lights, a vessel that men poured their love and lust onto and women their princess dreams of being the most popular girl in the world. Heavy, heavy burden, that, and she bore it from the lowliest, sleeziest agent in Hollywood to Kings of the Sports World and Men of Letters. She also bore it from other film stars, who looked at her fame and wanted a piece of it (and maybe her, as well), including Sir Laurence Olivier, who insisted on casting Marilyn in his production of The Prince and the Showgirl, a trifling movie if ever there was one, despite being written by Terence Rattigan, and despite having had a success of it on the stage. 

What Marilyn saw in doing the movie was obvious; she was working with the world's greatest Shakespearean actor and director on a film written by an acknowledged writer. Why Olivier wanted to do this is less so: financial success for his un-barded film; name recognition to draw the crowds for a film out of his metier; maybe he just wanted Marilyn, as so many men did, and the new bride of American playwright Arthur Miller (not the best looking guy in the world) might have provided a world to conquer for the actor who played so much ambitious Shakespearean royalty. Whatever the reason, Olivier was constantly frustrated with the fragile, neurotic actress, who had other concerns besides working with the exacting director—it was the only film she made outside of her protective home studio, 20th Century Fox, the only film she made outside of the United States, and the first film of her fledgling production company—all unique concerns that might have distracted the actress, on top of her new marriage to Miller and a hushed-up pregnancy during filming that resulted in a miscarriage.

The film that Hodges and Curtis have crafted from the events and a tell-all written about it by filmmaker Colin Clark (played by Eddie Redmayne), is one of the better ones to be made of this type. Casting has a lot to do with it. Michelle Williams is not the first person I would picture as Norma Jean, but the versatile actress manages to capture the presence of the human being at the core of the star and suggest the winsomeness that charmed so many in her orbit.

Kenneth Branagh has been linked with Olivier for most of his career, paralleling the legendary thesp by making his own film directing debut with a gritty, strapping version of Olivier's own first directorial effort of Henry V. His portrayal of Olivier might seem too easy, but there was nothing about the man that was 'easy," and Branagh has a fine time, mixing Olivier voices, accents, and mercurial swings throughout the film—his Olivier is never consistent in mood, manner or method, just as you'd expect a Master Thespian to be (he maximizes the precision of great lines like "Teaching Miss Monroe to ACT is like trying to teach URDU to a BADGER!"), but undermined with the idea that Monroe's "presence" on-screen had nothing to do with his efforts behind the camera.

Rounding out the cast are such fine performers as Toby Jones (hilariously indecent as Marilyn's publicist and future Planet of the Apes producer Arthur P. Jacobs), Dench—playing a woman she once acted with, Dame Sybil Thorndike, Dougray Scott as Arthur Miller, and Weinstein go-to girl Julia Ormond as Olivier wife-partner, Vivien Leigh, as well as turns by Zoë Wanamaker, Derek Jacobi, Emma Watson, and one of my favorites, Michael Kitchen. Redmayne is fine and callow, as he's supposed to be, eyes always a little bit wide at a new turn of events in the film business, and a tentative, crooked half-smile his constant fall-back.

The script is full of great zingers about fame, fortune, the madness of the movie business, and how hard people work to make things look effortless (and on-time), as well as loads of gossipy references for "the blue-hairs." It also has a nice undercurrent that touches on fantasy and reality—hence the Prospero—and the process by which reality and the illusion of reality can really mess us up...if we believe our own "press." Sometimes the illusion of reality is nothing more than fantasy—the very stuff that dreams are made on. And the makers of fantasy are just as susceptible as the rest of us—maybe even more. My Week with Marilyn brings to the imagination such thoughts, beyond just being a tale of the Myth of Marilyn. 

She did exist in reality. And her reality had little to do with her fantasy. The camera loved her and made us love her image. 

And that's what killed her. 



 Olivier and Monroe on-set and Monroe at the premiere party

Beauty and the Beast (2017)

There's Something There That Wasn't There Before...
or
Be Our Grist

Okay, a big confession out of the gate: I didn't like it.

Now, big back-pedal: I'm a huge, huge fan of Disney's animated version of Beauty and the Beast, thinking it a near-perfect movie and a damn near perfect musical—you can't argue with the wit and artistry of song-writers Alan Menken and Howard Ashman in their prime, and the two men had a strong hand in the production of the film, the construction of it, and the Disney animators, emboldened by their work on The Little Mermaid, stretched their imaginations and the medium's potential, creating what was literally the strongest animated film of that golden era of Disney's resurgence as the preeminent producer of animation in the world.

So...I kinda liked the original, as you can tell. So, my ambivalence to the live-action of it—even the idea of it—has nothing to do with the material.

It is entirely due to presentation.

For example, compare the animated version of "Little Town" ("Belle")...

 

...with the "live" version:

Now, my impression when I watched the film on the big screen was that the song had been slowed down. You look at the two together here and they're actually close to the same tempo...but the presentation is slowed down, parsed, and robbed of momentum in the live-action version. The cartoon version pranced. This one kinda ambles. It feels longer than its 129 minutes (by contrast, the animated version zips by at 84 minutes). It costs more to create a minute of animation as opposed to a minute of film, even in this CGI-laden production world. So, it was to the animation team's advantage to make things quick, quick, quick. But, the pace helped the film, as well.

Emma Watson "Julie Andrews" it as Belle

But, Bill Condon's direction of the live action version is a bit leaden (it works for Gods and Monsters and the "Twilight" films, but destroys musicals like Dreamgirls), as if he wanted you to notice all the ornateness that went into the making of the film. That's nice when it comes to Technical Oscar-time, but it sure makes Beauty and the Beast a little turgid. Early on, I began to worry that the "Beauty and the Beast" sequence, the weakest part of Disney's animated version, would be interminable in this one...and it is...but there were some other changes not to the film's betterment.

1. Padding: Some songs are streamlined, some are shortened or have replaced lyrics ("And every last inch of me's covered in hair!" is Naired out of "Gaston"). But, there are new songs, the most significant of which is "Days in the Sun," by Menken and lyricist Tim Rice, an "I Want" song sung by the ensemble in which the transformed castle staff remember what life was like as humans (which, story-wise, replaces the Menken-Ashman song cut out of the original—"Human Again" which is too bad). The thing about this and the other new songs is that you can immediately tell it's not Menken and Ashman because Rice's lyrics are so godawful uninspired. Where Ashman took chances with humor, subject matter, and a complexity of vocabulary, Rice's libretto is as bland as vanilla. In "Gaston," Ashman ended lines with "intimidating," expectorating," "decorating," and "anticipating," Rice stops at single syllable words, the most egregious song of which is an uninspired "Farewell" song sung by the Beast, "Evermore," where the title is the most complex word of the piece. Other new songs include: "Aria"—an unnecessary performance piece for a ball sequence in an equally unnecessary prelude showing the Prince's pre-Beast narcissism; a song for Belle's father "How Does a Moment Last Forever?"; "Home" for a diversion to see Belle's house growing up; and that "Days in the Sun" thing, which adds a good sub-text to the story, but brings up story issues that we'll get to later.

2. The Beast: Here's where the animated Beast has it all over the CGI Beast—expression. Disney animators, especially Glen Keane, gave the transformed Prince a bullish bear look that had a malleable range of expressions from rage to gob-smacked delight. The CGI folks must have been trying to concentrate on realism and making the thing look fearsome because the "live-action" Beast barely cracks a smile.

When he does, it's a wan thing that reminds me more of George C. Scott (who actually played The Beast in a 1976 Hallmark Hall of Fame version with his wife Trish van Devere) when he wanted to smile charmingly without exposing his teeth (which could be pretty frightening). Perhaps that's the way Dan Stevens played it in his motion capture suit, but it makes The Beast a bit "johnny-one-note" and, more than that, makes you wonder what Belle would see in this glum mountebank. I mean, geez, let's see what might appeal to her, so she doesn't seem like someone who'd "settle." 

As it is, this Beast has none of the range of the animated one. It is hard to see his potential, and, frankly, hard to see what Belle sees in him, so dour and morbid he is. In fact, the only reason she might think him beyond appearances is his decision to let her escape to try and save her father (Kevin Kline), who is also a little down in the dumps the whole movie. Hm. Maybe that's what she sees in him. "Daddy issues."

3. Gaston: The villain of the piece in Beauty of the Beast is a piece of work, a boorish, uber-male who's an exaggerated portrait of the worst tendencies of the male animal: vain-glorious, destructive, clueless, and not thinking too many inches away from his own needs. He's what Tom Wolfe called a "Master of the Universe" in his "The Bonfire of the Vanities" and he's just some degrees separation from the standard square-jawed "hero" type—"He's such a tall, dark, strong, and handsome brute." It's just that the only "love-interest" for him is himself, as he sings of "Belle" "Here in town, there's only she/Who is beautiful as me...", missing her passing-by due to his gazing at himself in a mirror.

It's hard to think of any actor who might be able to play such a cartoon without injecting him with some ballooning steroids. Henry Cavill, the current "Superman," maybe, but that causes a problem because you want Gaston to, at least, be entertaining. Luke Evans has the attitude (if a bit more petulant), but not the girth to play Gaston and he's a light bass at best, when Gaston's voice should be as deep as Tony the Tiger's. Gaston is such a victim of high-T and 'roid rage, it's hard to see him as anything but a buffoon. But, Luke Evans just won't go there, treating Gaston as relatably human instead of a figure so ridiculous, he's dangerous. And, speaking of Gaston...

4. The "Gay" Thing: Anybody above the age of 12 knows that the character of Lefou is such a fawning victim of his bro-mance with Gaston that there must be something more than friendship going on. It's such a dysfunctional relationship it reminds one of the abuse-fest between Harley Quinn and The Joker...or Abbott and Costello. Gay? Yeah, and the way Josh Gad plays him, well, denial's not just a river in Egypt, honey. Unless you're in Alabama, where denial's a bloody flood-plane.

Because Gad would be in traction if he did the slapstick of the animated version, Lefou's swishy behavior in the live version is the replacement for the comedy. I don't know what Alabama is worried about, you'd think the LGBTQ community would be the one's protesting. The whole made-up "controversy" is a bunch of hooey, blown up out of promotion by a bunch of bigots who claim to be doing it "for the children." Nah, they're doing it for themselves, and the publicity will only help this movie and may damage them. Live by the sword...

5. The Furniture: The one aspect of the "live" Beauty and the Beast that really complicates things is the supporting players. Trapped in The Beast's castle, consigned to their fate as knick-knack's, kitchen utensils, tchotchkes, and anything common in a Bed, Bath and Beyond, they are tied to his curse if he fails to find or give love. Lumiere (a candlestick), Cogsworth (a mantel clock), Mrs. Potts (a teapot) and the rest are played by name-celebrities who are surprising to see once they take on human form (although I guessed one of them, a veteran of a couple Condon films, and was glad to see the writers didn't give him an in-joke-line "YOU shall not...PASS!"). In this version, they are re-united with  their loved ones in the village. This light-bulbs a question: Didn't anyone realize they were missing...for years? I didn't see any flyers posted...or pictures on milk cartons. It's nice for these characters to have a more complex history than as indentured servants, but it doesn't make any sense at all if one thinks about it.

And that may be the biggest problem with this Beauty and the Beast—the makers know it is what it is, one of the best products of "The Disney Version." As they're doing these live-action versions of their past features—Alice in Wonderland, Cinderella, Jungle Book, Maleficent (can't wait for what they're going to do with Dumbo and Song of the South and, yes, that is sarcasm)—it might be a bit too soon at 25 years, to go back to this well. But nothing can stop Disney once they get dollar-signs in their eye like Scrooge McDuck. It makes you realize that everything, every childhood memory is merely grist for the Disney mill—maybe they should have that as their corporate symbol rather than a castle.