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swaglexander-the-great · 4 years

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If you feel like it : develop on your hatred of the new Beauty and the Beast movie? I've heard a lot of salt about the way the music score was handled 👀

O MAN DO NOT DO THIS

Every time I think about this film, rage fills me like a super saiyan powering up and i scream

How do i even start

i think i will do bullet points

these will not be in any coherent order, I take no criticisms on this or my extreme bias

also i have not watched this movie for like years so my rage may outweigh my accuracy BUT

The opening?? With Cate blanchett narrating?? Who do u think u are?? Lord of the Rings? Peter Jackson in an epic trilogy changing the world forever?? You’re Disney eating your own meal and shitting it out again don’t fucking even try it

They didn’t even change anything and the animated intro was much shorter and better

The enchantress enters like Malificent, acts like a trickster god japing bitches, but try to paint her as Good uwu Princess.

Gaston, roughly the size of an ox if the ox was a slightly buff man who would bounce off Terry Crew’s majestic chest like a ping pong ball

You don’t have to be a crusty cynical adult to narrow ur eyes at that twunk picking up a solid 170kg of two people and think CGI

Yes, a queer-coded snivelling sidekick who adores a horrible man is exactly the gay representation we all wanted may I lick ur boots Disney and also suck ur dick but only if we say no homo

Gaston’s sidekick (don’t ask me to spell french) bribing the bar people to like Gaston or something??? The whole point?? Is that Gaston DOES check off the list for Desirable Bachelor in those times!! Can hunt? Yes. Lorge? Yes. Well off? Yup! An asshole? Of course, but does that matter in these times? No! Your privilege is to wash his socks! But Belle is a Different and Special Girl who DOESN’T find Gaston attractive for all the things the village thots do! Gaston is the outer ‘perfection’ that society praises while he’s still a cunt, the Beast is seeing the goodness within no matter what society says! The whole movie is fucking inverted by that one goddamn scene!! I hate this film!!!

this also makes it fuckin weird that they then discriminate against Maurice and side with gaston in the end? The villagers just do whatever the fuck the writer wants them to do and in this it’s so painfully obvious, the CEO of disney may as well be standing there with flags directing their movements in the background, I hate this fucking film

Instead of making cool inventions belles dad just makes like, a weird dolls house if I remember correctly

THEY DUBBED THE WOLVES IWTH TIGER NOISES! W H Y

The Be My Guest was so lacklustre. It was like a clown singing kareoke in an empty warehouse while frisbees fly around. You wasted Ewan McGregor on this. Disney has no imagination anymore

To add to that, the ending ballroom scene dance thing?? Lacklustre. Disappoint. Bad dress.

The best character in this film is the horse, who not only remembers the impossible way to the Beast castle, but runs at max speed between the two locations (a half-day journey), regularly with ease, carries the Beast, who IS roughly the size of an ox, and fights off fucking wolves who also seem to totally ignore his presence

Disney robbed me of the one scene I did desperately want, which was Belle deadlifting the Beast on to the main character, the horse

THE PLAGUE

ok the fucking plague ok. You do not mess with the goddamn plague. And this wasn’t cowpox either, this was the full 1500’s shithole Paris Black Death burn-you-alive fucking PLAGUE. Belle’s mom had the Plague, and both her and her dad somehow did not contract this while living with her through her entire sickness, they go to a different town (ISOLATE U HEATHENS) and then?? The Beast and Belle GO BACK to a plague house and run their hands all over shit! Do you know how long the plague takes to die off?? Even TODAY when we dig up a plague pit, everyone has to get immunized, I know this from EXPERIENCE. Congratulations, you and the Beast either have plague or have introduced it to your lovely village. Do not fuck lightly with the plague.

The magic fucking teleportation book.

Why

what the shit

WHY

They use this shit to instantly Star Trek beam themselves into a plague house

I assume the Beast wasn’t using this to heist random women to see if they would fall in love with him because, like, why would you not do this when you can just politely return them with your stupid magical teleport book

People attack the castle? Use the magical teleport book dumbass

The Beast’s unnecessary, long, boring song from the top of some fucking tower, idk, I skipped it, I got bored

The Beast design. What’s the point if he doesn’t look like feral garbage please. Also his voice pissed me off but I can’t remember why

I dont like him even personality wise

give him to Guillemo del toro you cowards

This was set in Actual History for some fucking stupid reason, and for another unfathomable reason, it was set directly before the French Revolution, so I guess it’s not a happy ending at all. Who wants to be transformed into a guillotine ?

Why is it so fucking dark half the time

The teapot is creepy

Why in the shit did we get the Prince’s fuckin weird tragic backstory? We don’t care. Man get turned beast is what we come for. And why? Why do we need a tragic backstory to excuse his actions? Can he not just be an asshole? Rich, stupid asshole? Who then maybe has to learn a lesson? Instead of oh tortured soul rich boy is so misunderstood! No. Die.

Disney’s absolute desperate need to have characters be ONLY GOOD or BAD BAD makes me want to knee the face of the collective corporation so hard that they are sent into the Hell Dimension

Where did the hot priest at the start go? Why do I think of him sometimes

They want this to be painfully French, but somehow ends up and an even more agonizing blend between painfully British and ass-kissingly american.

Why does the castle just fall apart like that. What is holding it together? Spirit gum? Why? Stone that looks like it has been soldered together with a welding iron doesn’t just give out, or The Earth would have caved in millenia ago

Ian McKellan uses his Gandalf voice and in this film it’s honestly a crime and also jarring to hell

The prince is not hot at all

The stupid dubbed growl at the end which I try so hard to repress makes me want to throw myself into a swimming pool full of mace

The only 1 good thing about this film was the dude who got dressed up by the dresser and was so fucking happy about it.

People complain about the soundtrack, but I for one refused to listen to the songs that bored me within the first 20 seconds, and the ones I listened to were like average remakes of the OGs so that wasn’t really the worst sin

This film so visibly sucked its own dick that this is probably why it was banned in china

Thinking about this film makes me want to commit Violence so I think it’s about time I stopped

I will not be taking constructive criticism or counterpoints to anything about my thoughts on this ever.

Goodbye and thank you for your curiosity

#beauty and the beast #beauty and the beast 2017 #disney #emma watson #disney remakes #I want to beat this film to death #asks #my asks #awesome people #writing #film reviews

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rayreviews · 6 years

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The Long Way to Happiness: A Review of Becky Chambers’ ‘The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet’

The Long Way was published nearly four years ago, now. It’s won awards, been praised inexorably by almost everyone who’s read it, and has made a stir both online, and in the world of the critics. It’s not new, per se.

But it does, in many ways, represent something new for me. Something new, and something wonderfully old, and to help you understand that, I must tell you a story.

Don’t worry, I’ll be brief. (Sort of.)

When I was six years old, I hated reading. It was difficult and boring, and although I loved to listen to stories, the books I read rarely contained such sharp wit, or simple joy. In the books I was told to read, a ball went missing and caused chaos. A magic key took people to places that meant nothing, felt like nothing. I didn’t care. It was all so stilted; nothing flowed, not the plot, or the characters, and don’t get me started on dialogue.

At the end of the year, we were given a reading assignment: to take a book from one of the higher reading tiers and read as much as we could in a month. Oh, how I complained. My book – left to me by default, since it was a boy’s book and none of the boys wanted it – was a book of short sci-fi stories. There were six in total, and I thought it would take forever. I was right, in a way. That first story was tortuous. It took me a full three weeks to read it, and I grizzled all the way through.

Then I started the second story.

I can’t tell you, now, what that story was about. I can’t tell you it’s title or it’s author. What I can tell you, is that I fell in love. I finished the rest of the book with time to spare, begged the teacher for another, and that was that.

Time went by, school got harder, and by the time GCSEs rolled around, I had already cut back my book a week to a book every two. Through A-Level I hardly had a chance to read much outside the books I was studying, and then I was at university. Studying Literature.

Dream come true, right?

Except I, and a lot of my friends, had hit something of a problem. For the last four years, we’d been told that every year was the most important year of our lives, and we couldn’t afford any mistakes. We’d pushed ourselves so hard that it was difficult to find any motivation left at all and I, like many others, stopped reading almost all together.

Three years on, and I can count the number of books I’ve read in that time on my fingers. Pretty bad, for a Lit. student, huh? The thing was, I didn’t really care anymore. Oh, I still loved the worlds inside those books, still loved the characters and the beauty of words, but it was just so much effort to pick one up and read it. There were other reasons, too, but they aren’t important here.

What is important, is that a few months ago a friend recommended The Long Way to me. Very highly. I’d just spent something like three months reading a three hundred-page novel, and I was looking to keep up the momentum. (Yep. That was momentum.) So I thought I’d give it a try.

The Long Way is four-hundred and four pages long. I finished it in five hours.

Becky Chambers’ debut novel tells the story of a tunnelling crew about the Wayfarer, who punch through reality to create the more easily traversable wormholes that other ships use to get about. Rosemary, the ship’s newest crewmember, is arguably the protagonist, but every member of the crew gets their moments in the spotlight, from the affable six-legged Dr Chef, to Kizzy, the energetic and emotional engineer.

A multi-species crew isn’t exactly a new idea – Star Trek, Star Wars, Farscape – they all got there first. But the cultures Chambers has created are as wonderfully varied and original as they get, each with their own complex histories: the reptilian Aandrisk, with their complex social structures (and distinct lack of breasted females); the military, but elegant, Aeluons. Even the human cultures, Martians, Gaians, modders and travellers, have their own place and their own histories, all beautifully woven together.

Chambers uses her space-opera to explore gender and sexuality – giving readers a variety of both, as well as a variety of species – and also the importance of choices, and the unwitting impact that can have on others.

It’s Firefly meets Farscape, with a dash of early-era Star Trek, sans the censorship. It’s a feel-good novel, a book that builds characters up without unceremoniously yanking the rug out from under them, and seeks its character development through learning about other cultures and ways of life.

It should be noted, at this point, that if you’re looking for a sci-fi action thriller where some dread world-ending event happens every other chapter, you may wish to look elsewhere. The Long Way is slow-paced, but not less exceptional for it. Character is the heart of the story, and although the book is hardly without any action (there are plenty of perilous moments), it is relationships, not disaster, that drives the main plot. Not just romantic relationships, either, though there’s lots of love to go around; friendship is as important a bond in this book as any love affair.

It’s also, and I cannot stress this enough, wonderfully queer. Genderfluid character? Check. Bisexual characters? Check. Lesbian relationship? Check. And none of them are used as jokes.

TL;DR, should you The Long Way by Becky Chambers? YES. Unequivocally. I would (and have) recommend it to anyone looking for something a little different in their science-fiction, something a little new, built on a wonderfully solid tradition of space-opera, of the shipboard family and their sallies through space.

For me, best of all, the highest praise I can give it: it made me fall in love with reading again, in a way I haven’t since that first sci-fi story when I was six.

Thanks, Becky Chambers.

Can’t wait to pick up the next one.

♦♦♦♦♦

#the long way to a small angry planet #becky chambers #book review #sci-fi #5-stars

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