fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #4446 ]

[ SECRET POST #4446 ]

⌈ Secret Post #4446 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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07. [SPOILERS for The Umbrella Academy]

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08. [SPOILERS for The Umbrella Academy]

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09. [SPOILERS for The Promised Neverland]

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10. [SPOILERS for The Umbrella Academy]
[WARNING for character death]

Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 00 pages, 00 secrets from Secret Submission Post #636.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

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01. https://i.imgur.com/G8eIuXu.jpg

I didn't see her as Hermione, but I couldn't get past her casting. I don't understand casting people in main roles in musicals if they can't sing.

Very much cosigned. there are people who can both act and sing. Why do those people never get cast in musicals? Why is it always people who can only do one and are terrible at the other?

If she were a phenomenal actor who somehow brought added complexity and depth to Belle, it wouldn't really bother me that much that she's not much of a singer. But IMO she's an entirely mediocre actor. I have nothing against Emma Watson, in fact I like her, but I don't think she's more than just OK as an actor.

Presumably she was cast because production felt she was the right kind of famous to bring in viewers. And also because she looked how they wanted Belle to look. And those just aren't very good reasons to cast someone for a role, IMO.

Ditto to these. I don't hate Emma Watson (though I don't think she's half as clever as she thinks she is), but as an actress she's flat.

However, personally, I think the film felt like it was going through the motions and a lot of the attempts the film made to make Belle more sympathetic made me dislike her more.

Emma can only play a version of herself, however that's not really a bad thing. I think she was really good in Perks of Being a Wallflower but Belle was completely beyond her.

You know, you're actually right. I've always thought that I hated Emma in every role I've seen her in, but she WAS alright in Wallflower.

That's exactly why they chose her. Not for talent or ability, but bc the connection between Bookish Hermione and Bookish Belle was too strong not to cash in on.

Idgaf about her being Hermione, but jfc the woman just cannot sing! The autotune could hardly have been more obvious, and that's speaking as someone who barely ever notices that sort of thing!

Never mind the singing, I've never found her a particularly strong actress overall. Not that she had to be for this but when I watched it I just...didn't get into it. Both her and Dan Stevens as The Beast were meh.

I personally ALSO started to sort of resent that I was watching a shot for shot remake of the animation that didn't really improve anything (I was a child when that was out the first time) with some shoe-horned additional extras to lengthen the run time. I realise I'm not the target audience though. The target audience is parents who fondly remember the animation and now have their own kids.

I personally ALSO started to sort of resent that I was watching a shot for shot remake of the animation that didn't really improve anything

I wouldn't say I resented it, per se, but the movie was basically incapable of making any real impression on me, because it just wasn't offering anything new.

It felt a bit like that "fanart" where someone has taken a screenshot they like and applied a really heavy "portrait" type filter to it, so that it looks like art...but you can tell it's just a screenshot with a filter. It's like, "Kay?"

That's a good comparison imo. Those screenshots with slight edits often confuse me ("fanart, how?") cos I always have to do a double take to realise I'm not just looking at a screenshot from the film. Almost exactly how watching Beauty and the Beast (2017) made me feel.

Well, they did add original stuff in the live-action, and make some tweaks to the original material. The real problem is, none of their changes make sense.

Like making Belle more "feminist" - fine, but it was not the case in France that women were not allowed to read or were shamed for it or anything. Felt pretty hamfisted, knowing Emma Watson's political activism (which I admire, but in this case, it seemed like Emma Watson was trying to make the movie as Emma Watsony as possible.)

Or the "gay" Fool character. Wow. Such representation. Yay.

Or the highly forgettable original songs.

etc.

Also what do you mean you're not the target audience? You absolutely were, if you saw Beauty and the Beast as a kid.

Pretty sure original added songs are just a thing that all musical films that aren’t original themselves do. I didn’t see any problem with Belle being feminist or shamed for reading, since those both are tenets of the 1991 film. I loved her being an inventor.

I did take issue with Watson’s supposed influence on Belle’s costume designs. The ballgown was ugly and looked as though it was made with the primary goal of being easy to knock off in cheap Disney Store costume form. The “no corsets” thing was dumb because obviously the ballgown had foundation garments of some kind beneath it, which is what corsets were for, and for everyday villagewear a set of flexible corded stays would’ve done the same job. I get that the live-action Cinderella got some blowback for playing up how tiny Cinderella’s waist was in her ballgown, but most 1700s women’s gowns before the French Revolution didn’t emphasize an insanely tiny waist anyway, and the rest of the costumes looked fantasy-mid-1700s-ish.

And ffs, put her in shorter skirts for everyday wear instead of having her tuck her skirts into her waistband all the damn time! She could still tuck them up to garden and hop fences and ride Philippe but as it was I kept expecting her to trip when the bunched up skirt layers got in her way.

nayrt

"I didn’t see any problem with Belle being feminist or shamed for reading, since those both are tenets of the 1991 film."

Ehh... I mean, yes, sort of. But in the cartoon, the villagers don't view Belle's reading with outright hostility, they just think it an odd habit. In the live action version exaggerates it quite a bit with Belle getting bullied by the other villagers for daring to try and teach a little girl to read.

I don't have an issue with Belle being feminist; I just think the live action version didn't handle that well. Ditto her being an inventor - it's a neat idea, but a token one. Do we ever see it in action? Does it play a significant role at all?

IA that Belle's gown was hideous. It looked cheap, like a costume version you'd buy at Walmart. The fuss about the corset seemed more a reaction to the Cinderella film than any sort of concrete statement about feminism in general.

There was a great quote about Belle's gown verse Cinderella's in live action, but I forget who said it. It was something like "Cinderalla's dress was a wedding dress and Bella's was a bridesmaid's dress designed so that they don't outshine the bride." I hated that yellow monstrosity so much. Why was it that color? It photographed horribly.

(no subject)

(Anonymous) - 2019-03-09 04:41 (UTC) - Expand

AYRT—I don’t think the exaggeration of, hmm, the negative treatment of the heroine from the animated to the live action versions of Disney films is unique to Beauty and the Beast.

I remember being frustrated with the live action Cinderella because having raised a question the animated one never outright does—why does Cinderella not just leave her abusive “family” behind—her answer is that she can’t bring herself to leave the place her father/parents loved so much.

It felt... fake, like she should’ve been hiding another, less twee reason—depressed misery, anger, stubborness—behind that answer and the film was so committed to her being sweetness and light that there wasn’t room. Likewise Lady Tremaine’s outburst about why she hates Cinderella felt like shorthand, but it’s still way darker than anything said in the animated version.

And while Maleficent was a reimagining of Sleeping Beauty, both the very thinly veiled rape-metaphor of Maleficent herself, and the fact that Aurora’s mother dies and her father is a conniving madman are way darker than Disney’s animated version gets.

I would be very surprised if any of the new live action (for a given value of live, cough cough Lion King cough) movies end up lighter in tone or even as light as the Disney originals.

I don’t necessarily think Disney’s done a good job of inserting darker moments into their remakes, but Beauty and the Beast isn’t the only one it’s happened to.

Yeah. I don't think she was horrible but she was definitely cast for her name and not her acting/singing talent.

My problem with Emma Watson is that she just can't act.

I appreciate her as a person and all, but she really is a meh actor. And she is the same character in everything she does, i.e. roles she identifies herself with.

She was just so different from the cartoon Belle, even if she technically did a lot of the same things. She had none of the warmth or maturity of the character. And she really couldn't sing.

Huh.

I thought it was mediocre at best, and the big Gay Moment was overhyped garbage.

Each to their own, though.

Agreed. I think I would have really enjoyed this movie if not for her. Not because of Hermione, but because to me it seemed like she was in a very different movie than all the other actors. The others seemed to be having fun with it, not taking it too seriously, hamming it up. Watson in comparison always seemed to be all business.

I kept forgetting the movie was meant to be somewhere in France because everyone sounded English to me...

I think that was one of the biggest things for me. That and the stale choreography.

The picture made me think this was about the sound of music.

THIS

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