Beauty and the Beast

"Well, you know, I love to read. Actually, I'm looking at a book,

I'm reading a book, I'm trying to get started.

Grade:  C +

Director: Bill Condon

Starring: Emma Watson, Dan Stevens, Luke Evans, Kevin Kline, Josh Gad, Ewan McGregor, Ian McKellen, Emma Thompson, and Audra McDonald

MPAA Rating: PG

Running Time: 2 hr. 9 min.

“Little Red Riding Hood,” “Hansel and Gretel,” and “Cinderella” are iconic children’s literature, but it's forgotten that the subject matter of these and other classic fairy tales are exceedingly dark and violent—in the original “Snow White,” the Queen, Snow White’s actual mother, wants her daughter killed so she can eat her liver and lungs.

From the original 1740 French fairy tale by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont to its acclaimed animated and stage adaptations, the common narrative thread running through every iteration of Beauty and the Beast is the notion that love can tame even the most savage creature, unlocking its inner beauty. The latest version is a lavish, live-action Disney update that nonetheless mirrors the plot and songs in the 1991 Oscar-nominated film. Perhaps the patina of cel animation masked an unsettling underpinning that, 16 years hence, rings rather regressive to contemporary eyes and ears. It’s hardly politically correct to recoil from a romance spawned by a brute holding a young girl captive, positive that if she would only get to know him better that she’d learn to love him and cure his violent impulses. Our court system and women’s shelters are full of such stories.

When doddering dad Maurice (Kevin Kline) wanders across a seemingly abandoned castle and picks a rose for his lonely daughter Belle (Emma Watson), a monstrous Beast (Dan Stevens underneath lots of CGI), the lord of the manor, claps Maurice in his dungeon. When Belle discovers her father's whereabouts, she bargains with the Beast to take his place. That’s just fine with the Beast and the other inhabitants of his castle, all anthropomorphic finery ranging from a candelabra (Ewan McGregor), a brass clock (Ian McKellen), a harpsichord (Stanley Tucci), and a teapot (Emma Thompson). They’re former helpers of the house encased in these animate objects, and the Beast is actually a vain prince damned to this grotesque visage unless he can convince a woman to love him before the last petal falls from a hexed rose.

Belle, a bookworm branded “funny” by her townsfolk, has long rebuffed any romantic overtures, particularly the coarse advances of Gaston (Luke Evans), an arrogant would-be suitor accompanied by LeFou (Josh Gad), his long-suffering sidekick. Much has been made about this LeFou being the first avowed gay Disney character, and while Gad’s interpretation leaves little to guesswork, he doesn’t exactly play LeFou like Harvey Fierstein.

Condon’s coiffed, painterly set design produces its fair share of eye-catching moments, from the opening ball to the frenzied “Be Our Guest” feast. But further hindering the parochial plotline are the two leads. Stevens’ digitized voice makes him sound like a Transformer. Meanwhile, it’s hard to decide which countenance is more devoid of emotion: Stevens’ motion-captured mask, or Watson, who simply and quite unfortunately appears bored and/or lost in the part. She wanders aimlessly through entire scenes without design, and her go-to expression is a bemused, pursed-lip smirk for a role that demands a broader mien. Together, it’s the woolly mammoth meets the woolly personality—I’ve seen better chemistry in Fifty Shades of Grey.

There are the inevitable plot quibbles—the herd of snow wolves that prowl the forest encircling the Beast’s abode accost those approaching the castle as well as those attempting to escape, until the storyline needs them to mysteriously disappear. Beauty and the Beast’s insistent romance will lure susceptible viewers, but there’s little need for this revival to run a whole 45 minutes longer than the 1991 adaptation. The result is overstuffed pastiche, trying mightily to recapture the magic of a story that doesn’t age so happily ever after.

The Girl on the Train

Grade: C +

Director: Tate Taylor

Starring: Emily Blunt, Rebecca Ferguson, Haley Bennett, Justin Theroux, Luke Evans, Allison Janney, Édgar Ramírez and Lisa Kudrow

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 1 hr. 52 min.

What begins as a promising psychological character study unravels into a loopy Lifetime movie in The Girl on the Train, which owes more to Douglas Sirk than Alfred Hitchcock. Based on the best-selling page turner by Paula Hawkins, this loco locomotive lurches out of the station, fueled by the needless narration and woozy booziness of Rachel Watson (Emily Blunt), a patently troubled woman who sucks on her sports bottle full of vodka and rides the train in and out of Manhattan every day, bound for nowhere except her own post-marital malaise.

Rachel spends the relevant part of her commute gazing at and envying the seeming bliss of a comely lass named Megan Hipwell (Haley Bennett) and her husband Scott (Luke Evans), who live just two doors down from Watson’s former home, now occupied by her ex-husband Tom (Justin Theroux) and new wife Anna (Rebecca Ferguson), who began their affair around the same time Rachel discovered she couldn’t have a child and apparently sunk deeper into despair and alcoholism.

Megan also happens to be Tom and Anna’s nanny, a thorny fact when Megan goes Gone Girl the same night Rachel drunkenly follows her through the park, then blacks out and awakens the next morning covered in blood. Rachel’s a person of interest since she’s spent the better part of a year constantly drunk dialing Tom, plus accosting Anna and her child in the street—restraining orders apparently do not exist in this movie universe. Further complicating matters, Rachel spied Megan canoodling a strange man on her patio prior to her disappearance, allowing Rachel to parlay her obsession into a reason to visit and share this with Scott, who soon also finds himself in the investigative crosshairs.

The Girl on the Train is a Blunt vehicle, and the actress makes mixed use of her copious screen time. Once the plotline kinda settles in, and Rachel visits an AA meeting, Blunt finally unveils a more complete character suffocating from crippling sadness. But the plot puzzle is figuring out where Rachel’s madness ends and her justifiable suspicions begin. Director Tate Taylor (the considerably less byzantine Get On Up and The Help) deploys his favored device of flashbacks/forwards to gradual layer the mystery, including the role of Megan’s shrink Dr. Kamal Abdic (Édgar Ramírez), Megan’s own tortured past and Scott’s furtive motives.

“You’re just a sad liar with no life,” Scott tells Rachel, and that’s the dreary thrust of the film for 90 minutes or so, until it’s time for the Big Reveal™. No spoilers here, but suffice it to say the denouement unfurls about the time Taylor and screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson decide it’s time to wrap things up. The ending arises inorganically, and essentially renders irrelevant, if not moot, everything that came before. A glossy, but convoluted story about crazy women becomes a superficial story about awful men in The Girl on the Train, where it’s the audience who feels taken for a ride.

Fast & Furious 6

Beware Of Falling CGI

Grade: B

Director: Justin Lin

Starring: Vin Diesel, Paul Walker, Dwayne Johnson, Michelle Rodriguez, Tyrese Gibson, Jordana Brewster, Luke Evans, Ludacris and Gina Carano

Running Time: 2 hr. 10 min.

MPAA Rating: PG-13

I can’t decide what is more amazing: that six Fast & Furious films have been made (and made money) over the past 12 years, or that (Lord forgive me...) they’re somehow getting better.

For this sextuple installment, the franchise vanguard of Vin Diesel, Paul Walker, Tyrese Gibson, Ludacris, Jordana Brewster and others (character names irrelevant) are recruited out of wealthy hiding by returning fed agent Luke Hobbs (the ubiquitous Dwayne Johnson) and his new sidekick (Gina Carano) to traverse Moscow to London and points in between and take down a mirror-image car gang led by a former Special Ops soldier (Luke Evans). The bait? The baddies include Letty (Michelle Rodriguez), Diesel’s ex-squeeze and partner-in-crime believed dead and buried two movies ago.

The plot is utterly mindless, and it feels almost intentionally so at times. How else to explain why Walker’s wanted Brian O’Conner went to extreme, precarious efforts to sneak into not only the United State but a maximum security prison to interrogate a former drug lord for information that nobody seems to want or need upon his return? And when Tyrese and Ludacris are your emotive tentpoles, it’s safe to assume the cast won’t be on the shortlist for any SAG Awards.

However, the film knows its reason for being and delivers that to the audience in spades. Director Justin Lin helms his fourth film in the franchise, and with bigger budgets come bigger, ever-escalating, gloriously 2D action sequences that violate all strata of law, including penal, physics and gravity. There are the obligatory races between nitrous-powered muscle cars seemingly capable of infinite upshifting. But wait, there’s more. In one scene, an armored tank rumbles down a freeway against the flow of traffic, leaving crumbled SUVs and compact coupes in its wake. In another, Lin oscillates between about a half-dozen simultaneous fights/chases, including fisticuffs between Rodriguez and Carano—the scary/sultry former MMA grappler who starred in Steven Soderbergh’s Haywire—while speedsters anchor a cargo plane attempting takeoff.

But, there’s also enough cheeky wit at play, whether it’s a conspicuous evocation of “007” or the sidelong needling of the Marvel film series when the muscle-bound Hobbs is jokingly referred to as “Hulk” and “Samoan Thor.” With more action than Iron Man 3 and more fun than the stuffy Star Trek Into Darkness, this is a summer movie that gives you your money’s worth. And yes, I feel guilty for writing that.