In Which Dan Stevens Is Your Rumpled Warden For Now

Attack by Wolves

by ELEANOR MORROW

Beauty and the Beast
dir. Bill Condon
118 minutes

Beast (Dan Stevens) looks like a vaguely unkempt man, the sort who sleeps on a couch. He is starved for female company, or any company at all to be completely honest. His bestial qualities are not many, basically he doesn't use utensils or say please. In this reenactment of the 1991 film, the fantastic songs of Alan Mencken and Howard Ashman are supplemented by new music that adds about as much as Emma Watson does to the role of Belle.

Now 26, Watson's girlish charm evaporated quickly. She is now a woman in middle age. "They think I'm strange in the village," Belle informs Dan Stevens, who is looking at her like, is it really kind to compare our two situations? The only odd thing about Belle is that she always wears the same dress. Belle does not seem to understand the reason she is stared at is because of a man: specifically her father (Kevin Kline).

Kline's role is rather thankless. The fact of his poor parenting makes substantially more sense in the Bill Condon version, since while an animated character pissing away her day reading books seems fine and dandy, Emma Watson doing the same is a less enviable life goal. Belle doesn't want to marry Gaston (Luke Evans), which makes sense, since in this version Gaston is a decade her senior and Evans' face implies he has had a hard life.

None of these actors can sing worth a shit outside of the specific ones that Condon has recruited for the purpose. Whoever is doing Watson's vocals is particularly inept, making some of the numbers sound like the sea chantys you might hear from actual reenacters at a local seaport. The visual look of the film also suffers from this pseudo-realist aesthetic. Instead of giving us these characters reimagined in an actual society, the environments look staged and reduced from their original versions.

Stevens is a fine Beast to the extent that he makes voice acting into a character beneath the effects. Watson is particularly awful as Belle – perhaps because she has never actually been anguished or agonized in life, her method of showing any displeasure comes to simply pursing her lips as if she is suffering a mild ulcer. She never really touches Beast or invades his personal space at all. During the sequence where Beast is recovering from an attack by wolves she seems vaguely uncaring towards him, like the main method by which any human being relates to her is one of inconvenience.

Using magic, Beast takes her to Paris, where the power of imagination allows Watson to whine about her mother dying in the city. Thus she does not ever want to return to society. Instead of forcing her to change and adapt to the world, as the lyrics of the film's signature song suggest Beast does, it adapts to her. In Beast's immense library, he tells Belle that she can have it if she wants. What isn't given to her? Given that theme, maybe the choice of Ms. Watson for the role does not seem so strange.

Eleanor Morrow is the senior contributor to This Recording.

In Which Nothing Can Ever Tell You How Bad Noah Is

God Wants You To Cease Filmmaking

by DICK CHENEY

Noah
dir. Darren Aronofsky
A billion minutes

It feels like an eternity waiting for the only sex scene in Darren Aronofsky's Noah. It takes about ninety minutes into this mess for that to happen. In an instinctual move brought on by the realization that Anthony Hopkins has restored her ovaries, Emma Watson instructs her bf (Douglas Booth) to throw her a high hard one in the area every thinking person calls a hermione. He complies, and we wait for this transcendent moment humanity was denied for too long. Instead Aronofsky cuts away. An entire family sitting next to me whispered, "Goddamnit."

Emma clearly fired her hairstylist for calling her Granger too often, because this is completely unacceptable.

Noah (Russell Crowe) has been instructed by some vague dreams that the world is about to end. He goes to see his "grandfather" who drugs his son and later hits on his wife. Methusaleh (Anthony Hopkins) is the devil in disguise - for Christ's sake he is Lecter - and for good reason. He is the only performer in this utter disaster with the least bit of acting ability.

actually there was a kind of frosty sexual tension between RC and Ray Winstone, but it was never fully explored. Sequel? Jk.

Lynne wanted to see Noah because she loves when two animals, two animals of the same species, are brought together in close quarters. I asked, hadn't she had enough of that?

He can't stop thinking about how weird her ears are. He will never stop thinking about how weird her ears are.

Noah's wife Naameh (a completely insane Jennifer Connelly), reprising her entire performance from the weirdly cold blooded roles she is forced by her agent to play, has had enough of this proximity to another person. So far, all her marriage to Noah has brought her is two mediocre sons and a tent in the desert. He never fucks her, not even on her birthday.

Connelly's Naameh has one completely bizarre scene where tears run down her face and around her mouth, making her look like some depraved ex-wife shown up at Noah's doorstep. You start to wonder why Noah is even in a relash, given that he never looks directly at Naameh the entire movie. When they finally reconcile later he resorts to a bro hug because he doesn't want his mouth to touch her gross tears.

this is the mother of all retouched photos. Actually she looks like the wicked witch of the west tbh
It is hard to know who to blame for this disaster. I could joke and say it was on God for making Aronofsky in the first place, but that would probably be a premature assumption. All of the director's screenwriting efforts have been complete fuck-ups, and in Noah, he even loses the visual éclat that brought him to prominence in the first place.

the people who cut down trees in Avatar were evil, here they are heroes. Missin u always James Cameron

Instead of feeling like a surplus of excess, the visuals of Noah are highly dated. At times the CGI looks unprofessional, and the characteristic bestiary is never even viewed in its entirety. The animals have no personality, even as themselves. We never see them up close, just as a indeterminate mass. No one care for them. Lynne could only conclude that the makers of the production held some bias against any type of creature at all.

The ark itself is a massive disappointment, looking more like a sloppy 2x4 than a construct befitting the God who commissioned it. The only thing that would have made it worse is Frank Gehry.

at least have them kiss with tongue. It's not too much to ask.

No scene in Noah is more than ninety seconds, lest we realize the complete clichéd absurdity of what is being communicated or said, or see how little there is to this entire thing. Aronofsky has never been the slightest bit skilled at subtlety — the individuals in his films rarely turn out to be anything other than what they are. As Ila, Watson herself never provides any kind of Eve-ian sexuality; in fact there are few roles in cinema she would seem more ill-suited for, given her mincing, sexy mouse-like appeal and flaccid Englishness.

For some reason Aronofsky figured it would be better to have everyone doing poor English accents, while allowing Crowe to just talk as he normally does, and Connelly to keep her own American whine. Noah is a linguist's nightmare, and it's also a completely racist festival that includes only whites. No one is even tan, though many are dirty.

"Guys, there is this really mean blog post about our movie. Let's build another ark."

What is most missing from this piece of shit is wonder. The world ending and a boat floating across its flooded ruins is supposed to be at least partly enjoyable, the way that falling from a great height suggests a thrill we will remember for the rest of our life, no matter how much longer it may go on. There is no wonder to the animals or the places the ark goes, no delight even at finally reaching land — we suddenly cut to the entire group on a beach, without even seeing the discovery. At that moment, I felt like Tom Hanks when he found out Captain Phillips was utter bullshit — extremely upset and disappointed with myself for even witnessing this debacle.

I mean, I feel so fucking embarrassed for this shit (below). Emma has like five scenes in the movie, and 90 percent of her lines consist of telling someone her belly hurts:

God will have his revenge on those responsible for these lies.

I mean yes, The Fountain was completely embarrassing and stupid, but it was just some revolting made up story, it didn't have actual things like drama and exciting moments that you expect from the story of Noah. At the very least Noah could have made a compass or done something besides send a really tired seagull out to find land for him. Deprived of all the things humans do in order to survive difficult situations, Crowe's Noah just growls a lot and tries to kill his grandchildren. It would be laughable if it was not so completely dull and boring. Throw in a swordfight, or cast Antonio Banderas as Jennifer Connelly's latin lover. Anything but this.

0/10

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording. He is a writer living in an undisclosed location. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here.

"Don't look at the metacritic Jennifer. You won't like what you see."

"Lonely Child" - Christina Perri (mp3)

"Sea of Lovers" - Christina Perri (mp3)

In Which We Lop All The Chandeliers

Peasants

by MOLLY O'BRIEN

The Bling Ring
dir. Sofia Coppola
115 minutes

Seven years ago, Sofia Coppola made a movie called Marie Antoinette. Spoiler alert: at the end of the movie, Marie Antoinette gets robbed in a pretty major way. The peasants storm the château, ruin her stuff, make off with her head. We don’t get to see the revolutionaries lopping the chandelier from the ceiling, just the shot of a bunch of crystals in pieces on the ground.

A couple years ago, a handful of upper-middle-class teenagers burgled the homes of Hollywood people like Orlando Bloom, Megan Fox, and Audrina Partridge. Then, on a tip from a classmate who heard them bragging about stealing Rachel Bilson’s shit, they were arrested. Nancy Jo Sales covered the hullabaloo for Vanity Fair in an article called “The Suspects Wore Louboutins”; in the full-length book that came after the article, she compared the teenagers’ thievery to the 18th century peasants who stormed Versailles.

Coppola must have noticed the connection. In The Bling Ring, the chandelier is back up, sparkling over a rack of cocktail dresses and Louis Vuitton jewelry cases as a small gaggle of girls (plus one boy) scavenge for treasure in Paris Hilton’s mansion. Our contemporary Marie Antoinettes appear in a montage of pixelated TMZ snapshots. The peasants take selfies and put them up on Facebook with captions like “Who’s stepping out with me tonight :)” and “Wanna smoke a bluuunt?”

First: The Bling Ring has more than a few funny moments. The comedy, intermittent though it may be, is the product of the actors, most of them unknowns, who spout marblemouthed adolescent blandishments as if programmed to do so. “That’s chilllll,” they say. “I love Chanellllll.” “So hottt.” “Ooh, this is Balmaainnn,” the raspy blonde coos, holding a gunmetal dress up to her abdomen. Watching these actors interact with each other produces the same effect as listening to teenagers talk on subways or park benches: contact embarrassment and intrigue.

They drive to the beach, yelling over Rick Ross’s guest spot on “9 Piece”. They smoke their joints dramatically, shuffle around to EDM in six-inch heels, insult each other’s outfits or tell each other they look sooo hotttttttttt. They are the children of Laguna Beach and The Hills, only less wistful and more nihilistic. You could wreak serious havoc with characters like these.

As an interpretation of a piece of journalism in a glossy magazine, the film is only sporadically faithful. Quotes are reproduced verbatim, and the narrative progresses much in the way Sales documented it — Marc (Israel Broussard) meets cute, troubled Rebecca (Katie Chang), Rebecca introduces Marc to celebrity kleptomania, more people get involved, everyone gets caught, Marc spills the whole story. But for readers of the Sales story, something is missing.

One major element of the original Bling Ring story absent from the movie is the reality television factor. Alexis Neiers, the young woman who appears as “Nicki” in the film and whom Emma Watson plays, was being filmed for an E! reality show called Pretty Wild at the time of the burglaries, though for reasons that had nothing to do with the burglaries. Her apprehension and trial were major plot points on the show. Real-life Neiers, as she appears on Pretty Wild, is actually kind of fascinating. She’s a mess, an addict, a model who saunters around her house with her “sister” Tess, both girls exuding a sexuality that is, in a single word, terrifying.

Everyone knows that reality television isn’t real. Neither are movies. Still, in the vacuum of unreality, movies have the ability to take the idea of a real person and further animate it, tell another side of the story, make that person even more real somehow. The Bling Ring misses this opportunity. Coppola’s version of Neiers is Watson looking cold and brittle in a pink Juicy sweatsuit, executing one excellent spin around a stripper pole that looks like it took three weeks to perfect. Her reality television background is nonexistent; the only camera that follows her around is the camera on her own iPhone.

So if you’re receiving the story firsthand from Coppola, you probably wouldn’t catch anything significant about the delusional nature of reality TV, nor would you know about the complications of Marc’s status as the rat of the investigation. You’d just see the stuff. So much stuff.

The first two-thirds of the movie are devoted to the stuff. The dresses, the gilded bracelets, the piled-on necklaces, the pillows with Paris Hilton’s face on them, the crystal bottles of vodka, the rolled-up wads of cash stuffed in leather trunks and metal cases, the Ziploc baggie of cocaine, the pistol on Megan Fox’s fiancé’s nightstand. It’s all so shiny and beautiful. It turns the audience into magpies. It made me want to go shopping.

We rarely see any of the kids do anything with the stuff. The few scenes when they do — when the crew’s ringleader smiles to herself in the mirror through a mist of perfume, when the initially hesitant Marc tries on a pair of Hilton’s hot pink heels and falls in love with them, when one of the tertiary characters picks up the gun and briefly becomes a maniac—are magic. The rest is just stuff.

Maybe the problem is the lack of suspense. We all saw what happened to the kids. The Antoinettes became victims and received their restitution. Between Sales, Pretty Wild and TMZ, there are no unknowns. Even when a story’s out there, a handful of explosive characters can make for a good story. Coppola defuses them. We know these kids are shallow, vapid, superficial. That’s why we want to watch them. It’s too bad the movie, which could have been dynamite, doesn’t rise above those same descriptors.

Molly O'Brien is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Brooklyn. She tumbls here. She last wrote in these pages about the king. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

"Til I Lost" - Tom Odell (mp3)

"I Know" - Tom Odell (mp3)