2023 - THE LITTLE MERMAID, another live action remake of a Disney cartoon

This  overlong remake of another Disney cartoon was not the money making success the company was hoping for.  The film apparently will make back it's production and marketing costs but it won't be a billion dollar hit. There has already been a lot of finger pointing about what went wrong. 

 The right wing bunch had a problem with the skin color of the title character played by the singer/actor Hallie Bailey.  The foreign market did not embrace the film particularly the Asian market. The budget of probably 250 million dollars didn't help.  However I would argue that the whole Little Mermaid experience was just plain tired.

The original film zipped along at under 90 minutes, this behemoth lumbers along at over two hours.  The original film had a score with at least three decent songs this new version has additional and very forgettable songs by Lin Manuel Miranda who somehow scored a producers credit.  What was short and compact in the cartoon now is an overproduced mess with lots of CGI stuff.  

Hallie Bailey seems a competent and charming performer but there is so much "computer magic" applied to her it's hard to know when she is a live actor or yet another enhanced computer generated character.  The character of Eric her love interest is completely bland and his scenes just stop the film cold.  Daveed Diggs was a big deal when he appeared on stage in Hamilton as Thomas Jefferson.  Here he's nothing more than a crab and not even a real crab.  The less said about the rapper Awkwafina the better, she's just another voice in yet another computer generated character.  I'm sure the price tag for Melissa McCarthy wasn't cheap.  Javier Bardem who at one time worked with Pedro Almodóvar is now a fish king or something and what exactly did those two bring to the film? A bigger question, what is the point of even using actors if you take their images and completely modify and digitize tham?

 

I fully realize the Disney studio is in the business to make money and they are going to gamble on sure things like Marvel movies, Star Wars movies and their library of animated cartoons.  However the creative inspiration for this stuff just does not seem to be there these days.  The computer artists put a lot of colorful digital image junk in almost every scene in the movie but after a while it just doesn't mean anything.  The director Rob Marshall is supposedly the guy in charge but lets face it the real behind the film talent are the hundreds of computer nerds who overlay this stuff on to the film.  It appears the public is beginning to get burned out on the Marvel and Star Wars stuff and this flop won't help.  Will Disney ever be able to develop new and interesting ideas?

  

The screenplay was written by David Magee who wrote the equally inspid Mary Poppins Returns for Disney.  The running time is 135 minutes.

2014 - INTO THE WOODS, another attempt at a film musical

Here we go again, another shot at making a contemporary musical in a genre that is mostly dead these days.  Into the Woods is based on the Sondheim Broadway musical which was a reworking of classic fairy tales with a modern twist.  Sondheim and his associate James Lapine's big insight in this film is that fairy tales don't always have happy endings.  This is something that I will not be going through life worrying about.

As is the trend with contemporary musicals these days.  The cast is made up of actors who can barely carry a tune.  But the nice thing about a Steve Sondheim song is that they mostly don't worry about tunes it's mostly a lot of rhythmic patter.  Between the non singers and the non songs it's fairly easy to juggle a singing performance out of an actor who is not a professional singer.

The chief exception to this non singer actor stuff is Meryl Streep.  After slaughtering about every ABBA song she got near in Mama Mia.  Streep takes a shot at murdering some of the songs in this film.  Streep tops it off with her very broad performance as the witch.  I know the witch is probably supposed to be a larger than life character but she could at least come off like she wasn't phoning it in with a megaphone.

The basic fact is that there is no longer the talent or resources to make film musicals anymore.  This genre died out with MGM in the 1950's.   That a mediocre film like Into the Woods could get decent reviews and box office show how far the musical genre has fallen.

 124 minutes, screenplay by James Lapine.