Live Action Fairy Tale Disappointments

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This are movies that I was disappointed in and in a few cases just missed the worst list. These are in no particular order.  Also only did five of them.

Jang Dong-gun as Kunlun & Cecilia Cheung as Qingcheng The Promise picture image review

Jang Dong-gun as Kunlun & Cecilia Cheung as Qingcheng

The Promise –  This one just nearly missed the worst list. A few things kept it off, one being it was its own thing so it didn’t  oppose a source material, at least to my knowledge, the visuals in parts were very nice and I gave it the benefit of the doubt that the Chinese version was better. However, I wished the plot focused more on the lead female like Netflix suggested it did and not a fast runner fighting an evil duke that has a thing for feathers. Overall this one way really confusing and disappointing.

Vincent Cassel as the Beast and Léa Seydoux as Belle La Belle et la Bete 2014 picture image

Vincent Cassel as the Beast and Léa Seydoux as Belle

La Belle et la Bete (2014) – This movie I really wanted to like but the film-makers really messed most of this up. They gave the Beast a backstory that confused things and they went too far with trying to make it epic. I’m not saying that Fairy Tales movies can’t be epic but film makers need to stop doing it because you can’t pull if off. But more than that they didn’t even bother to have  Belle and Beast fall in love which should have been a crime. This movie is lucky that they were so many other terrible  movies or it would been on the worst list. The costumes were nice though.

Moira Shearer as Vicky having to choice between love and dancing The Red Shoes picture image

Moira Shearer as Vicky having to choice between love and dancing

The Red Shoes – This movie is yet another movie that people like and I was more disappointed in. If they had spent the time to establish Vicky’s love of dance, the romance,  and why she really had to make the choice between dancing and love it would have been better. The plot was just too rushed and unexplained. The Ballet part of the great though, so it’s slightly forgivable that the rushed the boring icky movie parts. I just want to note that shot  which is the picture shows  is really great.

Rutger Hauer as Navarre with Isabeau in Hawk form Ladyhawke picture image

Rutger Hauer as Navarre with Isabeau in Hawk form

Ladyhawke – I really wanted to like this movie but it was just too boring, too bland, too tonal confused  and too fill of 80’s cheesiness.   It’s a weird yet bad combination.

Lily James as Ella and Richard Madden as Prince Kit Cinderella 2015 picture image

Lily James as Ella and Richard Madden as Prince Kit

Cinderella (2015) – Again I really wanted to like this movie, the casting spoke to me and it had lovely costumes but it wasn’t enough. The choices they made just confused the plot and Ella was less proactive than her 1950 counterpart. I don’t need or really want a super hero military leader Cinderella but girl just spins and twirls. Also the pacing of this one was really bad, it felt so much longer than it needed to be.

Honorable Mention

The Snow Queen (2002) – Just because it was super long, the acting was bad and the weird to heck plot. But I didn’t have any excpetations of it so that helped.

Ladyhawke Review; The hawk and the wolf were the best actors

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Ladyhawke picture image

Ladyhawke

My first experience with this movie is an episode of The Critic by the same name. To be honest I had no idea it was a play on a movie but when I was looking at live-action fairy tale movies this one from 1985 crossed my path. From the start I was pumped, I wanted to like Ladyhawke. It was a fantasy movie from the 80’s, Fuck yeah, but then the credits with most cheesiest 80’s music you could ever imagined ended and this snooze-fest began.

Rutger Hauer as Navarre with Isabeau in Hawk form Ladyhawke picture image

Rutger Hauer as Navarre with Isabeau in Hawk form

Actually, the beginning with Matthew Broderick’s character, Philippe “The Mouse” Gaston was fine. Broderick plays this thief who is the only person to escape this place call Aquila, that is run by this dweeb Bishop, if he has a name I don’t care. No, where this movie gets bad and quite boring is when Philippe meets Captain Navarre a.k.a the plot. You see Navarre has this hawk and him and the hawk are cursed. The hawk is actually his lady love, Isabeau, played by Michelle Pfeiffer. Isabeau is cursed to be a hawk by day and Navarre turns into a wolf by night. They can only see each other in human form for a few fleeting moments.

Turns out the bishop cursed them with the powers of satan no less because he wanted Isabeau. Geeze a holy guy being obessed with a pretty lady, where have I heard that one before? Let me think…… oh yeah The Monk , that book sucked.

Not going to lie, I wasn’t playing that much attention but here is what I think happen. Navarre wants to kill the bishop even though that would mean they can’t break their curse. To break the curse they have to appear together in human form before the bishop. Navarre wants Philippe to sneak him into Aquila. Navarre is told by some monk guy that there is a day when there is no day and night or something, it’s an ellipse. Why couldn’t the monk guy just say that? Drama. Navarre goes to fight and tells the monk dude that if he hear church bells to kill Isabeau, which is stupid but in the end it all works out, they break the curse and I got to stop pretending to pay attention.

Michelle Pfeiffer as Isabeau Ladyhawke picture image

Michelle Pfeiffer as Isabeau

 

So why was this movie bad? Well much like some major criticism of Disney’s Hunchback this movie has no idea what it wants to be, it has no identify. Is it a darker fantasy? A light fantasy? A comedy? Some movies and TV shows has such great writing that they blended the genres into a balanced and cohesive story. Ladyhawke does not. And I will get this out of the way, the stereotypical 80s music does not even help one iota. If anything it just further confuses.

Matthew Broderick as Philippe

Matthew Broderick as Philippe “The Mouse” Gaston

Then there is the acting, it sucks. The only characters I believe are the wolf and the hawk and the horses too. At least I believe that they were the animals they were. Otherwise the acting was either hammy or bland. If the tone had been more comedic, Broderick’s would have been fine but his dramatic parts were boarder on PAINFUL and the dude who played Navarre, one Rutger Hauer, I swear was channeling Charleston Heston the whole movie, which was weird.

Frankly the only character who has any personality was Broderick’s character and that is because practically all his lines told us what his character was like, no need for acting.

Navarre as the wolf Ladyhawke picture image

Navarre as the wolf

However some movies just like to say “fuck it, style over subtense,” so you might think this movie was all about the style. Well maybe that is true but I didn’t see anything that resembles style. The editing was weird, the costumes were boring, and most of the shots were too dark to really see anything. In fact I think this movie was the opposite, it was all about the subtense, that the love story was movie and tragic.

Michelle Pfeiffer as Isabeau with the evil bishop Ladyhawke picture image

Michelle Pfeiffer as Isabeau with the evil bishop

The love story might have been good if the characters were not so stupid or if they had personalities, maybe if their back story was a flashback instead of a monologue told to us by the monk dude. With a flashback we could have felt for Isabeau and Navarre more. Speaking of their curse, why fuck would the devil make THAT the curse the bishop would use. Turning a couple into animals at difference times of the day sounds more like mark of witch for pissing her off or something not the devil for a dude who wants a woman. Also we know an ellipse is like a loop-pole but are there other loop-poles? Like a serve overcast day? IS the curse really time specific to the sun? Would sunblock have helped? I don’t know this story seems better on paper than as a movie.

Michelle Pfeiffer as Isabeau Ladyhawke picture image

Michelle Pfeiffer as Isabeau

Ladyhawke is a boring and genre confused movie with little logic and no likable characters. Of all the 80’s fantasy movies this one is better left forgotten. Though it could be worse, it could be a shallow high school remake of Beauty of the Beast, wait that is the next movie isn’t it? Cries.