MOVIE REVIEW–“Beastly” for Wrong Reasons

SPOILER ALERT

Message for teens: Always be nice to the bald recluses you live with because they might turn out to be the hot rich guy you used to crush on in high school and if you fall in love with him, he’ll totally pay for you to go to Machu Picchu with him. No joke.

Despite an entertaining premise -a youthful contemporary spin on the Beauty and the Beast classic – Beastly is uncomfortably lacking.

With a screenplay too smart for the director (odd, since Daniel Barnz both penned and helmed the film adaptation from Alex Flinn’s novel), Beastly’s often charming dialogue acts like an unexpected house guest in this fluffy, shallow production. The best one-liners and most intelligent references are hurried over by the young cast, who seem ill at ease with the screenplay’s indie stylings. Only stage/screen vet Neil Patrick Harris seems in on the joke and manages to evoke some easy laughter from the primarily pre-teen/parent demographic (also uncomfortable, the adult language was a little thick for its intended audience). Besides the mumbling, mushy delivery from Vanessa Hudgens and (can I say this without laughing) Mary-Kate Olsen, there were some good moments in cast performance. If a little too likable on screen to be truly “beastly,” Alex Pettyfer is certainly easy on the eyes and plays with some real honesty (The Hunger Games casting rumors are a little more interesting).

Besides a tenuously-constructed plot (drug addict dad shoots dealer and is blackmailed into turning teenage daughter over to bald, tattooed rich son of uber-wealthy anchorman who makes him live in a separate apartment because he’s so ugly…okaaaay…), the most disturbing element of Beastly is its strange morality: Goth witch girl has the power to cure blindness and help refugees from other countries but chooses instead to use her powers to punish the snotty, popular boy who hurt her feelings because he doesn’t understand compassion for the weak. Right. Okay. Don’t worry, she cures the blindness and saves the refugee family after the popular boy learns his lesson. Heart-warming. Truly.

Ms. e.lizabeth gives this uneven teen romance a C minus (for NPH’s sake) and a “try harder next time.”

Five Lies Your Beauty Magazine Tells You

Today, I was inspired by this post by an old friend of mine, Jenni and her blog Story of My Life and her sweet guest post over at this blog Simply Sunshine and Daisy's. Be sure to visit both Jenni and Liv and leave a nice note! Jenni’s topic was beauty and she had some helpful tips for readers that had me thinking about my own experiences with beauty. The five things on this list are part of what I would call the lies of a cultural framework, a system that tells us that beauty is what we never are…perfect (Jenni summed this up in her post beautifully!) 

So here you are…lies, lies, lies…

1. Beauty is based on the negative. Too fat? Here are some diet plans. Too short? Wear these shoes. Whiten your teeth, erase cellulite, hide wrinkles, minimize pores, eat less, don’t wear that. Culture feeds on our insecurities as women (and it preys on the young).

2. Beauty contradicts itself. Be sexy but don’t sleep around. Be skinny but don’t starve yourself. Be tan but don’t get skin cancer. Be yourself but fake it if you don’t feel confident, successful, smart or beautiful.

3. Beauty is a commodity, up for sale if only we knew where to shop, what to wear, and who to listen to. Magazines, commercials, billboards, movies and television, even mannequins in the mall all deliver the same message, subtly, whispering just under the surface of our feminine consciousness, “You’re not good enough. No matter what you buy, no matter what you do…you will never be enough.” And even though we fight these thoughts in ourselves, tell ourselves that we are beautiful “just the way we are,” and read the pop-psychology article entitled, “Learn to Love Yourself” on p. 54. But we can’t help it when our eyes wander to the ads that sandwich it on either pages. Ads with pictures of impossibly thin, attractive, desirable women leading the lives we wish we led.

4. Beauty is the antithesis of the insecure. The connection we feel as women between our appearance and our confidence is inestimable. But feeling insecure is not wrong. We’re a product of our culture, after all. And if you’ve been told in a hundred ways, by a hundred people, that what you look like determines your right to opinions, feelings, desires, and success, you will probably crack under the weight of it all. You might even do what I did today at the hair salon when the stylist asked me a question. You might shift, embarrassed, apologetic in your chair, hating the fluorescent lighting for making you blotchy and the old sweats for making you look heavy and hating yourself. You can’t even meet her eyes as you mumble, “I just want to look pretty.” But being insecure doesn’t make you ugly. It just makes you human.

5. Beauty is external. This is the biggest lie and it pretty much sums up all the other ones. Beauty is not what you put on your face or in your body or comb through your hair or brush your teeth with. This is the lie we buy into, no matter what we say or feel about “true beauty” and “not judging a book by its cover.” We continue to obsess over ourselves as if squinting in the mirror might make that intangible quality appear. Real beauty comes from looking out at the world, concerning yourself with others. It is an act of selflessness.

"To see beauty is to learn the private language of meaning which is another's life - to recognize and relish what is. Beauty must be defined as what we are, or else the concept itself is our enemy. Why languish in the shadow of a standard we cannot personify, an ideal we cannot live?" –Crimethinc

Picture credits:

http://www.dietsinreview.com/diet_column/02/wordless-wednesday-skewed-body-image/

http://knol.google.com/k/real-beauty-magazine-liposuction-is-it-for-you#

http://www.imogene.org/blog/2008/06/06/friday/

http://discoverthejourney.net/2009/04/20/how-your-insecurities-can-hurt-others/