In the second act of The Circle (a film so poorly structured that it feels like it has five acts instead of three), Emma Watson’s painfully earnest protagonist Mae Holland decides to go “transparent” and have her entire life live-streamed around the clock, save for the occasional three-minute bathroom break. Throughout these sequences, CGI text boxes appear on screen to display viewer comments in “real-time,” with half-baked thoughts ranging from “I just ate cheese from last year” to “My girlfriend dumped me.” Those comments, often irrelevant and ineloquent, are the only part of The Circle that feels remotely relevant or clever…or entertaining. The rest, like the titular shape, is hollow.
You know when you’re casually scrolling through Facebook reading statuses and an ad pops up for that random blender you were researching on Amazon? Or when that person you went on a really awkward Tinder date with shows up in Instagram’s recommendations to follow list? If you think the internet is terrifying now, just be glad we don’t live in a world with The Circle… yet.
To say that the first trailer for Beauty and the Beast was evocative of the 1991 animated classic would be an understatement; it was a live-action carbon copy, and if Disney’s remake of Cinderella was any indication, we were in for yet another tedious — if visually stunning, well-acted and beautifully-designed — exercise in nostalgia-based capitalism. But Bill Condon’s live-action update of Beauty and the Beast is more reimagining than remake, a lavish and lovely take on a familiar tale (as old as time, no doubt) that enriches its source material without betraying it, embellishing a cherished antique with modern ideas.
We never got to hear Emma Watson’s singing had she not turned down La La Land, but thanks what we’ve got the new Beauty and the Beast for. The latest TV spot for Disney’s live-action remake, which debuted during the Golden Globes, features Watson singing “Belle” from the classic animated movie.
When the news that Disney was making a live-action Beauty and the Beast movie dropped, we all wondered one thing: how close was this version sticking to the original? Would the costumes look the same? Would the inanimate object characters be changed at all? Would there still be songs? From what we’ve seen, it looks like everything in this version, will look the same, just more realistic. Emma Watson’s Belle still has her blue-and-white outfit, the Beast looks similar, if not a little more uncanny-valley, and Lumiere and Cogsworth look more or less like themselves, just with a few tweaks.
Warner Bros. purchased the rights to the Harry Potter movies in 1999 for $2 million. That may sound like a lot, but here’s the part where we remind you that the Harry Potter movies have made over $10 BILLION at the box-office, which is a pretty good return on investment. That’s just one of the facts packed into the latest episode of You Think You Know Movies, which takes you behind the scenes of the first film in the Harry Potter movies!