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edenfallingTonight I finally got around to watching Ella Enchanted, which Netflix sent me a while back as a sort of "whoops, the actual next movie in your queue is rare and we can't get it to you within the normal shipping time, so have two movies out at once!" apology... and then, of course, I couldn't get another movie until I send both the real movie and the bonus movie back.
I freely admit I only had the movie in my queue because of watching two seasons of Hannibal and wondering what else Hugh Dancy and Mads Mikkelsen had been in. For similar reasons, a couple months ago I watched the 2004 King Arthur, which is a deeply stupid and inadvertently hilarious movie, not to mention baffling in the way it tries to play on the whole Arthur-Guinevere-Lancelot triangle without actually doing any setup for it, so Lancelot comes off as a creepy stalker who sacrifices himself for a woman who may not even know his name. But anyway, moving on!
Ella Enchanted is a pretty cute movie. Ridiculous and shallow, sure. But a lot of fun.
It is also a terrible adaptation of the YA novel it's nominally based on, and I think if I'd been watching it with the expectation of a proper adaptation, I would have been extremely annoyed and disappointed. The gist of the story remains -- a girl cursed to obey every order anyone gives her falls into a loose Cinderella plot, complete with horrible stepfamily, prince, ball, and eventual happy ending after the curse breaks -- but almost all the actual plot elements are wildly different, starting with the movie's invention of an evil uncle who's been ruining the kingdom with fantastic racism policies and now wants to kill his nephew the prince.
So, you know, it's about as faithful to Gail Carson Levine's book as Disney's The Little Mermaid is to Andersen's fairy tale. In other words, it's a remix. And if watched with that set of expectations rather than a checklist of every deviation from the book, it is, as I said, a pretty fun hour and a half.
...
I should get a copy of the book from the library and reread it, though. I remember enjoying it a lot. :-)
I freely admit I only had the movie in my queue because of watching two seasons of Hannibal and wondering what else Hugh Dancy and Mads Mikkelsen had been in. For similar reasons, a couple months ago I watched the 2004 King Arthur, which is a deeply stupid and inadvertently hilarious movie, not to mention baffling in the way it tries to play on the whole Arthur-Guinevere-Lancelot triangle without actually doing any setup for it, so Lancelot comes off as a creepy stalker who sacrifices himself for a woman who may not even know his name. But anyway, moving on!
Ella Enchanted is a pretty cute movie. Ridiculous and shallow, sure. But a lot of fun.
It is also a terrible adaptation of the YA novel it's nominally based on, and I think if I'd been watching it with the expectation of a proper adaptation, I would have been extremely annoyed and disappointed. The gist of the story remains -- a girl cursed to obey every order anyone gives her falls into a loose Cinderella plot, complete with horrible stepfamily, prince, ball, and eventual happy ending after the curse breaks -- but almost all the actual plot elements are wildly different, starting with the movie's invention of an evil uncle who's been ruining the kingdom with fantastic racism policies and now wants to kill his nephew the prince.
So, you know, it's about as faithful to Gail Carson Levine's book as Disney's The Little Mermaid is to Andersen's fairy tale. In other words, it's a remix. And if watched with that set of expectations rather than a checklist of every deviation from the book, it is, as I said, a pretty fun hour and a half.
...
I should get a copy of the book from the library and reread it, though. I remember enjoying it a lot. :-)
(no subject)
Date: 2015-05-01 04:48 am (UTC)I read Ella Enchanted about a year and a half ago, I think. I knew nothing about it until my daughter started reading it. At first she was saying "oh, I love this, it's such a great book," etc. And then a few chapters in she began shrieking "I hate this! I can't stand it! I can't read any more!" and threw it down in horror. Of course I was curious. What got her was the scene where the stepsisters force Ella to give them her mother's necklace. It makes perfect sense, because my daughter dreads feeling out of control more than just about anything. She may be ready to give it another try, because she has started to be more tolerant of scary/bad things happening in books. I mean, if she can read The Hobbit she ought to be able to read Ella Enchanted, right?
Anyway, i liked it. Another good entry in the Revisionist Princess subgenre of fantasy.
(no subject)
Date: 2015-05-02 03:08 pm (UTC)There's a difference between things that are physically scary/upsetting and things that are emotionally scary/upsetting, you know? And coping with one type of Bad Thing doesn't necessarily mean anything about a person's ability to cope with the other. For instance, I can read about battles and torture and gore all day long, whereas scenes in which a character embarrasses herself or is publicly humiliated are very difficult for me to get through. And I've known people who have precisely the opposite reaction. *shrug*
(no subject)
Date: 2015-05-06 04:31 am (UTC)I so agree with you about reading scenes of public humiliation. I also find rape scenes extremely difficult to read, especially those in which a character is raped by someone she trusts, and especially when I see it coming and the character doesn't. I'm not big on graphic violence in general, but rape scenes tend to combine physical and emotional violence in a particularly excruciating way.