Welcome to The Morning After, where I share with you what I’ve seen over the past week either in film or television. On the film side, if I have written a full length review already, I will post a link to that review. Otherwise, I’ll give a brief snippet of my thoughts on the film with a full review to follow at some point later. For television shows, seasons and what not, I’ll post individual comments here about each of them as I see fit.

So, here is what I watched this past week:

Beauty and the Beast 3D

(Original Film Version)
(3D Conversion Version)
Watching the 3D re-issue of Beauty and the Beast, I’m struck by just how little the film has aged in terms of story quality, excitement and musical aptitude. Sure the animation feels a bit dated now despite being rather revolutionary at the time (it was one of the first hand-drawn animated features to employ computer animation), but the film itself is almost timeless.

The 3D conversion felt a bit rushed and only in the scenes where the camera pushed through multiple layers to create depth did it really spark to life. This was most frequently when the characters weren’t on screen. Disney’s acclaimed use of multiple layers of backgrounds no doubt made those scenes so magical. So, I wouldn’t recommend it in 3D, some scenes were simply too flat with it, but I would definitely recommend catching up with it again on the big screen. It was twenty years ago that I last saw it on the big screen. I was but a high schooler at the time and although many films have faltered in my estimation since that time, this one remains one of the rare treats of my adolescence that is as magical now as it was then.

(NOTE: As a point of clarification, my differing ratings above have nothing to do with the film. No matter what format it is in, the base film itself is still a 4-star film. The half-star deduction was for the 3D, a seemingly wasted attempt to create depth in a story that had more than any 3D film yet made, simply by the tone and simplicity of its story and character.)

The Dead

My initial thoughts (not a review)

Blue Valentine

Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling deliver brilliant performances, each ranking among their best. The film itself is a bit too fractured for my tastes and tries too hard to be inventive. The story follows parallel stories of Gosling and Williams as they fall into and out of love. The scenes in the past are almost as compelling as the present day ones, but they are so starkly intermixed that they seem almost unrelated. Gosling may deliver the finer of the two performances and while I wouldn’t begrudge Williams her deserved Oscar nomination for the film, Gosling was far more deserving of recognition and was unfairly snubbed.

The film gives us a relatively realistic portrait of these two people made more impressive by the performances of the leads. And Derek Cianfrance displays a great deal of potential. His issue, as I mentioned above, is the interwoven story. Had the film been told as a single, streaming saga, the narrative impact of their marital collapse might have felt more bittersweet. Of course, stringing it along chronologically wouldn’t have worked either, so while I was rather underwhelmed by the structure, I must accept it as the lesser of two evils.