I have seen Into the Woods!
Dec. 26th, 2014 09:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
next_to_normalI mean, yeah, whatever, Merry Christmas happy holidays blah blah, NOW ONTO IMPORTANT THINGS.
I saw it. I did not hate it. I did not love it, but I did not feel compelled to scream or throw things in the theater or otherwise cause a scene, so let's call that a win.
Short version: When the movie was over, my mom and I turned to each other and said, "Meh."
Long version: Meryl Streep was better than I expected, sort of - granted, she's still Meryl Streep, so of course she's going to be good at whatever she does - but as it turned out, she was much better at the singing than the dialogue. When she was singing, I hardly ever felt the urge to compare her to Bernadette Peters, but her line delivery was off for a lot of things. In general, it felt like she was trying to be funny in a different way - being more hammy and goofy rather than Peters' above-it-all exasperation - but it didn't work, and just made her seem eccentric and too often pitiable, when she should be powerful and scary.
James Corden was very good as the Baker. My mom was surprised at how much she liked him. I thought both he and Emily Blunt did a decent job - they are, to some extent, the "straight man" characters in this nutty, magical world, so you can kind of get away with them being good but unremarkable in a way you can't with the Witch. Though my mom was not pleased with Emily as the Baker's Wife, lol, but her main complaint was essentially, "She's not Joanna Gleason," which is true, but not Emily Blunt's fault, any more than it's Meryl's fault she's not Bernadette Peters.
(Also, if you recall this previous post, basically none of the weird characterization Emily talked about actually shows through in the movie, which just goes to show that an actor can turn in a good performance even if they have a completely wrong interpretation of what they're playing.)
Jack and Little Red Riding Hood were surprisingly great. I still wished they were a few years older, if only because the point of the story is that they are on the cusp of adulthood, whereas they look about twelve here (not to mention the unintended skeeviness of "Hello Little Girl"), but they are both incredibly talented kids and Lilla Crawford especially nailed the deadpan delivery of her lines.
That's the thing about this show - oftentimes, it's not the lines themselves that are funny, it's the WAY they're said, the tone of voice, the timing, the facial expression that goes along with it. And they miss an awful lot of those moments in the movie - I noticed it a lot with Meryl, because so many of the Witch's lines are the ones my mom and I quote all the time, but it happened at one point or another with most of the characters. So it was a huge relief to have someone like Red come along and deliver a line in exactly the way it's meant to be hilarious.
Tracey Ullman as Jack's Mother was also fantastic. Christine Baranski was exactly as good as I expected. I was a little disappointed in Chris Pine - it felt like he was trying to do a big, arrogant Robert Westenberg voice, but he wasn't really pulling it off - but both he and Billy Magnussen were both hilariously committed to their hammy Princes. "AGONY" ON A WATERFALL. BLESS. (Let us just pause to acknowledge the ways in which the film considers what they can add to the show that you can't do on stage. See also: the new staging of "On the Steps of the Palace.")
Ugh, Johnny Depp is the worst. Can we stop pretending he can sing? Or that he can act in anything that's not a Tim Burton movie? We've already discussed how the Wolf costume looks nothing like a wolf, but I feel like someone who was actually trying might have pulled it off, whereas Johnny Depp just does Johnny Depp.
It is incredibly strange to me that they cut out the Narrator character, and yet somehow managed to ADD MORE NARRATION than there was in the show. Here, the Baker tells the story in voice over, but instead of making snarky little asides (the only one he attempts is "Well, it was a full day of eating for both," which is rushed and as a result totally falls flat) or giving the audience information the characters don't have ("Now, the Giant, who was nearsighted and had lost her glasses..."), he chooses more often to TELL US EXACTLY WHAT IS HAPPENING ON SCREEN. Bad use of voice over.
Little Red Riding Hood's grandmother lives in a tree? What? Why? Like, of all the things to change, this is so weird and so random. Why can't she live in a cottage like a normal person? It is a completely pointless detail, and yet it distracted me enough that I am commenting on it.
Speaking of random weird changes, I don't know why they have the Witch telling the Baker straight away that she can't touch the ingredients for the spell. The whole point is that they don't know that, and more importantly WE DON'T KNOW THAT, so that when they feed Rapunzel's hair to the cow, we don't know that it's not going to work. If we know ahead of time that the Witch can't have touched the hair, there's no suspense.
They completely butchered the second act. Like, AWFUL. In chopping things up, they lost the parallel structure, eliminated the clear transition in tone, and subsequently totally muddled the show's message. Not to mention they seem to have cut all of the humorous parts - the whole "Do you think it was a bear?" exchange between the Witch and the Baker and his Wife, "Some of us don't like the way you've been telling it" when they turn on the Narrator, the second "Agony" (DWARFS ARE VERY UPSETTING), all of which makes the second act kind of a joyless slog of misery.
Don't get me wrong, I love the fact that things take a dark turn - that's what elevates this show above the typical fairy tale - but dark doesn't have to mean not funny. I mean, when you eliminate the brutal murder of two characters and the show gets LESS funny? You've probably done something wrong.
I assume the second "Agony" was cut for time because it's kind of repetitive, but in doing so, they really minimize the philandering of the princes. It makes the Prince cheating on Cinderella (and thus her reason for leaving him) entirely about the Baker's Wife, when it's supposed to be clear that this is just a thing he does - he seduces maidens, all the time, doesn't even matter who they are, and it's not something he's ever going to stop doing. We also don't get any sense that Cinderella has spent any time at all actually in the castle being a princess, so how can she have decided if she enjoyed that life or what she wants, which also undermines her choice to leave the Prince and makes it look really impetuous.
(Oh, apparently the reason they cut out the extra cheating is because of the condensed time period over which the show takes place. There's no year-long time lapse between Act 1 and Act 2 here, so having the Princes get married and then immediately run out on their spouses would apparently make them "real whores," and we can't have thateven though that's exactly what they are and that's the point.)
And Rapunzel's Prince gets off scot-free, because he doesn't even get a second act dalliance, and Rapunzel (who also never goes crazy or gives birth to twins while banished in the desert) just rides off into the sunset with her Prince, instead of getting stepped on by the Giant, which - sorry, Rob Marshall - is not at all "just as dark and harrowing" as her fate in the show. In fact, it kinda implies a happy ending for them? Which is, you know, completely missing the point.
I REALLY don't understand what they were doing with the Baker's father. So they cut out the Mysterious Man character, which, granted, streamlines some of the action in the first act, but then they put even MORE emphasis on the Baker's father being a huge influence on him and his conflicting feelings about having a family of his own, which just makes it bizarre that they cut out the character's actual appearance. And then, instead of singing "No More," we basically get a talky version in which his father's ghost just tells him not to make the same mistake, even though it carries no weight because we haven't seen how guilty his father felt about leaving or all the steps he took to try to make things right by helping them break the curse.
Oh, and the movie just ENDS after "Children Will Listen" and there was a big "lol wut... wait is that IT?" pause, and then the final "Into the Woods" reprise plays over the end credits. I recognize why it would be unrealistic and/or confusing to bring back all the dead characters to sing the finale on screen, but still. Extremely disconcerting to have it end so abruptly.
I may have other thoughts later, but for now - has anyone else seen it? Talk at me! What did you think?
I saw it. I did not hate it. I did not love it, but I did not feel compelled to scream or throw things in the theater or otherwise cause a scene, so let's call that a win.
Short version: When the movie was over, my mom and I turned to each other and said, "Meh."
Long version: Meryl Streep was better than I expected, sort of - granted, she's still Meryl Streep, so of course she's going to be good at whatever she does - but as it turned out, she was much better at the singing than the dialogue. When she was singing, I hardly ever felt the urge to compare her to Bernadette Peters, but her line delivery was off for a lot of things. In general, it felt like she was trying to be funny in a different way - being more hammy and goofy rather than Peters' above-it-all exasperation - but it didn't work, and just made her seem eccentric and too often pitiable, when she should be powerful and scary.
James Corden was very good as the Baker. My mom was surprised at how much she liked him. I thought both he and Emily Blunt did a decent job - they are, to some extent, the "straight man" characters in this nutty, magical world, so you can kind of get away with them being good but unremarkable in a way you can't with the Witch. Though my mom was not pleased with Emily as the Baker's Wife, lol, but her main complaint was essentially, "She's not Joanna Gleason," which is true, but not Emily Blunt's fault, any more than it's Meryl's fault she's not Bernadette Peters.
(Also, if you recall this previous post, basically none of the weird characterization Emily talked about actually shows through in the movie, which just goes to show that an actor can turn in a good performance even if they have a completely wrong interpretation of what they're playing.)
Jack and Little Red Riding Hood were surprisingly great. I still wished they were a few years older, if only because the point of the story is that they are on the cusp of adulthood, whereas they look about twelve here (not to mention the unintended skeeviness of "Hello Little Girl"), but they are both incredibly talented kids and Lilla Crawford especially nailed the deadpan delivery of her lines.
That's the thing about this show - oftentimes, it's not the lines themselves that are funny, it's the WAY they're said, the tone of voice, the timing, the facial expression that goes along with it. And they miss an awful lot of those moments in the movie - I noticed it a lot with Meryl, because so many of the Witch's lines are the ones my mom and I quote all the time, but it happened at one point or another with most of the characters. So it was a huge relief to have someone like Red come along and deliver a line in exactly the way it's meant to be hilarious.
Tracey Ullman as Jack's Mother was also fantastic. Christine Baranski was exactly as good as I expected. I was a little disappointed in Chris Pine - it felt like he was trying to do a big, arrogant Robert Westenberg voice, but he wasn't really pulling it off - but both he and Billy Magnussen were both hilariously committed to their hammy Princes. "AGONY" ON A WATERFALL. BLESS. (Let us just pause to acknowledge the ways in which the film considers what they can add to the show that you can't do on stage. See also: the new staging of "On the Steps of the Palace.")
Ugh, Johnny Depp is the worst. Can we stop pretending he can sing? Or that he can act in anything that's not a Tim Burton movie? We've already discussed how the Wolf costume looks nothing like a wolf, but I feel like someone who was actually trying might have pulled it off, whereas Johnny Depp just does Johnny Depp.
It is incredibly strange to me that they cut out the Narrator character, and yet somehow managed to ADD MORE NARRATION than there was in the show. Here, the Baker tells the story in voice over, but instead of making snarky little asides (the only one he attempts is "Well, it was a full day of eating for both," which is rushed and as a result totally falls flat) or giving the audience information the characters don't have ("Now, the Giant, who was nearsighted and had lost her glasses..."), he chooses more often to TELL US EXACTLY WHAT IS HAPPENING ON SCREEN. Bad use of voice over.
Little Red Riding Hood's grandmother lives in a tree? What? Why? Like, of all the things to change, this is so weird and so random. Why can't she live in a cottage like a normal person? It is a completely pointless detail, and yet it distracted me enough that I am commenting on it.
Speaking of random weird changes, I don't know why they have the Witch telling the Baker straight away that she can't touch the ingredients for the spell. The whole point is that they don't know that, and more importantly WE DON'T KNOW THAT, so that when they feed Rapunzel's hair to the cow, we don't know that it's not going to work. If we know ahead of time that the Witch can't have touched the hair, there's no suspense.
They completely butchered the second act. Like, AWFUL. In chopping things up, they lost the parallel structure, eliminated the clear transition in tone, and subsequently totally muddled the show's message. Not to mention they seem to have cut all of the humorous parts - the whole "Do you think it was a bear?" exchange between the Witch and the Baker and his Wife, "Some of us don't like the way you've been telling it" when they turn on the Narrator, the second "Agony" (DWARFS ARE VERY UPSETTING), all of which makes the second act kind of a joyless slog of misery.
Don't get me wrong, I love the fact that things take a dark turn - that's what elevates this show above the typical fairy tale - but dark doesn't have to mean not funny. I mean, when you eliminate the brutal murder of two characters and the show gets LESS funny? You've probably done something wrong.
I assume the second "Agony" was cut for time because it's kind of repetitive, but in doing so, they really minimize the philandering of the princes. It makes the Prince cheating on Cinderella (and thus her reason for leaving him) entirely about the Baker's Wife, when it's supposed to be clear that this is just a thing he does - he seduces maidens, all the time, doesn't even matter who they are, and it's not something he's ever going to stop doing. We also don't get any sense that Cinderella has spent any time at all actually in the castle being a princess, so how can she have decided if she enjoyed that life or what she wants, which also undermines her choice to leave the Prince and makes it look really impetuous.
(Oh, apparently the reason they cut out the extra cheating is because of the condensed time period over which the show takes place. There's no year-long time lapse between Act 1 and Act 2 here, so having the Princes get married and then immediately run out on their spouses would apparently make them "real whores," and we can't have that
And Rapunzel's Prince gets off scot-free, because he doesn't even get a second act dalliance, and Rapunzel (who also never goes crazy or gives birth to twins while banished in the desert) just rides off into the sunset with her Prince, instead of getting stepped on by the Giant, which - sorry, Rob Marshall - is not at all "just as dark and harrowing" as her fate in the show. In fact, it kinda implies a happy ending for them? Which is, you know, completely missing the point.
I REALLY don't understand what they were doing with the Baker's father. So they cut out the Mysterious Man character, which, granted, streamlines some of the action in the first act, but then they put even MORE emphasis on the Baker's father being a huge influence on him and his conflicting feelings about having a family of his own, which just makes it bizarre that they cut out the character's actual appearance. And then, instead of singing "No More," we basically get a talky version in which his father's ghost just tells him not to make the same mistake, even though it carries no weight because we haven't seen how guilty his father felt about leaving or all the steps he took to try to make things right by helping them break the curse.
Oh, and the movie just ENDS after "Children Will Listen" and there was a big "lol wut... wait is that IT?" pause, and then the final "Into the Woods" reprise plays over the end credits. I recognize why it would be unrealistic and/or confusing to bring back all the dead characters to sing the finale on screen, but still. Extremely disconcerting to have it end so abruptly.
I may have other thoughts later, but for now - has anyone else seen it? Talk at me! What did you think?
