#i just mask them by projecting all of my shortcomings onto being nice to the other person

[the-casbah-way]

i think. i might be the best boyfriend ever. i fear

[sapphire-weapon]

Sure. If you're so damn sure I'm the same person, go ahead and find me, then block me. Just don’t mess up and block the wrong person. It would suck to block someone innocent over a dumb assumption...

And no, I’m not about to dig up an ask from months ago. I don’t have time for that. Not unless you pay me for it. But hey, if you wanna accuse me of being the same anon, go ahead. I can throw baseless accusations too. For all I know, you could be sending yourself some asks.

you're clearly the same anon, because no one else would dare to be this stupid in public.

>thinks that i somehow have the ability to comb through a billion+ tumblrs in order to find someone who may not even have posts on their blog that can be used to identify them >cowers when called on their own burden of proof >tries to use my own trolling tactics against me, almost verbatim, because they're not smart enough to come up with their own schtick >piles baseless accusation on top of baseless accusation with a weird smugness because they think that that somehow comes off as clever >projects their own shortcomings onto me

this is all shit you've done before. you literally are just repeating your own tactics. you don't know how to act in any other way.

you act like i did at 14. and, just like you, 14-year-old me was very easy to spot while sockpuppeting, because i was too ignorant to argue from any viewpoint other than my own, and i was too self-absorbed to convincingly mask my identity. i didn't know how to be anyone other than me, because i didn't care to learn anyone else's perspective.

so... if you're just like 14-year-old me, you should not be talking to me in the first place. i'm 35. it says so in my bio. don't fucking talk to anonymous 35-year-olds, kid.

not all of them are as nice as i am.

[sogoldensolo]

Beauty and the Beast Trailer Music (Epic Version)

Because I know people are looking for it.

We saw it the other night after family kicked us out of the house so they could “hang out” (they refuse to call it babysitting) with our son.

Am I the only one who was disappointed?

I had really high expectations. Between the amazing original movie and the spectacular job done of the Jungle Book and Cinderella remakes, I thought “there is no way this movie can be bad.” And yet, while it wasn’t bad, I can’t say it was great, either.

For one, Emma Watson’s singing just didn’t meet the needs of a musical role and Belle is perhaps one of the biggest out there. Disney typically hires Broadway talent to voice its animated characters (or at least to sing for them) because of the need to almost over-emote both speaking and singing parts. The Original Belle has a voice that is capable of extreme gentleness as well as belted-from-the-chest power. Watson’s voice was a flat whisper in comparison and Disney knew it. Unfortunately, rather than trying to perhaps play-up its almost innocent quality, DIsney chose to auto-tune it. I nearly choked on my popcorn when I heard it. Unless its a deliberate stylistic choice, auto-tune is bad. It has no place in music like this. Disney used it to try to hide the shortcomings of Watson’s voice and, given that Belle’s singing is part of the bedrock of this movie, it was a terrible mistake.

Next, we have Gaston. In the first half of the movie he comes across as much more sympathetic than Original Gaston. His character is more fleshed-out and he actually tries to woo Belle with flowers and dates rather than just dragging her off to look at his trophies, etc. He’s still oafish, but it came across (at least to me) less as pure arrogance and more as lack of awareness. Of course, things shift a bit when the “Gaston” musical number plays. (One has to remember, though, that in the movie world Gaston’s personal qualities are universally admired while Belle is the weirdo.) What’s the problem? Well, this movie takes Gaston from being a sympathetic war hero who truly admires Belle (if for the wrong reasons) to being a psycho who leaves her father to be eaten alive by wolves. I really just didn’t expect to see such an insanely dark turn of his character because nothing really set him up for it. The Original Gaston (probably) would not have gone so far and, from the perspective of the village, he’s actually the hero right up to his death. By the end of this movie, Gaston isn’t even a hero to his trusty stooge LeFou.

Speaking of LeFou, I don’t understand why people project “he’s gay” onto the Original LeFou. He was a fanboy. He didn’t just admire Gaston, he wanted to be Gaston. There are millions of men who want to be Tom Brady, and since they can’t, they’d be happy doing the next best thing and being his best friend/suck-up/footstool. That doesn’t mean they’re gay. This movie, however, confuses everything. Gaston outright asks LeFou why he doesn’t have a nice girl and LeFou’s reply was, essentially, “it’s not because I’m not trying” or something similar. At the end of the movie, LeFou is shown dancing with a lady in a wide shot (dancing really well for a dude who wasn’t even taught to read) then a later tight shot shows him dancing with another dude. So, he’s bi? Why does it even matter? Also his switching-sides things made zero sense to me. Sure he didn’t like Gaston anymore but that doesn’t mean he automatically likes Bell or the Beast (whom he’s never met), so why not just put his pitchfork down and go home?

Moving on, the subplot with Belle’s mother was just a bit depressing and, for all of its dark gravity, I don’t think it added enough to the movie to justify its existence. 

The Beast himself was, to me, less than beastly. The Original Beast was pretty fearsome. His brute strength and animal tendencies were definitely on display in the original movie and he gave Belle a reason to be more than just a little afraid of him This Beast is much more toned down and I’m not sure why. It undermines the whole premise of the outside matching the inside until the Beast learns to change. Also I am totally confused: was the father turned into the beast first and then his son inherited the curse or something? Because the prologue shows an adult but the Beast attacks a painting of a boy. Time passes and the Beast ages but yet he’s still a young man when the curse is lifted. It’s the same paradox from the original movie (that I always explained as the Beast didn’t age while cursed).

Finally, there were bothersome costume choices. 

For one, why does Belle have her skirt hiked up to her hip for half the movie, putting her bloomers on display for the entire world? At first I thought it was to indicate her absent-mindedness (like accidentally tucking your skirt into your underwear while dressing) but then it kept happening, so it was obviously a deliberate choice. She walks around everywhere like this, the equivalent of a woman walking with her skirt tucked into her underwear, and nobody notices/says anything, not even Gaston who presumably would be very interested in the goings-on beneath her skirts. It drove me crazy.

Then there is The Dress. Belle’s dress from the original movie is famous, iconic. I remember when the movie came out that the dress itself seemed like a marvel of animation. I really looked forward to how the movie would interpret it and had very high hopes because of how well the dress had been done in the Cinderella remake. Alas, Emma Watson strikes again. Why blame Watson? Because she had a lot of input on the creation of the dress and she specifically declined to wear a corset (because feminism or something). Corsets aren’t always meant to squeeze; often they’re meant to provide structure to a dress, to provide a support to anchor heavy fabrics. So because Watson didn’t want to wear a corset the costumer couldn’t have the voluminous skirt and petticoats that define Belle’s famous dress. Instead we got a flat, if expensive looking, mess. The linked image shows the dress on display, all draped perfectly, and even then it doesn’t look great and it definitely doesn’t have that shape when worn on the body. The layers of ruffles try to mask the fact that the dress itself really has no shape and all of the photos from the movie show the dress in motion or puddled beneath Watson. She’s never shown just standing still. And from the movie I recall only a brief moment of stillness where the full length of the dress was shown. It’s almost as if Disney knew it didn’t look good. I have seen better cosplay. Disney’s own theme park face characters do a better job. And then there is this interpretation, also with Disney, that would have probably been very elegant and true to the spirit of the original dress. All of these are better than what the movie ultimately provided. 

Aside from the dress, there are nitpicky things that didn’t work or seemed out of place. I didn’t like Belle’s necklace. It looked chunky, didn’t go with the dress, and I’m not sure what the theme of the branching tree was supposed to be (perhaps alluding to the fallen tree that guided her father to the castle?). Maybe a choker or nothing at all would have been better. I also didn’t like her ear cuff. It looked anachronistic. My husband said he was fixated on the Beast’s messily buttoned waistcoat, but I thought that worked to depict the Beast’s own slovenliness (or pure inability to button his stuff, but doesn’t he have servants for that?). 

My son is waking up so in all, the movie was OK and I don’t regret seeing it. It just doesn’t come anywhere close to the original and likely owes most of its accolades to the original movie’s coat tails.