Cruella (Craig Gillespie, 2021)

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wattsup32
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Re: Cruella (Craig Gillespie, 2021)

#26 Post by wattsup32 » Sat Jun 05, 2021 10:38 am

therewillbeblus wrote:
Fri Jun 04, 2021 5:59 pm
He.. he doesn't even talk about why it doesn't work, it's just a weird rant.. Plus this is Exhibit A in lazily refusing to engage with the film beyond the surface level:

I've read a couple thinkpieces on this, and they tend to be predetermined strikes against the trend of humanizing villains/telling backstories that alter the fiction that's come before, without any talk about what the movie does accomplish or how it internally operates as a work of different fiction. Like, if you acknowledge that it's doing something different, but you aren't interesting in approaching the work as it is, and demanding it fit the schema of your own preferred feelings, isn't that anti-intellectualism rather than film criticism?
You nailed it and I'll go a step further. None of this criticism is specific to Cruella being a film. It would apply equally to a novel, a Broadway play, an old-timey radio show, or bedtime story. Film criticism rarely engages with the merits of film as cinema. Instead, this criticism treats film as a mere packet of narrative without any regard to the medium of delivery. That refusal to engage with art as art (rather than mere narration) isn't unique to film criticism. It's true about almost all art and cultural criticism.

Well, I guess sometimes you'll get a critic that calls something "beautifully photographed" so that's something . . . sort of.

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ianthemovie
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Re: Cruella (Craig Gillespie, 2021)

#27 Post by ianthemovie » Sat Jun 05, 2021 11:45 am

Haven't seen Cruella, but having read Lane's review it seems pretty clear that his argument has to do with burdening very flimsy existing properties like children's stories (the same could arguably be said with what Marvel and DC have done with superheroes) with excessive and inappropriate amounts of seriousness and pop psychology--cookie-cutter ways of building "character" that have themselves become cliche. ("No villain, these days, is complete without a backstory. If a modern Olivier were remaking “Richard III,” he would have to show little Dick being hump-shamed in the playground.") A little bit snarky but that's on brand for Lane--and I have to admit that he has a point. Having seen a few of the other recent Disney live-action remakes they are all trying way too desperately to be "edgy" or "deep," usually by slapping on these lazy readymade pop-psychological backstories.

This is not to say that movies based on children's material, comic books, fairy tales, etc. can't be reinterpreted as high art, or that they can't be mined for deeper material (I'll admit to being a long-time connoisseur of fairy-tale films for all ages)... but, at the risk of sounding like a curmudgeon, I would agree with Lane that such remakes often show little sensitivity or understanding of the tone of their sources, and so risk becoming empty exercises in style.

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therewillbeblus
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Re: Cruella (Craig Gillespie, 2021)

#28 Post by therewillbeblus » Sat Jun 05, 2021 12:08 pm

I understand that point, but this film in particular establishes a backstory without going full-tilt into any self-serious depth or psychology. The psychological aptness is in the omissions. While it's fair to not like a manipulative intervention of shoving potent sympathy down our throats, something bothers me about any position that views granting complexity to another human being as empty, or sensitivity to people as tone-deaf. I know this is a personal bias as a humanist, but for someone to bluntly ask to simplify a main character and place them in a binary category to feed the 'bad' pathology that person has already assigned them in stone, well, that says something deeply depressing about where we're at.


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knives
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Re: Cruella (Craig Gillespie, 2021)

#30 Post by knives » Sat Jun 05, 2021 10:01 pm

Why should these films show sensitivity to their source? The source is totally irrelevant.

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therewillbeblus
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Re: Cruella (Craig Gillespie, 2021)

#31 Post by therewillbeblus » Sat Jun 05, 2021 11:52 pm

knives wrote:
Sat Jun 05, 2021 10:01 pm
Why should these films show sensitivity to their source? The source is totally irrelevant.
Exactly, and to use ianthemovie's point inversely, if these films were just recycled source-sensitive portrayals that fit the schema of the bone-pickers, wouldn't that be pointless to externalize into a film and become an "empty exercise in style"?

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The Curious Sofa
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Re: Cruella (Craig Gillespie, 2021)

#32 Post by The Curious Sofa » Sun Jun 06, 2021 4:57 am

I thought this was better than any of the other Disney live action remakes/reboots/etc I've seen but that isn't saying much. What keeps it from being a good film is how it's continuously forced to acknowledge its origins. I'm fine that it isn't faithful to the source, but I rolled my eyes at the unconvincing attempts at explaining Cruella's motives, which never move beyond the most trite pop-psychology level and at all the the "aha" moments which pay lip service to 101 Dalmatians. Half of the film is corporate deadweight and you won't find anything as graceless in the Dodie Smith novel or in the original Disney animation.

Cruella is at its best in its mid-section where Cruella keeps upstaging The Baroness. That's where the film takes flight, being its own thing and hinting at what it could have been if studios weren't slaves to franchise service. I wasn't convinced by the time and energy it strains at being a 101 Dalmatians prequel and I'm not sure why I should be satisfied with a " good for that it is" compromise. While I liked the film better than Lane, I get where he is coming from.

Also, there is a Tove Jansson biopic which appears to be halfway decent, that's good news as far as I'm concerned.
Last edited by The Curious Sofa on Sun Jun 06, 2021 12:32 pm, edited 2 times in total.

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ianthemovie
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Re: Cruella (Craig Gillespie, 2021)

#33 Post by ianthemovie » Sun Jun 06, 2021 12:30 pm

therewillbeblus wrote:
Sat Jun 05, 2021 11:52 pm
knives wrote:
Sat Jun 05, 2021 10:01 pm
Why should these films show sensitivity to their source? The source is totally irrelevant.
Exactly, and to use ianthemovie's point inversely, if these films were just recycled source-sensitive portrayals that fit the schema of the bone-pickers, wouldn't that be pointless to externalize into a film and become an "empty exercise in style"?
Neither I nor Anthony Lane (I'll go ahead and assume) is arguing for "recycled source-sensitive portrayals." This basically describes the live-action Beauty and the Beast from a couple of years ago which was almost a shot-for-shot remake of the 1991 animated film and which I found more or less pointless. But I wouldn't have enjoyed the remake any more had it deviated from the 1991 version merely in order to psychologize the Beast by imposing some sort of gritty back-story on him, or if the action of the story had been set against the French Revolution or whatever, just for the sake of trying to do something new.

By "sensitivity to the source" I suppose I mean a sense of proportion with regard to the strengths or limitations of a certain piece of material and what it's capable of expressing. This is not to be dismissive of Dodie Smith's original novel--which I have never read--but my guess is that it's pretty lightweight stuff, and using as a jumping-off-point to try to address Serious Themes seems silly. Should Gillespie have the right to use this material however he wants to tell a new story or explore a new idea? Absolutely. I don't believe that any piece of intellectual property is inherently sacred and should not be available to re-interpretation. But it just seems laughable to make something as delightfully insubstantial as 101 Dalmatians bear this kind of weight. It reminds me of Woody Allen's hilarious review of a (fictitious) Method-style production of Snow White in which the Seven Dwarfs, played by Marlon Brando, Lee J. Cobb, George C. Scott, et al., are all riddled with rage issues, impotence, shell-shock, etc.

Putting it slightly differently: is there anything that Gillespie does in this film, in terms of style or content, that wouldn't have worked just as well if this screenplay were entirely divorced from the world of 101 Dalmatians? I ask this question sincerely as I still haven't seen the movie. It makes me wonder (along with The Curious Sofa who hints at something similar in their post) whether, if Cruella is really an imaginative and original piece of filmmaking, why does it need to exist in relation to this source that it seems to little-to-no interest in relating to in the first place? Change the character names and I'm guessing you'd have something far more interesting, and it wouldn't be burdened by the ghosts of the Disney and Smith versions. But of course a major studio like Disney would not be able to sell such a film (and wouldn't have greenlit it in the first place).

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knives
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Re: Cruella (Craig Gillespie, 2021)

#34 Post by knives » Sun Jun 06, 2021 1:19 pm

That’s also a tad ridiculous as adaptation has often taken lightweight material and made it more grand. Would you say that Goerthe was wrong for adding pathos to Faust given the limitations of the original fairy tale and Marlowe’s play?

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therewillbeblus
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Re: Cruella (Craig Gillespie, 2021)

#35 Post by therewillbeblus » Sun Jun 06, 2021 1:22 pm

ianthemovie wrote:
Sun Jun 06, 2021 12:30 pm
Putting it slightly differently: is there anything that Gillespie does in this film, in terms of style or content, that wouldn't have worked just as well if this screenplay were entirely divorced from the world of 101 Dalmatians? I ask this question sincerely as I still haven't seen the movie. It makes me wonder (along with The Curious Sofa who hints at something similar in their post) whether, if Cruella is really an imaginative and original piece of filmmaking, why does it need to exist in relation to this source that it seems to little-to-no interest in relating to in the first place? Change the character names and I'm guessing you'd have something far more interesting, and it wouldn't be burdened by the ghosts of the Disney and Smith versions. But of course a major studio like Disney would not be able to sell such a film (and wouldn't have greenlit it in the first place).
Yes, it would have and does work divorced from that world- isn't that exactly what knives and I have argued in our respective longwinded writeups? I'll just speak for myself, but I think I outlined just that in detail. And as for why they needed to tie it into an already existing world, well, why does that need to carry an intrinsic burden? That was the question knives posed, as I interpreted it. The burden seems to be superimposed by the viewer (or in some cases, by people before they even see the movie- and I'm not even referring to you, I've spoken to several friends who have lodged these same predetermined questions burdening the film with their own burdens without having seen it). There is a lot of value in taking a familiar world and making something entirely new with it. When we see a new Bond take over (and to align with the prequel logic as here, we can point to Craig's 'prequel' Bond), we don't say, "Hey wait, why isn't Daniel Craig as misogynistic as Connery? What must have happened to him between these time periods to warrant a change in attitude and a loss of grit?" We accept that they are different spins on similar characters.

The value of manipulating ideas - whether using familiar iconography, milieus, or more abstract concepts - is that it provokes us to recognize a new angle, to think, feel, see something novel and grow in our adaptability and perceptiveness as a result. It's the consumer's rigidity that stunts them from this process, which is fine and everyone's right (and I certainly have my fair share of moments where I do this too, in no way am I trying to say I'm "above" it), but arguments that the film is a failure because a viewer isn't willing to take it as-is and find its value within those constraints isn't fair.
The Curious Sofa wrote:
Sun Jun 06, 2021 4:57 am
What keeps it from being a good film is how it's continuously forced to acknowledge its origins. I'm fine that it isn't faithful to the source, but I rolled my eyes at the unconvincing attempts at explaining Cruella's motives, which never move beyond the most trite pop-psychology level and at all the the "aha" moments which pay lip service to 101 Dalmatians. Half of the film is corporate deadweight and you won't find anything as graceless in the Dodie Smith novel or in the original Disney animation.

Cruella is at its best in its mid-section where Cruella keeps upstaging The Baroness. That's where the film takes flight, being its own thing and hinting at what it could have been if studios weren't slaves to franchise service. I wasn't convinced by the time and energy it strains at being a 101 Dalmatians prequel and I'm not sure why I should be satisfied with a " good for that it is" compromise. While I liked the film better than Lane, I get where he is coming from.
I don’t know if anyone is disagreeing that the explanations of her motives “move beyond the most trite pop-psychology level,” but what about the proposed reading that this is intentionally mirroring Cruella’s own refusal to engage with her deeper psychology? We watch her begin to stew in intangible feelings and then either suppress them before our eyes and make them tangible with anger, or literally get whisked away from a confrontation by a character or music cue. This is another example of how such a criticism doesn’t have to be an inherently bad thing because of how the film’s technique is working in step with the blockbuster's need to restrict us to some superficial depth, to give it a unique twist and make it deep on its own terms. I thought it was an incredibly realistic and subtle (yes, in a fantasy bursting with pizzazz) depiction of how people bury their more challenging emotions. What these articles are arguing, as I see them, is that the film is going into overdrive with psychological sentiment, and so are you saying you’d rather see that, even more trite approach?

It seems like you're both more upset that there was "franchise service" rather than accepting such and meeting the film where it's at, where it is utilizing the expectations of the studio and doing something very interesting with that reality. I'm honestly hearing a "damned-if-they-do, damned-if-they-don't" complex from those critiquing this film- either it goes into excess empathy and becomes problematic and trite, or it is too restrained and becomes pop psychology and trite. Can't the film be doing the latter in a unique and self-reflexive way that uses the compromise to demonstrate a raw truth about how we avoid our more uncomfortable emotions?

On the previous page, I went to great detail to explain why I believe this is true, deconstructing certain specific scenes, so I am genuinely curious, The Curious Sofa, what you think about those points in relation to your criticism, since we seem to agree on what the film did but not on the intricate merit in what it accomplishes through the elisions.

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knives
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Re: Cruella (Craig Gillespie, 2021)

#36 Post by knives » Sun Jun 06, 2021 1:52 pm

To one of those points something I felt helped the film was being connected to a source material. The familiarity allows the film to use a number of short hands. For an obvious example, the use of dalmatians creates tension between several characters that wouldn’t initially exist without knowing the Cruella archetype beforehand. Just naming a character Roger tells us how we should feel about him.

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therewillbeblus
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Re: Cruella (Craig Gillespie, 2021)

#37 Post by therewillbeblus » Sun Jun 06, 2021 2:06 pm

Yes, this is a case where familiarity helps as a jumping off point, and as a skeleton to weave through these themes in established devices, and it also works in its sage comprehension of psychological defense mechanisms segregated from the burdens folks are imposing on the source to distract from the strengths. The addition of a familiar milieu removes the legwork of establishing certain extraneous details that might detract from what Gillespie is doing, but it does also allow one to attend to new important details that we may have missed in our two-dimensional depictions in the past. There are always new layers to the onion worthy of peeling back for human behavior in the social environment, and using a construct people know allots more space to the approach, but these kinds of sly explorations also worked wonders in I, Tonya and not everyone entering that movie knew the ins-and-outs of the story, nor did they issue these same complaints of preconceived burdens on narrative..

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swo17
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Re: Cruella (Craig Gillespie, 2021)

#38 Post by swo17 » Wed Jul 14, 2021 1:05 am

I just watched this and 101 Dalmatians back to back and feel like the twist ending is
SpoilerShow
that the entirety of the original film is some kind of fairy tale exaggeration built on a misunderstanding about why Cruella was hording all of those dogs. (I would expect a sequel to tell Cruella's version of that story.) In the '60s film, Cruella explicitly expresses her desire to have all the dogs killed, and Jasper and Horace are game to do it. In Cruella, however, she makes a show of having us think she killed the dogs for an outfit only to reveal that she would never do such a thing. Not only that, but she gifts Pongo and Perdita to her friend and accomplice Anita, as well as to Roger, seemingly as an apology for getting him fired. Why would she do that only to turn around and steal their offspring in the next film? As she says in her big speech toward the end of this film, she is the "villain they need" but not necessarily a villain in deed

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