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intomorning and I watched Belle, which a movie based loosely on a true historical story of a black girl being raised as equal with her white half-sister/cousin in a noble house. It was actually a lovely movie that balanced, I thought, the romance, the identity struggle, the overarching theme of race and slavery, and the court case.
Reviews kept comparing the movie to Jane Austen stories even though Austen wrote about the Regency period and this was lateVictorian Georgian (where women's dresses were still huge and men still wore wigs!) or Downton Abbey, which took place around the First world War. Come on, guys, not all British period pieces are the same damn period. Oh, so the movie had to do with the marriage mart and trading rank and fortune? Welcome to hundreds of years of British history, not only the Regency era.
What could have been a terribly cheesy movie was instead moving and thoughtful and paced well, and even occasionally quite funny. Our E Street Cinema theater had a small but very participatory crowd, who laughed at the coachman's long-suffering face and groaned at someone's well-meaning but awful courtship and literally snapped at some of the insults being thrown around in the film (period appropriate ones, of course!).
It was a fun experience and a good film, though it did sneak in some classic Hollywood moments that are less true to the period as it is true to cinema expectations: epic speeches that resound with the truth of hindsight, the climactic kiss of true love that would have never taken place on a public street, and so on.
And all the actors were lovely -- I didn't know any of them but Tom Felton (who was quite easy to dislike as a villain, mor eso than his Draco ever was), but they all put in quality performances, especially the lead, Gugu Mbatha-Raw. And it probably says something about identity struggles (and the theme of the personal being political) that many of those depicted in the film are still resonant with what people experience and grapple with today.
intomorning and I watched Belle, which a movie based loosely on a true historical story of a black girl being raised as equal with her white half-sister/cousin in a noble house. It was actually a lovely movie that balanced, I thought, the romance, the identity struggle, the overarching theme of race and slavery, and the court case. Reviews kept comparing the movie to Jane Austen stories even though Austen wrote about the Regency period and this was late
What could have been a terribly cheesy movie was instead moving and thoughtful and paced well, and even occasionally quite funny. Our E Street Cinema theater had a small but very participatory crowd, who laughed at the coachman's long-suffering face and groaned at someone's well-meaning but awful courtship and literally snapped at some of the insults being thrown around in the film (period appropriate ones, of course!).
It was a fun experience and a good film, though it did sneak in some classic Hollywood moments that are less true to the period as it is true to cinema expectations: epic speeches that resound with the truth of hindsight, the climactic kiss of true love that would have never taken place on a public street, and so on.
And all the actors were lovely -- I didn't know any of them but Tom Felton (who was quite easy to dislike as a villain, mor eso than his Draco ever was), but they all put in quality performances, especially the lead, Gugu Mbatha-Raw. And it probably says something about identity struggles (and the theme of the personal being political) that many of those depicted in the film are still resonant with what people experience and grapple with today.
