Maleficent
Jun. 2nd, 2014 11:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lizbeeI saw Maleficent last night! It was the final task of a busy and stressful weekend, and the fact that I'm referring to a movie I enjoyed quite a lot as a "task" is a sign of just how much I had to do. And still have yet to do, but I took today off on the grounds of NOPE, and it's the best decision I have ever made. I'm going to do some Continuum chores (CONVENTION STARTS FRIDAY AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAApleaseI'msotired), clean my room (resembling my current mental state) and generally square things away so I can approach the week with a clear head.
(I cited insomnia as my reason for staying home, which is true, but now I'm starting to feel like the death cold that has moved throughout the house has finally hit me. Could I be concrud patient zero this year? I hope not!)
Anyway, Maleficent. I realised yesterday afternoon that I had strong Sleeping Beauty feelings. I was given the video for Christmas when I was six or seven, and proceeded to watch it every single day for the rest of the summer holidays. (You can imagine my parents' delight.)
Anyway, the thing about Sleeping Beauty is that Aurora is barely in it (as a conscious non-infant). The real heroines are the three fairies, Flora, Fauna and Merryweather. I joked on Tumblr a few months ago that the real test for whether or not I liked Maleficent was how it handled the fairies. As it happened, it did not handle them well at all, but I mostly liked it anyway?
See, in the 1959 original, the fairies are scatty, egotistical and silly, but basically competent. Flora is bossy, Fauna is a follower, Merryweather is more independent. It's Merryweather who weakens Maleficent's curse from death to a sleep with hope of rescue, and later, the three of them rescue Phillip and actively help him defeat Maleficent and rescue the princess.
Here, they're just ... stupid. Maleficent offers the solution to the curse herself (for valid plot reasons!), and the fairies are so incompetent they don't even know how to feed a baby. It's literally only through Maleficent's secret assistance that Aurora makes it through childhood. Even at the very end, when order and balance have been restored, they try to tell Aurora they gave the best years of their life to raise her -- but Maleficent, Aurora's "real" fairy godmother, shuts them up.
Aurora isn't that great a character either. Not that she ever was -- reviews in 1959 called her insipid -- but she was drawn with a glint in her eye that made her seem more proactive than she really was. Elle Fanning tries really hard, but Aurora comes across more like a parody of a Disney princess.
(This isn't helped by the fairies' gifts -- in the original, she was given beauty and musical talent, then Merryweather saved her life. Here, the gifts are beauty and eternal happiness, which to me was kind of chilling, because no one can be happy all the time. Except Aurora. She comes across as somewhat blunted, and I wanted the other characters to notice, but that never happened.)
So basically, every woman in this movie who isn't played by Angelina Jolie is kind of not great. Aurora's mother gets exactly the same number of lines as she did in 1959, except the '59 version lived to the end instead of dropping dead offscreen.
On the upside, Maleficent herself, and her story, were GREAT, and although I found the editing a bit uneven, I would like to see MANY vids. I mean, yes, her initial motivation was entirely about extracting vengeance from a dude, but he stole her wings! He took advantage of her trust and mutilated her! Cutting off Maleficent's wings is almost too obviously Feminist Retelling 101, but it was brilliant anyway. And I didn't expect her to get them back, so well done on that front. And I loved that she was redeemed by her connection with another woman.
(I also didn't expect Maleficent to bust out a catsuit, either, but I have no complaints.)
There's a totally valid queer reading re Maleficent and Aurora, but I choose not to buy it because it carries with it a fairly strong subtext of grooming, and it turns out I don't like my OTPs to have profound underlying dysfunction any more. Well, a little. But not these two? YMMV, obviously.
Not All Men: I dug that Phillip was really not into kissing a girl he barely knew. And how his casting and appearance were straight out of Non Threatening Boys territory. If I was 13, I would have been all over that. (If I was 18, I think I would have been into Aurora/Diaval.)
IN SHORT, this was not a perfect movie, and it's not what I would have done, but overall I liked it, while regretting that the fairies were diminished to make Maleficent look better. AURORA CAN HAVE FOUR MOTHERS, GUYS, IT'S OKAY. And if the scene where Maleficent, her wings re-attached, throws herself out a window isn't in every multi-fandom LADIES vid ever from now on, I shall pout.
(I cited insomnia as my reason for staying home, which is true, but now I'm starting to feel like the death cold that has moved throughout the house has finally hit me. Could I be concrud patient zero this year? I hope not!)
Anyway, Maleficent. I realised yesterday afternoon that I had strong Sleeping Beauty feelings. I was given the video for Christmas when I was six or seven, and proceeded to watch it every single day for the rest of the summer holidays. (You can imagine my parents' delight.)
Anyway, the thing about Sleeping Beauty is that Aurora is barely in it (as a conscious non-infant). The real heroines are the three fairies, Flora, Fauna and Merryweather. I joked on Tumblr a few months ago that the real test for whether or not I liked Maleficent was how it handled the fairies. As it happened, it did not handle them well at all, but I mostly liked it anyway?
See, in the 1959 original, the fairies are scatty, egotistical and silly, but basically competent. Flora is bossy, Fauna is a follower, Merryweather is more independent. It's Merryweather who weakens Maleficent's curse from death to a sleep with hope of rescue, and later, the three of them rescue Phillip and actively help him defeat Maleficent and rescue the princess.
Here, they're just ... stupid. Maleficent offers the solution to the curse herself (for valid plot reasons!), and the fairies are so incompetent they don't even know how to feed a baby. It's literally only through Maleficent's secret assistance that Aurora makes it through childhood. Even at the very end, when order and balance have been restored, they try to tell Aurora they gave the best years of their life to raise her -- but Maleficent, Aurora's "real" fairy godmother, shuts them up.
Aurora isn't that great a character either. Not that she ever was -- reviews in 1959 called her insipid -- but she was drawn with a glint in her eye that made her seem more proactive than she really was. Elle Fanning tries really hard, but Aurora comes across more like a parody of a Disney princess.
(This isn't helped by the fairies' gifts -- in the original, she was given beauty and musical talent, then Merryweather saved her life. Here, the gifts are beauty and eternal happiness, which to me was kind of chilling, because no one can be happy all the time. Except Aurora. She comes across as somewhat blunted, and I wanted the other characters to notice, but that never happened.)
So basically, every woman in this movie who isn't played by Angelina Jolie is kind of not great. Aurora's mother gets exactly the same number of lines as she did in 1959, except the '59 version lived to the end instead of dropping dead offscreen.
On the upside, Maleficent herself, and her story, were GREAT, and although I found the editing a bit uneven, I would like to see MANY vids. I mean, yes, her initial motivation was entirely about extracting vengeance from a dude, but he stole her wings! He took advantage of her trust and mutilated her! Cutting off Maleficent's wings is almost too obviously Feminist Retelling 101, but it was brilliant anyway. And I didn't expect her to get them back, so well done on that front. And I loved that she was redeemed by her connection with another woman.
(I also didn't expect Maleficent to bust out a catsuit, either, but I have no complaints.)
There's a totally valid queer reading re Maleficent and Aurora, but I choose not to buy it because it carries with it a fairly strong subtext of grooming, and it turns out I don't like my OTPs to have profound underlying dysfunction any more. Well, a little. But not these two? YMMV, obviously.
Not All Men: I dug that Phillip was really not into kissing a girl he barely knew. And how his casting and appearance were straight out of Non Threatening Boys territory. If I was 13, I would have been all over that. (If I was 18, I think I would have been into Aurora/Diaval.)
IN SHORT, this was not a perfect movie, and it's not what I would have done, but overall I liked it, while regretting that the fairies were diminished to make Maleficent look better. AURORA CAN HAVE FOUR MOTHERS, GUYS, IT'S OKAY. And if the scene where Maleficent, her wings re-attached, throws herself out a window isn't in every multi-fandom LADIES vid ever from now on, I shall pout.
no subject
Date: 2014-06-02 02:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-06-02 04:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-06-02 05:06 am (UTC)You may not be surprised that I have different feelings on the queer reading. ;) I have to say, I don't see it as a grooming thing at all - if anything it almost feels like the opposite, because Maleficent so clearly is drawn into caring about Aurora only reluctantly.
I also felt like they tried really hard to give Aurora some agency in this. I'm not 100% sure they succeeded, but at least it was her desire to live in the Moors, and she freed Maleficent's wings... slightly better than the original, again.
There are things I would change, but mostly I'm really fucking happy they played with the tropes at least a little.
no subject
Date: 2014-06-02 11:31 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-06-06 08:41 pm (UTC)