Idek

This weekend S came over! I picked her up in my car but then we ran into traffic.


We went to paint more pottery!


There was a seriously hardcore grandma there. We had childhood flashbacks.


S really liked my apartment. She had a unique way of showing it, I guess.


We also went to a buffet at the mall. They had a lot of tasty desserts, but S got too many and also got a crepe.


I can't begin to describe how horrific it was, watching her eat that crepe. She folded it into a massive crepe ball, but the crepe sides didn't have enough structural integrity to contain the volatile crepe filling, and it began to gush out. Undeterred, S then began biting at the holes in the crepe to staunch the flow, but only managed to widen the crevasse through which the filling was escaping.

She did not want to pay 7.99 for a doggy bag, so we walked around for a while, S hunched over moaning that her stomach hurt.

Disney Movie Review (Beauty and the Beast)

Disney movies bother me. I mean, I love them, they have great animation and music and there are some cute little jokes you might not get as a kid. They’re cheerful and uplifting with a simple plot and best of all, they’re only like an hour and a half at the most, so they’re perfect for those evenings when I’m too tired to pay attention to some long suspenseful Hollywood blockbuster where the main plot isn’t even introduced until 45 minutes in, and can morph into a 4-hour marathon if you’re watching with another person or two, and you have to pause whenever someone needs to go to the bathroom or the kitchen for a drink or needs to have the plot explained (I hate this last situation; even if the person confused is me, I’m just like ‘fuck it, keep going’).

So Disney movies (along with Batman the Animated Series and Gargoyles cartoon episodes) have a special corner of the video-watching section of my heart. The problem is, Disney movies are so easy and enjoyable to watch that I watch them over and over again, to the point I know the songs and most of the lines by heart, which makes me popular with kids…and slightly disturbing to my med school counterparts who don’t even remember that Bambi had a dad (I mean, the guy was the GREAT PRINCE OF THE FOREST, and he raised Bambi. Without him, there’d be NO Bambi and NO movie—how can you forget him?!?). Then again, they’re devoting all that memory space to SAVING LIVES, so I probably lose.

Failing at life, regardless, one of the movies I’ve recently focused on is Beauty and the Beast. Really, a beautiful movie. I remember going to see it in theaters with my parents as a kid, and bawling uncontrollably when I thought the Beast had died (and then being horribly disappointed when he returned as a hideous Fabio wannabe with lasers shooting out of his fingers and toes).

My parents remembered the three of us sharing a Coke and contracting my random sore throat cold and being incapacitated for several days. Ridiculously expensive movie theater food 1, Asian cheapness 0.

But even back then, some things in the movie bothered me as a kid, which have only snowballed in adulthood, resulting in me writing this blog at 25 years old about a fairy tale movie. I’m…just not going to think about that. Sigh. Alright, for one, the Beast is a prince, right? That doesn’t just mean a castle and servants, it means a kingdom and political power. People probably had to pay him taxes and shit so he could have his fancy castle. If he became a beast, wouldn’t other people have to hear about it? Even if they didn’t understand the specifics, they’d have to know something was up. And they’d likely gossip about it and probably blow it even more out of proportion. Isn’t that sort of how Elizabeth Bathory and Vlad the Impaler became vampires or something? Instead, the good villagefolk of Beauty and the Beast do the exact opposite – they completely forget that they ever had a ruler.

Well, you might say, maybe he’s not their ruler. Maybe he’s like a neighboring kingdom’s prince. He’s hidden in that creepy forest.

Which Gaston and the angry mob easily navigate through in what, a few hours, to go kill the everloving shit out of him. There’s no, ‘Wait, where do we find him?’. Gaston sings an evil rousing song, they organize, gather up weapons, say goodbye to their wives and children, and march to the castle like they knew the whole time where he’s been and had just been waiting for an excuse to lynch him. Well, you might say, that’s because the magic mirror showed them the way. And okay, I thought about that, ‘cuz it does look like a beacon at times. Even though the magic mirror is technically supposed to only show what you ask, not where it is. Maybe it was especially accommodating that night. Or maybe it was looking to diversify.

But even then, all the events I just described occurred in the very same night. They lay siege and battle, and the night sky does not change color the entire time.

There’s no lightening, no starting rays of dawn. It would have stayed night for some time if it hadn’t been for the whole spell breaking (and then what, did everyone in that time zone have to lose several hours of their day? Geez.) And it’s not because it’s always night or something at the enchanted castle, because we have that whole bright snowy day montage where Belle has a snowball fight and sings about her budding bestiality. So, if you ask me, for everything to happen in just one night, it’s rather clear that the Beast has all this time lived essentially next door. And yet, no one ever mentions him.

Poor guy. I’m really pretty miffed on his behalf. No, I really was. As a kid, I always thought princes were cooler than princesses. Or maybe it was because my parents started telling me from a young age that since I was not a blond-haired, blue-eyed tall Caucasian girl, there was no chance in hell I’d ever be considered beautiful, a prerequisite as all young girls know to be a princess since princes don’t marry fuglies. Of course, they weren’t deliberately trying to crush my dreams and soul, they just wanted to encourage me not to rely on superficial looks and develop a work ethic and healthy inquiring mind. At the same time, however, I just sort of lost interest in Disney princesses and became rather resentful of them. Stupid Caucasian princess sluts.

Which leads to my second problem. No, not racism, although that’s probably also an issue at this point. After the really neat stained-glass-esque intro, the movie opens with its first musical number by Belle. She saunters daintily out of her cottage, swinging a basket, and sings about her little town where “every day [is] like the one before”. She greets the baker and tries to tell him about her book, but he loses interest rapidly and turns to yell at some guy named Maurice. At this point, we’re supposed to shake our heads in sympathy for Belle and her plight of being the singly intelligent and imaginative being in her village of ignoramuses. Poor misunderstood Belle.

Who has nothing better to do than read and look pretty while everyone else is working their asses off trying to feed their families and earn an honest living. Seriously, she’s just walking through the town scorning everyone’s livelihoods while they in turn sing about how beautiful she is and how they worry she’s just always reading (ie, not contributing anything useful to society). I mean, that whole line where she’s like, “There goes the baker with his tray like always, the same old bread and wares to sell.” SORRY BELLE. DOES MY HUMDRUM DAY JOB BORE YOU?? Cut the guy a break, Belle. No one’s job is exciting every day, and he makes bread for you and your “poor provincial town”. Go ahead, Disney, spread the message. Teach little girls to make fun of the hard-working middle-to-lower class families of the world.

…And I have to ask, why? Why would Disney do this to Belle? In the original stories, unless I’m mistaken, Belle is this girl who asks her dad for a rose instead of fancy dresses and whatnot like her sisters. She’s supposed to be all unmaterialistic, simple, loving, and virtuous. That sounds pretty good. Disney could have stuck with that. But I guess, it’s not very realistic and difficult to identify with. Plus Disney can’t encourage un-materialism when the whole point is for little girls to go out and ask their parents for all the Belle-stamped lunchboxes and backpacks they can find.

So instead of un-materialism, at least Disney encouraged reading in their heroine. I’m all for that. But. Belle reads picture books. Judging by her shapely figure, she has at least hit puberty. Yet she’s reading fairy tale picture books over and over again. When she’s singing to some sheep at a fountain, you can clearly see an entire page taken up by a picture. The sheep proceeds to try and eat the page, in what I hope a gesture meant to say, “Fuck this shit. Do you have Fetal Alcohol Syndrome? Can you not read simple YA bullshit like Sweet Valley High or Goosebumps yet?”

Really, you’d think Belle would learn something from her dad. Now there’s a man with real dreams. Like his daughter, he wants to live in a better world. But unlike her, he knows bitching about your hometown isn’t really the way to go if you want things to change. He takes his destiny in his own hands and tries to create something new. Even if he’s no Thomas Edison, he keeps trying and working toward his goal of being a world-famous inventor.

Belle, on the other hand, I didn’t even really understand what her dream was. She obviously wanted out of her village and “adventure in the great wide somewhere” as she reprises her song in a dandelion field.

But what does she mean by adventure? Does she want to help people like her father? Or maybe, if she likes reading so much, she wants to become a writer or teacher. I remember as a little girl, when I watched her sing, I got all excited. I thought, since I knew Disney always changed the traditional fairy tales, maybe she wanted to be like a ninja or something. Maybe she’d fight the Beast. Yes, it was retarded, I know. The other major piece of cinema I grew up on besides Disney cartoons was my dad’s favorite old-school wuxia classics, so it’s really not that surprising that I was always expecting swordfights in midair and chi blasts in my movies. (Come to think of it, this probably at least in part explains my penchant for anime. It combines the best of both worlds. Yay cartoons+gratuitious bloodshed.)

Anyway, imagine my disappointment when in the end, Belle is quite satisfied in her life with the Beast-turned-hideous Prince. Where’s the adventure in married life? I could understand it when she liked the Beast. A beast is adventurous, servants in the form of talking household objects is adventurous, a magic mirror and pretty glowing rose is adventurous. Fighting to save her furry love from her stalker and homicidal neighbors (who were probably taking out their repressed rage at her) is adventurous and honestly a little scary. But that all went away when the spell broke. Now she’s just married to a prince that apparently no one respected. But Gaston wanted to marry her earlier and she didn’t like that prospect! Granted, Gaston was a dick, but she didn’t sing, “Gaston sucks and sexually harasses me”, she starts singing all over about how she wants more in life. That suggests to me that there was something inherently distasteful to her about marital life.

So why doesn’t she ditch the prince, or if she loves him that much, maybe convince him to ride off with her to see the world or something? Doesn’t she want her adventure??

OHHH I get it. Princess = adventure.