@cmerry, sympathy with GCSEs there, especially them holding them in June, as my lady and I are reading through the Harry Potter books, its sort of interesting to compare school experiences, plus of course it brings back many (usually bad), school memories.
Well we've had an eventful few days. It turned out the application for extending my lady's spousal Visa took yet another form and another thousand quid to be completed asap, this one really was ridiculous! we hope this is finally it, at least for another three years. really the hoops we've had to go through for this one were even worse than getting the dam spousal visa in the first place!
After all that stress yesterday, my lady and I decided we needed a break, so went to see the new version of Aladdin, with Will smith as the Dgini. As I'll now be discussing the film, if you've not seen it, prepare for a massive load of spoilage!
The first good thing to say, is that the writing generally improved, and it was over all a snappier film in terms of dialogue and plotting to say the events, songs and characters were mostly the same as in the 1992 film, indeed the tone was rather different.
I liked most of the new casting, Aladdin worked well enough, but the new Jafar was frankly so slimy it was unbelievable! I also really liked the princess's friend and Djinni's love interest Dahlia as she was both a fun character and a nice idea to give the djinni some plot.
To go along with Jafar, Iago was also an amazing upgrade and now was actually sunister, though in fairness Iago is one of the elements of the original film that always got on my whick, and in a watch through last year with my lady he got on my whick even more.
I liked what they did with the songs for the most part though by just adding extra verses, indeed I've always fancied singing arabian nights but there's never been enough of it to sing, so a few extra verses were appreciated.
my only issue with characters were Princess Jasmin and the sultan.
Douglas seal was a sultan you could genuinely believe was someone's lovable old papa, the one in the remake is frankly so wooden and generally dysmal I never really got that anyone could think much of him.
The major disappointment though was princess Jasmin.
Likely for purposes of satisfying the SJW crowd, she was given a power balad and a hole motivation of wanting to be a leader for her people. Unfortunately, she also lost any sense of fun. The power balad was also wildly out of keeping with the rest of the music, as well as suffering from the actress only being able to sing at a belt and! requiring auto tuning, indeed hearing her belt a hole new world was down right painful.
The initial plot of her switching clothes with Dahlia was fun, but they just didn't continue it, and of course there couldnt' be any moments of her trying to play up to Jafar to get close enough to pincht the lamp, indeed my lady made the point that while the original Jasmin was more damselly, she was also a lot more fun.
I was also a little confused at the actual point of the power balad, which was sort of like a poor attempt to redo let it go without the heart, since basically the entire purpose of Jasmin's plot arc here seemed to be to prove that she was capable of bossing guards around, indeed if they were going to go with the route of making her a more effective character, why not go the hole hog and have her actually be compitant at something, rather than just able to give big speeches and apparently persuade men to do her bidding.
Disappointing princesses aside though, Will Smith was down right awesome! well he's will Smith, he's always going to be down right awesome, but I admit we were wondering what sort of Djinni he'd make because you can't replace robin williams.
I actually liked the idea of Will Smith as the Djinni, since if you had to have a new actor in the role, better someone who had his own presence than someone trying to pretend to be robin. And that was exactly what happened! he redid all the dialogue, and was very much a different djinni even whilst being the same character, plus of course, a big blue will smith flying around wrapping was just plane cool!
My only final cryticism, is that I wish they decided on an over all tone, since with matters generally feeling darker, they took several real kiddy short cuts, for example Jafar teleporting people he disliked off to the dungeons rather than doing antyhing more perminant, or even potentially perminant like turning them into other things, (anyone remember that horrific pigs scene from willow?)>
I also thought it was a bit silly towards the end, how often other people were holding the lamp and not! using it, indeed during the rather superfluous flying carpet chase, even if one with a rather cool Nazgaul type beasty, if someone had just rubbed the lamp and said "I wish Jafar was turned into a sheep" the problems would've been over pretty quickly .
As I remember in the original, once Jafar gets the lamp, he pretty much keeps it all the way through the final big fight.
In general though, \it was better than I expected, and Will Smith was genuinely fantastic.
We also had an amazingly nice meal, which was good, and spent most of today reading harry potter and the order of the phoenix
My Trimps have been a wee bit neglected, but I'm sure they'll cope, and of course my monster in breed memorial is on hold, though I'll be glad to get back to both of them soon enough.
With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)