I hadn’t seen the original “Beast” in more than a decade, but the movie remains as wondrous as ever. “Beast” tells the story of a unique and beautiful woman named Belle (Paige O’ Hara), who lives in a small town with her eccentric father (Rex Everhart). She’s considered weird by the townspeople who look down at her tendency to read books and a father who spends his days inventing new contraptions. When her father is imprisoned by a monstrous beast (Robby Benson), Belle switches places with her dad and moves into a castle with the beast.

The beast, however, is more complex than she originally presumed. He previously was a good-looking man who had a curse placed upon him when he denied an ugly woman entry into his home because of her looks. Eventually, Belle and the beast start falling in love despite his outwardly appearance.

The castle that the two live in is also full of wondrous supporting characters, including a talkative candlestick named Lumiere (Jerry Orbach) and a gentlemanly clock named Gaston (Richard White). These and other delightful characters help carry the story along. Angela Lansbury, of course, should be singled out for her delightful turn as a tea kettle named Mrs. Potts, who wants to give Belle a lovely home to live in.

It’s difficult to over-appreciate this classic film, which features a wonderful message about seeing the true beauty in people. The love story is wonderfully-told and the main characters are fully realized. Aside from that, the film’s vibrant colors are wonderful to behold, and the 3-D only adds to that. The new effects are more subtle than the typical 3-D effects where objects come flying off the screen.

The music remains one of the film’s main selling points. The soundtrack is phenomenal. From the exciting lyrics of “Be Our Guest” to the calm melodies of the title track, this film captures many of the reasons why Disney films are often a magical experience. Listening to the title song in the middle of the film actually gave me goosebumps.

“Beauty and the Beast” remains a Disney classic for many reasons. It may be a simple story that children can understand, but its themes and its presentation are magical. It’s no wonder that this film remains a modern-day classic.

Carrey is Mr. Popper, a divorced dad who sees his kids on alternate weekends but can’t relate to them, mainly due to his workaholic ways. All Popper wants from life is to be a full partner in a ruthless Manhattan real estate firm that specializes (for no logical reason other than to make them sinister) in purchasing New York landmarks and replacing them with cold glass and steel buildings. Popper’s partnership dreams are finally within grasp when his trio of bosses (including Philip Baker Hall and Dominic Chianese) issue Popper, their best closer, a seemingly impossible challenge: purchase the only piece of privately owned land in Central Park, the Tavern on the Green, and you’ll get your name on the door.

Unfortunately for Popper, Tavern on the Green is owned by Mrs. Van Gundy (the always delightful Lansbury), and she’s less interested in money and more interested in something Popper doesn’t have — integrity and character. Popper’s pretty sure he can wear her down, though, at least until his life is suddenly complicated (I won’t spoil why this happens) by the arrival of six live penguins at his swanky Manhattan high-rise penthouse. At first, naturally, Popper wants nothing to do with them. But in the end, will the penguins make him a better person, father, and citizen of the world?

What do you think?

The emotions are there, though you do feel more than a little manipulated, and some of the jokes do work, especially Carrey ripping on Baker Hall’s age. But most of the laughs fall flat, the penguins have no personality whatsoever, and the predictability of the story only gets worse as time passes.

What I did like, though, were the more conservative elements. Believe it or not, the villain is an obnoxious zookeeper, a boorish bureaucrat who’s always pushing people around with his stupid badge. Better still, when Popper attempts to get the city to take the penguins off his hands, he runs into worse bureaucrats made inflexible by union rules. Also, Gugino’s boyfriend is a touchy-feely hippie who’s the butt of more than a few jokes.

Concerned leftists need not worry. These jokes are subtle, not preachy or divisive, but like the sighting of a dodo bird, that kind of humor is worth mentioning due to the belief it was extinct.

Hey, maybe this weekend you could rent “Mr. Popper” for the kids instead of risking heir indoctrination by those communistic “The Muppets.”

I kid.

Mostly.

—– 

Shaw’s bombastic stepfather, Senator John Iselin (James Gregory), is a politician on the rise – and also a communist agent – who is a part of a plot that will take him all the way to the White House. At a crucial moment Shaw is to be activated by his mother to kill her husband’s rival, thereby initiating a series of chaotic events that will ultimately install the “Manchurian Candidate” into power.

But all along another former platoon member, Maj. Bennett Marco (Frank Sinatra), suffers recurring flashbacks and dreams about the time they all spent as prisoners in Manchuria and comes to suspect that he and the others were in fact brainwashed. Eventually he uncovers the plot, finds Shaw, and discovers just how far it goes. Shaw, clueless throughout, is a tragic figure as he comes to realize his condition and moves to act accordingly.

Released at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, The Manchurian Candidate is not a true Korean War movie per se. The target of its satire is really Joseph McCarthy and the Red Scare of the mid-1950s. Sen. Iselin’s thinly veiled caricature of the Wisconsin Senator provides a chilling commentary on the intoxication of political power and the gullibility of the American people. It also provides a fascinating  glimpse into the mindset of a nation at the height of tensions in a Cold War many alive today never knew and thus cannot understand.

It should also serve as a warning for us today — that Americans should never invest their “Hope” for “Change” in a candidate about whom they know so little, yet are willing to turn over so much power.

I can imagine yet another remake, this time perhaps featuring a little known Senator from Illinois whose ability to read a teleprompter and bring fawning crowds to ethereal rapture belies his baser motivations. 

But that’s for another article.

Although, as a rule, those people who star in movies are more obnoxious than their colleagues in television – perhaps because we’re not inviting them into our homes – the folks on TV tend to be even whinier.           

The question that comes to mind is when appearing on the tube went from being a well-paid privilege to being an inalienable right. 

So far as I know, it first became an issue when “Murder She Wrote,” a CBS staple from 1984 to 1996, was canceled.  The phenomenon may have pre-dated that event, but that’s when I became aware of the sea change.  Prior to that, diehard fans were naturally disappointed whenever one of their favorite shows bit the dust, but it was understood that nothing went on forever. 

However, in 1996, Angela Lansbury went ballistic over her show’s demise, even though it had already made her enormously wealthy.  As I recall, Ms. Lansbury felt that CBS had not treated her and the show with the proper reverence.  She didn’t seem to realize that a pink slip is a pink slip, and should not be confused with a condolence card.  In any case, I felt that someone should have pointed out to the lady that CBS is a corporation and not a friend of the family – although God knows this particular corporation had been enormously generous to her family, most of whom had wound up on the show’s payroll – and that a 13-year run is about as reverential as TV ever gets. 

Since then, every time a show gets axed because of poor ratings or lousy demographics or because the star is so deeply into drugs that she can’t read a cue card, we have come to expect the likes of Ellen Degeneres, Jane Seymour and Brett Butler, to accuse cold-hearted corporate robots of having it in for them.  The fact of the matter is that any TV network would be only too happy to hire Osama bin Laden to host a game show if they could only work out a deal.  There is a reason, after all, they call it the bottom line. 

Will we ever forget the media frenzy over Ted Koppel’s possible cancellation and the spectacle of Bill Maher’s carrying on over the axing of “Politically Correct” as if it was another of those notorious right-wing conspiracies?  The plain fact of the matter is that nobody had been tuning in “Nightline” for years, except to see if Koppel had finally found a decent barber.  As for Maher, I personally don’t know anyone who hadn’t grown tired of his incessant, adolescent gushing over the sheer wonderfulness of marijuana.  So, while his 9/11 comments about the cowardice of the American military may have cost him an advertiser or two, did he really expect that his talk show, which was neither entertaining nor enlightening, was entitled to an eternal slot on the schedule? 

From whence comes this bizarre sense of entitlement?  And how is it that modestly talented people who have been made ridiculously rich and famous feel compelled to bite the hands that have fed them so well?  What ever happened to simple, old-fashioned gratitude?  More to the point, why do any of us hop aboard their ugly little, ego-powered, bandwagons?

And, finally, I’d like to know if Angela Lansbury ever sent Christmas cards and birthday gifts and little love notes to CBS during any of those 13 years they were going together.

“Termites”  is only available through Amazon or, for an autographed copy, by sending a check or money order for $20 to cover shipping and handling to Scorched Earth Press, 16604 Dearborn Street, North Hills, CA 91343-3604.

Nathan Lane and John Goodman are selling tickets hand over fist for their revival of “Waiting for Godot” but neither received the honor of a nomination.  Same with David Hyde Pierce, Frank Langella, Mary Louise Parker and Matthew Broderick. 

It was no surprise that Jeremy Piven was included out of the Best Actor category after his famous sushi defense for missing performances in David Mamet’s “Speed-the-Plow,” but not honoring John Lithgow’s brilliant turn in “All My Sons” in the same category is a crime against humanity!  It ranks up there with the snub of Dustin Hoffman as Willy Loman in the 1984 revival of “Death of a Salesman.” Brian Dennehy was honored with the Best Actor award when he did Willy Loman in 2000, but that goodwill did not anoint him worthy of a nomination this year for his turn in “Desire Under the Elms.” 

Add to the list of the egregiously overlooked: Diane Wiest, Kristin Scott Thomas, Daniel Radcliffe, Tovah Feldshuh, Joan Allen, Jeremy Irons, Rupert Everett, Christine Ebersol, Patrick Wilson, Susan Sarandon and Katie Holmes. 

As an industry, Broadway seems to take an odd pride in the moniker “The Fabulous Invalid” and I have lamented this mindset on these pages before.  Broadway’s ability to eat its young and snatch defeat from the jaws of victory has become legendary and not a little bit annoying. 

Here we are at the end of a season where the biggest headline was about how horrible things are on Broadway and how every show is closing and how there are nothing but empty theatres, and right when the industry has a chance to turn that story around and promote the fact that not only has every theatre been occupied but incredibly high-wattage stars have come out to perform live in intimate, beautiful theatres, they turn around and kill their own lead. 

Wouldn’t it have been great to have a nationally televised theatre awards show with ratings better than an NHL playoff game? 

Now, I understand the argument that everyone can’t be nominated, and I recognize that some pretty big names were honored like Jeff Daniels, Geoffery Rush, Marcia Gay Harden, Jane Fonda, Stockard Channing, John Glover and Angela Lansbury.  But, really, if the industry is in the trouble they say it’s in, and you have a chance to showcase Daniel Radcliffe, Katie Holmes (and maybe Mr. Holmes?) and Rupert Everett on national television as honored performers from the prior season, shouldn’t you figure out a way to do it? 

Here’s a modest proposal:  Expand the acting categories!  Where is it written in stone that there should only be five nominees for each category?  In some pretty thin years in the not-too-distant past they have nominated LESS than five in some categories.  (I know that the doom-sayers on Broadway all think that this is the worst it’s ever been, but seriously, in 1989 the THREE nominees for Best Musical were “Jerome Robbins’ Broadway”, “Black and Blue” and “Starmites”!).  So in a crappy year, they change the rules and only nominate three, but in a year packed with stars, they hold to the arbitrary five nominee rule and the story becomes “Who Got Snubbed”.  It makes no sense at all. 

I know that none of this seems to follow a “Right versus Left” storyline that many of you may be used to here at Big Hollywood, but hang in there with me for a few more thoughts.  The fact is, the left on Broadway (meaning the vast majority of actors, designers and staffers in the production offices) relish the fact that they give a big “up yours” to the Hollywood types who dare to come to Broadway.  In this context, the Hollywood actors are “rich” and the New York theatre people are the poor, starving artists giving up riches for their craft.  They want to see the Hollywood star fail.  It’s classic class warfare, just like it is played out in the political world of America. 

The same mentality that celebrates the increased taxes on “The Rich” and rails against “Big Pharma” and “Big Oil” yet fails to recognize the damage done to our society when these productive members of our economy are punished by ever-burdensome taxes and regulations is at play when they watch in bitchy glee as Hollywood movie stars are snubbed in favor of a “real” actor from their ranks.  But they fail to realize that those Hollywood hacks are the ones who are selling the tickets and keeping the “Theatre Community” employed.  If Hollywood actors ever get the message and stop risking rejection and embarrassment by performing on Broadway, it will just mean more unemployment for the theatre purists. 

But, that’s OK, they’ll just blame Middle America for not being smart or cultured enough to truly appreciate Thomas Sadoski in “Reasons to be Pretty” instead of wanting to see Tom Cruise’s wife or that guy from “3rd Rock From the Sun.” 

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