REVIEW: Cinderella

There's an exchange between Camilla Cabello's Cinderella and Billy Porter's "Fabulous Godmother" in the Cinderella adaptation that hit Prime Video this week that caught my attention. When Cinderella asks her Godmother how their magic is supposed to work, Godmother replies by telling her, "Let's not ruin this incredibly magical moment with reason."

It's a very ironic quote within this particular rendition of the fairy-tale. One that has no trouble sabotaging its own magic with ... maybe not "reason," but a modern sensibility that seems so insecure about fairy-tales to begin with.

Boy does this movie want you to know it's not your grandma's Cinderella. This movie bolsters Cinderella's resume by giving her an "aspiring businesswoman" plotline. This addition, while subtle as a firework, is less intrusive than other storytelling decisions that keep the story anchored in 2021. Yes, this movie includes rats making penis jokes. Get ready to be swept away to the enchanting realm of your junior high homeroom ...

I don't even know if I was missing the classical escapism intrinsic to other recent adaptations like Brannagh's 2015 remake or 1998's Ever After. Mostly I was just hungry for an emotional connection with any of the characters, a connection this movie frequently passed on in favor of shorthand plot elements. The poor provincial town that frowns on innovators. The king who just can't understand why his son wants to follow his own path. The king so impressed with the size of his crown that he neglects his family and especially his wife. (The king is just in general an unlikable dude.) None of these plotpoints have any texture, and all of them are conveyed through the most expository of dialogue. I guess when you think feminist Cinderella is itself revelatory, you don't feel the need to bring anything actually new to the table.

Cabello's Cinderella isn't so much motivated by kindness as she is by confidence. Graciously this version recognizes that the two virtues are not mutually exclusive. Even girlboss Cinderella earns favor with her Godmother through an act of kindness that is very on-brand for a fairy-tale princess of any era. Cabello herself plays a Cinderella who is altruistic, confident, and even funny. The rare crumb of true progressive-thinking this film affords the princess is the privilege of being truly multi-dimensional.

But wait, one might say, maybe this team wasn't trying to make a traditional Cinderella retelling.

I don't doubt it, but when you're playing with a market as oversaturated as Cinderella remakes, you'd best have a new insight to bring to the table. It's not even as hard as it sounds. Sometimes it's enough just to have well-developed characters, but again this movie struggles to do even that much. (They try giving Stepmother some backstory at the eleventh hour, mind you, but it's a little too late.) This movie has no insight of its own, but rather tries to coast on the hope that you agreed that, yeah, those other Cinderella pics just weren't hip enough, were they?

This movie's not half as egregious as Shrek, I'll give credit where it's due, but it's not enough to set out to make a new Cinderella with the sole vision of making it not traditional. When you're defining a movie purely by its negative space, the end result is appropriately hollow.

--The Professor

Comments

ALGOctober 6, 2021 at 3:15 PM
Boy, you nailed this one on the head! 100% agree. Particularly with your summerial declaration: "it's not enough to set out to make a new Cinderella with the sole vision of making it not traditional." Very well put!
ReplyDelete
Replies

Add comment

Elemental: Savoring Pixar's Fading Light

I’ve only been doing this writing thing for a short while. But in that space, I have been surprised at many of the developments I’ve gotten to witness unfolding in the popular film landscape. It was only five years ago, for example, that superhero movies were still thought to be unstoppable. Here in 2025, though, we know better. But the wheels coming off the Marvel machine accompanied a shift in their whole method of production and distribution, and it didn’t take long for the natural consequences to catch up with them as verifiable issues started appearing in their films. Thor: Love and Thunder (2022) No. The development that has most surprised me has been critics and their slow-motion break-up with Pixar. The only way I know how to describe what I’ve seen over the last five years … imagine that your roommate has been stuck for a long time dating a girl who was obviously bad for him, and after he finally breaks up with her he gets back into the dating ring. All the girls he takes out ...

PROFESSOR'S PICKS: Five Lessons Hollywood Ought to Learn from the Success of WICKED

That which has teased studios since the freak success of La La Land and The Greatest Showman has finally come to pass: Hollywood has finally launched a successful musical. Or rather, they've launched two. The musical is sort of like the golden idol at the start of Raiders of the Lost Ark . It's valuable beyond imagination--but only if you know just how to retrieve it. There have been specific periods where the musical has yielded tremendous rewards for Hollywood, but for the greater part of the lifespan of feature-filmmaking, studios have been punished for reaching beyond their means. Yet after ages of dormancy, t he years leading up to the Wicked movies were lined with musicals, more than we'd seen in the previous decade. A few of them were quite well crafted. Others were ... learning experiences. None really became what we'd call "mainstream." But Wicked and Wicked: For Good have both seen rare success. I'm publishing ...

REVIEW: AVATAR - Fire and Ash

The "Avatar" chapters have generally renewed their interest to the masses based on which exciting new locale and each new culture whichever film opts to explore. Following that dance, "Fire and Ash" introduces yet another Na'Vi clan, this one hailing from the scorched plains under the shadow of an erupted volcano. But their biome is decidedly less spectacular than the lush jungles of the Omaticaya or the rich coral reefs where the Metkayina dive. Between the ashen grounds of the volcano clan and the metallic fortress of the humans, this is comfortably the most monochromatic of the three Avatar films. And yet, Avatar: Fire and Ash is no less gripping for it. And this is where the internet really starts to reckon with what us fans of the franchise have always kind of known: that the many screensavers offered by the Avatar world ... they have been nice . But these films would have never made the impact they have if the...

The Great Movie Conquest of 2022 - Febuary

Welcome back, one and all, to my latest attempt to justify being enslaved to a million different streaming services. My efforts to watch one new movie a day all year haven't worn me out yet, but we're not even past the first quarter yet. My first film of the month brought me to Baz Lurhmann's Australia , and it reminded me what a beautifully mysterious animal the feature film is. My writer's brain identified a small handful of technical issues with the film's plotting, but the emotional current of the film took me to a place that was epic, even spiritual. I don't know. When a film cuts straight to the core of your psyche, do setup and payoff even matter anymore? I think this film is fated for repeated viewings over the years as I untangle my response to this film. One of my favorite films of all time is Billy Wilder's The Apartment with Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine. You'd think, then, that learning that the t...

Year in Review: 2025

So, I guess I’ll start out by saying that … I wasn’t kidding last year when I said I was gonna do better with reviews, folks. This is the first time in three years that my review count landed in the double digits, and I reached that benchmark barely past the year’s halfway point. My total this year landed at 19. This breaks my previous record of 17 from 2021 and also outpaces the total haul from 2024 and 2023 combined. Once again, " WICKED " pulled through as the biggest contributor this year, and I wouldn't have had that any other way. These last two years of active anticipation have been some of the most gratifying I've ever had as a person who feels investment in moving pictures. I'm even more excited, though, for this duology to be folded into film history: that thing I really love writing about. I will always regret not reviewing The Holdovers (2023) In the past, I have let myself get away with checki...

Children of a Lesser God: Between Sound and Silence

So ... you all remember how I was really annoyed by The Power of the Dog ? I am more than perfectly fine that the award went to the much better CODA . I thought it was much more enjoyable as a piece of film, and unlike The Power of the Dog , it did showed honest interest in the community it was reporting to champion. In the case of CODA , that was, of course, the deaf community. But it's actually not CODA I want to talk about in detail at this time. That movie's milestones exist along a timeline that extends ... further back than I can track today, but at least as far back as March 30, 1987, when Marlee Matlin became the first deaf actor to receive an Academy Award for her performance in Children of a Lesser God . Randa Haines’ 1986 film centers on the romance between a hearing man and a deaf woman and the challenges they face. This was a major shift in how the deaf community was represented onscreen. Paul Attanasio wrote in ...

Saying Goodbye to Stranger Things

There's a quote from critic Mark Caro that I think about a lot. I shared it back when I did my critical survey of Pixar movies . Writing about Finding Nemo , Caro wrote in the Chicago Tribune in 2003 , "Classic film eras tend to get recognized in retrospect while we take for granted timeless works passing before our eyes. So let's pause to appreciate what's been going on at Pixar Animation Studios." I think that captures the aspirations of all active-minded media consumers. Or at least, it ought to. "This good thing won't last forever, so savor it while it before the sun goes down." Modern Times (1936) But this is also a very hard mindset to access in an online culture that is always seeking to stamp labels and scores on a thing before we shove it on the conveyor belt and move on to the next parcel. It's something I have been thinking about for the last year or so as the completion of the ...

Do You Hear the People Sing?: "Les Miserables" and the Untrained Singer

Perhaps no film genre is as neglected in the 21 st century as the musical. With rare exception, the o nly offerings we get are the occasional Disney film, the occasional remake of a Disney film, and adaptations of Broadway stage shows. When we are graced with a proper musical film, the demand is high among musical fans for optimum musical performance, and when a musical film doesn’t deliver this, these fans are unforgiving. From the moment talking was introduced in cinema, the musical film has been a gathering place where vocal demigods assemble in kaleidoscopic dance numbers in a whirl of cinematic ecstasy too fantastical for this world. What motivation, then, could Tom Hooper possibly have for tethering this landmark of modern musical fandom in grounded, dirty reality? This movie’s claim to fame is the use of completely live-singing, detailed in this featurette, something no previous movie musical had attempted to...

The Notebook Has No Excuses

The thing about film is … the more you think about it, the less sense it makes. Film tells us, even in a society obsessed with wealth and gain, “Remember, George, no man is a failure who has friends.” Film warns us that the most unnatural evil lies in wait at the Overlook Hotel and peeks out when all the guests leave for the winter–and that the heart of it resides in room 237–knowing we'll trip over ourselves wanting to open that door. Film is what makes us believe that the vessel for the deepest human emotion could be contained in a cartoon clownfish taking his unhatched cartoon son and holding him in his cartoon fin and telling him he will never let anything happen to him. Nights of Cabiria (1957) Even when it tries to plant its feet aggressively in realism, film winds up being an inherently emotional realm. We feel safer to view and express all manners of passions or desires here in the space where the rules of propriety just don’t matter anymore. So a fa...

Pan's Labyrinth: The Fantasy and Reality of Good and Evil

So here’s a question I’m sure no one’s asked yet: what is the point of fantasy? Ask your resident D&D enthusiast or aspiring fantasy writer what it is about the fantasy genre that excites them so much, and you’re bound to get a variety of answers, but the topic of escapism tends to be a common thread. Sometimes the trash compactor of the real world just stinks so much, and you just need to vacation in someone else’s world. You can only stew in real world politics for so long before you just have to unwind by tracing the Jedi lineage or memorizing the rules of alomancy. This is where you commonly run into thoughts that fantasy nerds are just incompatible with reality and are deliberately shirking any responsibility from participating in it. This mindset has a lot in common with the nostalgia stigma we discussed with “Roger Rabbit” and “Detective Pikachu.” It is also a very elitist perspective born out of the same attitude...

Films and Feelings

Search This Blog