Think of only what is.

The Little Mermaid (2022) — 2.5/5

It's unfortunate that the movie wasn't better received because, while it's not great, it might also be the best of these live-action Disney things? (This of course excludes Cinderella which was genuinely good but somehow feels distant from all the ones between this and that?) It does the thing that those do which is to make a primarily beat-for-beat remake but make it 10x slower, but this one unlike those feels most like a cartoon. Halle isn't a great actress, but she's a great caricature. She's naive and innocent and bubbles. Melissa McCarthy and Awkwafina are already live-action cartoons and they're just left to do their thing—which is great. Let them do their thing. When you hire Maurice Chevalier, you are hiring him to be Maurice Chevalier. There are times this movie felt like the Disney live-action movies from the '60s, in their innocence and charm and slapdashery. But it's this fucking art direction house style of these live action monstrosities which bring it down. Every time it tries to feel real, it feels less authentic to the world. Straight up, serious question, why the fuck isn't a newt playing a flute nor a bass playing de brass? The visuals too often aim for beauty instead of fun. I do not care that you've brought the bottom of the ocean floor to life with photo-realism and many gigabytes of data and Intel processing power. I just want to watch the fluke as the duke of soul (yeah). It's not great, for all of the above reasons (and please god make these movies less than 2 hours long) but there's something in here that makes it better. And that includes continuing to cement Lin Manuel-Miranda as the heir apparent to Howard Ashman — 'The Scuttlebutt' is kind of a bop — though that also deserves criticism as his two other tracks are definitely not-a-bop. Not sure if that's as much a criticism of him as much as a lack of editing in a desire to sell the idea of EVEN MORE SONGS (ONLY $19.99). It would have been better if it had been smaller. Too bad it didn't do as well as all those others. A good lesson might have been learned. Then again, the lower expectations only help it. 

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