by emmaburns
Recently, I had the harrowing experience of watching Camilla Cabello’s Cinderella. I had been seeing the jokes and comments and felt adequately prepared for how bad the movie was going to be. Oh boy, was I fucking wrong.
This Cinderella, in an attempt to address the complaints about having Ella’s story centered around a man and finding love, decided that the best way to fix this was to make Ella a Capitalist Girlboss. This version just wants to own a business and exploit labor. Her stepmother’s not wicked because she won’t let her go to the ball, she’s wicked because she stands in the way of Ella’s capitalist dreams. The dresses she wants to sell are extremely ugly, the prince is a fuckboi with an earring, his sister (another girlboss) just wants to be queen (and probably oversee massive human rights violations, but like, in a pink pantsuit) ((also she is almost exclusively eavesdropping on people and despite being told that she’s a genius queen in the making we see none of this)), Pierce Brosnan is a deeply sexist king but one musical number and suddenly he’s cured, the film has a “Somebody To Love” number that’s a clear rip off of the masterpiece “Ella Enchanted”, I could literally go on for hours.
In fact, it would be easy to continue to dunk on the paper-thin plot, the sound engineer’s clear beef with Ms. Cabello or the weird Hamilton knock off town criers (which the experience of watching was only slightly less of a cringe experience as when I had to watch a group of 12 and 13-year-olds just straight-up perform Hamilton). However, there is something even more insidious about this movie. The fucking mice. Jesus Christ these mice are horrifying. Bad CGI is maybe the least offensive thing about them, and the fact that James Corden playing one of them is not the most upsetting aspect really says something.
This Cinderella could technically be classified as a musical, and whenever you see CGI animals in a musical the odds of them bursting into song are significantly high. In this regard, Girlboss Cinderella is no different. Where their path diverges is how the mice sound when they sing. I cannot stress enough how unprepared I was for the demonic screeches that came from these tiny bastards the first time they opened their rodent mouths. It was wretched. I was horrified. Blood splurted from the ears of everyone watching. The noises they made are something that you would expect to hear when first entering the pits of hell, not watching some cash grab children’s movie.
Even days later I wake up in the middle of the night, the phantom sounds of those motherfucking computer rats ringing in my brain. All I can say is, god bless whoever watched this movie sober.
Categories: emma burns, oct. 12, review, vol 25