Black Beauty has been adapted many times, but in Ashley Avis’ movie, Black Beauty is female, and so is the little girl who loves her.
When we meet Black Beauty (voiced by Kate Winslet), she is a young Mustang running wild and free, just starting to be wary of new animals encroaching upon the land. Not wary enough, as it turns out; Black Beauty is captured and sent to live in a stable so she can be broken and sold. John (Iain Glen) who runs the stables and trains the horses isn’t a bad man, and he’s soon joined by his orphaned niece Jo (Mackenzie Foy). Jo is not your classic Horse Girl; in fact, she’s never ridden. But she must see a bit of herself in Black Beauty, who is also adjusting to new surroundings having just lost her parents and her home. Their bond is immediate and undeniable. Jo insists not on breaking Beauty, but on “partnering” her, based on friendship , respect, and gentleness. But the stables are a business, and Beauty is leased out to a wealthy family whose daughter is training to be competitive in dressage. Georgina (Fern Deacon) isn’t a natural horsewoman but makes up for what she lacks with spurs and whips. She is not kind to Beauty (nor to Jo), but sadly nor is she the worst owner that Black Beauty will encounter in her life.
Told from Black Beauty’s unique perspective (don’t worry, she’s not a talking horse, we merely hear her thoughts voiced by Winslet), we follow her as she’s transferred from home to home, owner to owner, many more pitiful or abusive than the last. Anna Sewell’s wildly popular novel from many moons ago opened people’s eyes to the mistreatment of horses, but it’s clear from Avis’ adaptation that things have not changed nearly enough for horses in nearly 150 years. Set in various modern American environments, Black beauty knows pain, overwork, and perhaps worse still, loneliness. The bond she shared with Jo endures and holding her memory in her heart is the only reason Beauty has the strength to go on.
I didn’t expect to like Black Beauty as much as I did. It doesn’t feel emotionally manipulative – Black Beauty is a horse, and though we inevitably anthropomorphize her, she isn’t asking to be pitied. But her indominable spirit is enviable and some pretty cinematography, we feel a sort of empathy, a sort of kinship with animals of all kinds, and an emotional attachment to Beauty herself, whose loyalty and resilience remind us of the four-legged family members in our own homes. Not without its flaws, Black Beauty is still a worthy version for 2020 audiences and a nice little treat on Disney+.
Meanwhile, Justin Timberlake got some deserved flak for daring to wear a Times Up pin but refusing to so much as comment on his willingness to work with Allen. Both Selena Gomez and Elle Fanning have been unapologetic about working with him on A Rainy Day, a troubling trend for young women. Jude Law and Liev Schreiber have also remained mum. Scarlett Johansson, who has positioned herself at the forefront of the Times Up movement and has publicly criticized James Franco for his creepy sexual advances, has failed to comment on Allen’s though she’s worked with him repeatedly. And Alec Baldwin has of course been stupid enough to support him – I suppose abusive men have to stick together.
strangers in an airport, devise their own workaround: they’ll hire a small plane to get ahead of the storm and deliver them to their destination. But as you can probably guess, this was not the cleverest of plans. Their plane goes down, and thanks to some handy plot devices, no one even knows where they are. Help isn’t coming. They can either stay where they are and starve\freeze to death, or they make the mountain their bitch.
Journalist Bitsey Bloom (Kate Winslet) is brought in to do one last interview with him before he’s put to death, but what he tells her isn’t a straight forward of guilt or innocence, but rather challenges her notions of justice and the legal system. But can she trust what she’s being told, or is David Gale just a smarter-than-average killer?
unintentionally, somewhere in the convoluted mess, it might actually manage to do the complete opposite. The Life of David Gale certainly traps some very worthy actors in a mess they can’t act their way out of. Kate Winslet is pretty Winsletty, although she does a fair bit of running just to show how urgent, how life-and-deathy this whole thing is, but Spacey: man. That guy did not get the good end of the salami here. He’s particularly bad acting opposite the kid playing his young son. It’s just uncomfortable to watch.
While searching for Will Smith’s filmography, I was surprised to see the pleasure with which critics are tearing this movie apart. The reason I was looking for Smith’s info was to try to figure out whether Collateral Beauty is his best dramatic performance (and I quickly realized that since I haven’t seen Ali, I’m disqualified from weighing in on that topic). With that lead-in, it probably goes without saying that I again think it’s been too long since the critics were thrown a juicy morsel, they’re searching for anything to bite down on as a result, and Collateral Beauty has been flagged as an easy target.
model?” Charlize said in the May issue of British GQ, whining that “when meaty roles come through, I’ve been in the room and pretty people get turned away first.”
Devil’s Advocate because director Taylor Hackford thought she was too good looking to play such a gritty role. “Devil’s Advocate was probably the hardest — they put me through the wringer,” Charlize told the publication recently, “Taylor just wasn’t convinced. He was like, ‘If you were his wife, why would he cheat on you?’ So there. She’s also too pretty to be cheated on. And definitely too pretty to realize how stupid she sounds. I mean, if you’re going to show up to accept Spike TV’s “Decade of Hotness” award, you just have to be prepared to accept all the terrible fallout that comes along with it.
Nicole Kidman – this ugmo got the lead role in Moulin Rouge instead of Charlize, who can’t sing, incidentally, but the main reason was of course, her distracting beauty, which is why they replaced her with Kidman, who after all, only models for Chanel, Jimmy Choo, and Omega, though that’s not an exhaustive list.
beautiful, so she has to be replaced by someone far plainer – Gwyneth Paltrow (who admittedly models for Hugo Boss and Estee Lauder), who actually was still too damned beautiful, so they got rid of her and went with the plainest woman they could think of, Marion 
Cotillard (yes, she technically models for the same brand as Charlize – Dior – but it’s in the uglier handbag section, so it barely counts), and then they thought, jeez, I don’t know, maybe even crummy old Marion is still just a little too pretty for this, so let’s call up that frumpy dancer, Alicia Vikander (who barely manages a Louis Vuitto
n campaign)
Theron was in consideration for the role of Helen Gandy in J. Edgar, but the director realized, no, this woman is just too beautiful, and so he hired the repulsive Naomi Watts instead, once voted #2 in the French edition of FHM magazine’s “100 Sexiest Women in the World 2006”, presumably right behind Miss Theron, and a model for Pantene and Ann Taylor.
And then there was the time Charlize auditioned for the role of Rose in Titanic. James Cameron must have also been ultimately discouraged by her exquisiteness, poked around for someone a little less stunning and thankfully landed upon the face of Lancome herself, Kate Winslet. Gross.
definitively a few rungs lower, a solid 6 on a good hair day, she was able to land the role of a video game character, who are known for their realistic-looking women.
ASSHOLES WATCHING MOVIES 