Tonight's marathon is totally inspired by the Lord of the Rings marathon. When you do a marathon of that caliber and as amazing, you don't reduce the following one to something smaller in scope. You try and match that one as best as you can. Tonight's marathon reaches that height of success with three of the screens most tragic romances. We proudly have on tonight's menu
Beauty and the Beast 1991, King Kong 2005, and Titanic 1997
Now THAT'S epic. You start it off with the original Beauty and the Beast which was a breakthrough for animated films in 1991 landing the first academy award nomination for best picture to a cartoon. If Silence of the Lambs didn't win that year, this would've been my second choice for the Oscar. What Beauty and the Beast does is it introduces the story arc of a complicated romance between a normal well bred woman and a man turned beast. The beast has a dark heart full of bitterness and the woman named Belle has to make him love another person in order to defeat a dark spell that's turned everyone in the castle into furniture and silverware. Beauty and the Beast is more than just a great love story, its a real human drama. You totally buy into the plot, and care a great deal about the main characters. The lead character Gaston acts like Billy Zane in Titanic, creating the story arc of the jealous lover of the female character that inevitably turns out to be a mismatch. The real lovers are either looked down on society as being inferior with the beast being too hideous and fearful, King Kong being a giant ape, and Leonardo Dicaprio being viewed as third class throwaway by the rich. King Kong takes the story of the desireable woman in love with the beast to the next level which is reality. They both form a special connection but realize their love can never be in the mist of pure adventure and spectacle. This is essentially the Empire Strikes Back of the marathon, and ups the scope of it to spectacular heights which only Titanic can match in terms of grandeur. King Kong may be 3 hours long but its a fantastic 3 hours full of ill fated romance, adventure, and a true sense of wonder. Titanic is a great finish to the setup because even though it's not a romance between woman and beast, it has the same epic scale production that King Kong had, a jealous lover who decides to get revenge on the two leads, great special effects, good old fashioned melodrama, and three emotional climaxes that tug at your heart strings and make you feel the loss at the end of each journey.
This is one of the proudest marathons I've ever done, and one that has a powerful message behind it about true love, discrimination based on wealth or gender, and the will to prevail in the mist of a historical tragedy.
No comments:
Post a Comment