Looks Aren’t Everything: “Beautiful Creatures”

Movie Review by Jack Silbert
First of all, they’re not witches, they’re Casters. And not those roll-y things on the bottom of ottomans, either. In case you didn’t read the 563-page (!) book that Beautiful Creatures was based on, let me give you the basics. We’re in a small Southern town in which having supernatural abilities is considered almost as bad as being a Democrat or gay. Young Ethan, his head filled with crazy ideas from all those banned books he loves, dreams of getting out. (It’s a town full of losers, and baby he was born to run.)

From Book to Film: “Beautiful Creatures” Authors Kami Garcia & Margaret Stohl

Profile by Jack Silbert
My friend across the hall refuses to see any movie until she’s read the book that it’s based on. Well, if she wants to see Beautiful Creatures when it opens this Valentine’s Day, my neighbor better get cracking: The first novel in Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl’s four-book supernatural romance series weighs in at a hefty 563 pages. But book length certainly hasn’t slowed the ravenous fans who have turned these modern-gothic tales into YA best-sellers. And it’s not just teens and tweens: Garcia and Stohl count themselves among the 55% of YA readers who are adults.

To Serve Animals: Disney’s “The Lion King”

Disney’s Thirty-Second Animated Feature - 1994 (original release) 2011 (3D release)
I have a confession to make: I’ve never been a huge fan of The Lion King. While it’s impossible not to get swept up in its beautiful animation, top-notch voice performances, and exciting story, the essential phoniness of animal life along with its celebration of adherence to royal bloodlines and “proper” succession to the throne has always irked me. A much earlier Disney classic about animals in nature, Bambi, was set in a world where animals speak and the owl is a friend to a rabbit; but on the whole, the story of Bambi set the deer in a recognizable, realistic world. The Lion King, on the other hand, is more a movie about a European royal family (pre-Renaissance) than it is about any group of animals.