A Ghoul Versus Maleficent (Part 2)

Click here for Part 1!

With Aurora's sweet sixteen fast approaching, Maleficent asks her to come live with her in the Moors. Aurora happily consents to this, rushing off to tell her aunties. Oh, I guess they are still in this thing. However Aurora can't quite think of how to break this news to them, so she stops in the forest to rehearse her speech. She runs into a young man who is on his way to Stefan's castle and has managed to get lost in the woods. He'll be instantly recognizable if you've seen the recently reviewed film The Signal since he was the star of it, Mr. Brenton Thwaites. Here he is Prince Philip (now spelled with one “L” because screw those hacks from the 1950s), like that's any surprise in the slightest.

He and Aurora have Insta-Chemistry, achieved even without the magic of a song and dance. Aurora asks him to visit her after his trip to the castle, to which he QUICKLY agrees to. Maleficent and Diaval have been watching this whole thing play out, Diaval excitedly speculating Philip could be the answer to the curse. Maleficent dismisses this, as she says there's no such thing as true love. Diaval counters with it's fine she believes that, but what about Aurora's belief on the matter? You know, with the exception of the idiot fairies, every actor in this film has been good to great. Jolie has been awesome, but that's a given. However, Diaval's actor, Sam Riley, has completely OWNED this movie. This guy has stolen every scene he's in, which is really saying something when all of those scenes were shared with Jolie.

A Ghoul Versus Maleficent (Part 1)

“Original Vs. Remake Part 2: Disney's Sleeping Beauty vs. Maleficent / WTF Happened To Fairy Tales?!”

Click here for the first half of Original Vs. Remake: Sleeping Beauty!

Of all the things to come out of the 1990s, I think BY FAR the worst was the “Grim 'n Gritty” trend: the making of everything into dark and stylistically bleak because it's KEWL. It spread across all forms of entertainment, most prominently comics where EVERY one became a badass anti-hero more vicious than any villain of decades before. In movies, the Matrix was the genesis for most movies copying the formula of disaffected and monotone heroes clad in black blasting the shit out of everything indiscriminately.

The success of Christopher Nolan's Batman films only served to crank this to eleven, as damn near every superhero movie since has tried to copy that formula. This brings us to the latest feature on A Ghoul Versus..., something I'm going to simply call “WTF Happened To Fairy Tales?!”. One of the many trends happening in today's Hollywood has been giving classic fairy tales this same treatment, which I'll concede isn't totally unwarranted given most fairy tales originated with stories that were FAR from happy, but now that ALL OF THEM are aping this concept, it's gotten very annoying.

A Ghoul Versus Disney's Sleeping Beauty

“Original Vs. Remake Part 1: Disney's Sleeping Beauty vs. Maleficent!”

Disney's Sleeping Beauty is a film that needs no introduction, but here's one anyway. This timeless animated epic was released in 1959, and actually was a financial failure at the time. Boasting a budget of over six million dollars, it failed to even make that back upon release and resulted in Disney posting a LOSS for the fiscal year. Keep in mind this was the 1950s, if you adjusted that number for inflation it'd be like 90 trillion dollars or something. People were fired right and left to the point where Disney didn't attempt another fairy tale based animated film until thirty years later with the insanely successful Little Mermaid.

Critics were fairly harsh on virtually every aspect of the movie, which certainly hurt its box office receipts. It also didn't help the film is incredibly similar to Disney's 1937 film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, both featuring an evil witch whose jealousy of a younger woman causes her to curse her into a deathlike state that is only curable by the kiss of true love. Hell, Snow White and Aurora both even hide out in a cabin with a gang of goofy little people. But, like many great films that missed their mark upon release, Sleeping Beauty eventually carved out its own legacy and now is regarded as one of the greatest animated films of all time. Time to see why this is with the first half of the latest Original Vs. Remake showdown, as it's time for A Ghoul Versus Disney's Sleeping Beauty!