![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Movie: Cruella
Aug. 29th, 2021 07:33 amAfter a limited release last month, "Cruella" became available to non-premium streaming subscribers a few days ago, so we watched it last night. I think so did a lot of people: there were frequent "buffering..." freezes, adding a couple of minutes to the movie's 2:16 official length, and the first half dozen attempts to start streaming it failed completely, which makes me wonder if it lives on a single server that was getting overloaded with streaming requests. Which seems like a silly problem to have in 2021, when distributing copies of data to geographically-dispersed servers has Been A Thing for at least twenty years.
Anyway, we thoroughly enjoyed it. In a nutshell, imagine "The Devil Wears Prada" as a prequel to "101 Dalmatians". Indeed, according to IMDB, the screenwriter of "The Devil Wears Prada" wrote an early draft of this script and has a story credit.
Summary [mostly the first half; no spoilers thereafter]:
Estela, an intelligent little girl with an uncompromising eye for fashion, grows up in the early 1960's with congenitally half-black, half-white hair, which gets her teased in school, for which she fights back and gets in a lot of trouble. Her single mother nicknames her troublesome side "Cruella" and urges her to keep Cruella in check. It doesn't work: she leaves that school and travels with her mother and her puppy (a mutt she found in a dumpster) to London to start a new life. But in need of money for this new life, they stop at the home of the mother's wealthy ex-employer to ask a favor. There's an 18th-century-themed costume ball going on, the girl is mesmerized by the clothes, the puppy causes havoc at the ball, the employer's vicious Dalmatians are loosed to catch girl and puppy, and instead they knock the mother over a cliff to her death on the seaside rocks below. The suddenly-orphaned girl blames herself for her mother's death and flees, eventually reaching London and falling in with a couple of young pickpockets named Horace and Jasper (whom you'll remember as Cruella's bumbling sidekicks in the 1961 movie and the 1956 book). Estela grows up, combining her charm and knack for making clothes with the boys' skills at thievery, with the aid of their Chihuahua and her dumpster mutt, to make a decent if thoroughly-illegal living. But they can see that she wants more, so as a birthday gift they wangle her a job offer at a high-end clothing store, where she's surrounded by beautiful fabrics and clothes, but is only allowed to do janitorial work. Eventually she comes to the attention of The Baroness, the queen of the London fashion world, who has all the personal characteristics of the original Cruella DeVil, or for that matter Miranda Priestly from "The Devil Wears Prada", and who hires Estela away to work for the Baroness's own fashion label. Things get complicated as Estela discovers connections in her own past to the Baroness and revives her "Cruella" alter-ego, who becomes the Baroness's mysterious rival while Estela keeps working for her. Confrontations and reckonings ensue, with a happy ending.
Things are more politically correct than in 1956 or 1961, of course. Cruella doesn't smoke. Her school friend Anita is black, and one of her co-conspirators is a flaming queen, portrayed positively. Cruella doesn't actually make coats out of Dalmatians, although she does have Horace and Jasper kidnap a few of them, for reasons that make sense within the plot. And, with an eye to the flurry of short-lived adoptions that has followed every previous release of a major Disney dog movie, the credits say "If you are ready for the responsibility of pet ownership, please visit your local animal shelter...." It will perhaps help that most of the Dalmatians in this movie are not adorable, and the "nice" dogs in the movie are pound puppies.
The result isn't really a "prequel", because one can't imagine it subsequently leading to the events of "101 Dalmatians". Instead, if "Cruella" were the literal truth, "101 Dalmatians" would be a legend reconstructed by hearing second-hand of a few disconnected events from "Cruella" and stitching them together wrong, analogous to the misinterpretations by Brian's followers in "Life of Brian".
The writing is deft and funny, the visuals are gorgeous, including street scenes of 1970's London and a lot of over-the-top costumes, the cast and acting are superb (once you accept the premise of the over-the-top, scenery-chewing characters), and the sound track (made up largely of 1960's and 1970's pop songs) is excellent. Highly recommended.
Anyway, we thoroughly enjoyed it. In a nutshell, imagine "The Devil Wears Prada" as a prequel to "101 Dalmatians". Indeed, according to IMDB, the screenwriter of "The Devil Wears Prada" wrote an early draft of this script and has a story credit.
Summary [mostly the first half; no spoilers thereafter]:
Estela, an intelligent little girl with an uncompromising eye for fashion, grows up in the early 1960's with congenitally half-black, half-white hair, which gets her teased in school, for which she fights back and gets in a lot of trouble. Her single mother nicknames her troublesome side "Cruella" and urges her to keep Cruella in check. It doesn't work: she leaves that school and travels with her mother and her puppy (a mutt she found in a dumpster) to London to start a new life. But in need of money for this new life, they stop at the home of the mother's wealthy ex-employer to ask a favor. There's an 18th-century-themed costume ball going on, the girl is mesmerized by the clothes, the puppy causes havoc at the ball, the employer's vicious Dalmatians are loosed to catch girl and puppy, and instead they knock the mother over a cliff to her death on the seaside rocks below. The suddenly-orphaned girl blames herself for her mother's death and flees, eventually reaching London and falling in with a couple of young pickpockets named Horace and Jasper (whom you'll remember as Cruella's bumbling sidekicks in the 1961 movie and the 1956 book). Estela grows up, combining her charm and knack for making clothes with the boys' skills at thievery, with the aid of their Chihuahua and her dumpster mutt, to make a decent if thoroughly-illegal living. But they can see that she wants more, so as a birthday gift they wangle her a job offer at a high-end clothing store, where she's surrounded by beautiful fabrics and clothes, but is only allowed to do janitorial work. Eventually she comes to the attention of The Baroness, the queen of the London fashion world, who has all the personal characteristics of the original Cruella DeVil, or for that matter Miranda Priestly from "The Devil Wears Prada", and who hires Estela away to work for the Baroness's own fashion label. Things get complicated as Estela discovers connections in her own past to the Baroness and revives her "Cruella" alter-ego, who becomes the Baroness's mysterious rival while Estela keeps working for her. Confrontations and reckonings ensue, with a happy ending.
Things are more politically correct than in 1956 or 1961, of course. Cruella doesn't smoke. Her school friend Anita is black, and one of her co-conspirators is a flaming queen, portrayed positively. Cruella doesn't actually make coats out of Dalmatians, although she does have Horace and Jasper kidnap a few of them, for reasons that make sense within the plot. And, with an eye to the flurry of short-lived adoptions that has followed every previous release of a major Disney dog movie, the credits say "If you are ready for the responsibility of pet ownership, please visit your local animal shelter...." It will perhaps help that most of the Dalmatians in this movie are not adorable, and the "nice" dogs in the movie are pound puppies.
The result isn't really a "prequel", because one can't imagine it subsequently leading to the events of "101 Dalmatians". Instead, if "Cruella" were the literal truth, "101 Dalmatians" would be a legend reconstructed by hearing second-hand of a few disconnected events from "Cruella" and stitching them together wrong, analogous to the misinterpretations by Brian's followers in "Life of Brian".
The writing is deft and funny, the visuals are gorgeous, including street scenes of 1970's London and a lot of over-the-top costumes, the cast and acting are superb (once you accept the premise of the over-the-top, scenery-chewing characters), and the sound track (made up largely of 1960's and 1970's pop songs) is excellent. Highly recommended.
