Happy Birthday, Luke Evans!

Happy birthday, Mr. Evans :-)  I'm so happy I don't have to be mad at you because you took the role of Gaston anymore.  I'm sorry I doubted your ability to choose good roles.  Here's to many more!  (Birthdays for you, and movies of yours for me to watch.)

"Beauty and the Beast" (2017) -- Initial Thoughts

Yes, I went to see this after all.  I'm happy to report that my misgivings were for naught, my whinings were in vain.  Gaston as portrayed by Luke Evans was not a boorish, ridiculous joke.

He was so much worse.  But in a good way.  I'll get to that.

I have only seen the animated Beauty and the Beast (1991) all the way through twice.  The first time was in college, and the second was a couple of years ago when a friend loaned me her copy because it is her favorite movie of all time.  I just have never liked it all that well -- and the fact that so many people expect me to like it has irked me for a long time.  Belle loves books.  I love books.  I must be just like Belle, right?  I must love Belle!  She must be my favorite Disney princess, right?

Wrong.  And I never quite knew why Belle and I didn't click.  Today, I think I figured it out, though!  It has to do with how she spends so much of the first part of the movie insisting "there must be so much more than this provincial life."  She hates living in a small town where everyone greets her in a friendly way.  (How dare they?!)  She looks down her nose at everyone who lives there.  She laughs up her sleeve at them because they're different from her, then gets all insulted when they don't like her because she's different from them.  Like the Beast, she needs to quit assuming she's better than everyone around her and stop judging people based on their appearances.  Sure, sure, the villagers are close-minded and don't like it when girls learn to read.  But it feels like Belle has spent the whole time she's lived here feeling -- even saying -- she's better than everyone around her, and that's not going to make you any friends.  That's not a kind way to live your life.

Belle, in my opinion, is not particularly nice in the beginning of this movie or the animated version.  In her own way, she's just as self-absorbed and conceited as Gaston.

Also, I happen to like small towns and open countryside.  I was ever so much happier living in a small town than I was in the two big cities I've spent too many years in.  When we bought a house, we found one with trees and a back yard and the illusion of not being in a city because I can breathe easier here.  So nope, I don't have a ton in common with Belle, folks.  EDIT:  I don't mean for this to sound like I dislike Belle!  As she grows and changes, I like her better and better.  I really enjoy how her character arc mirrors the Beast's.

Her dad (Kevin Kline) was really awesome, though.  I would totally be friends with him.  But he was not my favorite character in the film.  The Beast was.

In the animated version, I liked the Beast okay.  Mrs. Potts was probably my favorite character in the animated movie, and I definitely do dig her here (Emma Thompson is high on my list of favorite actresses!).  But in this new movie, the Beast is hands-down my favorite character.  Which makes sense, right?  Sad backstory.  Lonely.  Broody.  The most Byronic hero of any fairy tale I have yet encountered.  How am I not going to like him?

So, yeah, the CGI wasn't always on.  Actually, I thought his facial animation was excellent -- it was the wide shots where his movement didn't always look natural.  Coulda used the Andy Serkis touch, I guess.  But there weren't a ton of wide shots anyway, so oh well, not a big deal for me.

But back to what was a big deal for me, namely an actor I very much admire playing a character I very much despise.  Happily, I am no longer mad at Luke Evans for taking this role because it is sooooooooooooo much better than the animated Gaston.  This Gaston has issues, folks.  He was a captain in a war, and he has come home feeling like he no longer fits in.  He's tense and edgy and dangerous.

In the animated version, I find Gaston annoying and irritating.  He's not much of either here.  Yes, he pursues Belle against her repeated insistence that she won't marry him.  But he's not so much clueless as relentless.  He knows she doesn't like him, and he doesn't particularly care.  He wants her, he gets what he wants, so he's going to get her.  He's still a bully, but a believable and therefore a frightening one.

Years ago, I went from "I like Luke Evans as Bard in the Hobbit movies" to "I Need More Luke Evans Right Now" when I discovered he could sing, and sing well.  And what really convinced me I needed to go see this after all was Luke's wonderful voice.  I went to Barnes & Noble all by myself (a rare treat) right after the store opened one morning, when it was so quiet inside, I could hear the music they had playing.  Which happened to be the soundtrack to this.  And every time I knew Gaston might be singing, I'd drift toward a speaker and stand under it, enjoying Luke's voice.  By the end of the soundtrack, I'd decided to go see this after all.  And I'm glad I did.  It was fun.  Not a movie I loved, but one I did enjoy.

Though, interestingly, my favorite song is not one of Luke's, but "Evermore," the Beast's big solo.  Man, that song gets to me!  I also listen to "Be Our Guest" a lot because I just 100% love Ewan McGregor's voice.  His Lumiere was a constant delight, as was Ian McKellen's Cogsworth.

Lots of people have talked about the whole "exclusively gay moment" controversy.  Yeah, it was there, and yeah, I was annoyed.  Just like I was annoyed by the cross-dressing cowboy in Disney's The Lone Ranger (2013).  Unnecessary to the plot and only there to make a statement.  Grr.  If you want to read a really good article about not only the LGBT content, but also about the Christian themes lurking between the story's obvious layers, I recommend this one.

Is this movie family friendly?  Erm, sorta?  Scary, scary wolves.  Angry and violent villagers.  Some vague, campy LGBT content played for laughs.  I'm not taking my kids, mostly because of the scariness level.  They haven't seen the animated version yet, so I've promised I'll let them watch that because I can fast-forward through the wolves here at home.  I'll just have to close my eyes for the Gaston parts and imagine Luke Evans instead.

Not Shouting Hooray

All the kids marched into church today, holding palm branches and singing the first verse of "Hosanna, Loud Hosanna."  They do that every year, and it's a fun way to give them a special part in our Holy Week celebrations.  I co-teach the toddler Sunday School class, and every year, we have a little rehearsal for our toddlers where we give them pretend palm branches and practice walking in a line around our classroom and not whacking each other with the branches.  This is very important for 2- and 3-year-olds to remember.  For them, singing is optional, but not-whacking is mandatory.

As I was walking through the sanctuary this morning, herding toddlers in an orderly and non-violent fashion while singing the first verse of the hymn myself, I realized something.

We're not singing "Hooray for Jesus."

When we go to a parade and see someone we think is important, we make noise.  We might clap, we might cheer.  We might yell, "Hooray!"  I once hollered, "Merry Christmas, Mr. Keach!" at a Christmas parade.  Stacy Keach smiled in my direction and called back something like "Thanks!" or maybe even "Merry Christmas!"  That certainly made me want to shout, "Hooray!"

But we're not singing "Hooray for Jesus!" on Palm Sunday.  We're singing, "Hosanna, loud hosanna."  After all, that's what the crowd was chanting when Jesus entered Jerusalem the Sunday before he died.  But 'hosanna' does not mean 'hooray.'

It means, "Save us."

The Jerusalem crowd didn't know it, but that's exactly what Jesus intended to do.  Not save them from the Roman invaders.  Not save them from hunger.  Not save them from having to pay taxes.  That might be what they wanted him to save them from, but it's not what they really needed.  What they needed was someone who could save them from death.  From spending eternity in the abject, incomprehensible agony that is separation from God.  Which is what they deserved.  What you and I deserve.  Every one of us, whether we want to believe it or not.

And the only way Jesus could save them -- and us -- from that eternal death was by... dying.  And then coming back to life.  Those people were all in Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover feast, to sacrifice lambs and consume them.  Jesus was there to be sacrificed, to allow his body to be consumed by the grave.  But he was there to do more than that -- he was there to save.  Only he could, and only he did.

Hosanna!

The Writer's Life Tag

I'm snurching this from Mary Horton at Sunshine and Scribblings.  There's an old joke that writers would much rather write and talk about their writing than actually write.  Sad, but sometimes true.  I'm in the throes of rewrites for "Cloaked" and just... needing to blog a bit instead of fix and change and add and subtract stuff today.  So let's have a bit of fun with this tag, shall we?

Write-fuel: What do you eat/drink while writing?  Generally, a warm beverage of some sort.  At home, I'll make a mug of tea or hot chocolate because I'm writing after my kids go to bed, and I can't have much caffeine after about 7pm or I won't sleep.  If I'm writing at Starbucks on a Saturday morning, I'll have a hot mocha of some sort, usually.  Though sometimes a cold something, if it's really hot out.  Once in a while I munch something, but that's useless calories because once I'm writing, I'm not noticing what I'm putting in my mouth all that much, so I try not to nibble while I write.

Write-sounds: What do you listen to while writing?  Bobby Darin and movie soundtracks, mostly.  For "Cloaked," I've been listening to the scores for Shane and The Big Country a lot, but also a bunch of Aaron Copland's western compositions too.

Bobby Darin reading... not something I wrote, alas.

Write-vice: What’s your most debilitating distraction?  My email.  Also, Cowboy, if he's around, because he will pester me with affectionate nonsense.

Write-horror: What’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to you while writing?  I have been suddenly and deliberately attacked by spiders on several occasions, and that is terrible because I have to stop writing to hunt them down and kill them or else I will not be able to concentrate for fear that they are going to renew their offensive.

Write-joy: What’s the best thing that’s ever happened to you while writing, or how do you celebrate small victories?  As I don't know if I can choose a best thing, I will answer the second half.  I celebrate small victories by rejoicing with my best friend over hitting a word count goal or figuring out a plot problem or whatever.  Sometimes I also eat something chocolatey.  When I finish a draft of a major project, I sometimes buy myself a little something, like a book or a DVD or a coffee drink of epic proportions.

Speaking of epic... 

Write-crew: Who do you communicate with or not communicate with while writing?  My best friend is also my writing mentor.  We often write "together" via instant-messenger, by which I mean that we will chat for a few minutes while we each brew tea or hot chocolate and choose the music we're going to listen to, discuss story stuff a bit, and then drift off into our respective imaginary worlds.  We'll pop back now and then to say something or other, and then at the end of our stints, discuss how things went, share what we wrote, etc.  We freely share works-in-progress to encourage each other, help each other get through tough spots, brainstorm solutions to problems, etc.

Write-secret: What’s your writing secret to success or hidden flaw?  My secret to success is probably my stubborn desire to finish things.  I hate leaving a story unfinished.  I've done it, and it bugs me.  That's also my hidden flaw -- sometimes I'm too stubborn to give up on a story that isn't worth my time.

Write-spiration: What always makes you productive?  Nothing.  Nothing always makes me productive.  There are times when I don't write for days.  Or weeks.  And there are times when I sit down to write and spend ninety minutes writing 600 words.  Other times, I write 2,000 words in two hours.  Both of those happened this week.  However, the thing that generally helps me be productive is knowing what happens in the scene I'll be working on before I sit down to write.  If I don't know where it's headed, I waste valuable writing time on thinking and imagining my way through the scene, and I can do that while I'm folding laundry or brushing my teeth, so I should not be leaving it until writing time.

Sometimes, of course, I think I know where a scene is going, and then it doesn't.  Which is what happened the other evening, when my Bad Guy flat-out refused to talk about what I expected him to.  In fact, he wouldn't say anything at all for about twenty minutes, just leaned tantalizingly on a fence and smirked at me.  And then finally said all manner of things I wasn't expecting, didn't really like, and later realized perfectly set up two things later in the story.  Heh.

No, Luke Evans isn't playing my Bad Guy.  But he could.

Write-peeve: What’s one thing writers do (or you do) that’s annoying?  Honestly, I basically never read those blog posts where people interview their characters or share scenes of their WIPs.  They make me shake my head and say, "Why?"  I don't mind chattering endlessly about the process of writing, sharing the giddy joy and the bitter pitfalls, but the things you're writing don't need to be shared with the world willy-nilly until you are finished with them.  Share them with one or two close writing friends, yes, absolutely.  I've already said that I share nearly every sliver of fiction I write with one particular person.  I often also seek feedback from a few other trusted people.  But I don't wave my half-crafted creative shreds around to attract attention, and I don't feel any need to watch others do so.

Write-words: Share one sentence paragraph from a project, past or present.

He was too late to save his men, but he could still take down the monster that had destroyed them. And if he died in the process, so be it. He had failed to do the one thing he was supposed to do: keep his men alive. That knowledge filled him with despair. Despair and rage.

(from "The Better Part of Valor," still one of the best things I've written.)

I'm not tagging anyone, mostly because I wasn't tagged with this myself.  But if you're a writer and want to fill this out, have at it!

"Slow West" (2015)

I've seen this three times now, and every time I watch it, I like it better.  With every viewing, I peel back another layer here and there, figure out a little more about the characters and the story.  There things in it I still don't get.  There are things I feel like I instinctively understand, but can't put into words.  In fact, I've started thinking of Slow West as the movie equivalent of Ernest Hemingway's "iceberg theory" of writing.  The deceptively simple storyline is the bit of iceberg you see above the water, but the more you study it, the more you realize how much there is underneath the obvious.

A Scottish teen named Jay (Kodi Smit-McPhee) is on a quest to find and rescue his One True Love, a girl named Rose (Caren Pistorius) who recently fled Scotland with her father (Rory McCann).  Along the way, Jay gets "rescued" by a bounty hunter named Silas (Michael Fassbender), who demands Jay give him one hundred dollars in return for Silas escorting him safely to wherever it is he's going.  Since Silas goes around calmly shooting people, Jay decides to agree.  Although the audience soon learns that Silas intends to use Jay to collect a reward on Rose and her father, Jay remains blissfully unaware of this for most of the movie.

During his journey, Jay encounter a series of unusual people.  Black musicians who converse with Jay in French.  Silent natives slowly abandoning their burned village.  A German anthropologist who is studying the end of the Native American way of life.  Desperate immigrants.

And also other bounty hunters, one dressed as a minister and the other wearing a gigantic fur coat and leading a ragtag gang.  The latter is aptly named Payne (Ben Mendelsohn), and he plays an increasingly important role as the story progresses.

Side note:  I love that there are several instances here of the sound of words giving them more meaning.  Payne's name sounds like "pain."  If you say the title out loud, sounds like "slowest."  The film has a slow, leisurely pace, and Jay is also not the fastest brain in the west.  So many layers!

Anyway, Payne is also seeking to collect the reward on Rose and her father.  This makes Payne the primary antagonist for the story, though he's not any more of a Bad Guy than Silas, and in some ways, he's a better one at first.  Payne and his gang follow Silas and Jay for a while, and when Payne eventually invites himself over to their camp to share cigars and absinthe (to emphasize the movie's surreality?), things get really interesting.  We learn that he and Silas know each other, and know each other well.  Silas is angry and surly, and very mistrustful.  Payne is overly friendly, sniffing around for clues in a way that tells us he knows Jay is going to lead him straight to Rose and that reward.

We never learn what exactly went wrong between Silas and Payne previously -- Silas later says that he had joined Payne's gang when he was about Jay's age, and that when he left, he was lucky to do so with his life.  That's all.

We get a some tight close-ups of Silas during this scene, and he looks alternately angry, wary, worried, pained, and even a little bit wistful.  When Payne arrives, he interrupts Silas giving Jay his very first shave and a large dose of advice about how life works, a sort of father-and-son moment, and I feel like this points to Silas and Payne once having had a similar relationship.  Only something very bad happened that turned Silas against Payne, but not Payne against Silas.  Payne really, really wants Silas to come back to him and his gang, but Silas insists he's nothing like Payne and won't be persuaded.

It's Payne's presence that moves Silas to finally tell Jay that Rose and her father have prices on their heads.  From then on, it's just a question of who will find Rose first.

The film moves at a deceptively languid pace, seeming to drift from one experience to the next, but inexorably pulled toward a brutal climax.

The first time I watched this, I assumed that Jay was the protagonist.  The story begins with a voice-over explaining who Jay is, why he is here, and whom he seeks.  We spend a whole seven minutes with Jay before Silas ever arrives.  It's Jay who's on the journey to rescue Rose, after all.  His quest to help the girl he loves is what drives the story.  Or so I thought.

But the more I pondered the story, the more I realized that no, Jay is not the protagonist.  Silas is.

Silas has a beautiful character arc, going from a jaded and closed-off loner to a father figure for Jay, to a man willing to die to save strangers, to a man willing to live a life of responsibility.  All conveyed with a minimum of words, as he is one of the most laconic gents to grace the screen since Clint Eastwood's Man With No Name.

We all know Hamlette has a deep and abiding fondness for laconic gents.  This movie is a pretty major reason why I've become a Michael Fassbender fan.  In fact, so far, Silas is my favorite Fassbender role -- yes, even over his turn as Mr. Rochester!

(If you're worried about SPOILERS about the ending, you should probably QUIT READING right here.  Or skip to the last paragraph if you're wondering about content.)

Jay, on the other hand, has no character arc.  He starts out sweet and naive and loyal, and he ends that way too.  He fulfills his purpose of protecting Rose and providing a new life for her, but he doesn't get to enjoy the fruits of his labors.  Silas does.  Silas, by growing out of selfishness into selflessness becomes the man who can provide for and take care of Rose.  Rose never loved Jay, she told him so straight out, and they had no future together.  They were too different, one a pragmatic survivor and the other a dreamy wanderer.  Silas is also a pragmatic survivor, and although he and Rose don't share many meaningful scenes, the film makes it clear they are suited to each other.  Jay doesn't get a happy ending, but Silas and Rose -- and the audience -- do.  Silas ends the film by saying, "There is more to life than survival.  Jay Cavendish taught me that.  I owe him my life."  Not his physical existence, but the life he's now living.  He's no longer alone, no longer steeped in violence.

I don't know why I didn't figure this out from the get-go, as it's Silas who narrates the story.  His first words are, "I was drifting west when I picked up his trail."  He was drifting west.  He picked up the trail.  He's the subject here, the protagonist.  The journey is really Silas's.  Jay is the means to an end, just not the end Silas originally intended.

Slow West was filmed in New Zealand, but is supposed to be set in Colorado Territory.  If you've spent a lot of time watching Middle Earth movies, the topography will probably look distinctively NOT of the American West, but if you're willing to suspend a bit of that disbelief, it works.

It's beautiful, but it's not Colorado.

Sure makes me want to visit New Zealand, though!

Much of the movie is laden with hidden meanings, mysterious and sometimes down-right strange.  It has a distinctively mythological flavor to it, Jay an otherworldly creature who draws odd happenings and people to himself.  He has prescient dreams.  Silas himself refers to Jay's survival as a miracle.  Like The Lone Ranger (2013), this movie acknowledges that we have mythologized the Old West, and it seeks to accentuate that legend-making by not remaining strictly realistic.

When we first meet Jay, he is lying on his back in the dark, pretending to shoot at the stars.  He spends the rest of the story doing the same -- pursuing an impossible dream like Don Quixote, setting off to rescue a damsel who is only in distress because of him, and leading more trouble her way without realizing it.  Silas calls him "a jackrabbit in a den of wolves."

Interestingly, we first see Jay lying on his back with his hands clasped over his chest, almost like a dead body ready for burial.  Nice bit of foreshadowing, one among many.  My other favorite is this:

Yeah, I suppose it's not all that subtle, the whole idea of a man killed by the tree he was trying to chop down being like Jay who's going to be killed by the quest he's on.  First time you watch it, though, you don't know for sure that's going to happen, and that makes it much more subtle.

Anyway, then there's Rose.

In flashbacks, we see her playing an odd, morbid game with Jay where he has to choose a way to die, and then she pretends to kill him that way.  Shot by an arrow, shot with a gun, silly but dark kid stuff, and also foreshadowing the fact that she's going to be the cause of his death.  Jay asks her if she loves him, and she says she only loves him like a brother, even though he's rich and important and she most definitely is not.

In the present, Rose lives in a nice little house with her father, where she's learning to make butter (sort of), getting interested in a sweet Native American named Kotori (Kalani Queypo), and spending a lot of time worrying that people will figure out who they are.

She might struggle with making butter, but she knows how to handle a rifle, and as soon as we meet her in her new home, I want desperately for her to survive.  For a character with only a few scenes, she makes an indelible impression.

I keep thinking I'm about done with this post, and then I think of one more thing I have to say.  Okay, last thing I'm going to discuss, honest!

Silas and Jay are always shown travelling from right to left.  I'm assuming this is partly to show that they are travelling west, since we tend to look at maps with west to the left and east to the right.

However, as this excellent video points out, "in western culture, left to right indicates the progression of time," so movie makers have coded their films to use that, and we're used to movement from left to right in movies being used to "indicate time, progress, and normality," while movement from right to left "indicates moving back in time, abnormality, and regression."  This would seem to point toward Silas returning to a previous state over the course of the film, going from the hardened, bitter, remorseless killer back to his earlier self, who was stable and helpful.

It could also be emphasizing that both Silas and Jay are abnormal, which I've discussed earlier -- Silas is a killer and a bounty hunter, a man who preys on Jay, abandons orphans, and plans to benefit from the misery of others the way we assume he has done before.  Jay is otherworldly and naive to the point of childishness, which is also not normal.  With a film as nuanced and layered as this, I have to assume the filmmakers were deliberately using directionality to influence our feelings toward these characters.

Is this movie family friendly?  Nope.  Lots of spattery violence.  Also some bad language, a bit of mild innuendo (Silas concludes that Jay has not yet "bedded" Rose), and some non-sexual nudity (a dead man's naked rear).  Not a film for kids or the squeamish!

Spring Blogathons -- Coming Soon!

You know these little heads-up posts are really my way of saying, "Hey, you wanna join these too?"  Here are three blogathons I'll be involved in over the next couple months:

The Wonderful World of Cinema is hosting their second William Holden celebration April 15-17 -- yes, I know that's Easter weekend, but Holden's birthday is April 17, so that's why they went with those dates.  I'll be contributing a review of the frolicsome western Texas (1941), which co-starred very young William Holden and Glenn Ford.

May 5-7, Phyllis Loves Classic Movies and Love Letters to Old Hollywood are co-hosting a blogathon about homes featured in classic movies and TV shows.  I'm going to write about the tiny apartment inhabited by Gene Kelly's character in An American in Paris.

Finally, May 26-29 will be the Favorite Director Blogathon co-hosted by The Midnite Drive-In and Phyllis Loves Classic Movies.  For this one, I'll be reviewing The Searchers (1956), which was directed by John Ford and stars John Wayne, whose birthday is May 26.  I might also be contributing a book review of the book The Searchers:  The Making of an American Legend by Glenn Frankel if I can get it read in time.

If you'd like to join any of these, click on any of the links in this post, or the buttons here or in my sidebar -- they'll all lead you to the sign-up posts.

Beauty and the Beast Week Tag

It's Beauty and the Beast Week over at Meredith's blog, On Stories and Words!  I reviewed The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux for this yesterday on my book blog, and today, I'm going to fill out the tag Meredith kindly provided.

1.When did you first experience Beauty and the Beast? 

Sometime in the mid-'90s, a friend loaned us the Disney animated movie, but the part where Belle's dad gets chased by wolves in the forest scared my little brother so much, we had to turn it off.  I'm sure I read some version or other of it as a kid, but I didn't see the whole Disney version until I was in college.  I liked it okay, but didn't love it.

2. In what forms (book, movie, retelling) have you experienced Beauty and the Beast? 

I've seen the Disney animated movie a few times, and I've read the Five Enchanted Roses collection of five retellings from Rooglewood Press.  I've also seen the movie Rigoletto (1993), which I love and wish I could find on DVD for a decent price.  And I've read The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux and seen the 2004 movie of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical based on it, as well as the 1925 silent film version.  I've also read the children's version of the story by Jeanne-Marie Le Prince de Beaumont.  But by far, my favorite retelling is Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë!

3. Who is your favorite character in Beauty and the Beast?

Usually the beast.  I have a lot of sympathy for him.  Beauty is cool too, but she doesn't quite grab my emotions the way he does.  Though in some retellings, that's not true.

4. What is your favorite song from the cartoon Beauty and the Beast?

The title song.  It makes me cry!

5. If you were turned into a piece of furniture what you want it to be?

A bookshelf :-)

6. What would your dream cast for Beauty and the Beast be?

Hmmm.  I rather think Hugh Jackman would be an amazing beast.  And Alicia Vikander is quickly becoming a favorite of mine, so I'll cast her as Belle.  This would be a pretty serious movie, I think, delving deeply into issues of appearances versus reality, inner and outer beauty, and what promises really mean.  Self-sacrifice and loyalty would be major themes as well.

7. If your school were performing BatB, which character would you want to play?

Mrs. Potts, I think.  I'm too old to be Belle.

8. Like Belle, do you enjoy reading books multiple times?

Absolutely!  I am a devoted re-reader.

9. If you were to write a retelling, what would you change?

Interesting question, because I've been pondering writing a western version, but I can't quite find the right angle yet.  I think I would make the beauty a little older so that when she decides to stay with the beast, she's making a mature decision about her future, not being impetuous.  Not that I'm saying Belle is impetuous, necessarily, but... I'd like to write her as an older heroine, someone in her thirties at least.  I think that would be cool.

10. Are roses your favorite flower?

Nope, daffodils are.

Don't forget to visit On Stories and Words this week to join in all the Beauty and the Beast fun!