Be Prepared ... for The (New) Lion King

Plus: Stranger Things, Midsommar and what's making us happy [NPR] by Glen Weldon Welcome! It was the week [the Rapinoe]( became the new [this thing]( or maybe the new [this thing.]( It was the week the great [Rip Torn was ripped from us]( more about him below. And it was the week of the passing of [hugely influential composer João Gilberto]( and thus, of repeated playings of a song that starts off sort of like if the Male Gaze [had its own damn theme song]( but ends up being about a woman who would rather just go swimming by herself, thank you very much. Let’s get to it. Opening Argument I have seen the new The Lion King. We’re devoting a whole show to it next week, so I won’t get into a full review here, but just know that, when it comes to one specific aspect of the new film — the one aspect about which I cared most keenly, most deeply, most intensely — the news is not senSAAYtional. It’s anything but, in fact. I refer here to “Be Prepared,” the very best song on a soundtrack that does not suffer for good songs. It is the villain Scar’s anthem — his pitch to the pack of hyenas to help him effect “the coup of the century.” Here’s [the original version](. Go ahead, click. Treat yourself. Make your day better. Then come back, I’ll still be here. … [Scar in the new Lion King, with hyenas] Walt Disney Studios Hi again. So that was pretty great, right? The animation so expressive, so imaginative, so dynamic, so fluid? And the vocal performance, by noted non-singer Jeremy Irons, remains just as show-stopping as ever, for one very specific reason: It’s such a pure expression of the character. Irons’ Scar was theatrically sly, performatively unctuous, luxuriously fey. He reveled in his haughtiness, his condescending wit, his sneering contempt for those lesser than he. He not only embraced his status as Other, he wore it like a Bob Mackie gown. He was, in other words, not merely villainous, nor anything so mundane as simply evil. No, he was more fun than that: He was wicked. Now, there’s a long cinematic tradition of talk-singing in musical comedies. Rex Harrison and Richard Harris famously barked and yipped their way through My Fair Lady and Camelot, respectively. It’s an effective technique, and Irons could have contented himself to follow in those footsteps. Instead, he chose to impregnate every verse of “Be Prepared” with all the layers of characterization he was bringing to the rest of his performance. You hear it in every lyric — the sly playfulness, the sudden rage, the smug self-satisfaction, the abject delight Scar is taking in his own skullduggery. It’s why Irons’ “Be Prepared” became, and remains, indelible, even iconic. Cut to 2019. The first thing you gotta know is that there were rumors that the new film had cut “Be Prepared” to make room for new (and thus, Oscar-eligible) songs. I, for one, [was prepared to storm whatever barricades necessary in protest]( and I was not alone. Turns out, they didn’t cut it. It’s still in the movie … sort of. What they did do was cut it down. Waaaay down. From nine verses to four, from three minutes to just over one.The new orchestration is almost unrecognizable: Scar’s backup hyenas no longer join in with that lusty, insistent “hummmm/hummmmm/hummmmm” you feel in your chest — they instead chant “Be prepared/be prepared/be prepared” in 4/4 march time; it’s what it would sound like if the Boy Scouts imposed martial law. There’s a rejiggered spoken-word intro, to more fully engage the new film’s hyenas vs. lions subplot, that turns Scar from a sneering despot spitting vitriol at his subjects (“Thick as you are, pay attention!”) to a mere feckless politician attempting to sway a potential ally (“My vision is clear and wide-ranging/And even encompasses you”). This utter lack of mustache-twirling is a loss; a big one. And look, I like Chiwetel Ejiofor. He can play a great bad guy — check him out in Joss Whedon’s Serenity some time, if you haven’t (ha ha ha I’m being rhetorical here, dear PCHH Newsletter subscriber). But his Scar is merely, mundanely evil, and his emotional switch just flips from Off to Boiling Rage, while Irons’ Scar spent every moment adjusting his dimmer. Musically, non-singer Ejiofor talk-sings his way through the song, only intermittently attempting to hold a note any longer than you’d hold a hot coal. But the unkindest cut, dear reader? Is that by eliminating all but the very last verse of the original version, the new film’s Scar never gets to tell the hyenas — and by extension, us — to “prepare for senSAAYtional news.” Sure, maybe he couldn’t have put the same English on that legendary line-reading that Irons did (reader, he couldn’t have) but it would have been interesting to see him at least try. Did this all bum you out? I didn’t mean to. The new film does have some things to recommend it, which we’ll talk about on the show. But my purpose in giving you a heads up vis-a-vis Scar’s anthem was simple: service journalism. Odds are you’re gonna see this new Lion King, so you should go into it clear-eyed. Manage your expectations. Adjust your parameters. Be prepared. --------------------------------------------------------------- We Recommend Netflix’s Stranger Things is back with Season 3, which captures its main characters hovering awkwardly between kidhood (in all its wide-eyed innocence) and adolescence (in all its sebaceous glory). So it’s only fitting that the looming specter of sex, and sexuality, should ... well, loom over their lives like some kind of 30-foot-tall interdimensional spider-monster. (Only, you know, a horny one.) The character of Will has been the subject of much speculation from the jump, and the current season has only thrown kerosene on the long-flickering “What’s His Deal?” fire. Brett White, over at Decider, [assembles the evidence]( that the show’s been planting “Will Is Nascently Queer” seeds since Season 1, Episode 1 — though White, quite correctly, admits a personal bias. For the record, the actor who plays Will, Noah Schnapp, [prefers a more ambiguous take](. And it’s worth noting that this season, the show provided us with a character whose queerness is matter-of-factly stated, and requires no such reading of the tea leaves — or spilling of the tea. A year before he began playing the bluff, always-beaming producer Artie on The Larry Sanders Show, the late Rip Torn co-starred with Albert Brooks, Meryl Streep and Lee Grant in Brooks’ [1991 fantasy rom-com]( Defending Your Life. He played, with Tornian relish, an afterlife attorney arguing that Brooks’ character should be allowed to move on to another plane of existence — despite considerable evidence to the contrary. Torn found something highly specific in the role — you can see the DNA of Sanders’ Artie all over his grinning chumminess, though of course Artie’s smile was really just a fiercely protective aggression display — a baring of the teeth. (Defending Your Life is streaming on Amazon Prime, and is showing up several times a week on Cinemax right now.) If the death of João Gilberto got you thinking about, and/or listening to, some bossa nova this weekend, this brief 2017 blog post from Afropop Worldwide about [the influence of the album Getz/Gilberto on French bossa nouveau music]( — and how it occurred by way of the cinematheque — is worth a read. As soon as I finished it I found myself returning, as I so often do, to “Foux du Fafa,” a terrific Flight of the Conchords number they [perform on their recent HBO special]( (at the 44:00 mark) and OK, now that I type it out like that, it feels vaguely insulting to both Gilberto and the French language, but there you have it. --------------------------------------------------------------- What We Did This Week [Midsommar screencap] Csaba Aknay/A24 Last Sunday, Stephen and Lyndsey McKenna spread the [NPR Music “Songs of the Summer” love]( to All Things Considered, talking to Michel Martin. Feat. a rare instance of Stephen being absolutely right about something (namely, Lizzo’s “Juice”). On our Wednesday PCHH episode, we talked Midsommar, [the glorioosly gory, son-dranchad art-horror mmovia]( with All Things Considarad’s Mallory Yu and The Naw York Timmas’ Aisha Harris. On Friday, we kicked HBO’s determinedly odd Los Espookys up from (my) What’s Making Me Happy (a few weeks back) to the majors: [a full episode about the show]( featuring Alt.Latino’s Felix Contreras and Code Switch’s Shereen Marisol Meraji. --------------------------------------------------------------- What's Making Us Happy Every week on the show, we talk about some other things out in the world that have been giving us joy lately. Here they are: - Stephen: Goodnight, sweet [MAD Magazine]( and may choirs of furschlugginer angels sing thee to thy r SCHLAPP! PWANG! SHTOINK! - Shereen: [The Parable Series]( by Octavia Butler - Felix: [Coco Gauff playing at Wimbledon]( - Glen: [Twitter / Bot That / You Can / Chant To]( (Heroes in a half-shell!) (Turtle power!) --------------------------------------------------------------- What do you think of today's email? 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