Movie Monday: Annie (2014)

Alright... I love the original Annie... I really like the musical in general it's probably a favorite of mine... and this remake... had its issues. While I was watching it... I kind of thought the music was not that great, I didn't really like the Daddy Warbucks character- Will Stacks played by Jamie Foxx... I loved the girl that played Annie and I thought Cameron Diaz did a great job as Miss Hannigan... but overall it fell a little flat for me at parts.

Sooo... I'm going to talk about Cameron Diaz because I thought she was perfect for this movie... but there is a small problem... Cameron Diaz is tone deaf... so she can't sing at all... They dubbed over her and honestly that was not that distracting at all... but Miss Hannigan has some of my favorite songs in the play... and they had to change them a lot because of this movie... so that kind of sucked. Some of the other songs just... weren't as fun as in the original too... so it just was not the greatest combination of things.

Will Stacks... weird character. He was running for office and was just kind of using Annie to get ahead... but he was also a billionaire from owning a cell phone company... that was also a service provider it seemed like... it was very strange and didn't work that well as a subplot. There's a scene where he's serving Mashed Potatoes to the homeless... and then someone says Stacks has never had a mashed potato... so WHILE SERVING it he EATS SOME FROM THE SERVING SPOON and then he takes too big of a bite or he doesn't like it so he SPITS THE POTATOES OUT ON THE HOMELESS PEOPLE. After that scene... I just couldn't root for Stacks. It was kind of bad.

I did really love the girl that played Annie. She's a really good actress- she was in movies beforehand like 12 years a slave and Beasts of the Southern Wild... both well reviewed and I believe both were Oscar Nominated movies (I think? I know 12 years a slave won the oscar... but I'm not sure about the other movie) so... she knew what she was doing... but this was a really big movie and she's playing an iconic character... and she just did such a great job. I feel like the movie kind of... did some things that didn't make much sense though. Like they made Annie do things that were too young... Like she would spend every Friday night waiting for her parents to show up at a restaurant she knew they went to on Fridays... it was really weird. It kind of made sense towards the end of the movie and it made me like the end a little more... but it seemed like a weird choice that made her too young.

So... I didn't love a lot of parts of this movie...but overall in the end... It was cute. I was invested. This took me 2 sittings to sit through because it is a really long movie and there are definitely some scenes they could have cut down a bit.

This is available on Tubi- which is a free streaming service that has ads. This was the first movie I watched on Tubi- but they have a lot of great movies and its free... so you never really know what you'll see on there.

Bye!

-Shannon