
Roald Dahl's The Witches
2.6
(1.3K)
Family
Comedy
Fantasy
2020
106 min
PG
In late 1967, a young orphaned boy goes to live with his loving grandma in the rural Alabama town of Demopolis. As the boy and his grandmother encounter some deceptively glamorous but thoroughly diabolical witches, she wisely whisks him away to a seaside resort. Regrettably, they arrive at precisely the same time that the world's Grand High Witch has gathered.
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"Started off very charming. Good music and enjoyable characters.
Then the witches show up, and everything becomes very… stupid. Anne Hathaway does the most annoying accent ever. Daisy the mouse starts talking, and it turns out she’s a sassy girlboss. A fat kid gets caught in the witches’ trap when he demands chocolate from the witches. More fat jokes follow. The main black lead turns into an animal halfway through the movie, after wandering off on his own when he KNOWS witches are following him. These tropes aren’t tired; they’re exhausted.
Also, the witches are…
Well. They’re of different racial backgrounds. They come from different places, if Hathaway’s terrible accent is anything to go by. But they do have certain similarities.
They’re not “real women.” They wear voluminous wigs and lots of makeup. They’re missing certain body parts and have other body parts instead.
Stay with me here. If you google the definition of a drag queen, you get,
a performer (typically a man) who adopts a flamboyant or parodic feminine persona, with glamorous or exaggerated costumes and makeup
That sounds… a lot like the witches in this movie.
The witches whose sole purpose in life is to prey on children.
So that’s… not great.
But I’m probably overthinking this, right? It’s just a movie about witches, not drag queens.
Except, apparently Anne Hathaway said her character was inspired by RuPaul’s Drag Race. “I just tried to take every single thing I’ve learnt from that show and incorporate it into making a fabulous entrance.”
Yeah, it was… fabulous, alright. Fabulous and flamboyant and scary as hell. Nothing like a cishet woman co-opting drag culture to make her villain scarier.
And that’s not even getting into all the backlash the film got for its monstrous portrayal of baldness and limb differences. But there are real life people with alopecia and limb differences who can explain better than me just how wrong that portrayal was."