If and when I get around to seeing The Little Mermaid (no way would I forsake my precious Paris time by seeing it here), I’ll probably feel underwhelmed. I’ve hated nearly every Rob Marshall film ever made (I found Nine half-tolerable), and he’s not going to change and neither am I, and this is just a live–action rehash anyway.

I’m a genuine fan of the 1989 animated original (83 minutes!), and so sight unseen I despise Marshall’s version, which tells roughly the same story, for adding 52 minutes of bloat.

Are there some hinterland trollers out there who are saying ixnay because of Halle Bailey’s casting as Ariel (i.e., standard Disney-fied diversity)? Yeah, I guess, presumably. But who believes that the shitty Rotten Tomatoes ratings (top critics at 47% and ticket-buyers at 56% if you count all of them) are driven by this?

The obviously gifted Bailey seems fairly cool and appealing, but I see no genetic evidence of her being the daughter of Javier Bardem’s King Triton, a pale-faced Spaniard by way of the deep blue sea. Why didn’t they make this aspect work? They easily could have. Not a huge deal but a deal.