Once upon a time, there lived a studio executive… Thus begins most movie fairy-tales. After Walt Disney’s super colourful and musical animated extravaganzas, Hollywood sporadically turned to the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christen Anderson for inspiration.
Now that we are 14 years into the millennium, we are going to be serious and subversive with fairy-tales. The Shrek movies (2001 to 2010) seemed to be going in the right direction. While the first two films were great fun with the cleverest jokes and sly referential humour, the third and fourth films were a bit of a drag. In 2011 came Red Riding Hood —dropping the ‘little’ seemed significant but the movie was too silly for any sort of serious feminist deconstructionist angle.
Amanda Seyfried plays Valerie who lives in a village plagued by a werewolf while Gary Oldman is witch hunter Father Solomon. Directed by Catherine Hardwicke, the film had a serious Twilight hangover—not surprising since Hardwicke had directed Twilight .
Last year there was the rip-roaring Jack the Giant Slayer inspired from Jack and the Beanstalk and the vaguely incestuous Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters. Apart from being the year the world was going to end according to the Mayan calendar and Roland Emmerich, 2012 was the year of Snow White. There were two films — Tarsem Singh’s Mirror, Mirror and Rupert Sanders Snow White and the Huntsman . Apart from sharing inspiration and being disappointing, both films had A-listers playing the wicked queen.
Tarsem’s beautiful and shallow Mirror, Mirror had Pretty Woman Julia Roberts play Snow White’s insecure step mother, while Sanders had Charlize Theron do the honours. Twilight’s Bella Swan, Kristen Stewart, could barely keep her eyes open as Snow White.
Apparently Angelina Jolie and Winona Ryder were considered for the role of the evil queen. Ryder preferred being human mom to the Vulcan science officer on board the USS Enterprise and Jolie decided to be evil supremo, Maleficent, the wicked fairy from Walt Disney’s Sleeping Beauty .
Disney’s 1959 film is rather sweet and Jolie’s Maleficent seems to have borrowed her look from the animated film horns, raven and all. There is also a Prince Philip while the good fairies Flora, Fauna and Merryweather have been replaced by pixies— Knotgrass, Thistlewit and Flittle. Maleficent is supposed to be the Sleeping Beauty story from the wicked fairy’s point of view. Apparently Maleficent has a whole backstory that explains why she is so nasty. There seems to be some subliminal environmental message as well with Maleficent protecting the woods. While the master of bizarre, Tim Burton was supposed to direct the film, Maleficent is directed by Robert Stromberg, the production designer for Burton’s Alice in Wonderland for which Stromberg won an Oscar for Art Direction and a nomination for Production design. Elle Fanning plays Aurora, the princess cursed to sleep for many years when pricked by a spindle and woken by true love’s kiss.
There are tons of allegories in the Sleeping Beauty story to keep analysts thrilled to little bits. From the folk theory of sleep being winter and waking up to spring to a reading where Sleeping Beauty’s awakening is sexual, there are as many theories as there are readings.
While the trailors show a handsome production, one only hopes the pageant is as meaningful as it is magnificent.
The other fairy tale at the movies this week is Blended where Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore play single parents who get together on a disastrous first date and somehow end up in a resort in South Africa. This is Sandler and Barrymore’s third collaboration after Wedding Singer (1998) and 50 First Dates (2004). Frank Coraci, who has directed Blended , also directed Wedding Singer . In Wedding Singer Sandler and Barrymore meet and fell in love and in the goofy 50 First Dates , the relationship progresses to marriage and children. Now in their third outing, Barrymore’s character has two sons in their tweens, while Sandler’s character has three girls. While one part of us does not want these characters to age, as it reminds us of getting old, there is a side of us that is curious of what these two immensely likeable characters with excellent chemistry and comic timing will bring to the screen.
You could choose which movie you would like to go for depending on the school of magic you subscribe to.
