Untapped goldmine: Disney Princesses 'to the rescue'.

There is a spot near the beginning of Peggy Orenstein's Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture that details the origins of the Disney Princess brand that originated around 2000.  Long-story short, the compromise for allowing all of the various Disney princess characters to appear on the same merchandise was that they not actually interact with each other in any way.  You may not realize it, but you've never actually seen a Disney Princess t-shirt or storybook with Jasmine and Belle playing tennis together or Aurora and Cinderella picking out party gowns.  They are always staring either at us or off into the distance, but never at each other.  I bring this up because in the midst of all the 'who should be in Expendables 3' or 'who should be in that female Expendables spin-off', I realized that Disney was in fact practicing a remarkable bit of restraint when it came to financially mining their properties.  Imagine: Jasmine, Belle, Mulan, Cinderella, Aurora, Pocahontas, Snow White, Ariel, Tiana, Rapunzel all in one spectacular adventure to do some kind of derring-do and/or saving the proverbial day.  Of course since most of their arch villains are suffering from a slight case of death, the already-established antagonists would be pretty limited (although Jafar and Dr. Facilier would be the easiest to resurrect since they both perished via magic).  But putting aside the whole 'art' argument, can you imagine how such a film wouldn't gross hundreds of millions of dollars in theaters?  Can you imagine how many untold millions of DVDs or Blu-Rays such a thing would sell? Say what you will about the alleged greed of the Walt Disney studios, but it says something that they haven't leaped at such a seemingly obvious opportunity to rake in untold amounts of money.

Scott Mendelson        

Review: Mirror Mirror (2012) is lifeless and drab, a poor-man's Ella Enchanted.

Mirror Mirror
2012
106 minutes
rated PG

by Scott Mendelson

The good news is that Tarsem Singh's Mirror Mirror is nowhere near as obnoxiously zany and aggressively annoying as the trailers seem to suggest.  Frankly, the most eye-rolling moments of the marketing campaign aren't even in the movie, and I'd be hard-pressed to name more than a few pop-culture references over modern-anachronisms.  And the film is surprisingly nonchalant about gender, presenting a heroine and  female villain whose respective strengths and flaws have little to do with their gender.  But the film is strangely immobile throughout, feeling less like a cinematic experience than an overlong stage-play with expensive costumes and occasionally well-constructed sets.  Every scene goes on too long and every performer seems too tired to give it their all.  When the first trailer dropped, I derisively compared its apparent tone to the live-action Cat in the Hat.  As horrible as that film is, Mirror Mirror could have used some of its boundless energy.

Trailer: Tarsem's Snow White revamp, Mirror Mirror, looks like a terrible remake of Ella Enchanted, as Julia Roberts invokes The Cat in the Hat.

Wow... just wow.  This looks shockingly bad, a sophomoric, obnoxious, and outright painful.  The humor seems to be on the level of Happily N'Ever After, and any kind of would-be 'fairy tale reversal' shtick just points out that Ella Enchanted did it first, did it smarter and wittier, and did it without having to piggy-back on a famous property.  Julia Roberts looks so strained and campy that she evokes an awkward kind of sympathy with her ghastly 'comic moments' and the constant pokes at her age (most of her bits revolve around how apparently old and ugly she is).  Of course Lily Collins looks gorgeous and fetching, and Arnie Hammer looks blandly-dashing, but the whole tone reeks of Mike Meyer's The Cat in the Hat.  This one drops on March 16th, 2012.  As always, we'll see, but unless this is some kind of bait-and-switch, um... yeah.

Scott Mendelson  

Relativity releases a bunch of photos, but no title, for their Snow White film.

I don't usually post about every photo from every movie, but Relativity was nice enough to send me a batch of photos all in one handy file, so why not?  Anyway, we get glances at Lily Collins as Snow White, Julia Roberts as 'the Wicked Queen', Arnie Hammer as 'the Prince', and all seven dwarves.  While most of the pictures try to sell the 'fairy-tale beauty' and/or 'virginal innocence' of the title character, the best picture is the cast photo above.  Not only is Collins actually smiling, there is a sense of playful wickedness that is lacking from the other photos.  Obviously the Tarsem Singh project will be visually scrumptious, and I'm all for films that actually have bright and bold colors, but I still fear for an industry that feels the need to have three (3!) Snow White projects coming out over the next year.  Anyway, the other bazillion photos are after the jump.  Enjoy.

Scott Mendelson

Happily Never After: The sad (and sexist?) rush to cast some of our most promising young actresses as fairy tale princesses.

There were a few interesting articles written over the last several months about the unusual amount of ass-kicking (or at least take-charge) young female roles being written into mainstream cinema.  Whether it was Chloe Moretz in Kick-Ass, Hailee Steinfeld in True Grit, Jennifer Lawrence in Winter's Bone, or Saoirse Ronan in Hanna, the last 18 months or so has seen a mini-wave of genre pictures where young females were basically the lead characters (or in the case of Kick-Ass the star attraction), 'strong independent character' (god, I hate that cliche) who not only could fend for themselves but were not defined in any way, shape, or form by their male love interest (not a one of them had a boyfriend).  Yes, I would include Sucker Punch in this category, as it was basically a satiric examination of whether ass-kicking young women in pop culture were automatically sexualized by virtue of the salacious nature of such imagery (stop whining and read THIS).  The somewhat negative undercurrent of this trend is that these actresses were generally under 18, often barely passed puberty.  Point being, what would become of these actresses once they reached adulthood?  If recent developments are any indication, Hollywood has a genuine desire to roll back the progress clock and turn these actresses into fairy tale princesses.