If there's anything good to say about Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland and its billion dollar gross, it's that it might make Hollywood a safer place for female-driven magical tales. Disney's Tangled and its $449 million gross (and rising) enthusiastically seconds the notion that fairy tales and old timey stories aren't passe. Fairy tales are a good well to draw from: they're familiar and thus as easy to market as any hit franchise and yet they're flexible and thus of interest to artists who can bring fresh takes to old stories.
Kristen Stewart and Snow White... with birds.
Initially the prospect of Snow White and The Hunstman thrilled. It got even more mouth-watering when Charlize Theron and Viggo Mortensen were named as the Evil Queen and the Hunstman, respectively. But now that we have our Snow White in Kristen Stewart, the apple seems poisoned prematurely.Stewart's performance as Joan Jett in The Runaways proved that she could in fact play something beyond Self-Indulgently Mopey Girl (Twilight + Into the Wild + Adventureland) but playing a naive sweet dreamy girl suddenly thrust into danger because she's just too beautiful to live? That's such an about face it may be less a healthy stretch and more a case of getting strapped to the rack. Stewart's edge and performance style seem radically wrong for Snow White unless they're just using the name as a jumping off point.
Reinterpreting fairy tales can be fun, provocative, artistic and lucrative but don't you have to maintain some semblance of connection to the material?
What's in the box? A gift to moviegoers or something...awful.Plus there's the small matter of "the fairest of them all". This is not meant as a knock against Kristen Stewart who is obviously an attractive woman but I think few would worry for Charlize Theron's ego in that particular department up against practically anyone.
We wont know if this particular Snow White is a poisoned apple to moviegoers until 2012, but if it is there's still hope for the fairest of them all to find her prince and defeat the vain queen. Two other Snow White movies are also in development. Tarsem Singh's Brothers Grimm: Snow White (with Julia Roberts a possibility as the evil queen) would undoubtedly be something to gawk at at the very least. The other one is Snow and the Seven which Michael Arndt (Little Miss Sunshine, Toy Story 3) is scripting for Disney. One suspects not all of these movies will happen but with three competing Snow White themed movies and (what, seven!?) new Wizard of Oz themed movies, plus that Red Riding Hood thing with Amanda Seyfriend and maybe Tim Burton's take on Sleeping Beauty focusing on Maleficent, the Teens is going to be a very fairytale heavy decade if this keeps up.
Friday, February 4, 2011 at 12:50PM 
