Kristen Stewart as Snow White? Quick, Grab an Apple.

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.

How I Feel / How I Wish I Felt

As demonstrated vibrantly by Mr. James Franco.

I'm not going to have to saw off my arm but I feel like I'm going to have to make some major sacrifice (gulp) because things just aren't going well. Long story short: I'm off my game. I never fall while rock climbing and cave exploring!   I want to be happy smily mischievous Franco instead.

HOW ARE YOU?

i.e. open thread. what's on your mind? Are you trapped and panicky or happy and confident?

Links

MUBI Maria Scheider of the infamous Last Tango in Paris has passed away. RIP.
My New Plaid Pants The Golden Trouser awards continue to be completely amusing. I'm totally LOL'ing.
Scanners "The Otherworldy Terrain of Fish Tank."

Off Screen Antics
Boy Culture explains why "Femme Fatale" is a terrible title for a Britney Spears record

Distant Relatives: Midnight Cowboy and The Fighter

Robert here, with my series Distant Relatives, where we look at two films, (one classic, one modern) related through a common theme and ask what their similarities and differences can tell us about the evolution of cinema.  This week there are definitely SPOILERS AHEAD, not necessarily specifics but revelations in terms of happy ending or sad ending. Be forewarned.

Two men looking for the American Dream

In the 1960's Easy Rider, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Midnight Cowboy and other films followed an emerging theme, two brethren on a quest for success, triumph, togetherness, the American Dream. It may seem odd to consider The Fighter a descendant of this type of film. Indeed The Fighter (2010) and Midnight Cowboy (1969) come to drastically different conclusions about how attainable the dream is, but their journies to that concusion are consipuciously similar, especially in terms of the relationship between the two men at the center of the stories.

In Midnight Cowboy, Joe Buck (Jon Voight) has dreams of making it big in the male prostitution business, but can't seem to get out of small time transactions. "Ratso" Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman), the untrustworthy but sympathetic loser who eventually takes him under his wing, has no hope in life without Joe. When Joe makes Rizzo his manager of sorts it's a move that he needs and yet one that keeps him teetering on the edge of success and failure. Eventually the men will become brothers in their quest for a better life. So it is with real life Mickie Ward (Mark Wahlberg), the underachieving boxer who needs his actual brother Dickie (Christian Bale), a drug addict and perpetual screw-up, but the only man who can lead him to a world championship.

The Adonis and the Scofflaw

The two man story structure isn't anything new, nor was it anything new when our earlier film was made in the 1960's. In fact, in the world of comedy, the straight man/comic relief duo has always been standard. And it's that structure that both of our stories share in common. Not to suggest Ratso or Dickie are "comic relief." They're definitely the more animated character who stands in direct contrast to their straight man. This is what makes Midnight Cowboy the more significant cousin to The Fighter. Butch and Sundance don't have this dramatic a dynamic, nor do Billy and Wyatt.

While The Fighter asks us to make comparisons between Dickie's past failure and Micky's impending failure that Midnight Cowboy does not, both present a picture of men on different sides of their hopes and dreams, one beyond hope, and one filled with it. They are a contrast of sickness and health.

A man's got to make a living

Consider also the similarities between the jobs of Joe Buck and Micky Ward. I don't mean to suggest that the legitimate pursuit of boxing is equal to prostitution, however both present opportunities for the film to comment on the projection of the protagonist's success, one opponent/clinet at a time. Something between luck and talent lead to whether the next opponent/client will be an improvement over the last, a step in the right direction. So it is with the American Dream, half luck, half talent. But in these cases, all the more apparent when noticed one job at a time.

Inevitably Midnight Cowboy ends by declaring the death of the dream, and finishes off with an actual death to symbolize this. For The Fighter the dream is achieved, renewed even through the symbolic renewal of a character. Is the fact that the modern film ends happily a sign that audiences reject the suggestion that the dream is dead? Not necessarily. The truth is far more complex than that. Plenty of films with harshly realistic endings these days find success on their own level. Suggestions about the declining taste or tolerance of the modern moviegoer need not be marked against a film as lauded as The Fighter. What is telling about the film is, considering just how many inspirational sports films, even boxing films, there are, filmmakers wanted to tell this story. It is perhaps because it presents something new to the feel-good genre: the idea of opposites, but brothers, playing off each other in their quest for something great.