This week’s selection was a bit of a comedy of errors. My original idea was to do foreign buddy cop films which went on a side route of finding german comedies which included a film called Seven Dwarves: Men Alone in the Wood which got me adding a few other versions of Snow White on to my list just in case.
Well in the end it turned out that Scarecrow had about half of the films on my list and most of them were all PAL format so this left me stuck with two english language Snow White films that came out on the same year..
The first on my list Mirror, Mirror was something I had heard in passing to be a different take on the tale of Snow White mostly from the Wicked Queen’s perspective… so I was surprised to find it in the children’s section. Julia Roberts plays the aging queen fearful of her mortality and desperate to marry a wealthy noble to gain more wealth having impoverished the kingdom, her mirror a portal to another lan with the mirror itself being a facet of her personality. She keeps Snow White imprisoned in the castle for fear that her budding beauty will provide completion to her endeavors. And the Dwarves are highwaymen who attack wary travelers running on stilts and the list goes on…
Make no mistake it is very much a children’s film with an all star cast that, along with Roberts, includes Nathan Lane and a cameo from Sean Bean. But it’s a children’s film directed by Tarsem Singh of The Fall and The Cell so the visuals and the symbolism are amazing and will make the film all the more worth watching, even during the saccharine bits.
Snow White and the Huntsman is another one I’d heard a lot about when it first came out but never got around to seeing it. What it consists of mostly is turning the original story into an epic adventure. The wicked queen is turned into an immortal sorceress who has murdered the King to gain control of the kingdom and needs Snow White as her final sacrifice.
From there we have her escape an enchanted forest where she meets the Huntsman played by Chris Hemsworthof Thor fame who had been hired by the queen to hunt her but quickly joins her side. From there we have a chase through the realm of Fairy where she meets the seven dwarves and then forms an army to fight the Queen as a Joan of Arc figure. The power of goodness fights evil soccerry and fun is had by all.
This movie was perfectly enjoyable with good effects and imagery and Charlize Theron is clearly having fun hamming it up as the queen this ultimately felt like an eighties sword and sorcery film but with a much larger budget.
(On a side note I found Seven Dwarves: Men Alone in The Woods on Youtube and while I hear German humor is an acquired taste what little I saw makes me think it’s just as well I couldn’t acquire it at Scarecrow)
