bookish dreamer

Went and saw Snow White & the Huntsman with a girlfriend of mine earlier this week, and while I'm glad I saw it because I wanted to satisfy my curiosity, especially with the way they ostensibly played with the story, there were problems.

I'm curious about the spate of fairy tale adaptations that have been in the air lately - Grimm (a show I tried to watch but basically got bored with *sorry those who love it*), and Once (upon a time) that I go back and forth on liking (though I was SUPER happy with the season ender), and even Mirror, Mirror.

And then we get the super slick, totally takes itself seriously, with big stars and lots and lots of cgi, 'this-will-be-so-epic' SW&tH... and ... I'm just glad I didn't pay for it myself.



1. what was up with the dwarves singing? Dwarves sing in Tolkien. That's it, kids. If the whole movie was set up around a society that had a singing tradition, have the fucking intro sung! Instead we have random breaking into song dwarves (and once a strange ethereal voice taking it over). The thing with Tolkien was there was an *entire* tradition around singing by everybody - elves, hobbits, dwarves, men, the works.

2. what the hell was up with Snow saying the Lord's prayer while she's shut up in her little tower? I was completely and entirely jolted out of the film when she started murmmuring that to herself. I mean, again this is shitty world building - if the difference between teh Queen and 'Good' people is the clash between Christianity and Witchcraft, MAKE it about that by having the wedding use the language of Christianity, have some prayers at different times, *something* other than just this one tiny weird little girl saying something to herself. LAME. OH, ALSO, THIS WOULD HAVE WORKED BETTER HAD SHE BEEN SINGING NURSERY RHYMES (and would have keyed in with the dwarves thing). Finally, the princess is supposed to be able to overthrow the Queen because of her purity (that literally has magical powers to heal those around her), and she literally goes out and meets with the white stag (which has a far longer tradition of being associated with nonChristian mythology than with Christian) in the land of the frigging elves ... not the things a good christian girl should do!

3. the super extended closeups on Charlize Theron's eyes. I'm sorry, the way you film anger / frustration / hate is not always to go tight on her bloodshot eyes. I mean, really, this is what we get? ok, she did throw things and cut people, but most of the time the reaction shot when right back to her eyes.

4. why on earth did they not have the little girl who played the young snow white have black hair? she had blond darkening to brown hair and I just ... what the hell? This film is not making any attempts to be 'realistic' why would you do that with the most important character's hair? They certainly dyed Kristin Stewart's so why not, oh, i dunno, cast a little girl who isn't almost blond?

5. The massive infodump narrations ... first to do the mother/rose/naming snow white (which is fine, mostly), but then there was another 10 minutes of infodump introducing Theron's takeover of the kingdom. THEN another 10 min of 'Evil Queen is destroying the kingdom and sucking the life out of it' narration as well. Honestly all of this could have, and probably should have, been done in a series of montages that had little to no VO. (take, for example, one of the best incredibly long but totally not boring 'backstories' are the couple growing old together in Up. It's wordless and SO FUCKING EXCELLENT even thinking about it brings tears to my eyes ... something like *that* would have worked for this). OR, hey, this is a remake of a fairy tale, so USE THAT the way that Once does - via book pages or some other kind of metaphor that actually acknowledges it's history.

I will say that I loved Chris Helmsworth throughout this entire thing - he and his character worked for me through the film, and he was really the only one who had a back story (even if it was narrated by Theron in an info dump). BUT, that being said...

6. the ending was ... pretty lame. I get that they're trying to suggest a kind of feminist ending - she doesn't *need* a love interest, there is no requirement for the handsome prince, it is her very innocence and purity that gives her her 'power'. AND YET. If the Huntsman is supposed to be some kind of a mentor to her, why not have him at her right frigging hand? he doesn't need to be a prince, but the way he's sort of hanging around the back of the hallway with his unwashed hair (OMG grr WASH) basically left me confused, not pleased. Additionally, ok, so the boy who was supposed to search for her his whole life wasn't the one who woke her, fine. But the huntsman kisses her and then walks OUT of the hall before she can wake up? why not destablize the kiss as the thing that wakes her up instead of retaining it but rendering it so awkward as to be ludicrous. I will say this is NOT the way to write a feminist snow fucking white.


ok, so apparently I had a lot to say. lolz.

And today I spent the day making pizza (of which I will possbily post photos later). It finally came out AWESOME. see Trader Joe's has pizza dough, and I've used it to make calzones, but the pizzas I made didn't really come out well. I went and read a bit about it online, let my dough warm longer, pre-cooked my dough, and came out with two pizzas that were much much tastier and more beautiful than i expected. It took me a while to get all the ingredients sorted, but mmmmm. (though perhaps only I would like these pizzas, as they are tomato-pesto based sauce, mozzarella, spinach, basil, cherry tomatoes, prosciutto, little cheddar cheese, and corn. yes, corn. it tastes awesome.)