{"id":1105,"date":"2012-04-09T17:55:36","date_gmt":"2012-04-09T17:55:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/complete.ironsoap.org\/?p=1105"},"modified":"2012-05-09T16:09:06","modified_gmt":"2012-05-09T16:09:06","slug":"mirror-mirror-2012","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/complete.ironsoap.org\/?p=1105","title":{"rendered":"Mirror, Mirror (2012)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Mirror, Mirror<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u2605\u2606\u2606\u2606\u2606<\/p>\n

Directed by:<\/strong> Tarsem Singh<\/p>\n

Written by:<\/strong> Jason Keller and Melisa Wallack<\/p>\n

Based on the Fairy Tale by:<\/strong> Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm<\/p>\n

In nearly every case, when presented with the opportunity to re-visit some entertainment media I\u2019ve experienced before\u2014a book I\u2019ve read, a show I\u2019ve watched, a movie I\u2019ve gone to, a game I\u2019ve played\u2014I prefer to try something new. Often this is great because I end up with a wider breadth of pop culture reference points than someone who might, say, read the same book once a year or watch their favorite movie over again. However, sometimes it can result in a circumstance where I can reflect back and say with authority, \u201cI\u2019d have been better of going with the known quantity.\u201d<\/p>\n

This fact of consumptive life was reiterated with the recent decision for my wife and I to spend a day at the movies seeing either Mirror, Mirror or re-watching The Hunger Games. We went with the new, and we were punished sorely for it. The consensus we had upon exiting the theater: \u201cWe shoulda seen Hunger Games again.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cinematic regret aside, let\u2019s talk\u2014as briefly as possible\u2014about Mirror, Mirror. This is a\u2026 different\u2026 take on the classic Snow White Grimm\u2019s fairy tale. I suppose the hook is that it focuses on the villainess more so than the titular character (hence the re-titling) which, as Wicked apparently revealed, can be a novel concept. However, my impression is that Wicked re-casts the character of the antagonist where Mirror, Mirror takes a one-note bad guy and gives her an incredible and undeserved amount of screen time.<\/p>\n

So let\u2019s recap the basics of the original tale for comparison\u2019s sake: A beautiful princess is born with ivory skin and dark hair and named Snow White. Her mother passes away, her father hooks up with a beautiful but criminally vain woman who comes with a talking mirror accessory. The mirror typically reassures the queen she\u2019s the most beautiful woman in the world until Snow White grows up a bit and the mirror changes to Team Snow and the queen loses her grip. The queen implores a huntsman to kill Snow White in the woods but he can\u2019t bring himself to do it so he lets her go, then tricks the queen with some hunted offal saying it is proof of the princess\u2019 death. Meanwhile, Snow White finds a group of seven dwarves living together who agree to take her in if she\u2019ll play housemaid for them and the queen thinks everything is ducky until she checks in with the mirror who reveals that Snow is still kicking around. The queen sets out to solve the problem herself by poisoning Snow, half-succeeds but is ultimately thwarted when a prince shows up and falls in love with Snow\u2019s comatose body and manages to revive her without anyone filing necrophilia charges. The end.<\/p>\n

Obviously the source material could use some work, so there is an opportunity here.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, what the writers did instead was take the one-note evil queen character and give her a lot of annoying scenes of being sort of passive-aggressively wicked. They then made the dwarves a band of bandits (instead of just pioneers or miners or something), included the prince much earlier in the tale but shoehorned a ridiculously hackneyed love-triange between him, the queen and Snow and made the huntsman a court lackey played by Nathan Lane. Oh, and they made the woods a sinister place by putting an oh-so-obvious Beast in it who never appears until it is necessary for the script that it do so. They also change the mirror to a sort of portal to a weird extra-dimensional green room type place and in a real casting coup, make Julia Roberts both the queen and the mirror-persona with some white face powder and sucked-in cheeks.<\/p>\n

Of these changes the one that has potential is the dwarves being outcast bandits. What that does is facilitate their connection with Snow to be one of sort of banditry zen masters who teach the sheltered Snow to fight for her people. There\u2019s actually a ton of possibility inherent in this concept, and the movie comes closest to working during the short montage sequence where she goes from being a befuddled shut-in to a capable, twenty-first century approved do-it-yourself heroine. Sadly, it\u2019s a completely squandered idea that never quite fits in to the mess that makes up the rest of the film.<\/p>\n

If I had to pick just one core element that makes Mirror, Mirror such a failure it would be this: Neither the screenwriters nor the director have any idea what kind of movie they\u2019re trying to make. For the first maybe twenty minutes it seems like they\u2019re trying to get a Princess Bride\/Stardust kind of vibe going, which might have worked. Unfortunately, where William Golding and Neil Gaiman are good writers, Keller and Wallack are not and the humor never really works, the characters are never particularly compelling and, most importantly, the relationships between the characters don\u2019t mesh. Take the connection between Snow and the dwarves. For one thing, the dwarves themselves don\u2019t get enough screen time to ever develop even the most superficial sense of camaraderie, so it\u2019s difficult to even accept them at face. Then they add Snow White into the mix and there just isn\u2019t enough time given to make the connection between them gel, especially since the film keeps cutting back to Julia Roberts as the evil queen whenever it should be making the characters we\u2019re actually intended to care about work as, you know, characters.<\/p>\n

Sooner or later the film devolves into a cartoon (quite literally at one point) and utterly baffling sequences such as the mirror persona sending giant marionettes to attack the dwarves\u2019 hideout waste time to no discernible end. There are hints at plot elements that should matter but don\u2019t get any attention such as the price for the queen doing magic, which only manifests as some boring banter between Julia Roberts and\u2014well, Julia Roberts. And let\u2019s talk about Roberts for a moment, who, aside from hogging the screen (not her fault) fails to create anything even remotely resembling a full-fledged character, much less a full-fledged laugh, while she bounces between a terrible American accent and a much worse British accent at random (totally her fault).<\/p>\n

Most of the other actors fare no better: Armie Hammer flounders as the prince who is written as a goon and a buffoon and who never once deserves Snow White but the film expects us to root for; Nathan Lane looks bored throughout and at one point is inexplicably transformed into a cockroach. The CGI cockroach upstages him. Also, the dwarves, many of whom are familiar and capable little people actors, struggle with sappy or dippy lines when they aren\u2019t struggling with normal lines as well. Even the cameo by Sean Bean late in the film (if you think I\u2019m \u201cspoiling\u201d the movie, you haven\u2019t been listening to me) looks embarrassed to be there. Off topic: Why isn\u2019t his name pronounced either \u201cShawn Bawn\u201d or \u201cSeen Bean\u201d?<\/p>\n

The one semi-bright spot is Snow White (played with a sort of accidental development by Lily Collins and her eyebrows), who manages to convey both timidity and confidence when the script calls for it (bearing in mind the script calls for it seemingly at random) so at the very least she sort of almost crafts a character out of the morass that is the script. Still, she never quite breaks the barrier between Disney\u2019s animated version and the empowered rogue that I speculate the writers were aiming for so it\u2019s not like I can recommend the movie for one second based on her work. When chain-smoking male animators had a better handle on your character seventy-five years ago\u2014and this was when they cast her as basically the ultimate victim under the heavy lids of a sinister male gaze\u2014something has gone off the rails in a bad way.<\/p>\n

There is a single unqualified thing I can say about Mirror, Mirror that is not inherently negative: I didn\u2019t loathe the movie. I mean, you can\u2019t hate it. It sucks, it fails at everything it tries to do and it isn\u2019t worth watching in any capacity, but it\u2019s not deplorable. It\u2019s just a crummy movie that tried something and failed. Like the kid at the pinewood derby whose wheels fall off before it even gets set on the track, you kind of want to pat the (ahem) creative forces behind it and say, \u201cThere, there, Mirror, Mirror.\u201d And the good news is, in a couple of months Hollywood will have a chance to try again with the Kristen Stewart vehicle, Snow White and the Huntsman.<\/p>\n

Then again, the last Kristen Stewart movie I saw I gave an even lower score, so maybe we should all just make plans to re-watch The Hunger Games again now.<\/p>\n

from No Thief Like a Bad Movie<\/a> \u2014 April 09, 2012 at 10:36AM<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mirror, Mirror \u2605\u2606\u2606\u2606\u2606 Directed by: Tarsem Singh Written by: Jason Keller and Melisa Wallack Based on the Fairy Tale by: Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm In nearly every case, when presented with the opportunity to re-visit some entertainment media I\u2019ve experienced before\u2014a book I\u2019ve read, a show I\u2019ve watched, a movie I\u2019ve gone to, a game […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1105","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nothieflikeabadmovie"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/complete.ironsoap.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1105","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/complete.ironsoap.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/complete.ironsoap.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/complete.ironsoap.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/complete.ironsoap.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1105"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/complete.ironsoap.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1105\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1381,"href":"http:\/\/complete.ironsoap.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1105\/revisions\/1381"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/complete.ironsoap.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1105"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/complete.ironsoap.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1105"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/complete.ironsoap.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1105"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}