Happy Monday! Did you have a good holiday weekend? Here's hoping it was better than what transpired over the last few days at the box office, where returns ranged from modest to sluggish as America's families holed up with God and the Masters and whatever else struck their fancies while multiplexes hummed along quietly with a shrinking blockbuster and a few decent runners-up. Your Weekend Receipts
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Mirror Mirror is about as postmodern as a postmodern version of a fairytale gets these days – “It’s been focus-grouped!,” the prince protests, as the princess defies tradition and sets out to save him. So why is it so very white? It’s especially jarring when Indian director Tarsem Singh ends the movie with a Bollywood-inspired dance number – it’s a Technicolor celebration of cultural diversity by a cast that doesn’t seem to have any, save a dwarf or two who barely stand out from their pack.
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You had about as much chance of winning last Friday's lotto jackpot as either Wrath of the Titans or Mirror Mirror had of knocking off the blockbuster incumbent Hunger Games in the box-office sweepstakes, but at least the two new releases didn't have a totally losing ticket. Meanwhile, at least one aggressive holdovers is making its money the old-fashioned way. Your Weekend Receipts are here.
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Here at Movieline readers have to work for their hard-earned prizes, but today we have a haiku contest that should also engage your inner child and tap into the most whimsical, fantastical depths of your imagination: Write an original haiku inspired by this weekend's colorful and witty Snow White retelling Mirror Mirror -- a movie featuring heroines in swan dresses and people wearing boats as hats! -- and you could win dinner and a movie for four! UPDATED: See the winning entry below!
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There’s plenty of spectacle in movies these days; it’s delight that’s in short supply, and Tarsem Singh’s Mirror Mirror offers plenty of it, shimmering like a school of minnows in a reflective pond. The picture is gorgeous to look at: There are fairytale castles topped with minarets of fluted gold, interior marble archways that look as if they might have been carved by Alfonse Mucha, ball gowns that take their inspiration from the rock-star effrontery of peacock feathers. But the story is a delight, too, a modernized -- but not too modernized -- retelling of the Brothers’ Grimm Snow White peopled with actors who polish the material to a bright glow rather than a high gloss. Mirror Mirror has a great deal of energy and wit and color, so much that it sometimes threatens to go right over the top. Somehow, though, it always stops short of being just too much -- it’s never too taken by its own reflection.
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He's painted cinematic landscapes of psychosexual kink (The Cell), childhood fantasy (The Fall), and ancient Greek 3-D abs (Immortals), but in this week's Mirror Mirror director Tarsem takes a turn into uncharted territory: The family-friendly fairytale. Turning his attentions to the story of Snow White, Tarsem creates another visually rich fantasyland of imagination -- and gives the fabled princess a post-modern streak to boot -- with the help of the late Oscar-winning costume designer and longtime collaborator Eiko Ishioka (Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark), who passed away in January at the age of 73. In an exclusive chat, Tarsem takes Movieline through his work with Ishioka and the whimsical, inventive, and utterly imaginative designs of Mirror Mirror that comprise their final collaboration on film.
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It may be indicative of Snow White and the Huntsman director Rupert Sanders’ fearlessness – or his newness, this being his feature debut – that, after presenting much-anticipated footage to fans yesterday at WonderCon, he nonchalantly dropped the vivid phrase “dwarf gangbangs” into a discussion about his dark (and yes, likely PG-13) allegorical fairytale actioner. (Now that’s how you get the attention of a certain demographic.) For the record, there are no such scenarios in June's action-packed SWATH, but there were many more revelations and key insights to be had into Sanders’ take on the age-old tale, which stars Twilight’s Kristen Stewart and debuts two months after that other Snow White movie dances into theaters.
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Some directors clearly have no filter and suffer for it; others choose to live altogether filter-less, playing the game their own way, on their own terms. Which is why earlier this year Movieline anointed Tarsem Singh (The Cell, The Fall) the honey badger of Hollywood; an indie film talent recently gone mainstream -- who wore a homemade shirt proclaiming "I've been media trained" at WonderCon -- Tarsem's infamously cheeky public persona might threaten to overtake his work if only his films, just three features to date counting this week's Immortals, weren't so distinctive and gorgeous.
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