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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Sam Raimi's Evil Dead reboot, which begins filming in New Zealand this spring, has found a new star to fill the shoes of original Ash Bruce Campbell, so to speak: 22-year-old British-born actress Lily Collins, who'll next be seen playing Snow White to Julia Roberts' evil queen in Tarsem's fairytale adaptation Mirror Mirror. Let that sink in, Evil Deadites... deep breaths... now hit the jump for more details.
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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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Julia Roberts shot newbie director Dennis Lee's ensemble family drama Fireflies in the Garden four years ago, but after an infamously disastrous Berlin Film Festival showing and distributor drama at Senator Films, the indie film languished for years on the shelf. Last night at their premiere in Los Angeles Lee told Movieline how Roberts saved the film from direct-to-video hell and Roberts explained why her upcoming project, Snow White, will be worth the price of admission.
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"Basically, I'm fighting evil -- I'm fighting the most evil motherf--kers -- and it's fine that they're being killed," Kristen Stewart told Box Office Magazine of her currently-filming Snow White and the Huntsman. "It's anguish. It's literally f--king anguish. She takes absolutely no pleasure in ever hurting anything. I'm exhausted right now and I was thinking, 'The fight stuff is coming up, maybe that won't be so bad.' And then I realized that they're probably going to be my most emotional scenes because I'm killing people and I'm Snow White. It's a really f--king cool way to approach a movie where so many people die." Score another badass point in favor of SWATH. Sorry, other Snow White movie. [Box Office Magazine]
Stand back! Brace yourself! Nothing can prepare you for the rocking magnitude of the blast that is Movieline's Week in Review. Read on for all of it, but careful! Don't look directly into the light, and consider hiding the children. And in any case be stay to drop by this weekend for box-office updates and other fiery dispatches from the one and only Louis Virtel. Have a good one!
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Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the fairest Evil Queen of them all? Is it Julia Roberts, who will star opposite Lily Collins's Snow White in Tarsem Singh's untitled fairy tale adaptation? Or is it Charlize Theron, who will play the wicked queen opposite Kristen Stewart's armored Disney princess in Snow White and the Huntsman? Take a look at the side-by-side comparison below before deciding for yourself.
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Both of the competing Snow White studio flicks are racing to the box office as we speak, but Universal's revisionist take has scored the latest blow, casting Ian McShane as the leader of the dwarfs. (If you can't keep your Snow Whites straight, this is the one with Kristen Stewart as the titular princess and Chris Hemsworth as the killer huntsman who aids her, with Charlize Theron as the evil queen.) Get to dream casting McShane's remaining dirty half-dozen dwarfs! [THR]
