Once Upon A Time:
The Fairy Princess Snow White lived in an empty castle with her Evil Stepmother, The Queen. The Evil Queen had a Magic Mirror, whose power included the ability to definitively rate chicks' hotness according to a complicated algorithm that only he could properly interpret. Every day, The Evil Queen would ask the Magic Mirror, "Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who's the fairest of them all?" and every day the Mirror would respond that she was the fairest of them all, until Snow White woke up looking particularly fair one morning, and just managed to tip the scales in her favor.
When The Mirror breaks the bad news to the Evil Queen, she flips out and hires a hit man to stalk Snow White in the woods and kill her.
The hunter follows Snow White into the woods, and sees her chatting earnestly with a baby bird who fell out of its nest. He realizes she's insane, and can't bring himself to kill her. He tells her the Queen wants her dead, and that she should run away, far far away, and she does. She runs and runs and runs all night and finally crashes in some bushes and sleeps the sleep of the damned.
When she wakes, about fifty deer, rabbits, squirrels, and birds surround her and fret visibly about her well-being. Snow White explains the situation to the most sentient-looking deer in the bunch, and asks it if it knows of a place where she can live. The animals excitedly lead her to a house in the woods that Snow White insensitively refers to as a "doll house". They go inside, and it's a mess. Snow White sees seven little beds and decides seven children live here and that she could be their mother. She declares she'll clean the house and forces her new animal friends to submit to slave labor, washing the clothes and dishes and making the beds, while she sweeps the floor and whistles.
Meanwhile, the "little children" who live in the house are actually seven dwarfs: Doc, Dopey, Happy, Sneezy...um...Sleepy....how many is that? Wait...Doc, Happy, Dopey....Bashful! I always forget Bashful. Uh...Bashful...Sneezy, Grumpy...did I say Dopey? Hold on...is there a Vanity?
Anyway, the dwarfs dig up millions of dollars with of precious jewels on a daily basis, and as a consequence are quite cheerful about it. Their leader, the near-sighted one with speech problems, declares that it's quitting time, so they all march in a line and sing "Heigh-ho, heigh-ho". Once they get back to the house, they see a candle on in the living room and the chimney smoking, and they freak. They get inside and see that someone is upstairs asleep on the bed. They elect the mildly retarded mute one with alopecia to go upstairs and confront the intruder. Classy, guys. But he chickens out, so they all go up and Snow White wakes up and everybody screams, then she tells them she's a Princess and she needs to hide out for a while because the Queen's trying to kill her because she's so pretty. Wow, ego much, Snow White? The chronically depressed one says it's a terrible idea, but the rest of the dwarfs are down with it.
So Snow White cooks them dinner, but won't serve it to them unless they wash their hands, and I think the dwarfs are giving their new houseguest too much power. But they wash their hands and then eat and then dance and frolic with Snow White and the woodland animals all night long. The one with severe allergies keeps trying to sneeze, but the others cruelly won't let him, and the narcoleptic one bows out early and goes to bed in a shelf. It's pretty much the worst kegger ever.
Meanwhile, The Evil Queen wants to know who's the fairest now, bitch?, but the Mirror still says it's Snow White. The Evil Queen says but that's like, just your opinion, man, and besides, I've got her heart. The Mirror says the hunter tricked her and that's a pig's heart (and the pig's family is shattered beyond repair). The Queen decides she'll kill Snow White herself with a poison apple, and then concocts a magic spell that that turns her into an old crone, which should really hurt her standings in the "fairest" rankings, but she doesn't seem to get those implications. Then she reads the instructions on the back of the apple and sees that the one who bites it won't really be dead dead and will wake up if kissed by a random bland white guy. She heads off into the woods.
The next morning, Snow White sends her men off to work, kissing the one with crippling social anxieties on his bald head, and causing him to turn purple with shame and humiliation.
The Queen shows up in disguise and tries for half an hour to get her to eat the damn apple while the woodland animals race to the mines and get the dwarfs. They run back to the cabin, just in time to see Snow White fall to the ground. They angrily chase the Queen through the woods and up a cliffside, where two evil looking vultures wait. The Queen tries to push a rock on them, but is struck by lightning and falls off the cliff.
But all the dwarfs think Snow White's dead, so they do the logical thing and build a glass casket for her so they can watch her decompose.
But then a random guy happens by and kisses her and she says see ya suckers, and rides away.
Review: So as I sat watching ten minutes of footage dwarfs scrubbing each other in a large troth, I came to a realization. There's a lot of talk nowadays about how modern MTV audiences have short attention spans and need everything to move quickly and how that's an indication of the dumbing down of society and I think that's bunk. I think we're smarter now, not dumber. I think the fact that a modern audience wouldn't sit still watching three or four minutes of dwarfs sleeping reflects well on us. This movie is 83 minutes and a good 40 of it is filler. And not even good filler. Really boring filler.
And the other thing that occurred to me, is maybe old audiences didn't necessarily have better attention spans, maybe they just hadn't seen this stuff before, so watching the dwarfs putter around and do nothing for huge blocks of time didn't feel like "nothing" because everything they did was entertaining, just by virtue of existing. I've used the Avatar comparison before, but I think it really applies well here. At no point while watching that movie did I think it was a good movie. And yet I loved it, because it was visually the most stimulating movie I've ever seen. There's no doubt in my mind that fifty years from now, someone my age now will think it's boring as hell, because the effects will be outdated and the story itself is terrible.
Anyway, what's especially annoying about this movie's inclusion in the list is that some of the other classics around the same era are far far better. Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Jungle Book just to name three all have better developed characters, more interesting sub-plots, scarier villains, and far better sense of "world-building". And then of course The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and The Lion King blow the old ones out of the water. Even Robin Hood and Alice in Wonderland are better than Snow White. But much as Toy Story is in the bottom tier of Pixar films, it gets AFI inclusion based on being first, so we give it to Snow White here.
But to be fair (or perhaps even the fairest), there are a couple good moments. Snow White, the Queen, and the Prince are mind-numblingly boring, but the dwarfs are fun and have some good moments. The songs are catchy. And the Queen's death scene was very creepy and well-done, easily the movie's highlight.
Stars: Two out of five.
Next, one of my Very Favorite Movies, "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" (spoiler: five stars), and then "The Godfather: Part II" (ditto).
No comments:
Post a Comment