This is a cute little story retelling a modern version of Beauty and the Beast. It takes place in a high school and we enter the story on a student election and the most handsome guy in the class is running for the president. The guy, Kyle, promotes himself by saying that he'll be chosen because of his looks, because in the world, people who look good are better off than people who don't. They're treated better, have more opportunity, are more well liked, etc. And he gets elected. There is a goth girl there (played by Mary-Kate Olsen) who it is hinted, he dated in the past, and she doesn't look too kindly on him or anything he does, the kids also joke around that she's a witch. He also meets a girl, Lindy, who was also in the elections, and they end up taking a picture together. She's sort of nondescript, if slightly alternative. Anyway, Kyle ends up pissing off his gothic ex by attempting to humiliate her, and she puts a spell on him. He will become ugly, and if he can't get someone to tell him they love him before a year is up and a tattoo on his arm blooms, he will look that way for the rest of his life. One thing leads to another, and he starts following Lindy around. He's living in a house by himself because his rich father has neither the time, nor the inclination to bother with him. He gave him a house keeper and hired a tutor so that he doesn't fall behind in school. One night while following her, he sees a couple of men attack her and her father, and her father ends up shooting one. The other promises to hunt down Lindy and take her life for the life of his brother, and Kyle then tells the man to give Lindy to him for protection, and after a slight hesitation, her father agrees. Then the two live in the house together, and I'm sure you can take a stab in the dark at how the rest of the story goes.
I didn't mind this movie. I thought the actress who played Lindy was a little too 'nonchalant' at times, too detached from the situation by her 'coolness'. And I didn't see a reason for Kyle to start obsessing over her so much. I understand the intent, but I think they could have set up the situation a little better to explain the obsession, and not have him obsessively covet some random girl he spoke to twice in his life without properly setting the stage. If you look past that though, the story is kind of cute, and it mas a good message, that substance is more important than good looks and that you don't need to care about what the entire world thinks about you... just what the select few you care about think. They didn't really go into Kyle trying to accept himself regardless of appearance, that would have been the next step, but at least it gets the audience thinking, hopefully.
As for some actor comments, Niel Patrick Harris plays his blind tutor, and I can't help but see him as his role in How I Met Your Mother, in which he's hilarious. So that was kind of distracting, but he was still good in it. The girl who played Lindy was ok too, but (and I know this is a weird criticism) she has a beak-ish upper lip that I rather not have had to look at for an hour. She seemed to be a decent actress though.
To sum up, cute teen romance trying to tackle the whole 'image' issue through a modern retelling of an old fairytale.
This is a re-imagining of the Sleeping Beauty Story in modern times. 'Sleeping Beauty' is a university student who holds several part-time jobs to pay the bills, and judging by her lifestyle, is unhappy with her current life. She meets random people in bars and does pretty much whatever is suggested to her, looking as though she doesn't care all the while. When the bills start to pile up, she applies for a job as an erotic server, and eventually ends up being promoted to being drugged and sleeping (no penetration) with paying customers. She has only one 'friend' she visits on a regular basis, a man whose relationship to her is unclear, but we only ever see her break down or cry when she's with him, and we never see them do anything sexual together. One day she's given her normal assignment, but the guest asks for a suicide and she wakes up to a deceased old man, and the movie ends with her screaming at realizing this, and maybe other things too.
I heard several negative reviews about this film, but I actually didn't mind it. It was a little more artsy than your average blockbuster, but all of the main elements were there. The girl is not present in her life, she's figuratively and symbolically asleep. She indulges in many forms of escapism, drugs and sex with strangers being prime examples. She attacks her body as violently as she can, without actually doing any physical damage, in effect attacking her mind. On more than one occasion she hooks up with strangers she meets in bars, or takes drugs some random person hands her. At the interview, the woman informs her that she need not worry because there would not be any penetration and that her vagina was a temple. She responded by flat-out denying that, and we can repeatedly see this disrespect she does to her own body. She actually burns some of the money she makes on her very first assignment, removing the practical reason for her degradation. What she does never seems to faze her either. She approaches everything with a cool disdain, if not with blatant apathy. The only time she shows any real emotion is when she's with her seemingly one and only friend, named Birdman. In a way, he might be her prince. **Spoiler** The turning point for her, the moment she begins wanting to break out of this apathy is with his death... so he wouldn't be her prince in the traditional sense, but his death is like a symbolic 'kiss' that begins to awaken her. In fact, he never even kissed her. He kept saying that he really wanted to, but wasn't good enough, or wasn't ready, and he was the most stable thing in her life. She often wound up on his doorstep after a rough night, and he would sooth her, no matter the hour. And that soothing was never sexual in nature either, unlike the damaging lifestyle she chose to lead. A good scene between them is him holding her on the pullout couch watching the nature channel on mute as he narrates, and she begins crying. He was more of a refuge for her than anything else. **Spoiler end** I also think the end of the movie is her full awakening. After her assignment she wakes up next to a corpse, and she is understandably shaken and disgusted and screams, but it isn't just a short scream of disgust or horror. She screams continually, like she's just woken up and can't understand where she is or how she got there.
There are also several situations external to the girl herself that accentuate and explore the idea of 'awakening'. There is this good scene with the first patron who comes to her in her drugged state and he tells a lengthy story about a folktale he read, and how he himself is inhibited and was in his own way 'asleep' for most of his life. The execution of this story was carefully thought out and there is a lot of symbolism and suggestion supporting the central theme of the story, which makes this one of those films you could watch several times and pick out something new with each viewing.
There is nudity in this film, but I wouldn't see anyone watching this to turn themselves on. Basically, if you've seen a naked person before it shouldn't upset you too much as they just walk around. There aren't any sex scenes or erotic dances or anything of that nature.
This is an okay movie to watch if you're in the mood for watching a fairy tale... but otherwise it's quite bad.
The movie takes place in a more magical world than the original story. The story begins by informing the viewer that once upon a time a green fire landed on earth high on a mountaintop. The fire was magical and brought with it dragons and elves, which embodied its power. We then fast forward to a dragon killing a king, and then to his wife who is practicing her false sorrow for his funeral, who is obviously the evil step mother. The prince from the adjacent land has come to propose marriage to her because he fears that she will invade his country, though he doesn't really like her as she's killed off all of the elves and dragons living on the king's land. Little does he know, she is also planing to attempt a union with him because the magical green fire is rumoured to be on his land, and she is of course power-hungry. We see some of her greed and vanity when she does the whole mirror mirror routine, which they explain by having her use the power stones she stole from elves. This all changes however, when the prince sees Snow White, which takes the story off into a familiar direction, save for a few altered details and a prophecy that has to do with the magic fire.
I thought the inclusion of the magical fire and the elves was an interesting spin, and I thought the film pulled it off quite well, it wasn't too campy. There were elves instead of dwarves, and the magic fit in with the storyline quite smoothly. The acting wasn't that bad either. There were some predictable character sub-plots, but overall it was decent. The thing that really killed this movie were the special effects. I was shocked and appalled when I found out this was made in 2012, because watching it, I pegged the CG to be maybe late 90's early 00's. That animation that poor was still being used in this day and age is just disgusting. The worst of it was the dogs... they could have saved the money and just used real dogs. Even if the dogs weren't as ferocious as would be desired... it wouldn't have looked like crap. This movie wasn't a blockbuster or anything, it might have gone straight to video, but for me that's not excuse for shoddy quality.
Besides that, I did enjoy it. Snow White played a more active role than housewife and mock corpse (taking nothing away from Disney, I love their version) and actually saved the day in her own way. The cinematography was decent too, so it wasn't horrible to look at. Overall this was an acceptable version of the story, but there are better versions our there.
This is a pretty good remake of the Snow White story. The story starts off with a couple running in the woods. There's something chasing them down, and it hits the woman, who is pregnant. The woman then tells her husband to save the child rather than her and to keep running. Then we're brought forward to see a young girl, who is Snow White (named Lilli). The father decides to remarry and chooses for his wife a lovely woman named Claudia, of what we later find out comes from questionable origins. Claudia is seemingly normal and nice to Lilli, even years after the wedding. It's actually Lilli who is wildly resistant to this new woman, feeling as though she's replacing her mother. There are subtle hints of Claudia noticing Lilli's youth, but nothing is acted upon. Claudia eventually gets pregnant and is very happy about the child, but due to complications during the birth, she lost both the child and the ability to bear any future children, and it is then that she starts acting crazy. Claudia hints at some point that her mother was a witch, or social outcast of some sort, and after losing the child, she starts consulting this mirror that was given to her by her mother. She then begins to hear her reflection say things to her, and it eventually suggests that she get rid of Lilli. From this point on the story is pretty typical, but the dwarves aren't all small people, but in fact discontented peasants who actually want to kill her at first. And in this version she may or may not end up with the 'prince'.
I liked this version. It had all of the main elements of the traditional Snow White story, but with a bit of a twist. It still had that old-time feel and was set in the past, all of the main players were present, but some of the more minor details were changed just enough to give the story a fresh feel. Sigourney Weaver played the 'evil queen', and I thought she did a pretty good job. Actually, I bring up this movie just to say her name out loud, it's an interesting one. I don't know if this is a keeper, but if you like the Snow White story, you will probably find this interesting.
This is a retelling of the story donkey skin. A short summery of the book would be; after the death of a girl's mother, her father abuses her out of grief and she runs away, and I think she takes her dog with her (it's been a while since I've read it). She kind of looses herself because of her grief at what her father did in the wilderness and after a while comes to this castle, wearing a deerskin dress, and they take her in and call her deerskin, and there's a prince etc. I won't spoil the ending.
There is an odd obsession with dogs in this book, and the girl (princess) has her own dog and also takes care of the prince's puppies. I don't have a dog or care about them much, so while fascinating, this part of the book didn't really draw me in and dragged on a bit at parts. There was a nice symbolism present and the heroine did regain a sense of herself and an acceptance of herself by the end of the book. Overall not my favourite read, but decent. Worth it if you put in the time, but nothing mind blowing.
Zel is my favorite Napoli book. I enjoyed the alternate perspective and thought that she expressed herself in a very effective and enthralling way. It's basically has the same elements as the Rapunzel story we all know and love, it's just told on a more personal level.
In this story, Zel lives with a woman who adopted her her because she couldn't have any children, and the woman loves Zel very much and never wants her to leave, so therefore feels threatened when Zel bumps into a boy we discover is the prince in town. She then takes action against Zel leaving her forever to live with someone she'll love more by locking her in a tower, and we more or less know the rest. I thought it was a good retelling.
I picked up this book because I've read other books by this author, the Sevenwaters trilogy and Wolfskin and Foxmask, and I enjoyed both the author's writing style and subject matter in those books, so decided to give this a chance. And it was good. It's set in a medieval (ish) Romania and is a retelling of the fairy tale the Twelve Dancing Princesses (and possibly another but to say which would kind of spoil it). Five sisters are given the privilege of being able to go to the fairy realm every full moon for a night of dancing with faeries and dwarves and trolls, and the like.
Near the beginning of the story, the girls' merchant father goes away on business, and he has poor health which causes the girls to worry throughout the novel about their future. When he goes he leaves the financial situation of the household to the second daughter, and narrator, Jena, and this is somewhat uncommon behaviour as women were not usually doing business at that time in Romania. Over the course of the book her male cousin forcibly takes more and more of her responsibility away from her and patronizes her and her sisters. That's basically the set up, and I think to go more into the plot might ruin it a bit, so read the book to find out what happens I guess.
Jena had a very practical and down to earth grasp on the world, and while I appreciated this quality in her, more towards the end of the novel it frustrated me a bit that she was so stuck in her practicality. Not frustrated in a bad way really, but a frustrated that makes you just want to shake her for her obtuseness. I was only this affected at one point in the novel though, for the most part I liked her.
One thing I kind of didn't like about the novel... the close your eyes, stick your fingers in your ears and yell lalalala because you like the rest of the book part of the novel was at the endish of the book, Jena's older sister Tati's relationship with the guy she liked. She fell in love with one of the night people, which would be similar to a vampire I guess. And I have nothing against who she chose or how they interacted with each other, but with the way she reacted at the end of the novel because she of their uncertain future. It was very 'romantic' and not so much practical... but this was a minor annoyance and I didn't have to focus on it too much because there were other things going on, and the writing was well done.
I enjoy books by this author because she writes well, as I've stated, so the words flow nicely, almost to the point of having an air of sophistication around them, but it's an easy read. Also, the author knows what she's talking about subject matter wise. She seems to be well read mythologically, and retells the story knowledgeably. It's a believable rendition of a classic fairy tale, and it's done by a really good author. I say give this one a go
