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Have we discussed the live-action remake of 1937's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs since it came out?
In an effort to drum up business my local theater is running a promotion that includes free movie tickets for spending money at local bars and restaurants. While it's not something I would've spent my own money on, I elected to use one of my free movie vouchers to see the new Snow White because I was curious, and wanted to form my own opinion of it.
I expect most readers of this thread have at least a passing familiarity with the various controversies surrounding this production and more knowledgeable people than I have already done the business and Culture-war narrative side of things to death. So I'm going to focus on the on-screen product.
As a movie Snow White is solidly "Mid". Not good, but not terrible. The writing, acting, and set-peices are all passable. The humor is bland and inoffensive, and the songs are mostly forgettable. Gal Godot may have the dramatic range of an Electric SUV on 5% charge, but "Sultry Femme Fatale" is well within that range, and she seems to be having fun vamping it up (As is often the case the "villain song" is one of the better ones). To Rachel Ziegler's credit she sings well and serves adequately in the role of "pretty princess" / "coquettish ingenue" coming across as substantially less "Girlbossey" than I had expected given her off-screen persona.
The movie wastes no time establishing it's left wing-wing politics. The opening song and dance number is essentially all about how wonderful life is when people give according to their ability and receive according to their need. The word-play between "fair" as in "light-skinned" or "pleasing to the eye" and "fair" as in "fair use" "fair trade" and a "fair contest" is a recurring leitmotif throughout the script and it gets established in this bit.
Because Disney princesses are not allowed to have a mother the good queen falls ill and dies at the end of the song which is when a wild Gal Godot appears. She is a beautiful noblewoman from a far-off land across the sea whose people, covet wealth, power, and beauty above all else, and have magical powers. The King (Snow White's dad) is naturally smitten and immediately marries Gal Godot presumably because she is wealthy, powerful, and looks like Gal Godot.
In her new position as Queen, Snow White's stepmother immediately begins to subtly corrupt the Realm and remake it in her own harder and more covetous image (think Pottersville versus Bedford Falls in It's a Wonderful Life). In case you haven't picked up on it yet, Snow White's canonical origin story in this movie is about a virtuous and happy left-wing government being subverted and taken over from within by an evil Jewish woman through a combination of sex-appeal, blood magic, and propaganda.
We skip forward an indeterminate number of years, Snow White has been kept cloistered in the castle "because it is not safe". The evil queen Gal Godot has been sowing fear about a nebulous threat on the southern border as an excuse to get Snow White's Dad out of the picture and to crack down on dissent. (I wonder what that was intended as an allegory for?) Snow White catches a thief named Johnathan played by Handsome McStrongJaw raiding the Castle's pantry, and he informs her that life outside the castle walls is not all sunshine and adorable woodland creatures. Snow White's response is to inform the Queen. You see, if only the queen knew what was going on she would put a stop to it. Johnathan is arrested and put to death, but Snow White helps him escape the castle because this is a Disney movie and he is the designated love-interest.
Snow White is getting a bit too uppity and too "fair" for her own good so Gal Godot convinces the one black guy in the palace guard to take Snow White out to the woods and kill her by getting all up in the guard's personal space and offering him anything he wants. Black guy takes Snow White out to the woods to kill her, but he gets cold-feet and decides to tell Snow White about the whole murder plot because she was nice to him and asked him how his day was going.
Snow White flees into the enchanted wood where she meets the Seven AI-Generated Dwarves we are all familiar with from the 1937 original. After some hijinks and another musical number the Dwarves inform her that the enchanted wood is also home to Seven Bandits. A troupe of erstwhile actors who are plotting to overthrow Gal Godot and have recently been joined by our "prince of thieves" Johnathan. Snow White sets out to find them and a bunch of stuff happens without any real rhyme or reason. There is singing, there is dancing, there is peril, but none of it really effects the plot or evokes a feeling.
The proverbial "final battle" of the movie is Snow White and the Seven Bandits leading a protest march against Gal Godot that ends with the Townspeople and Palace Guards
all drinking a pepsiturning on the queen and reinstating the socialist order from the opening musical number.In conclusion, for what is otherwise a very bland and boring movie in the watching there seems to be a lot going on. And im curious to hear other people's thoughts on it.
I also find it funny that what is easily the most "woke" movie in recent memory could plausibly be interpreted as endorsing dissident right ideals, Jews Bad, hereditary monarchy good, "the people" are sheep, etc...
I just think the original story's random and uninteresting.
Queen becomes jealous of princess. Tries to murder her. Fails. Queen tricks princess into eating poison apple. Princess falls into coma. Queen is chased up cliff and then falls to death due to lightning strike (lol). Prince stumbles upon comatose princess and kisses her, awakening her from her coma. The end.
Throw a magic mirror and seven dwarfs in there because why not.
I simply don't care. The general audience probably doesn't either. Not sure why the remake was greenlit.
You can do this type of reductionist deconstruction with every story.
As a counter argument: Using the 'correct' view, good stories are about the journey. Not the Shyamalanaman plot twist, clever subversion of tropes or badass value shifts.
It's easy to get overwhelmed by these short term moments, designed to give you an emotional high, and lose focus on what's actually good when you're born into what's effectively a vortex dragging your brain towards this sort of short term stimuli on an ever-accelerating repeat. But we should be able to spot it.
This vortex afflicts both the consumer and creator. As can be seen, for example with projects like Star Trek. One of the big problems with new Star Trek, to kick that dead horse, is the narrow scope of the overarching narrative. It's not about a transcendent view of humanity, that existed in the older versions. It's about... Brexit? Immigration? Racism? It loses sight of what makes the 'journey' of watching Star Trek and being immersed in that universe feel good. None of the bells and whistles of the new era matter since the journey you have to take to enjoy them involves wrapping yourself in some sort of post-progressive pessimism where humanity is still constantly tripping over itself.
By the same token, categorizing fairy tales by their plot elements is just... For a lack of a better term: Not getting it.
You don't really need a plot twist at the end of a story with a simple moral message. And whilst the OG versions of these fairy tales often had a quite a... 'convoluted' message, they lived on to serve a different purpose. In short: These movies should be wrapping the viewer in the warm embrace of a loved one that's just sat down next to them on a sofa with a grandfather clock rhythmically ticking in the background. Ready to soothingly tell them a story from memory. Instead the movie is contextualized in political feces before it's even released.
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