Colette Arrand

Tag: Lily Collins

  • Movie Review: Mirror Mirror (2012)

    Movie Review: Mirror Mirror (2012)

    Tarsem Singh‘s Mirror Mirror is a constant disappointment, a re-imagining of Snow White so droll and lifeless one wonders when a valiant prince will wander by to resuscitate the poor thing. Though it supposes itself a radical take on classic material, there is little—if anything—new going on here. The Queen is still evil. The princess is still beautiful. The prince, though oafish, is still charming. The two will mostly likely live happily ever after, the very picture of hetero-normative bliss.

    Here, Snow White (Lily Collins) is the daughter of a King (Sean Bean). Her mother dies at birth, and her father re-marries. When he disappears, his second wife, Clementianna (Julia Roberts) becomes The Queen, using her royal appointment to drive up taxes and throw lavish parties. The kingdom, as one would expects, is in crippling financial peril, and The Queen must find a suitor who’ll provide her with a line of credit capable of maintaining her lifestyle. In wanders Prince Alcott (Armie Hammer), stripped to his underwear after a roadside encounter with a band of thieves. The Queen is immediately smitten and begins plotting to take him as a husband, but he is woefully infatuated with Snow White, who cut him down from the thieves’ trap. When White and Alcott dance at a ball the Queen throws to ensnare the Prince, it’s clear that the two were meant to be with each other.

    Naturally, this enrages The Queen, who instructs her henchman (Nathan Lane) to take her to the woods, where she’ll be killed by a griffin-like creature who first appeared around the time The Queen took power. Despite Brighton’s slavish devotion to The Queen, he lets Snow White run away, where she takes up with the thieves—the seven dwarves. Together, they plan to return the Queen’s unfair taxes to the townspeople and restore Snow White to the throne, where she’ll presumably marry Prince Alcott and rule in peace. But The Queen, using the aid of her magic mirror, has Alcott under her spell, setting the stage for a royal wedding.

    As cut-and-dry as it seems, Mirror Mirror is an absolute mess of plot elements, bits and baubles of fairy tale shtick stuck here and there to prop up an incredibly weak plot. The mirror, for example, seemingly exists as the story’s sole tangential connection to any previous version of Snow White; her ability to conjure love potions and send puppet assassins after Snow and the dwarves carrying a faint whiff of  deus ex machina. The dwarves, too, are superficially updated for our time, given names like Half-Pint, Butcher and Chuckles, saddled with the backstories to match. They take Snow White in, teach her how to fight, and are then locked in their own house when the time comes for them to fight. This is perhaps a better fate than the one that befalls Brighton, who is turned into a cockroach for not killing Snow in the forest. “A grasshopper had his way with me,” he complains to The Queen, preparing for her wedding.

    As one expects from a Tarsem movie, Mirror Mirror is visually sumptuous. The castle’s architecture, the odd hut that houses the mirror, the dazzling array of dresses worn by both Roberts and Collins, all of these things look terrific, perhaps better encompassing the heightened, romantic reality of a fairytale than many films that’ve come before. Unfortunately, they’re put in the service of a film so benign that even its climactic role-reversal feels trite, a matter of focus group tested obligation. The action sequences, too, are listless, staged like lazy re-creations of the brawls from Shrek.

    Roberts, at least, appears to be having fun, and she is Mirror Mirror‘s saving grace. Though not quite sympathetic—Tarsem reportedly wanted the audience to look upon a woman who’d poison a teenager with an apple as more human than monster—her vanity not only makes her more human than any other character in the film, but also provides for all of the film’s worthwhile scenes, among them a lavishly ridiculous spa-treatment involving bees, worms, and bird droppings. When the cartoon peril is finished, I’m left feeling like The Queen probably deserves Prince Alcott more than Snow White does. God knows she put more work into her pursuit.

    Rating:

    Mirror Mirror. Directed by Tarsem Singh. With Julia Roberts (The Queen), Lily Collins (Snow White), Armie Hammer (Prince Alcott), Nathan Lane (Brighton), and Sean Bean (King). Released March 30, 2012, by Relativity Media.

  • Movie Review: Abduction (2011)

    Movie Review: Abduction (2011)

    A quick spoiler for those of you considering putting down your hard earned money on Abduction: Nobody in it gets abducted. Guns are fired, people are murdered, others are beaten up, and spies from the CIA battle a rogue Russian black-ops agent looking to regain some stolen files, but the only people who get kidnapped here are Alfred Molina, Sigourney Weaver and Michael Nyqvist, who were apparently blindfolded and shoved into a van headed to Pittsburgh. There, they were forced, likely at gunpoint, to recite 20-years worth of teen action movie cliches as Taylor Lautner smiled or grimaced at them, depending on the scenario.

    There happen to be two scenarios. In the first, Nathan (Lautner), is a typical high school kid. He crushes on the girl next door (Lily Collins), gets wasted at a party, gets busted by his dad and, like your normal American high school kid, is beaten up by him in the backyard of their fantastic mansion. Lautner is all smiles here, other than when he’s about to deck his crush’s boyfriend or when he’s at therapy, where his shrink (Weaver) leads him by the hand through some angsty boilerplate. Despite the fun he has playing beer pong and riding his motorcycle, he feels weird, like he doesn’t belong at the school or with his family…a stranger in his own skin.

    If that’s not familiar enough, there’s scenario two, where Lautner discovers that his parents aren’t his parents, that he’s been trained by world-class martial artists, and that he has a Russian hit squad coming after him for unknown reasons. He finds this out because, conveniently, he was assigned a paper on missing persons, and a missing persons site had some software that aged an old baby photo of his into a shockingly accurate future-him. The girl he’s crushing on, Karen, immediately jumps to the most alarmist conclusion: “Like, ohmigod Nathan, your parent’s totally aren’t your parents! They, like, abducted you or something!”

    Only they didn’t abduct him, and they’re soon shot dead by the Russians. The CIA gets involved, and Nathan and Karen run from both groups, traveling in teen-friendly vehicles like 2011 BMWs and Amtrak trains as CIA man Burton (Molina) and the rogue Kozlow (Nyqvist) chase him down. The rest of the movie consists of standard chase scenes, punctuated briefly by bits of dialog so awkward, Sir Laurence Olivier would struggle in lending them gravitas.

    “I’m not dying here,” A man says, trying to fend off Lautner’s blows. “I’ll tell you everything you need to know. There’s a bomb in the oven.”

    And then Lautner goes to the oven, discovers that there is indeed a bomb in it (a decidedly old-school looking one that must have been placed and set magically), and manages to drag his panic-stricken future girlfriend to safety, even though the digital readout is at a comically short seven seconds. This, of course, means that the man who swore he wasn’t dying there dies, which would be sad were he not inept at his job. Later, in recounting the day’s tragedy, Lautner grimaces and deadpans “I just saw my parents get murdered in front of my eyes.”

    And that’s just it…his parents did get murdered, right in front of his eyes even, and his loss just flat does not register. Yes, I understand that he’s an “action hero” and I get that he’s got “rage issues.” But rage is an emotion, and it’s the one action heroes need. First Blood, for example, would be nothing without Stallone breaking down and crying into Richard Crenna’s arms at the end of the movie, and half of Schwarzenegger‘s best stuff would similarly be wasted were he not enraged that somebody killed/kidnapped/threatened his wife/child/Christmas cookies. Neither Schwarzenegger or Stallone were particularly known for pathos, but, bulletproof though they were, they reacted to danger as if it were dangerous. Here, in an empty PNC Park, Lautner puts his arm around his girl and cracks wise about how exciting their first date was, despite missing the Pirates game.

    Yeah bro, but your parents are still dead. Maybe you ought to work through those issues before sliding into second base.

    Rating: 

    Abduction. Directed by John Singletary. With Taylor Lautner (Nathan), Lily Collins (Karen), Alfred Molina (Agt. Burton), Michael Nyqvist (Koslow), and Sigourney Weaver (Dr. Bennett). Released September 23, 2011, by Lionsgate.