The first of this year’s two takes on Snow White, Mirror Mirror is a sumptuous visual feast – the trademark of director Tarsem Singh – with enough laughs, action and romance to make it worth a trip to your local multiplex.
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Julia Roberts
Mirror Mirror benefits from the low expectation syndrome, but does not quite overcome it. This is one of those movies where you ask the question, “Why?” Yes, from a purely budget and numbers perspectives you can see why a studio would want to make this film. They got Julia Roberts and re-imagining fairy tales is all the rage now. Especially retailing Snow White.
Grade: C-
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Julia Roberts has closed a deal to play the evil queen in Relativity Media’s Snow White movie, according to The Hollywood Reporter’s Jay A. Fernandez.
Tarsem Singh [The Cell, The Fall] is directing from a script by Melissa Wallack and Jason Keller. The edgier take on Snow White finds Snow and her seven dwarvish friends seeking to take vengeance on her evil stepmother for killing her father. Production is scheduled to begin in April, with a July 29, 2012 release date.
So, is this take on Snow White going to be Grimm, or grim? I wonder…
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Eat Pray Love is a breezy, leisurely travelogue that is held together by one woman’s search for enlightenment. Directed and co-written [with Jennifer Salt] by Ryan Murphy [Glee, Nip/Tuck], this is a movie that looks great – check out the panoramic looks at Italy, India and Bali – has a mostly easy to take script, and features an amazing cast. So, why am I of two minds on it?
Grade: B-
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Espionage movies usually deal with state secrets and impeccably dressed spies; state secrets and dishevelled spies, or grim, dark corporate espionage. Tony Gilroy’s Duplicity harkens back to movies like Charade and North By Northwest, in which intelligence wit and charm are as important as guns. In fact, there are no guns in Duplicity.
Gilroy’s male and female leads – Ray Koval [Clive Owen] and Claire Stenwicke [Julia Roberts] – are, respectively, ex-MI6 and ex-CIA operatives now working in corporate espionage for two major companies and may [or may not] be trying to screw each other over as they try to figure out what major breakthrough might be about to make the news. The two corporations are run by old school titan of industry, Howard Tully [Tom Wilkinson] and Dick Garsik [Paul Giamatti], whose style is more piratical.
Duplicity demands a certain amount of attention to detail. The script is smart and filled with seeming double, triple and [potentially] quadruple-crosses. Literally none of the characters is stupid, and this time Gilroy pulls it off [unlike with Michael Clayton, where one brief moment of idiot plotting destroyed the whole film].
Owen and Roberts get to dish out some witty dialogue; develop a strange [and maybe false] relationship over the course of the film which is structured in both the past and the present – each arc developing chronologically until the very end, when there’s a revelation that makes sense even as it dumbfounds. Wilkinson and Giamatti give their usual excellent performances and Gilroy’s direction reminds of Stanley Donen [Charade]. He propels the film at a pace that only seems leisurely, and uses a four-way split screen to establish locations in much less time than might otherwise be needed.
The one thing about Duplicity that might have been better [and this is just a weird thought that I had during the closing credits] would be to have cast Giamatti and Wilkinson in each other’s roles. As it is, though, the film is grand, smart fun, and that makes it a winner.
Final Grade: A-
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