Battle of the Snow Whites

Mirror, Mirror


Snow White and the Huntsman

I have already stated my clear and strong support for the repurposing of Disney Princesses.  Therefore, it is likely not surprising that I have no problem what so ever with two, that's right two, live-action reimaginings of the Snow White fairy tale.  At least in principle.  But now that the trailers for both of these endeavors have surfaced, I can resoundly say two additional takes on the costs of extreme female vanity is one too many.  

The two Snow White  movies could not have taken more different approaches to the source material.  Snow White and the Huntsman did the en vogue thing and took the whole thing to a dark place while transforming the heroine into a fully empowered warrior princess.  The whole thing looks like a high concept actioner where the princess stops wishing for the one to love and becomes the latest iteration of Buffy, the wicked witch slayer.  The only glaring negative with this version is the actress charged with bringing Snow White into the flesh.  Somehow, someone in Hollywood decided it was a good idea to give our nation's worst living actress a career outside of the Twilight series.  Just superficially, Kristen Stewart fails to live up to the standards of a beauty greater than all others in the kingdom.  A beauty worth killing for.  And that is before she opens her mouth and makes everyone in the audience wish you can have a Snow White movie without Snow White.

But the other option, Mirror, Mirror, is trying exceeding hard with its trailer to guarantee there is no audience even in the theater to question why they spent good money to see it.  This thing looks absolutely awful.  It is fine that they decided to go light hearted in this one.  It differentiates it nicely from the Batman Begins-version of Snow White the competition is selling.  But maybe if it is going to be a comedic version of the story, maybe some of it should be actually funny.  This Grantland piece does a nice job of pointing out many of the ways this trailer went horribly wrong.  Let me just add a couple more nails to the glass coffin.  The production value of this looks low rent by the standards of high school musicals.  The casting is down-right dreadful.  This Snow White not only makes Kristen Stewart look like the fairest in the land, she makes miss Stewart seem like someone two super-powered, immortal beings would fight over.  And Prince Charming is just as bad.  The Winklevoss smarm still oozes off of old Arm and Hammer.  He was born to play bad guy from the rich, snooty frat house in a college set comedy.  Not the man of virginal girls dream.  Julia Roberts, you are better than this.

Solitaire Update - Things picked up a bit after my involuntary shut out a couple of days past, included a personal best of 3 wins in a day.  I still have resisted applying any real strategy yet.  That is still to come.  But in the meantime I was also think that there needs to be some cool lingo to go along with certain events in solitaire.  This will be a critical step in setting it up the mainstream competitive sport it was always meant to be.  Just like in bowling, three consecutive strikes is called a turkey and four strikes is a hambone.  Solitaire needs its own hambone.  What do you call it when you lay out a hand and you can't make a single move.  No cards can be brought down from the stack and none of the cards below can be flipped.  This phenomenon seems like it should have a name.  For that matter, the different areas of the solitaire playing field need names. How is any one going to be able to follow all of my great insights into the practice of solitaire if they don't know if I am referring to the stacks or the triplets (my first attempt at some names)?  So, top of my list of things to do in my solitaire sojourn - develop some cool jargon.

Day 4 - 2 out of 13
Day 5 - 3 out of 12
Overall Success Rate - 7 out of 56 (12.5%)

This blog poster is sponsored by Gen Sys Research Laboratories.