Showing posts with label Tarsem. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tarsem. Show all posts

November 14, 2011

Movie Trailer(s) of the Week - Snow White

It's amazing how certain stories can be told and retold and reimagined and if done well, we will never tire of them.

One such story is Snow White. Here are a couple trailers for projects about the classic character.

Daphne and I have really gotten into ABC's Once Upon A Time lately. It imagines a modern day American town called Storybrooke in which all of the Brothers Grimm fairytale characters live but have no remembrance of their past lives. Snow White is now a school teacher. The evil queen is the mayor. Rumpelstiltskin is a powerful and mysterious man named, appropriately enough, Mr. Gold. And each week, the story unfolds a little further. It's been on the air for a few weeks now, but here's the original trailer:



There are several theatrical releases in the works as well. The first trailer to be released is for Snow White and the Huntsman. Twilight's Kristen Stewart plays Snow and Charlize Theron plays the (hottest possible) queen. This film looks as though it takes itself unfathomably seriously, but it could be good. The interesting twist in Huntsman is that Snow White has been training in the art of war with a huntsman (Thor himself, Chris Hemsworth). It looks like it could be good.


While some of you may have seen last weekend's new film 11-11-11 or the Jennifer Lopez creeper or The Cell from director Tarsem,  most of us first encountered him through his gorgeous award winning video for R.E.M.'s "Losing My Religion". Obviously Tarsem is more than capable of making trippy and quite beautiful pictures come to life, so a Snow White film in his hands could be amazing.

His film, which only very recently came to be titled Mirror Mirror, stars Julia Roberts as the evil queen, Lily Collins (The Blind Side, Abduction) as Snow White, and Armie Hammer (Social Network, J. Edgar) as Prince Charming. There's no trailer for this one yet, but recent photos in Entertainment Weekly are pretty incredible.




Yet another Snow White movie will be released sometime in the next year or so. This one sounds very interesting and despite being released by Disney, seems to be the most original take on the story.  Currently titled Snow and the Seven, the film has gone through dozens of changes and is still not in production. Once titled (or maybe now titled?) The Order of the Seven, the film will focus not on Snow, but on her seven companions. Set in China in the nineteenth century, seven expert warriors (not dwarves), each from different parts of the world and each with a different fighting style, are brought together by a British woman who returns to Hong Kong for the funeral of her father, only to discover her evil stepmother is plotting to kill her.

This movie has been in the works since 2002 and has had several directors, screenwriters and actors attached, so it's anyone's guess as to how the final crew sheet will look. Francis Lawrence (I Am Legend, Water for Elephants) was attached to direct but later bowed out and was replaced by Michael Gracey, a first time director who has done visual effect on films such as The Magician and Ned Kelly. At one point Natalie Portman was thought to be playing the film's title character, but now that seems to be up in the air.

Of course, if you can't wait for these to be released, there's no shortage of choices available on DVD.