Today would've been Eiko Ishioka's birthday. What a better way to celebrate her genius than by heading to PopMatters and reading my review for Mirror, Mirror. 

Short Take: "Mirror Mirror", "Safe House", "Chronicle".

If ever a movie was victim to terrible, misleading advertising, this would be definitely be it. Tarsem Singh's retelling of the Snow White story is an exuberant, breathtakingly beautiful take on an old tale, that manages to update it without the forced quality of movies like Shrek. What the movie presents us with is a revisionist tale, in which the Evil Queen (a simply delicious Julia Roberts) doesn't hate Snow White (Lily Collins) "just because" but due to her insecurity (both fiscal and personal). Even the Prince (Armie Hammer looking positively dashing) in question arrives for an unconventional reason, as the Queen sees in him the opportunity to save her kingdom from bankruptcy as well as satisfying her sexual needs.

This is probably what the movie gets so well, Snow White and the Queen aren't stereotypes but actual "women" who crave different things and aren't afraid of expressing it. Like an inverse version of Tarsem's The Cell with less creepiness obviously, the film grabs a woman's psyche and expresses it through the lavish set design and costumes. Jennifer Lopez's character in The Cell was trying to hide and escape from the mind of a killer, the women here want their psyches to expand into the real world. What we get then is a battle between women trying to find their places in a world that suggests only one of them is fit to inhabit it. Whether they became enemies because of taxes, beauty or men, the honest truth is that they are all factors uncontrollable by them and demanded by society. Who knew you could gather such a rich post-feminist message from a children's movie?

Safe House is the kind of movie where the main characters spend 80% of the movie as moving targets for gangsters, CIA agents and honest but expendable police men, while barely missing bullets, yet they get shot at the last minute just in time to have an epiphany.
As usual Denzel Washington plays the "mentor" to a less experienced movie star who crosses his character's path. In this case Ryan Reynolds plays the goody-two-shoes' safe house guard who ends up trying to catch a suave criminal he was supposed to look after. We are never asked to really understand the characters' motivations, other than the fact that they are who they are and the action should keep us entertained without thinking. The problem is that Denzel has been playing the same character for more than a decade and this movie feels like it's the continuation of whatever train/plane/evil cop/martyred bodyguard movie he released last year. Reynolds holds no candle to Denzel's charm but he and we deserve much better than this by the numbers thriller.

The been-there-done-that feel of "found footage" films almost seemed to  have been refreshed at the start of Chronicle. Unlike most movies of its type where we spend the whole time wondering why the hell won't they drop the camera when they're being followed by ghosts, Blair witches or monsters, this one actually grabs the concept selfconsciously as characters question why is nerdy, unpopular Andrew (Dane DeHaan) carrying a video camera everywhere. This becomes obvious when we run into the film's major plot twist, after an encounter with a strange crystal he and two other teenagers gain telekinetic powers. The most delightful part of the movie has the young men try out their new powers in ways teenagers would, by pulling pranks on people or using them to hit on girls. For a while the movie feels like an FX-laden version of Jackass until the filmmakers found the need to be moralizing and show us that unrestrained power can bring disaster (something that, thank you very much, no other superhero movie has done as perfectly as Spider-Man). The movie then reveals its true colors and how in its search to be original, it just ended up turning "found footage" into an even more offensive gimmick. By the time we have two crazed teenagers destroying the city of Seattle and still not dropping the freaking camera, all you want is for the Blair with to come and be done with them.

Grades:
Mirror Mirror ***
Safe House *
Chronicle *

Sheet-y Saturday.

 Where we take a look at posters for upcoming features.

Whoever is behind this one sheet for Mirror Mirror had only purpose in mind: destroy Tarsem movies from having flawless poster designs. Check out the posters released for The Cell, The Fall and Immortals all of which were visually intriguing movies, with imaginative graphic campaigns. What we have here is Photoshop gone seriously wrong and also slightly plagiarist.

For starters, do not showcase your movie's castle when Princess Jasmine isn't anywhere to be found, wait, are you telling me this isn't the castle from Aladdin?

Next, do not have Armie Hammer look like he's still wearing J. Edgar old age makeup...he's supposed to be the prince, not Snow White's creepy stalker. Next, do not make the elves look like a comedy troupe out of a Chelsea Handler fantasy. Last but not least, don't make people believe your heroine has no arms. Unless this is also an adaptation of Wicked, Snow White was never known for her lack of limbs. Seriously, the teasers featuring individual characters were much, much nicer. 

After the overloaded disaster we just saw, this poster is absolutely breathtaking. I don't even know what the movie's about, but the way in which they captured the imminent disappearance of love (don't you want to just try and contain those falling streams from dissolving the couple?) makes me already ache for how heartbreaking this movie will be.

What's your take on these puppies?

The Blind Side *1/2

Director: John Lee Hancock
Cast: Sandra Bullock
Tim McGraw, Quinton Aaron, Lily Collins, Jae Head
Ray McKinnon, Kathy Bates

The phrase "based on a true story" becomes a warning in this movie.
A warning that the events we are about to see are pimped versions of a person's life, tampered with so that Hollywood will continue its crusade for establishing middlebrow conservative values as the status quo.
It grabs the story of NFL player Michael Oher (Aaron) and deforms it to turn it into an "old fashioned" account of how good sportsmanship, strong family ties and money can help overcome any adversity.
Born and raised in the projects of his hometown in Tennesse, Oher is a big, silent teenager who is accepted in a Christian school (after the coach, played by McKinnon, sees his potential and manipulates the board by suggesting taking him in is the Christian thing to do).
But Michael feels out of place in a school where he's the only poor, black, taller than the average student, he even writes an essay about it, proving to his teachers that he can write and read.
Things change for him when he's taken in by the Tuohys a good, wealthy family who feeds him, clothes him and teaches him about football.
Mom Leigh Anne (Bullock) is the family, and the film's, center, her husband Sean (a charming McGraw) is there for moral support and their kids Collins and S.J. (Collins and Head) serve for comic relief mostly.
The thing with "The Blind Side" is that as it indulges in its own sense of morality and joy, it works like a 1940s movie minus the age factor.
This is no longer the day and age where Bing Crosby could get away with singing a song and fixing divorces, alcoholics and evil landlords. Try as it may, the movie's "all American goodness" is in fact racism hidden under Bullock's perkiness.
It has to be said that her performance is a surprise because the actress has rarely shown this maternal, Earthy side.
But her charm and star power aren't enough to justify the fact that this woman had the nerve to star in a movie that has the guts to say that even an eight year old kid can do better reasoning than an eighteen year old black man. Of course they use it as comic relief and Head is a charmer, in the right doses.
But as the white characters fend accusations of "white guilt", this is in fact precisely where the movie falls.
Oher is compared to "King Kong" and the screenplay tries to fix this by making reference to the Jessica Lange version, to prove that these people are too ignorant for the original.
And even when sassy tutor Ms. Sue (Bates) compares Oher to a Charles Dickens character, the intended uplifting plays out like disdainful condescension.
Oher is reduced to the role of the "magical negro" and the worst part is that the movie is so blind that it thinks it's actually doing good to him.