MIRROR MIRROR - disney on crack

Tarsem (director extraordinaire) strikes me as an interesting man. His direction, though odd as it is, strikes me, for lack of a better phrase, puffed up. He changed his original nom de plume from the somewhat pretentious Tarsem to Tarsem Singh Dhandwar. I mention this because only very few famous people get away with one name advertising and they have almost always put in a great deal of time in the entertainment world like Madonna, Cher and Prince. For the sake of brevity I will still refer to him as Tarsem. 

The Cell, his first film, and most certainly his best, captured the wonderful imagination of his mind to a degree of near perfection. All the sets and costumes were wonderfully odd and bizarrely intriguing as well as the story, despite starring the then unfunny Vince Vaughn and the songstress J. Lo. Each subsequent film has gone too far and belittled his visual genius. He is a bit like Guillermo Del Toro who is a visual director of the same strange and wonderful, who sometimes suffers from the same fate. 

Tarsem's epic disaster, The Fall, would be my case in point. It began beautifully and digressed into the fatuous and tired. The costumes were just plain awful. I liken him to Julie Taymor who seems to have the same problem. They have great visual sense but at the same time have a need for someone to come in and restrain them a bit. This doesn't normally happen, so we get great concept movies with some great scenes and we also get the god awful scenes in juxtaposition. This sometimes makes me even more irate than watching just a plain bad film because it's like watching Kubrick pair up with Uwe Boll.

All that being said, Mirror Mirror was a delightful children's story. It reminded me of Rodger and Hammerstein's live action Cinderella from 1965. This movie is a playful take on the Snow White story with just the right amount of Tarsem's self-aggrandizement. Lily Collins was surprisingly good as Snow White and my hats off to Armie Hammer (great name) who I think could go quite far. Julia Roberts was a nice choice to play the evil queen but I suspect Charlize Theron will destroy her. I must emphasize that Mirror Mirror is for kids and does not really seem to appeal even to the teen demographic, which was disappointing, but still a lovely picture for ankle biters. I'll be waiting for the other Snow White tale this year only to pull this one out again when I have small children.

Recommended Viewing: Cinderella (1965) - Sleeping Beauty - Ever After

              Bob Scale: Objective: 6.0   -   Subjective: 6.5

             MetaCritic: 47

 Rotten Tomatoes: 50

                      IMDB: 5.7