Snow White, Some Dwarfs and A Million Pieces of Coal

It’s clear that Hollywood is pretty well tapped-out when it comes to new ideas.  Heaven forbid they consider coming to WordPress and looking for some fresh writing talent.  Instead, they’ve rehashed a fairy tale and added a generous batch of special effects to spice it up.   I know my loyal readers will point out that I recently did the same thing with the Three Little Pigs in my erotic opus, Forty Seven Shades of Pink.  In my defense, no one is paying me buckets of cash to write anything, original or otherwise, and I didn’t actually use any special effects except the pigs being able to dress themselves in lingerie.  Let’s face it, they could already talk and build houses so that’s not exactly a quantum leap in believability.

It’s all in the wrist: you swing your broadsword thusly and…Boom! Nothing but a pile of coal where the knight used to be. (Image from Hotnerdgirl.wordpress.com)

I don’t have too many clear memories of my early childhood, largely because it was a long damn time ago.  I’m told that my parents and grand parents read me fairy tales from time to time.  Though my memory is admittedly a tad vague until early puberty,  I’m pretty sure I would have recalled the part in Snow White wherein evil doers are sliced in half with swords and immediately turn into a million chunks of digital coal.  I certainly would not have forgotten a witch who looks like Charlize Theron, spins in the woods and turns into a swirling flock of ravens like some bad-trip, M.C. Escher print.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I haven’t actually seen the new Snow White movie, and I likely won’t.  I’ve seen the trailer a couple of times, and that’s more than enough for me.  The special effects certainly looked dazzling enough, but to be honest, when you’ve seen one evil henchman reduced to a scattered pile of black rocks, you’ve pretty much seen them all.

Fairest of them all?! I mean it’s really, really close! Hottest of them all? Well, yeah, it’s still realllllly close. Do I have to choose? Maybe we could get that guy out of the picture so I could focus?  Thanks, dude…why don’t you take 5 and go grab a coffee or a danish, I got this.  (Image from justjared.com)

Compared to most fairy tales, the traditional storyline of Snow White is not particularly reliant upon special effects.  There’s an evil witch with competition issues and a talking mirror.  The mirror tells her about a more beautiful woman, named Snow White (we’ll save the speculation about Hitler youth ideals for some other blog).  The wicked witch can’t deal with being the second fairest of them all.  She fails in putting a hit out on Snow White who escapes into the woods, eventually shacking up with seven miners who happen to be dwarfs.  The queen hunts her down and slips her a poison apple which puts Snow White in a coma.  Aside from the talking mirror, there’s absolutely no reason for special effects in the story.  I’m pretty sure I’ve seen  talking mirrors on sale at Bed, Bath and Beyond, in case you’re interested in getting one of your own.  Bear in mind, those sassy bitches are on the clearance rack for a reason.

The new movie, if the title is accurate, focuses more on the early part of the story and the huntsman’s role as failed hit-man.  Certainly there is room for the character to deal with the turmoil of his task.  Again, no real reason for additional special effects, unless the film makers decided to go with the miniature angel-huntsman on one shoulder and the little devil-huntsman on the other, but I didn’t see that in the trailer.  A quick consult with some blog writers and we might have had the angel-devil on the shoulders scene, but nooo, those big wheels out in Hollywood couldn’t be bothered.

See? We could put these on the Huntsman’s shoulders, or on the Queen’s. As long as these she-devils/angels aren’t fairer than Charlize. These two might not be tied for 4th, but they could make the top ten, depending upon the kingdom. (Image from reviews.partycity.com)

Obviously, Snow White as a story doesn’t really need special effects, gratuitous or not.  Another part of the problem is the special effects themselves.  With the advent of computer generated imagery, the wonder of special effects is no longer wondrous.  Once upon a time, movie-goers would speculate for days about “how’d they do that?”, scanning the edge of the screen for tell-tale silouettes of wire or looking for the zipper on the back of the Godzilla suit.  Today, we don’t even bother wondering how the magic happens.

I know how to use my computer like a typewriter to write these dopey blogs and to look at porn research online.  There are hundreds of thousands of twelve year olds people who can do so much more with a computer than me.  They can do things like make Spiderman swing from buildings or create dog-beasts from thin air to chase the last few Hunger Games contestants to the final fight scene.  Hell, computer experts can even see about getting me an upgrade on my airline tickets (though they can’t consistently get me an emergency exit row or bulkhead seat).  I would love to say how much I appreciate their facility with the keyboard and mousepad, but as long as Spidey doesn’t break up and freeze into a pixilated mess of red and blue, midswing, I don’t even notice their work.

Sorry Hollywood, adding a bunch of eye candy and razzle dazzle is no way to fool us into thinking we didn’t already know this story line since we were 4 years old.  Now when “Jack and Jill, Terror Hill” comes out, I may have to change my stance and go see it.  Rumor has it the scene where Jack breaks his crown is incredibly gruesome, plus we finally get to find out what a crown is.

“The Hunger Games” Meet the Voices in My Head

I’ll admit it, I’m not exactly on the cutting edge of trends.

Take for example, the fact that “The Hunger Games” movie came out the other day, and I’m just starting to read the book.  Actually, I’ve been reading the book for a while, it’s just that between blogging and working and drinking, there isn’t too much awake time left for paperbacks of “The Lottery” meets “A Coalminer’s Daughter” meets “Futurama”.

I’m not a literary critic, so I’ll try to stop that.

When I started reading that book, I couldn’t help but notice that the words on the pages were echoing in my head in a British accent.  If I’m reading a P.D. James mystery or Thomas Hardy novel, the same thing happens.  I’m not sure if it’s due to my knowing  that the authors are from jolly old England, or if it’s because they write in a British style – I just know what the narrator’s voice in my head sounds like.  For the record, when I read the works of Stephen Hawking, the voice in my head takes on the automated sound of computer generated speech.  I know who wrote the piece, and it adds to my reading experience.  Besides, it adds an element of entertainment to the chore of reading the otherwise incomprehensible work of a mega-genius.

"I say, old boy, I believe my favourite smoking jacket is at the tailor's shoppe. Be a sport and toddle down to wardrobe and fetch me a new one, won't you? Also, I'm simply parched, would you mind bringing me a glass of port as well? Jolly good of you!"
(Image from kued.com)

As for the accents, it’s usually my voice, but a decidedly British version thereof.  If I close my eyes I can practically see the Brit version of  myself, sitting in a wing-back chair with a snifter of something brown on the table next to me with a doily beneath it.  There’s a tasteful lamp barely lighting the dark wood library behind me.  My pipe sits prominently in it’s holder next to the snifter.  My legs are crossed in the more feminine vertical fashion and I appear to be wearing some kind of Hugh Hefner/Don Draper smoking jacket.  I tilt my head slightly in an intellectual fashion and smile gently at the camera, revealing my crooked yellow teeth.  A dusty, leatherbound edition of “The Hunger Games” is open in my lap.  I regard the camera one last time, put on my trusty wire-rimmed reading glasses, look down to the pages and start reading.  You could practically smell the steak-and-kidney pie and scones baking in the nearby kitchen.

I needed to confirm my suspicions that the author of “The Hunger Games” Suzanne Collins, was originally from England, or had at least spent some serious time there.  I looked for a quick explanation, flipping my paperback over to find the usual all-about-the-author blurb.  You know how those go:

“R.I.P. Skippy – We Miss You!” is David Lovett’s 4th blockbuster novel.  He lives with his wife and several beloved pet iguanas in a small cabin in the Azores.  Born in Illinois and raised in the hard-scrabble streets of suburban New Jersey, he attended several American Universities earning degrees in fields which he eventually abandoned in favor of writing blockbuster novels.  Look for his next action packed novel “A Hangover Dissected” hitting shelves in Early 2013.

I was unable to find anything on the book cover and had to look online to find out whether Suzanne Collins came from Oxford-Hamptonshire or Hastings-On-Kent.  I was amazed to discover that she doesn’t appear to have a single tie to England whatsoever (She did work as a writer on the Nickleodeon show “Clarissa Explains It All” – which may or may not explain why she wrote a series of books about teenagers hunting and killing each other).

I was stumped.  The British voice in my head was still there.  Was it the bleak, Dickensian setting of “The Seam”?  Was it the weird names the characters had?  One’s named Katniss, one is Peeta – her bio says she’s adopted feral cats – are we surprised?  Anyway, back to the voice in my head.  I was having a hard time enjoying the book, because of reading each sentence multiple times.  The first time would be in a stiff, formal British Parliamentary kind of tone, the second would be more on the Cockney side (Eh Guv-nah?), then the third would be in my own glorious American accent.  By the time I’d read a given sentence three times, I’d have to go back and read it a fourth time because I was too busy affecting an accent to actually absorb the meaning of the words.  If you’ve read the book, you know these are not generally sentences which improve with multiple readings.

Luckily for me, lots and lots of people have read the book.  Even people who almost never read seem to have read all three of “The Hunger Games” books.  I began asking people who I work with whether they had had similar experiences with the whole British accent thing.  I’m not exaggerating when I tell you that not one person understood what the hell I was talking about.  Despite being rabid fans of the books, almost all of these people wanted to drop the topic of Katniss and company and talk instead about the voices in my head.  Many of them became convinced that I have some kind of paranoid schizophrenia and a few seemed a little frightened of what the voices might say to me.

“Is the voice in your head a man’s or a woman’s?”

“When the voices speak in accents, do they tell you to hurt yourself?”

“Does your dog ever tell you to do things?”

After a day or two of this, the voice in my head told me to stop asking people about the voices in their heads.  It went something like this: “I say old chum, it seems these blokes think you a bit daft.  I suspect you’d be better off not chatting them up about what I say to you.  Wouldn’t want them committing you to some sort of ‘looney bin’ as you Yanks like to say, what?  Now then, let’s not tarry, we’ve got rope and shovels to buy and a list to finish”