The Extremely Strange Story of Snow White

While Disneyland was closed for the pandemic, they made some changes to the Snow White ride that apparently some people are outraged about. I don't know what the complaints are about and honestly I don't care enough to find out. But it DID get me thinking about how deeply weird the story of Snow White is.

I've only seen the Disney animated classic one time, during my junior year of high school in 1995. (I had a two-hour Electronics class, and Disney let Snow White out of the Vault that year so the teacher brought it in and played it in lieu of us doing any work one day. We spent most of the movie trying to convince our classmate who had recently immigrated from India that there was actually an eighth dwarf named Horny, but you never see him because he's in the bathroom the whole time. This was not the only time we watched stuff unrelated to our Electronics curriculum in that class; we also occasionally watched the OJ Simpson trial. Another fun fact related to that class: I don't remember what the teacher's name was, but I remember that we called him Al because he kind of looked like Al Borland from Home Improvement. This annoyed the crap out of him, so naturally we did it all the time.)

My point is that  I may be a bit fuzzy on the details of the movie. But as I recall the driving force of the plot is this evil queen who's worried that her stepdaughter is prettier than her. Oh, and the ultimate judge of female beauty is apparently this magic mirror that the queen has hanging on a random wall of her castle. The way it works is, every day instead of taking care of important queen business, the queen goes up to this mirror and says "Hey, I'm still the hottest lady in the world, right?" and the mirror always replies "You know it, girl." Until one day when it says "Actually, your stepdaughter's looking pretty good these days." 

The stepdaughter's name is Snow White, which strikes me as kind of odd. Is "Snow White" her whole first name, and nobody ever uses her last name because she's a royal? Or is her last name actually "White" and her parents were attention-hungry celebrities and they named her "Snow"? I don't think the movie ever addresses it.

But back to the magic mirror for a second. I have some questions about it being the sole arbiter of female beauty. For years the woman in whose house the mirror is hanging has been asking it who the prettiest lady is and it's been like "It's you! The person standing in front of me who owns the wall I'm suspended on!" And then when it finally says that the prettiest lady is someone other than the Queen, the person it names is the only other lady who lives in that castle? A lady, I should mention, who has an old-person hairstyle and a nose so unnaturally small it makes post-surgery Michael Jackson look like Jamie Farr? Really? The mirror never says something like "Now don't get mad, but there's this woman in Brazil named Carmelita who's really got it going on." I don't buy it!

So anyway, the Queen is all upset over losing the title of "Most Attractive Woman as Decided By a Talking Mirror", and then to make things worse some random prince happens to see Snow White and immediately falls in love with her strange noseless face and unnaturally-squeaky singing voice, which makes the Queen even more jealous for some reason. Why? He's young enough to be her son! You'd think she'd prefer the company of a guy closer to her age who has more in common with her and knows what the heck he's doing. But anyway, this is the last straw and the Queen decides that Snow White must die. So how does she do it? Poison her food? Maybe hire a hit man? No! Instead she calls up the royal huntsman and tells him to take Snow White out into the woods, cut out her heart, and bring it back to her in a box. But since the huntsman's job doesn't involve murdering human beings he can't go through with it. He tells Snow White to run away, and she ends up moving in with the Seven Dwarfs.

But the magic mirror rats Snow White out, so the Queen goes to plan B. First, this beauty-obsessed supreme monarch drinks a magic potion that turns her into Emperor Palpatine's hemorrhoid. Then she dips an apple in an evil potion that makes it poison. Only the poison isn't deadly; it just puts the victim in a coma that can be broken by true love's first kiss. And her plan is to find Snow White somewhere in this huge forest and trick her into eating the apple. Even if this plan works, and the Queen drinks another magic potion to restore her original appearance, she will have accomplished nothing because Snow White won't be dead! She'll be like "OK, magic mirror, who's the hottest lady now, huh?" and the mirror will reply. "Snow White, who's now in a coma for some reason." It makes no sense!

And yet, somehow the Queen's plan works. She finds the Dwarf's cottage. Because Snow White is extremely gullible, she believes it when the Queen tells her that the poison apple is actually a magical wish-granting apple. And like any vacuous rich kid, Snow White is naturally selfish, so she immediately takes the apple instead of considering that the horribly deformed person that the woodland creatures flee from in terror because she looks (and probably smells) like something that crawled out of Nosferatu's butthole probably needs a magical wish granted a lot more than Snow herself does.

So Snow White takes a bite of the apple and collapses. The Queen's ridiculous plan worked. Only not really, because the Dwarves and the woodland animals chase her off a cliff and she dies. And then that prince who met Snow White exactly once comes along and is really attracted to her comatose state. (His last name must be Cosby.) So he kisses her, she marries him instead of pressing charges, and they live happily ever after. Later, Snow White becomes a panelist on the medieval version of The View along with Cinderella and Princess Aurora, but because there was no TV back then nobody ever sees it.

Batman v Superman: Happy Funtime

So recently I saw this movie from a director who many believe has made more bad films than good ones. It's a visually-rich, strangely-paced film that was almost universally panned by critics; one especially famous one called it "a stunningly interesting visual achievement, but a failure as a story." I'm talking, of course, about Blade Runner.

Today, of course, Blade Runner is widely regarded as a classic, and as director Ridley's Scott's best film. But back in 1982 most critics (including Roger Ebert, whose review I quoted above) said the same kinds of things they're now saying about Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. I finally got to see BvS this weekend, and I have to say it was much better than I expected considering the shellacking it's received from critics both professional and amateur.

Am I saying that Batman v Superman: Could This Title Be More Cumbersome? is as good as Blade Runner? No. I'm saying that although it's not a perfect film, I still enjoyed it.

Are there any perfect movies? Name one if you can, and I guarantee I can point out one giant story-derailing plot hole in it, or a bunch of little plot holes and imperfections that will completely take you out of the movie every time you see it from now on. Movies and TV shows are designed to entertain us during their running time. But somewhere along the way the Internet decided that in order for something to be good, you have to be able to watch it again and again and again and again and again and again and again into infinity without noticing any imperfection. Otherwise, that movie or TV episode sucks.

Of course, the most fanatical proponents of the Infinite Rewatchability Standard have their own personal lists of things they believe should be excluded from it, things that they love even though they're flawed. But that is not the point. The point is that the Internet often arbitrarily decides that things are bad, even if they share many common characteristics with other things that the Internet loves.

For example, early on in BvS there's a scene where an African terrorist warlord is holding a gun to Lois Lane's head, using her as a human shield to get Superman to back down. I was instantly reminded of a similar scene in the first Iron Man movie, when a bunch of Afghan terrorists hold guns on women and children to get Iron Man to back down. You remember what happens: Tony Stark uses the technology in his suit to target the terrorists and shoot them all at once, and not with tranquilizer darts, either. The outcome in BvS is similar; Kal-El uses his super speed to knock the warlord through several walls. We don't see the guy after that, but it's pretty safe to assume he's dead. I've seen lots of complaints about this, and oddly enough they all come from people who think the DC films should be more like Marvel's.

Do I thrill to the sight of superheroes killing bad guys? No. I'm just pointing out that the people who make the loudest noise about Superman or Batman killing villains have absolutely no problem with Iron Man or Captain America doing the same thing. They're just grasping for reasons to validate the decision they made to hate the movie way back when it was first announced.

So, what did I like about Batman v Superman: How Many Focus Groups Did It Take To Come Up With This Title? Well, as a Superman fan I really liked how the movie treated him. Look, the first Christopher Reeve film is one of my favorite movies ever, but it's almost 40 years old. This Superman can't go to the Fortress of Solitude and have the giant floating head of Jor-El tell him what to do whenever he has a problem. The people of Earth don't instantly accept him. And a lot of the time his efforts to save people spawn unintended consequences, some of which are engineered by Lex Luthor in a deliberate effort to discredit him. In light of all that, is it reasonable to expect him to be the smiling Superman that Christopher Reeve portrayed? Of course not.

In the final act of the film, Lex Luthor did something that he's done many times in the comics but never in the movies: give Superman in a genuine moral dilemma--does he kill Batman or allow his mother to die? When he leaves Lois to confront Batman, he seems resigned to killing Batman. But he doesn't. Even when Batman reveals he can hurt him with his Kryptonite gas, Superman continues to try and get him to stop, rather than just heat-visioning his face off. And in death, this Superman does something that we never really saw in the Donner/Reeve films: inspire people. He inspires Bruce Wayne to be a better man. He inspires Wonder Woman to come out of retirement. And he inspires the people of Earth to come together. The scene of the multiethnic crowd holding a candlelight vigil at his monument was maybe the most inspiring Superman-related scene we've ever seen in live action. All of these are good things. I've seen people complain that DC did the Death of Superman too soon, but in this universe Superman needed to die heroically for the world to embrace him.

Of course, there's stuff I didn't enjoy so much, like Jesse Eisenberg's over-the-top performance. And the killing. Let's talk about that again. Near the end of the movie when Batman is firing the Batplane's machine guns at Luthor's henchmen on his way to rescue Martha Kent, I realized that this is the world we live in now. Batman has been killing his enemies on the movie screen since 1989, and the world is an even grimmer place today. A majority of Americans favor the torture of captured terrorists, even though the facts are that torture is not a good way to extract reliable intelligence. Politicians running for office get big cheers from their supporters when they promise to massacre the families of suspected terrorists. Back in the early 1950s when the Comics Code Authority forbade comic book heroes from killing their enemies, these kinds of things would have provoked outrage. But to modern audiences, someone who identifies as a "good guy" taking the Judge Dredd approach to crimefighting seems justified, if not praiseworthy. I don't like that at all, but it's not an issue that's restricted to this movie; it's part of the cultural soup we're all cooking in.

Another thing that a lot of people didn't like/were confused by were the strange dream sequences that were never explained, and mostly seemed to be shoehorned in there to set up the upcoming Justice League movies. I don't mind a movie having weird stuff that's not explained, and since I read the spoilers ahead of time I mostly understood what I was seeing. Still, it wouldn't surprise me at all if the writers threw those scenes in there just because they seemed cool, without any firm idea how they would fit in with the Justice League films. You know, kind of like what the Battlestar Galactica writers did with the Opera House visions. If that's the case, I foresee many Internet tantrums in the future.

Overall, Batman v Superman: I Can't Believe They Actually Went With That Title was a solid, interesting movie that tried to explore the implications of someone like Superman in our world. I wouldn't call it fun, and I'm not sure if I'll buy the Blu-Ray when it comes out (if I do, it definitely won't be the R-rated extended cut) but it didn't provoke the vitriol in me that it did in so many amateur critics.

I guess I'm getting soft in my middle age.

Batman Is Stupid

At some point, Batman became the DC universe's favorite superhero. In the comics, Batman can defeat any adversary with enough preparation. Green Lantern, the Flash, Superman, and even Darkseid are no match for Batman's intellect and array of bat-gadgets. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if someone (Frank Miller, probably) eventually writes a story where the Dark Knight sneaks into heaven and beats up God.

But Batman shouldn't even exist.

Think about it: young Bruce Wayne swore to fight crime after a mugger murdered his parents. He's a billionaire businessman, maybe the most important person in Gotham City. And how does he choose to fight crime? By using his wealth and influence to attack the root causes, perhaps? Maybe nonprofit foundations and strategic partnerships with law enforcement and educational agencies to help lift people out of poverty and cure the ills that afflict Gotham's slums? Nope!

Instead he puts on a bat costume and randomly punches criminals.

Batman has no superpowers. He can't fly over the city using his super-hearing and super-vision to spot trouble, then zip down and stop it at super speed. So how does he go about his Batmanning? Every night he drives downtown, parks the Batmobile, and swings from building to building with his Batarang and Bat-rope looking for criminals to stop. Maybe he has some audio tech in his cowl to help him listen for things or some night-vision tech so he can see what's going on, but still his effectiveness is limited to whatever area he's in at the moment. He doesn't have super speed like Superman or The Flash, so he can't zip across town at will if the Joker or Killer Croc starts attacking people on the opposite side of Gotham City. And anyway, his "jump from rooftop to rooftop" method of patrolling the city would only work in some podunk place with a tiny downtown area of a few blocks. Gotham is supposedly the size of New York! Ah, but maybe Batman's stopping of a few random crimes here and there will serve to scare Gotham's criminal element straight! Sure, but has that ever actually happened? Gotham City is routinely depicted as a corrupt, crime-ridden dystopia that makes Detroit look like Disneyland. Obviously Bruce Wayne's "don a bat costume and punch whatever random criminals you happen to encounter" crimefighting scheme is about as effective as trying to fight fires with a flamethrower.

Also, it's ridiculously illegal. Kind of like those Death Wish movies where a fed-up Charles Bronson decides to make his neighborhood a safer place by going on a murdering spree. Only a psychopath would think Bronson's character is a good guy. In real life, he's a serial killer. Sure, Batman doesn't kill people, but the principle is the same: he chucks the legal system and dispenses vigilante justice to whoever he thinks deserves it.

But maybe you're thinking that Batman is necessary in a world where you have deranged super-criminals like Two-Face, Penguin, and the Joker. Except that each of those guys is a take-off on the ridiculously smart criminal trope you see on TV crime dramas, just weirder-looking. And you know what? Those guys always get taken down by ordinary cops who are not into cosplaying as winged rodents. But what about the bad guys that have superpowers? Don't the cops need Batman to step in with his array of anti-supervillain bat-gadgets? Well, in the Superman comics the Metropolis PD has a Special Crimes Unit that's specially trained and equipped to take down the various superpowered criminals that attack that city. They even have a specially-reinforced prison to contain them. Why doesn't billionaire Bruce Wayne make a donation to the Gotham PD so they could set something up like that?

I know, because the Gotham police are all corrupt except for Commissioner Gordon, right? Well then, gee, why doesn't billionaire Bruce Wayne use his connections to get some national media attention for the issue or get the US Justice Department to investigate Gotham the way they're doing in other real-life cities right now?

Look, I know the superheroes we love are basically just decades-old kids' entertainment. They weren't meant to withstand the endless scrutinizing and deconstruction that we do in the 21st century to make ourselves look smart on the Internet. But the conventional pop-culture wisdom that Batman's lack of powers makes him a realistic superhero is ridiculous.

In his hilarious reviews of Frank Miller's insane All-Star Batman and Robin comics, Internet reviewer Lewis Lovhaug (neé Linkara) posits that Miller's unhinged Batman is really Crazy Steve, a violent nutjob who somehow got his hands on a batsuit. I say that Crazy Steve is the real Batman. And he's no hero.

Shaving Mr. Banks

When I went to see Saving Mr. Banks on New Years Day, I didn’t know what to expect. Oh, I knew what the movie was about. But I didn’t know if I’d enjoy it. For one thing, the Internet Preemptive Movie Outrage Machine had been making angry noises about this film for months, even before it had finished principal photography. And since the Disney corporation routinely treats its founder like just another licensed character (one wonders if the vacuous social media drones who run the Disney Parks Blog even know that Walt Disney was a real person) the idea that the film would depict Walt as a saintly, one-dimensional figure was a very real concern.

^{Okay, I Photoshopped Chris Hansen in there. But otherwise, this is an actual piece of marketing for the film.}

Now, a lot of people have excoriated this movie because it pays fast and loose with the facts, especially as they relate to P.L. Travers. But didn’t we know that was going to happen? Haven’t we realized by now that “based on a true story” is Hollywood-speak for “95% dramatic embellishment”? Even if you didn’t know anything about P.L. Travers before seeing this movie, you can probably guess that the viewing of Walt Disney’s Mary Poppins neither magically resolved her daddy issues (and that those daddy issues were the invention of a Hollywood screenwriter) nor restored her creative mojo. And if you were surprised that a movie distributed by the Disney corporation chose to softpedal the real P.L. Travers’ dislike for their Mary Poppins film, then I imagine you’re also shocked when a Michael Bay movie contains explosions.

For me the real surprise of this movie was its treatment of Walt Disney. A lot of people worried that Tom Hanks would just play him like, well, a mustachioed Tom Hanks. They really should have given the guy more credit. After all, actors who only play a thinly-disguised version of themselves don’t win multiple Best Actor Oscars. But the fact that Oscar-winning actor Tom Hanks gives a good performance is not what’s surprising here. It’s that Saving Mr. Banks doesn’t give us the whitewashed portrayal of Walt Disney that many people feared. He’s a genial presence, sure, but he can also be a bit manipulative and even devious. I was genuinely surprised that a company as pathologically dishonest about almost everything relating to itself as Disney is would allow its founder to be portrayed that three-dimensionally.

Also, I loved the movie’s depiction of the Walt Disney Studios and Disneyland in the early 1960s. I don’t have any facts to back this up, but I believe that current CEO Bob Iger would like people to draw parallels between Walt and himself because both men acquired other people’s intellectual property for use by the Disney company. But for me, Saving Mr. Banks was a reminder of why the Walt Disney Company’s golden age has come and gone: the company has gotten too big, and there is no Walt. During Disney’s 1960s heyday, the company was small enough that it was possible for everything it did to reflect the creative vision of one person. Today’s Walt Disney Company is just too large for any one person to be intimately involved in everything it does. And even if that wasn’t the case, people like Walt come along only once in a generation. This generation’s Walt Disney, whoever he or she might be, is probably at the helm of their own company, not working at an ossified multinational behemoth like Disney or Microsoft.

In the end, Saving Mr. Banks reminded me that Disney became a beloved worldwide institution because of the guy it’s named after. In the absence of someone like that, any company-even one with competent management-would flounder creatively. The Walt Disney Company’s “golden age” of the 1950s and 60s was a unique time that will never come again. And even as brick-and-mortar products of that period, like Disneyland, are altered beyond recognition by clueless corporate decision-making, films like Mary Poppins, Peter Pan, and The Love Bug endure unchanged, giving us a crystal-clear snapshot of a modern Renaissance as it recedes farther and farther into the past.

On The Lone Ranger and Audience Appeal

For most of the past week or so, a lot of the conversation in my Twitter feed has revolved around The Lone Ranger and its failure at the box office. As far as I can tell there seem to be two main opinions on why the movie didn’t do well:

1. The Lone Ranger bombed because it is not a very good movie.
2. The Lone Ranger is a good movie, but people aren’t going to see it because of unfair bad reviews from movie critics and/or some kind of nefarious scheme by Disney to deliberately sabotage the film as part of some kind of corporate political power play.

I think the reason for The Lone Ranger’s failure to attract an audience is much simpler than that. The movie bombed because-and bear with me here-not a lot of people wanted to see it. I’m going to pause for a minute to let that sink in.

Whether the movie was good or bad has nothing to do with it. The opinions of movie critics have nothing to do with it. If those things were as important as people imagine, Michael Bay wouldn’t be able to find work as a director anymore. The Lone Ranger flopped because not a lot of people want to see a movie about the Lone Ranger. Period.

Hollywood would rather throw $300 million at a movie based on a preexisting thing as opposed to an original concept because it seems like a safer bet. The way it’s supposed to work is that you make your movie based on a preexisting comic book character or toy or whatever and millions of people say “Look, a movie about the Transformers, a thing with which I am familiar and for which I have nostalgic affection! Here’s my money!” And the next thing you know you’ve made a billion dollars.

The thing is, the making-a-billion-dollars part will only happen if the moviegoing public has a preexisting affinity for the preexisting thing your blockbuster movie is about. That’s why the Transformers movies rake in the dough, but Battleship tanked even though it was pretty much the same. The quality of the movie doesn’t have a lot to do with it. People will sit though three hours of Michael Bay’s seizure-inducing direction of a nonsensical Orci-Kurtzman script because they love watching Optimus Prime punch Decepticons and say “Autobots, transform and roll out!”

What I’m saying is that all preexisting intellectual properties are not created equal. Some of them (Star Wars, Batman, Transformers) are so well-liked that their mere presence will guarantee a hefty profit. Obviously, The Lone Ranger is not one of those. So why did Disney spends hundreds of millions of dollars on it? The answer is Iron Man.

Before 2008 nobody outside the comic fan community knew who Iron Man was. His film rights were only available because nobody wanted them. Iron Man was a surprise hit, but in retrospect it’s not that surprising. The film had a good script, a brilliant piece of casting in Robert Downey Jr., and who wouldn’t want to be a snarky billionaire with a high-tech flying robot suit?

The success of Iron Man showed that, in certain circumstances, a well-made film could get audiences excited about a character they’d barely heard of. Of course, Disney wanted to grab a piece of that, not just by buying Marvel, but by developing their own film franchise from an obscure piece of pop culture. Yes, they did it with Pirates of the Caribbean, but they failed with TRON:Legacy and John Carter. So they took the some of the people responsible for Pirates’ success (Johnny Depp, Jerry Bruckheimer, and Gore Verbinski) and threw the Lone Ranger at them. Or maybe they threw them at the Lone Ranger.

Obviously, it didn’t work. Why? Back to my original point: nobody wanted to see a film about the Lone Ranger. It has nothing to do with how well or how poorly the film was made. Iron Man was about a tycoon in a super-cool flying robot suit. The Lone Ranger is about a cowboy in a domino mask with a sidekick whose name means “stupid” in Spanish. One of those is appealing to modern audiences, and one is not. No amount of marketing will change that. The Lone Ranger is a character from the “Golden Age” of comics, pulp magazine, and radio, and those Golden Age characters are notoriously difficult to adapt for modern audiences. Studios tried it with The Shadow and The Phantom in the 90s and failed. Disney tried it with John Carter of Mars last year, and that failed, too. In fact, the only non-Batman, non-Superman, Golden Age character to enjoy a modern renaissance lately is Captain America. I think it has something to do with the fact that it’s easy to update Superman, Batman, and Captain America for the present day. Characters like the Lone Ranger (and DC’s “cowboy superhero” Jonah Hex, for that matter) are trapped in the past.

Now, I certainly don’t blame Disney for throwing The Lone Ranger out there to see if it would get any traction. And for people who liked the movie and hoped there would be sequels, I’m truly sorry. I went through the same thing when Superman Returns didn’t get a sequel. I wasn’t a fan of the whole idea of Superman as a deadbeat dad, but I enjoyed Brandon Routh’s and Kevin Spacey’s takes on their respective characters and would like to have seen more. But, if the film is a hit on Blu-Ray or on television, maybe the character will see life again in an animated series, comics, or some other medium.

But, like The Shadow, The Phantom, Fibber McGee, and Jack Armstrong The All-American Boy before him, the modern world seems finally to have passed the Lone Ranger by.