Here at Movieline readers have to work for their hard-earned prizes, but today we have a haiku contest that should also engage your inner child and tap into the most whimsical, fantastical depths of your imagination: Write an original haiku inspired by this weekend’s colorful and witty Snow White retelling Mirror Mirror — a movie featuring heroines in swan dresses and people wearing boats as hats ! — and you could win dinner and a movie for four! The family-friendly fairytale from director Tarsem Singh ( The Cell , The Fall , Immortals ) stars Lily Collins as Snow White, a princess living under the thumb of her power-hungry stepmother the Queen (Julia Roberts). When a dashing prince arrives in the kingdom, Snow White is sent to her death but finds refuge with a band of diminutive bandits, becoming a bandit princess and a champion for the people. Stay for the credits or you’ll miss the Bollywood dance number! So: The contest! Take inspiration from Tarsem’s vivid, bold fairytale ( Click for a gallery of Mirror Mirror’s fantastic designs and costumes ) and compose an original haiku. You know the drill — use the 5-7-5 syllable format to write a clever ditty about Mirror Mirror that captures the spirit of the modern-tinged Snow White retelling. (Hint: That iconic line “Mirror, mirror, on the wall… who’s the fairest of them all?” breaks up quite nicely into seven syllable-segments. I’m just saying.) What’s at stake in this contest for the ages? Behold the grand prize, courtesy of Relativity: (1) “Kids’ Night Out” dinner and movie package, which includes a $100 Gift Card to Red Robin and $60 worth of Fandango bucks, enough for 4 people to enjoy! Dinner and a movie for the whole family? What a steal . Get to writing, already! Entries must be received along with your name and an email address where you can be reached. You may enter in the comment section below or on Movieline’s Facebook or Twitter pages. Contest ends Monday, April 2 at 2:00 p.m. PT/5:00 p.m. ET. U.S. entrants only. One submission per person.
There’s plenty of spectacle in movies these days; it’s delight that’s in short supply, and Tarsem Singh ’s Mirror Mirror offers plenty of it, shimmering like a school of minnows in a reflective pond. The picture is gorgeous to look at: There are fairytale castles topped with minarets of fluted gold, interior marble archways that look as if they might have been carved by Alfonse Mucha, ball gowns that take their inspiration from the rock-star effrontery of peacock feathers. But the story is a delight, too, a modernized — but not too modernized — retelling of the Brothers’ Grimm Snow White peopled with actors who polish the material to a bright glow rather than a high gloss. Mirror Mirror has a great deal of energy and wit and color, so much that it sometimes threatens to go right over the top. Somehow, though, it always stops short of being just too much — it’s never too taken by its own reflection. The picture opens with a beautifully animated prologue that’s a little Brothers Quay, a little Bjork-era Michel Gondry: A king and queen give birth to a daughter, but the queen dies, leaving her grieving spouse to raise the adored child on his own. He remarries, but makes the wrong choice — and you know the rest. Except Mirror Mirror — which was written by Melissa Wallack and Jason Keller — follows its own merry breadcrumb path through the traditional story. With its loose-jointed colloquialisms and gold-tipped touches of romance, the picture is somewhat reminiscent of The Princess Bride , though not nearly as woolly. Lily Collins — who played Sandra Bullock’s daughter in The Blind Side — stars as the impossibly lovely Snow White, who has just reached her 18th birthday after a youth of de facto imprisonment at the hands of her stepmother, Julia Roberts’ wicked Queen. Snow’s father, as that prologue told us, disappeared into the forest soon after his remarriage — he has not been seen since. Now that Snow has blossomed into a real looker, the Queen has more reason than ever to fear her, particularly since her spending habits have caused some financial troubles: She needs to remarry, fast. Conveniently, the criminally handsome Prince Alcott (Armie Hammer) shows up at her castle – he’s just been mugged by merry outfit of seven you-know-whats, who have handily stripped him of most of his clothes. The Queen is dazzled by this dual vision of dollar signs and pecs, not knowing that Snow and Prince Alcott have already met in the forest and, of course, fallen instantly in love. The Queen sends Snow out into the forest with her chief lackey Brighton (a typically winsome Nathan Lane), who has orders to kill the girl. Instead, he urges her to run, which is how she lands in that commune of bandit dwarves. And what dwarves they are! Singh, somehow, manages to make each one reasonably distinct, though their ensemble muttering is also part of their charm. When Snow tries to tell them how wicked her stepmother is, their overlapping chatter indicates that this is old news to them: “She is evil! ” “She’s a bitch!” “Remember that time?” The most charming of the dwarves, Half Pint (played by Mark Povinelli, who also appeared in Water for Elephants ), has a crush on Snow and doesn’t bother to hide it, occasioning much teasing from his cohorts. But even the grumpiest one — his name is Butcher, and he’s played by Martin Klebba — grows to like her, and in one of the movie’s liveliest scenes, he and his pals school her in the art of swordplay, Kill Bill -style, as well as in various other modes of cunning and trickery: They whirl around her like seven little Pai Mei’s. Singh previously directed last year’s surprise crowd-pleaser Immortals , as well as the 2000 Jennifer Lopez vehicle The Cell ; on the basis of those movies, you might not have expected anything this fanciful or this sure-footed, but Singh pulls it off. The able cast he’s assembled sure doesn’t hurt: Hammer makes a stunning, long-legged prince – he’s so absurdly good-looking you almost can’t look at him without laughing. Collins, with those extraordinarily present eyebrows, looks a little like P.J. Harvey and a little like Jennifer Connolly, though she emerges victoriously as her own singular, strong presence. Lane delivers every gag with just the right degree of Borscht Belt ridiculosity. Roberts is the only one who perhaps gets a tad more screen time than she should: When you put Julia Roberts in a really big dress, a little goes a long way. Still, she’s game for anything, and she’s more than willing to cede the spotlight to her younger, and relatively unknown, co-star. Plus, her extravagant pre-party beauty treatment consists of just the kind of ewkiness kids like: A parakeet-poop facial masque, a bee-sting lip plumper, a fish-nibble manicure. (The last, unbelievably, is sort of a real thing .) The color palette of Mirror Mirror is dazzling, a pinwheel of tones that are wonderfully bright and yet always a little “off” — cobalt snuggles up against orange; deep maroons are balanced with just the right amount of gold. (The picture was shot by Brendan Galvin, with production design by Tom Foden.) The costumes, in particular, are so stunning that I’m feeling a hankering to see the movie again, just to get a better handle on their opulent genius. They come to us courtesy of Japanese designer Eiko Ishioka , who died in January at age 73 — I doubt we’ll see finer costuming this year. In one scene, Snow wears a big marigold cloak that falls about her person in lavish folds — I couldn’t tell if it was made of the heaviest duchesse silk or the softest lamb leather, but either way, it’s something to behold. That’s just one measure of the playful inventiveness that has gone into Mirror Mirror . To call the movie an updating of a fairy tale may be a misnomer — don’t all fairy tales take place in the here and now of the imagination? In any event, Mirror Mirror is bold, modern and fun — if not the fairest of all, it is certainly much fairer than most. See a slideshow of Ishioka’s Mirror Mirror costumes here. Follow Stephanie Zacharek on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
He’s painted cinematic landscapes of psychosexual kink ( The Cell ), childhood fantasy ( The Fall ), and ancient Greek 3-D abs ( Immortals ), but in this week’s Mirror Mirror director Tarsem takes a turn into uncharted territory: The family-friendly fairytale. Turning his attentions to the story of Snow White , Tarsem creates another visually rich fantasyland of imagination — and gives the fabled princess a post-modern streak to boot — with the help of the late Oscar-winning costume designer and longtime collaborator Eiko Ishioka ( Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters , Bram Stoker’s Dracula , Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark ), who passed away in January at the age of 73. In an exclusive chat, Tarsem takes Movieline through his work with Ishioka and the whimsical, inventive, and utterly imaginative designs of Mirror Mirror that comprise their final collaboration on film. GALLERY: Tarsem on Eiko Ishioka and the Fairytale Look of Mirror Mirror Head over to the Mirror Mirror Gallery here for Tarsem’s notes on the costumes, design, and visual inspirations for Mirror Mirror , or scroll down for additional thoughts as Tarsem discusses his relationship with Ishioka, his approach to the Snow White mythology, and his plans to take a break from heavily visual storytelling with his next project. ON HIS LONGTIME COLLABORATION WITH EIKO ISHIOKA Tarsem says he was looking for a break from his heavily visual films when he decided to take on Mirror Mirror for the chance to work one last time with Ishioka, who succumbed to cancer only months after production wrapped. “On a personal level I did not want to do more than three visual films,” he said, “but the reason that really pushed it together was that I knew that Eiko did not have more than a year to go. She did not have more than a movie left in her. I said, okay, let’s do a visual film. Eiko’s kind of like me, unfortunately – she has only two gears, full speed or off, and I just knew that she wanted to work.” ON THE IMPORTANCE OF MAKING SNOW WHITE A HEROINE CAPABLE OF SAVING HERSELF Tarsem’s Snow White (played by Lily Collins ) springs into action as a swashbuckling bandit princess in Mirror Mirror’s post-modern take — a far cry from the original Disney animation. Tarsem sought to make a family film that simultaneously rejected the “damsel in distress” angle. “I had done three R-rated movies and thought I wanted to do a family film,” he said. “Everyone asked me again and again if I wanted to do a gritty, R-rated Snow White and I said no! The original story, as beloved as it is, is a ten-minute story. It’s just about vanity. I’d never seen the original animation until about a month ago, and I thought I would like to have a different take on it.” ON THE OTHER SNOW WHITE MOVIE, SNOW WHITE AND THE HUNTSMAN Tarsem had to scrap plans to release Mirror Mirror in 3-D in order to get into theaters ahead of the competition — Rupert Sanders’ action adventure Snow White and the Huntsman , starring Kristen Stewart . “We had to come out first because we are a smaller movie than the big, grand action-adventure,” Tarsem explained. “It’s always easier to sell those on a trailer. I said, ‘We have to come first.’ They could afford to come second, but we couldn’t afford to come second.” ON HIS NEXT MOVIE — A ‘NON-VISUAL’ PROJECT “By that I don’t mean handheld, gritty, running around stuff — it’s not going to be Law & Order – but a contemporary tale. The film I’m going towards right now is a very simple drone attack from the perspective of the guys who fly the planes that are actually flying in Africa, but they do it from a little container in the desert. It’s a drone attack, so what are the politics involved in saying, ‘Go ahead and do this’ and just watching the collateral damage of when you can give a go-ahead and when you cannot, and how the same act feels completely different on the ground than for the people in the sky who come and knock them out? It’s what right now I’m gearing towards, but anything that’s interesting right now that isn’t fantasy oriented, a tale that isn’t completely designed, is what I want to do. This is the closest I’m to it right now and I’m going to go for it.” GALLERY: Tarsem on Eiko Ishioka and the Fairytale Look of Mirror Mirror Mirror Mirror is in theaters Friday. Follow Jen Yamato on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Last week, you and I watched the first trailer for Tarsem Singh’s Mirror, Mirror in slack-jawed horror. (After all, aren’t Snow White adaptations supposed to be about the titular princess and not Julia Roberts’s aging concerns, Bollywood dance numbers and Armie Hammer’s impression of a dog?) Surprisingly though, not all of the Internet’s feedback was negative. A few brave souls commented on the Relativity trailer enthusiastically — and now MovieMavericks.com is claiming that some of those suspicious thumbs-up reviews came from the same source.
Welcome to fairy tale trailer week! Yesterday, Movieline previewed Mirror, Mirror , Tarsem Singh’s hammy Snow White adaptation which features Julia Roberts as a ineffectively evil queen who worries about age lines and financial security (just like you!). Today, Pixar has unveiled a full-length trailer for the company’s first foray into fairy tale territory, the much more promising Brave .
‘There was a lot of sneaking around in the corridors,’ she says of her hotel love on latest episode, airing Saturday at 11 a.m. ET/PT on MTV. By Sara Waber Robyn on “When I Was 17” Photo: MTV International pop star Robyn blends her futuristic sound with the sunny pop of her homeland, Sweden. This past Halloween, she headlined MTV’s O Music Awards , and no one was left dancing alone during her showstopping set. The “Call Your Girlfriend” singer said performing at the awards show “was not like doing a TV show — it was a concert.” Robyn wasn’t always landing gigs that big, but she has been singing girl-power anthems like “Show Me Love” and “Do You Know (What It Takes)” since she was just a teenager. She reminisces about that time in her life on the next episode of “When I Was 17,” airing Saturday at 11 a.m. ET/PT on MTV. “When I was 16, I recorded my first album and it was released in Sweden and it did really well,” she says on the episode, also featuring J. Cole and Chad Michael Murray. “So labels in America started to pay interest to what I was doing, and when I was 17, I signed a record contract in America.” Just like ABBA years before her, America kept this spunky Swedish girl busy — in more ways than one. “I spent all my time in hotels,” she said. “I was constantly working and moving around. But I stayed a lot at this one hotel in New York, where I had a romance with the bellboy.” So what was her bellhop beau like? “He was my age, and his name was Alex. He was amazing. If anyone at the hotel would have found out that we had a thing going on, I don’t think Alex would have been able to keep his job. There was a lot of sneaking around in the corridors.” “When I Was 17” — this week featuring Robyn, J. Cole and Chad Michael Murray — airs Saturday at 11 a.m ET/PT on MTV. Related Videos Preview ‘When I Was 17’ Featuring J. Cole, Robyn And Chad Michael Murray Related Artists Robyn
Stunt coordinator pulls back the curtain for MTV News on stunning fight sequences and more from Tarsem Singh’s 3-D odyssey. By Eric Ditzian Henry Cavill in “Immortals” Photo: Relativity Media We’ve seen a zillion big-screen takes on Greek mythology, a zillion slo-mo fight scenes, a zillion eye-popping 3-D sequences. But what’s crazy about Tarsem Singh’s “Immortals” is that while we’ve seen this type of thing so many times before, we’ve never seen any of it quite like this. “Immortals” is, in a word, beautiful. How did Singh and his team take the story of King Hyperion’s (Mickey Rourke) attempt to conquer the world and humiliate the Gods — and Theseus’ (Henry Cavill) against-all-odds quest to stop him — and make it fresh, make it unique, make it beautiful? For answers to those questions, MTV News turned to stunt coordinator Artie Malesci, who revealed five secrets about “Immortals.” The Titans Fight “Immortals” begins with the mythical Titans, those precursors to Zeus and his Olympian clan, in prison. You just know they’re going to escape at some point. And when they finally do, their fight against the Olympians is not just amazing to watch, it also proved to be the most challenging fight scene in the entire movie. “The Titans’ fight was the hardest — figuring out the choreography and the sets and the motion-capture work,” Malesci said. “It wasn’t until way late in the process that we got the idea about how to do it. Were we going to go with motion-capture or was it going to be animated? We spent a lot of time coming up with ideas and showing them to the director and getting his input. We ended up doing it motion-capture, but within this very challenging environment. That was very, very hard.” Battling in Three Dimensions As Malesci explained it, coordinating stunts and fights for the big screen is never easy, but it’s particularly complicated when the movie is being shot in 3-D. “It’s difficult because it’s two cameras. You’ve got to move them around,” Malesci said of the dynamic, time-dilating fights. “We shot the fights at 60 frames, and they can slow it down in [post-production] to 24 frames, which makes the impact look harder.” He added, “If I wanted to smash your head into a wall, we wouldn’t do it in real time. We’d do it fairly slowly. But we film it at a higher speed and ramp it down, so it looks like I really smashed your head into the wall. This way, you don’t hurt people.” The Minotaur Head The film is filled with cool weapons and gadgets — from the CG Epirus Bow that drives much of the plot to a gruesome metal bull that stands over a fire and whose hollow belly provides a deathly chamber for some unfortunate prisoners. One of the most creative contraptions is a barbed-wire Minotaur head worn by one of Hyperion’s warriors. Sure, it looks cool, but it was demanding for actor Robert Maillet to wear and then to do anything other than stand around looking badass. “We thought it was a great idea,” Malesci said. “But we really had to stay within the limitations of what the actor could do. He couldn’t see well but the mask still had to be used as a weapon, so we made two versions: There was one made of metal for non-fighting scenes. And for the fights, there was one made of rubber. That was a challenge trying to make rubber barbed wire that could hold its shape when we were going [into] the fight.” Gods in Heaven The single hardest sequence to capture in the entire film, Malesci told us, is one that appears in trailers — gods floating and fighting against one another in heaven. How Tarsem and his team pulled it off has to be heard to be believed. “It took a month to figure out how to do that,” he said. “I thought we’d do it with wires. But instead, we built a glass floor 30 feet in the air. We made an actual elevator system using these giant computer-controlled winches to move the camera, starting right below the actors’ feet and then dropping it as fast as we could without getting any kind of camera shake.” Give the Dog an Oscar Malesci also pointed out one unexpected scene that left him, a veteran stunt coordinator with decades of experience under his belt, utterly impressed: a sequence in which a dog has to pick up the Epirus Bow on cue in the midst of a battle scene. “The dog was incredible!” Malesci laughed. “This dog, his name is Crash. The dog was able to deal with anything we threw at it — fire, fighting, rocks. Amazing!” Check out everything we’ve got on “Immortals.” For breaking news, celebrity columns, humor and more — updated around the clock — visit MTVMoviesBlog.com . Related Photos ‘Immortals’ Key Scenes
While many critics marvel at the visual spectacle of the Greek flick, others decry Tarsem Singh’s ‘style-over-substance exercise.’ By Kevin P. Sullivan Daniel Sharman and Isabel Lucas in “Immortals” Photo: Jan Thijs If recent Greek movie history has taught us anything, it’s that the men of myths and legends had some killer ab routines. “Immortals” continues the tradition started by “300,” but will the new film find the same magic that made the Gerard Butler flick such a huge success? Critics see the similarities, namely in the brains (or lack thereof) department. While it may not be the smartest picture on the block, most seem to agree “Immortals” is actually quite beautiful. Here’s a rundown on what the critics have to say about the movie, which hit theaters on Friday (November 11). The Story “Alas, the movie makes next to no sense. It involves, in a very broad sense, the attempt by King Hyperion (Mickey Rourke) to conquer Greece, and the battle to stop him led by a plucky peasant named Theseus (Henry Cavill). … But a lot of the time I had no idea what was going on. Characters would turn up for the first time, seem terrifically important, and disappear. If at many moments I had stopped the film and asked anybody around me, ‘Who is that, and what are they doing and why?’ I think they’d have been stuck for an answer.” — Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times Henry Cavill “Henry Cavill, cast as Superman in Zack Snyder’s ‘Man of Steel,’ next year, plays Theseus, a peasant who leads a rebellion against the wicked King Hyperion (Mickey Rourke, the highlight of the film). Muscular, oily and full of resentment, Cavill makes a fine perturbed peasant, though he’s got a tough bill sharing the most scenes with Rourke.” — Scott Bowles, USA Today The Direction “Tarsem Singh’s first two films, ‘The Cell’ and ‘The Fall,’ were shallow but exquisite displays designed almost entirely to show off his extraordinary artistry. With ‘Immortals,’ Singh finally acknowledges that he’s making movies, rather than just beautiful moving pictures. In his ostentatiously unconventional take on ancient Greek history, he gives us fully fleshed characters and a compelling (enough) plot, plus all the action an epic requires. And, true to form, it’s also the most gorgeous film of the year.” — Elizabeth Weitzman, New York Daily News The Costumes “The most eye-catching creative contribution consists of Eiko Ishioka’s sometimes striking costume designs, which not only functionally differentiate the assorted factions but often pop the eyes even against the colorful backgrounds.” — Todd McCarthy, The Hollywood Reporter The Final Word “Absent a compelling narrative, the spectacle alone may be enough to survive opening weekend, only to see returns for this style-over-substance exercise wither over the following weeks. — Peter Debruge, Variety Check out everything we’ve got on “Immortals.” For breaking news, celebrity columns, humor and more — updated around the clock — visit MTVMoviesBlog.com . Related Photos ‘Immortals’ Key Scenes
‘It’s a visual spectacle, and the 3-D only adds to that,’ actor says of film, in theaters Friday. By Kara Warner Henry Cavill in “The Immortals” Photo: Universal Pictures For lovers of big-budget, sweeping Greek hero-based epics, the stylized, intense and slightly foreboding promotional campaign for “Immortals” should have already convinced you to get thee to a theater stat when the film opens on Friday. However, for those who might shy away from blood and gore, the stars of the film insist there is a lot more going on in “Immortals” than in typical testosterone-fueled swords-and-sandals flicks. “People are going to think it’s just a guy movie. It’s gonna be all just about violence and it is just for guys,” Henry Cavill , who plays demi-god Theseus, told MTV News recently. “This is entirely different. This has that very strong aspect, which all guys are going to love, the sort of blood and gore and swords and fighting, but it’s so beautifully done. This is Tarsem Singh we’re talking about here, it’s a visual spectacle, and the 3-D only adds to that. “I will say in the past I’ve been skeptical of [3-D, but] after seeing this, the technology has come along so far. This is incredible, and all the violence in the movie, if people don’t like that, it’s actually art-ified,” he explained. “It becomes a ‘beautific’ ballet of blood if you will. That all aside, it’s an incredible love story as well. You often think of these Greek epics — it skirts over all that stuff — but you’ve got an incredibly hardened man who’s hardened his heart to anything at this stage, and there’s a woman who manages to soften him so much so that he starts to think of things which he’s never even considered in the past.” Cavill’s co-stars were equally enthusiastic in their recommendations. “It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen,” Luke Evans , who plays Zeus, added. “Like Henry said, Tarsem at the helm with his imagination and his enthusiasm and his ideas, it just married so well with what he was doing and the final production. The values of it are just incredible, and we’ve got this 3-D thing and it just comes alive, it really does.” “I think it’s a different take on the whole Greek mythology and that’s going to be the biggest surprise,” Freida Pinto , who plays the “chosen” oracle Phaedra, said. “Visually it’s not like anything, it’s not like any of the big-budget action-packed films that you’ve seen before.” Check out everything we’ve got on “Immortals.” For breaking news, celebrity columns, humor and more — updated around the clock — visit MTVMoviesBlog.com .
Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest Evil Queen of them all? Is it Julia Roberts, who will star opposite Lily Collins’s Snow White in Tarsem Singh’s untitled fairy tale adaptation? Or is it Charlize Theron, who will play the wicked queen opposite Kristen Stewart’s armored Disney princess in Snow White and the Huntsman ? Take a look at the side-by-side comparison below before deciding for yourself.
