Big D At The Movies: Snow White And The Huntsman

  Once upon a time there was a young princess with lips red as a rose, hair black as a crows wing and skin white as snow.  Then one day a wicked witch charmed her way into her fathers life and his bed and then stabbed him with a frigging great knife.
 The kingdom fell and the young princess was locked away in a a tower while the evil queen worked out what to do with her. At long last she decided that the best way to solve her ongoing political problem, and, incidentally, gain eternal youth, was to eat Snow White's heart.
  The news that the young princess had just escaped and was last seen heading into the Dark Forest made the evil witch very unhappy so she shanghaied a drunk and ordered him to bring back the girl while promising all sorts of things she was obviously never going to deliver.
  Luckily for our heroine, he turned out to be not quite the dick he appeared to be and agreed to help.  Even better, some dwarven bandits decided that they wanted to be on Team Snow White as well.
 Now all they had to do was get Snow White to her uncle's fortress and then the good guys can ride forth and inflict some righteous violence.

 As you can tell just from the movie poster this film has  no singing whatsoever.

  Now if I remember  the original story, Snow White gets rescued a lot and that's mainly it.  The huntsman spares her life, the dwarves save her from dying of exposure and the Prince saves her from the spell and then punishes the evil queen. She's a lot more proactive in this version, as befits the 21st century. Alright, so she's maybe not the badass you'd expect from the trailer but still manages to push events rather than being carried along by them and the final showdown is all her.
 There's also an attempt at giving Queen Ravenna some motivation for her actions - she's been hurt in the past and has been getting her own back ever since - although any flashes of sympathy I might have felt evaporated moments later. Maybe it's just me but I get the definite impression Ravenna is a spoilt, spiteful womanchild and not actually that bright.
  The Huntsman, by the way, starts off as a drunken mess and you can actually see him rediscover his self-respect as the film goes by. 

 The most impressive part of the film is the visuals - Ravenna's Glass monsters and the weird and wonderful creatures of the Dark Forest especially. I do take issue with the direction of the fight scenes though. Once again they are filmed so it's hard to keep track of exactly what's going on and that's a real disappointment given that the film is bookended by largescale battles. They are impressive but I'd have been more impressed if the camerawork wasn't making me dizzy.

 As to acting honours, Ian McShane pops up as a dwarf chieftain and just owns every scene he's in.  And considering that Kristen Stewart has become an internet meme for wooden acting, she's pretty decent here. Admittedly she spends a lot of the film with the same slightly-worried expression but when she has to carry a scene Ms. Stewart gets the job done and does it well.
 I have mixed feelings about Charlize Theron's  take on the Evil Queen though. Most of the time it's calm, collected and malignant but then she'll start raving and, as I've already mentioned, it tends to come across like a spoilt teenager throwing a tantrum.

 I have a very simple definition of a good cinema experience. I want to come out thinking "Wow"
"Snow White and The Huntsman" didn't quite manage to make that happen but I did walk out into the rain thinking "Yes. I enjoyed that."
 Worth seeing.

My Musical Pet Hates.

1. Songs that don't know when to end.

  If you're going to have a seven minute song there had better be something interesting going on in those last three minutes - have the guitarists duel with each other, suddenly change gear and crank up the volume, let the keyboard player have a solo, anything but repeat the chorus again and again and again and again...
Example: Anything off Judas Priest's Jugulator album. No kidding. There is not a single song on that album that couldn't lose a minute and a half and be all the better for it.

2. Mariah Carey Syndrome

   And this seems to be exclusive to female singers. specifically female singers who have a good range and want everybody to know it. Every single word is stretched out, bounced around the scale  and occasionally turned into something only dogs can hear. Why? It serves no useful purpose and gets on my tits something fierce.

3. Sudden outbreaks of rapping. 

   I'm not a massive fan of rap but I can appreciate the odd song here and there. What I do fail to understand is the ongoing tendency to shoehorn rap segments into songs that are otherwise mainstream.
 Fun fact. There has never yet been a pop song that has been improved by having Snoop Dogg pop up in the middle.
 Even Rush did this on the Roll The Bones album. Oh dear.
 (No, it wasn't Snoop Dogg. That would have been too weird for words.)

4. Miserable women with pianos. 

  I'm not a big fan of singer-songwriters. I prefer my music amplified and upbeat so having somebody wander onstage clutching an acoustic guitar will usually send me off to the bar.
  But there's one subspecies that causes me actual pain plus a fervent desire to stick a pencil in somebody's eye and that would be Miserable Women With Pianos. Adele, for instance.
 Fans would probably describe their product as "Personal", "Intimate" and  "Emotional" whereas I'd describe it as "Boring", "Shite" and "Why am I listening to somebody whining about how much their life sucks?"
 Screw that.

5. The Musical Makeover

 There's nothing wrong with tweaking your sound to keep current. Rush, Judas Priest, Black Sabbath, Yes and Pink Floyd (among others) have all taken a look at the musical climate around them,thought "We can do that" and adapted to fit. Usually there's a clear progression from album to album where you can track this happening.
 Then there's the bands that suddenly switch sounds completely.  Let me give you an example.
Ultravox made their name as a synthpop outfit, albeit one with grandiose leanings and a surprisingly useful guitarist.

But then they went  from this:

To this:

 Note the new clothes, brass section, backing singers and 

blatant ditching of all the elements I'd liked them for.

 If you want more examples, pick a Hair Metal band from the early 90s. An awful lot of them tried to jump on the Grunge bandwagon and got run over. Or any fading star that suddenly discovers dance music. (Looking at you, Cher. And you Wishbone Ash.)
 It gets particularly annoying when said artist announces that they are now making the sort of music they wanted to make all along.
 It's always nice when somebody basically let's all their fans know that he thinks they are mugs. Cheers.