Ever After
A sweet but smart Cinderella Story
DVD Review

This isn't the first time I've seen this film, not by a long shot. However, it might be the first time I've ever watched it voluntarily. My daughters and I have long been at odds in our taste in films, and we've had this thing on VHS since God was a boy. They've probably watched it a hundred times. I've watched it through a few times, but mostly seen it as fits and starts going through their viewing. But tonight for some reason it seemed like just the thing, and as it was released on DVD I didn't have to watch it in the boys' room, so we went ahead and got it.

Well, if you don't know this story already, you had better have your DNA tested because you are missing some introns or something. Cinderella and her dashing prince (or the moral equivalent) are characters in stories of many cultures. This one did add something though - the story was placed in a frame of semi-real-life. The conceit was that a noble dowager of some sort (they never do give her exact identity but they call her "Your Majesty") calls in the Brothers Grimm after reading their newly published fairy tale collection. She liked the rest of it, but was very distressed by their telling of "The Little Cinder Girl". They point out that there are so many versions of this story out there it is difficult to distill it to one chain of events. At that point, she turns to one of her servants, who brings her a box from which she lifts a single silvery silken slipper with a glass heel, and off we go.

Jeroen Krabbe does a short but telling turn as Cinderella's father. They needed someone you could believe would land the love of our wicked stepmother, done to steely-eyed perfection by Angelica Houston. The dynamic between them was well played as was his death scene, which set up the relationship between her and his daughter so well even my girls got it. Flash forward with Danielle suddenly grown into a very dirty little swan, and her stepmother is angling for one of the not-necessarily-ugly stepsisters to marry the prince of the realm. Enter Dougray Scott as our beleaguered Prince Henry, who keeps trying to escape the gilded cage of his royalty, but keeps getting pulled back in by his own noble impulses.

I'm not going to include any more spoilers, but I do want to talk about the characters more. Danielle (Drew Barrymore) is an educated but genuinely sweet person. She is a seriously unarmed opponent to Houston and her blonde daughter's machinations. The byplay between her and Dougray is charming and subtle, and surprisingly erudite. This is no maid with nothing but her embroidery on her mind and who makes no bones about showing it. They avoided the trap of being too "smart", there is no biting social commentary or all-too-knowing nods and winks to today's mores. When they meet, she knocks him off a stolen horse with a well-thrown apple, and he pretty much out of his league right then and there. Dougray has an amazing ability to go between strong and sure prince and overdressed hangdog puppy in a second that makes his character that much more endearing. Somehow even the fit of his clothes changes, neat and properly fit one second and then sagging and ill-fitting when he is nonplussed or out of his depth. I don't know if he did it on purpose or he just doesn't know how to wear those costumes properly, but it gave some of the more maudlin dialogue a poignancy it might have lacked.

As far as the disk itself goes, this is where I got kind of frustrated. Transfer quality was amazing; kicked our aging VHS tape right in the you-guessed-it. But that seems to be about par for the course these days. I haven't seen a really miserable transfer since Roxanne, and even that one was a step up from the VHS version. The menu was workable, but not obtrusive or annoying. The big killer was that there was only one extra - the trailer for the theatrical release. I couldn't believe it. I know there was a featurette made for this film, because I watched it on HBO at a friend's house. It was one of the main reasons I even let the thing in the door in the first place. But it is nowhere to be found.

And about that trailer.... What the heck was their marketing department thinking?! No wonder this one suffered at the box office. The Tangerine Dream-like music and the cutting made it come off as some modernization of the story a la "A Knight's Tale", when none of that is in the actual film. The score is a well done piece of standard orchestration by a George Fenton (who also did the music for "Shadowlands" and "The Madness of King George"). If I had seen it in theaters on the strength of this trailer, I would have been seriously annoyed.

But hey, this one's out there. If you want to watch a good film with a little bit of romance, a little bit of comedy, and a little bit of action and not come away feeling thrashed out or grossed out, I recommend this one as a nice but still substantive break.

The Core
Oh My God! The Humanity! The Pigeons!
DVD Review

The world is coming to an end, but nobody knows it. For some reason, people are dropping dead, and pigeons are flying madly around causing havok. A scientist makes a mad leap of intuition and then gathers evidence that the core of the world has stopped spinning, and it will destroy us due to the loss of our electromagnetic field. Mayhem and destruction ensues as they battle time to find a way to jumpstart a planet and restore things before it is too late.

I have to say that I came into this one with low expectations. I mean, anything another reviewer dubs "Core-mageddon" should be sending up warning flags in any decently sceptical viewer. But the kids insisted and it fit our ratings rules, so here I was.

I do want to point out that this review is rife with spoilers, so if you haven't seen it and don't want to know don't read past here.

First impression - did the writer pass 8th grade science? I mean, I knew it was going to be bad, but I didn't think it was going to be that bad. I just couldn't check my brain at the door hard enough to make it through. These have been covered in detail by other reviewers, but I can't resist pointing out that just because your super-metal can take a laser beam doesn't mean it can handle the bunch-teen thousand pounds of pressure at the Earth's core. That little scene with the mouse was all cute, but doesn't really handle one of their main problems. And speaking of pressure - did they find some way to make it so they stay at 1 atmosphere inside the ship no matter what? I mean, no decompression, and no discussion of the effect of that sort of pressure on people - if we have trouble with 7,000 feet due to synapse compression and other issues, I can't imagine what the pressure they were under would do. And the frickin' pigeons - yes they use magnetics for long-range navigation but they can still bloody well SEEE! Oh, and an EMP strong enough to stop a pacemaker would have also fried every other circuit in the same radius - they are shielded to a fare-the-well because of FCC regulations and medical common sense (who would want to buy a new cordless phone and stop their heart the first time it rang). Besides, it would have been really obvious what happened to anyone who saw and passed the aforementioned science class, or even saw "The Day After" or "Ocean's Eleven". And don't get me started on the Golden Gate Bridge/microwave thing. And the whole "hacking the planet" thing made for nice theater, but just a quick look at the internet's structure and the thousands and thousands of interconnections he would have to monitor and monkey with would show you the improbability of that.

I do want to talk about the Space Shuttle thing. You know, the one they scrub the belly off in the LA viaduct system due to an malfunction in the intertial guidance system. In case you weren't keeping track, they delayed the release of this film in theaters and re-built the trailer because of the Columbia. They did leave the sequence in the final film, though. This pissed me off. Not because they left it, but because some people thought they shouldn't have. I have a problem with people who cheapen real tragedies by somehow comparing it to things that happen in movies. Movies are movies, and we blow up the planet and do all sorts of other horrible things. They are pretend. The Columbia was real, and they really died. Oh, and that goes for the people who scrubbed the World Trade Center out of Spiderman's trailer as well. The pain isn't going to go away because you try to pretend that it never happened in media. They existed, and we should remember. Anything less is truly insensitive. At any rate, Bravo! to the producers who didn't bow to the pressure. I'll step off the soapbox here. Now, on to the good things.

Despite all the cringe-inducing hyperbole (the frying peach was a lovely touch), it somehow works. I'm not sure exactly why. The characters, I think. They are cardboard cut-outs, but they are such nice cardboard cutouts, and such well played cardboard cut-outs that somehow you learn to care for them just in time to loose them. We knew the captain was dead the moment he started going on about "you aren't a leader until you loose". Serge and Brazz's deaths were improbable but so emotionally fraught that they managed to evoke a real emotion. Even that idiot Zimsky's realization just before he died was corny, but so well played you forgave him the cheesy feel of that last-second, unseen redemption. And Rat. Dear Rat. Where did they find this actor? He was a walking cliche but he also looks frighteningly like someone I work with. The writers did an outstanding job at keeping the tone right between the deadly serious "Deep Impact" and the cheese-fest of "Armageddon". There were enough subtle knowing clues in the writing that showed they knew it was popcorn and they poked a bit of gentle fun at it. I mean, anyone who can name their super-metal "Unobtainium" with a straight face has the kind of sense of humor I like to hang out with.

And damn but the core itself was cool. This thing just looked cool all over. Virgil (the ship) was cool. The gem-sphere was cool. The production values were high enough that it really helped a bit with the suspension of disbelief, which I think I already mentioned needed all the help it could get.

All in all, it was a semi-harmless way to pass an evening. It has my kids looking up geophysics sites to poke holes in the plot, which is cool from a Mom perspective. If nothing else, it made for a great entry in Mystery Science Theater 3000 - The Home Game.

The Cutting Edge
Toepick!
DVD Review

The kids were watching "The Cutting Edge" for some adolescent reason I'm not going to try to fathom tonight. I have to admit to liking this film, if only for the sheer improbabiliy of watching them try to convince people that a hockey player can turn into a world-class championship figure-skater in something like six months. Heck, it's hard enough to convince people that an actor can stand up on skates.

Actually, I also have a soft spot for the characters. Moira Kelly is the classic fragile frozen-queen type, and her bewildered expression as he turns her ordered little life on it's backside really sells her character. D.B. Sweeney's take on hockey players was interesting, but in real life he would have spent most of his time on the road doing laps around the gym mummified in atheletic tape shouting "Chilly Willy is my hero!". My favorite line is when her boyfriend says, "I don't like to see her upset," in his own unique attempt at being British and Doug answers, "I'd invest in blindfolds." Roy Dotrice is one of the best character actors out there, and he gets his Russian thing on with a certain glee that is great for the character.

At any rate, back to real life. Sorry, just had long laugh at the thought.