Snow White Movie Review: It's Almost Like They Never Watched Pretty Woman

   I checked and I don't think I've written a movie review since 2023 when I wrote one for the movie Barbie. The most interesting thing about that review was when I announced that I had no intention of ever watching that overtly propagandist piece of shit. And I suspect that the most interesting thing about this review is it concerns the issues I have with another movie I have no intention of ever watching, Disney's disastrous remake of its own 1937 animated version of the Snow White.

   The original occupies such a sacrosanct status that there is really no reason to attempt a remake, much less one whose sole purpose seems to be to completely flip the script so that it ends up glorifying the lunatic nature of post-modern thinking. Add in the fact, that the film's most vociferous critic, and the entity who apparently played the biggest role in making sure the movie comes off making less sense than Joy Behar explaining gender theory to Whoopi Goldberg, would be the very studio that created it, and it becomes very suspicious indeed. But then again, this is the same Hollywood that awarded Anora the Best Picture Oscar and named Mikey Madddison as Best Actress for a role that could have just as easily got her named Newcummer of the Year at the AVN Awards. Expecting things to make sense, is probably the problem.

     The original movie was filled to the brim, with not only esoteric but  psychological tropes: the Evil Queen, the absent father, the huntsman, the Prince, etc. And even though the Disney movie was based on the Grimm Brothers' version and not the original folk tale, both prior versions concerned themselves with the psychologically sound concerns of a young girl's journey of self discovery. The remake however was an effort, like Barbie, and Anora, and Emilia Perez, about drumming home the nonsensical idea that men are not only THE problem, they are also very, very, unnecessary to human evolution, hence the need to label the Prince a stalker, hence the need for dispensing with the kiss, hence even the need for dispensing with my presence in audience. 

        Ironically, when all this was playing out, I was reading a short story by Eve Babitz entitled Heroine, originally published in 1974. In it, Babitz tells a thinly disguised biographical story about how female celebrities were being drawn to the lure of heroin, and unsurprisingly, with predictable results. Babitz was designing a cover for a Janis Joplin album and tried to meet with the singer but had failed twice because of Janis's drug use. Janis died a week after the last attempt. The event moved the author to offer up this stringent observation, 

    "Women are prepared to suffer for love. It's written in their birth certificates. Women are not prepared to have 'everything,' not success type 'everything.'  I mean, when the 'everything' isn't about living happily after after with the prince (even when it falls through and the prince runs away with the baby-sitter, there's at least a precedent.) There is no precedent for women getting their own 'everything' and learning that it's not the answer. Especially when you got fame, money, fortune, and love for belting out how sad and lonely and how beaten you were. Which is               only a darker version of Hollywood 'everything' in which the more vulnerability and ineptness you project onto the screen, the more fame, money, and love they load you with. They'll only give you 'everything' if you appear to be totally confused. Which leaves you with very few friends."
     
     Babitz was basically saying that while you are waiting for your prince to show-up, you need good friends. Friends who will drink with you at an out away cafe in the middle of the day, and not ones who use drugs as a substitute for filial love, and especially not those who'll use your weakness to shove modern day progressive lunacy down your throat and criticize you for gagging as you do your best to keep them happy just so you have some company.

​    And just so you know, men get bored too, and also suffer while waiting for their chance at love, or after they blew their first opportunity because their parents had no chance to watch movies based on fairytales when they were young. The last thing I'd ever want to do is have to learn the hard way that alcohol and drugs make a poor substitute for a kiss from the woman you love. And heaven help the fool, that would attempt to educate me on the idea that I'm better off without my testicles and/or the love of a woman.

    Some might read that passage, roll their eyes, and yell, "Yeah. it's Trump's fault," or "It's the Patriarchy that killed Janis! We are a creating something totally different!"  Thus, they disparage and deny the importance of the kiss in the story which, at its deepest level, refers to the most mysterious and transcendent of all human events, the joining of opposites for the creation of life itself. And when you refer to the Prince in the story as a stalker, and the kiss as sexual assault, you are basically shouting out about pride in your own ignorance and projecting your own psychological short-comings up on a screen just as surely as Janis Joplin did at Woodstock, or every time she took the stage, as she told the whole world how badly her upbringing had been and just how bored she was getting waiting for her prince to come.  The pertinent message to take from her life is to how learn to love yourself when the seems the whole fucking world is out there trying to cause you internal division and teaching you to hate yourself on the most fundamental of levels. The real irony is that they (those in charge of keeping us confused) only paid Judas thirty pieces of silver. Even in today's money, it sure suggests that Rachel  Ziegler was being vastly overpaid.

    I read the book Interpretation of Fairytales by Marie-Lousie Von Franz, a lady who had corroborated with Carl Jung, and I believe one of the first psychologists who ever had the idea that we could interpret folklore. From that reading, I got an idea for real movie on the real Snow White story. In it, a small town girl has Hollywood dreams and goes there and meets a handsome young man with a similar vision. They get married in a fever, and she gets pregnant and they both agree it's probably better to abort the baby. She schedules the procedure, but before it happens he gets called off to a movie set which will prove to be his big break. It's years before they meet again, and she ends up an alcholic stripper at a dive bar on the outskirts of Las Vegas.

    He gets out of a drug rehab and meets an old friend of theirs who informs him of her situation. He drives through a dust storm and finds her passed out in dirty dressing room where she's vomited on the dressing table in front of a mirror. He wets his handkerchief and cleans her face off and she opens her eyes before they kiss. Later, she takes him home, they enter the house together to the surprise of the baby-sitter.

       Now, you might say that Hollywood has made this cheesy movie a thousand  times before, but I'm saying to do it without Julia Roberts and Richard Gere, without Demi Moore and Armande Assante, and even without the Ving Rhames' character. You know, an unsanitzed version. Instead, make it with people who look like they know what it means to be broken down to the molecular level. For example, I would cast Madonna as the Evil Queen and Gary Sinese as the Prince. I would offer Dave Chappelle the role of the good hearted Pimp and/or comic relief. And I would cast Pamela Anderson in the role of Snow White character.


       Finally, in lieu of the seven dwarves (who apparently are persona non grata in Hollywood these days), I would create a side-kick for the main character, a miniature, streetwise, foul mouthed stripper who, up till that point, had only worked bachelor and frat parties and whose greatest dream was to mount the silver pole and dance beneath the golden lights at the Dancing Bare. I would offer role that to Rachel Ziegler. Yep, that Rachel Ziegler; it seems like she has been through being bought and sold, lied to, used and beaten up to the point that she might appreciate the chance to something else for a change.

Weird?

Yeah, weird!