Sam Downing

I have this theory that one of the reasons Hollywood likes fairytale reboots so much – aside from their built-in brand recognition – is because it gives them an excuse to cast movies without any of those pesky brown people. Snow White and the Huntsman is set in medieval times! So it’s totally not racist that it’s populated exclusively with white faces! Right?!

Anyway. I didn’t really have high hopes for this, and it more or less met my expectations. It’s not a bad movie. It’s just… blah. It’s nothing-y. It never sinks into awfulness but it never rises into anything much, either. Think Lord of the Rings without the bonds between the characters, or Game of Thrones minus the political intrigue.

Snow White and the Huntsman is visually pretty terrific, but its problems lie with the limp story (oh, wow. A Hollywood movie with a shitty script. Big surprise), which tosses some grit and some feminism into the familiar fairytale but forgets to add any actual human emotion. Example: the love story between the title characters. I say “love story”, but Snow White (Kristen Stewart) and the huntsman (Chris Hemsworth) have less chemistry than water stirred into milk. I think I actually yawned at the bit where he resurrects her with true’s love kiss, or whatever, because there’s no sense of any actual true love – or even any one-night-stand-see-you-later love. The kind-of-wimpy Sam Clafin plays a duke’s son who’s sort of the huntsman’s romantic rival, but he doesn’t share a spark with Snow White either.

(Spoiler alert: The film ends without Snow White winding up with either the huntsman or the duke’s son, which feels kind of… weird. I’m sure some viewers will be all, “She doesn’t choose either of them because she’s a strong woman, and feminism!” But I suspect the real reason for Snow’s lack of choice is so that the love triangle can be dragged out in potential sequels, Twilight-style.)

Incidentally, if you’re wondering why it’s called Snow White and the Huntsman and not Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, it’s because said little people basically have nothing to do with the core storyline. They’re there (played by several well-known actors, whose heads were controversially grafted on to dwarf bodies or something), but they’re just shoehorned in. You could cut out all their scenes without affecting the main storyline any. (And Snow White doesn’t have a convincing bond with any of them, either.)

Much is made of Stewart’s acting talent, or lack thereof – I saw a lot of people groaning when she was deemed the year’s highest paid actress. Honestly, I don’t think she’s terrible. Sure, she relies too much on the same old tics – the lip chewing, the blinking, the doe eyes. But there’s some weird inverse charisma to her: You can basically project any emotion on to her blank face and (almost) believe she’s actually emoting. (The same trick makes her so perfect at playing Twilight‘s personality-void heroine.)

Hemsworth is fine, even if did seem to pick up his (Scottish? Scottish-ish?) accent from watching Shrek a bunch of times. The best of the cast is easily Charlize Theron, as the corrupted wicked queen. She’s over-the-top, she’s melodramatic, she’s ridiculous (and at times her dinner theatre English accent sounds dangerously reminiscent of the mentally retarded character she played in Arrested Development, who was also a Brit). But boy, she throws herself right into it. If Snow White and the Huntsman is remembered for anything, it’ll be her.

For the record: Of this year’s two Snow White movies, I’m giving this one the edge over the boneheaded Mirror Mirror.

It doesn’t feel right to call Cassandra Clare’s The Mortal Instruments series “so bad it’s good”. It almost feels right. But – like the first season or so of Gossip Girl – while the books border on trashy, they’re smart, knowing trashy. Not so much “guilty pleasure” as “straight-up pleasure” – I’ve often recommended them as “Like Twilight, but good”.

So basically what happened is this: Clare wrote a trilogy of books (City of Bones, City of Ashes, then City of Glass) about the demon-killing Shadowhunters and their varied adventures and romantic entanglments. Trilogy becomes bestselling trilogy, and when you have a trilogy on your hands you do the sensible thing and extend it. Hence the fourquel City of Fallen Angels (which will be followed by two more sequels, comprising a second trilogy).

Which means Clare has to find more stuff for her heroes – including hunky Shadowhunter Jace Wayland/Morgenstern/Lightwood/Herondale/Whoevenknowsanymore, whose aforementioned hunkiness is endlessly purple-prosed at us; his girlfriend Clary; and her best pal Simon – to do.

And therein lies one of Fallen Angels‘ biggest problems: nothing really happens. The first three-quarters are mostly just melodramatic hand-wringing, with all the meat of the plot at the end.

Which wouldn’t be so bad if the melodrama wasn’t so forced. For example. We’re repeatedly reminded how passionately in love Jace and Clary are, yet their relationship is filled with vague problems-for-the-sake-of-problems. Sure, I get that conflict drives narratives and the course of true love never did run blah blah blah, but the couple’s impenetrable woes eventually become frustrating.

The bigger, unseen problem, though, is the book’s troubling subtext: three male characters (Jace, Simon and newcomer Kyle) physically hurt women, often greivously, and are forgiven because, basically, they weren’t themselves or weren’t in control of their actions at the time, and thus aren’t actually bad guys. This is… worrying, is the mildest way to term it, and I wonder how other readers reconcile it. (I’m guessing “easily”, given the number of rabid fangirls these books have.)

On the bright side, this is the best written Mortal Instruments entry so far (though not as good as in Clare’s spin-off, Clockwork Angel). The previous three books were marred by flat background characters, some of whom are fleshed out a little more in Fallen Angel.

Hungry Beast, an Australian TV show featuring a bunch of smug undergraduate types waxing lyrical about current affairs, ran a report in its most recent episode titled “Things we think might be bullshit: Adults reading kids’ books”:

Harry Potter, Twilight and other novels are deemed books for “children”, and adults (so the reasoning goes) need to grow up and presumably start reading “adult books” lest they develop a creepy Peter Pan vibe akin to Michael Jackson’s. Why, if adults continue reading “kids’” books, one day Spot Goes to School might be taught in universities – because after all, there’s no difference whatsoever between a book for preschoolers and a book for older teens!

Adults reading children’s books, we’re informed, is like owning golliwogs: “a bit wrong, but mostly just embarrassing”.

STFU, Hungry Beast. First of all, do your research: children’s books are very different from the genre known an “young adult” (note the use of “adult“). And guess what? There are loads and loads of YA books that aren’t Harry Potter or Twilight! (Shock!)

Why is it weird when adults read books about teenagers, given that adults were all once (another shock!) teenagers too? Is it also “weird” for senior citizens to read books about twenty- or thirtysomething characters?

Lastly, and most importantly, why are stories about young people automatically “childish”, and/or valued below stories about adults?

Cards on the table: I am no fan of Twilight. Luckily no one reads this blog, or I’d probably be flamed by fangirls wearing Team Edward tees for writing that. (For the record, I am Team Jacob. One. Hundred. Per. Cent.)

But while I’m happy to sit around picking Twilight apart, there’s one criticism that sticks in my craw. One criticism that actually inspires me to – gulp – defend Twilight:

“But vegetarian vampires is stupid! Vampires don’t sparkle in the sun! A vampire would tear a human apart, not fall in love with her!”

Uh, yeah. Vampires aren’t actually real, don’tchaknow. It’s impossible to decide what a real vampire would or wouldn’t do – there are no real vampires. Pop culture has many things to say on what a vampire is, those things aren’t laws.When people complain that Twilight‘s vampires aren’t “real” vampires, they’re really just complaining that Twilight‘s vampires aren’t the same as the vampires in a book/film/comic/etc that they like better. Any writer is free to interpret vampire lore how they choose.

Maybe this only bugs me because I, like Stephenie Meyer, have written a book featuring non-traditional vampires. (Sadly, unlike Stephenie Meyer, I am not an uber-bestselling bazillionaire.) (Yet.) But if you want to rag on Twilight, don’t rag on its vegetarian vampires. Rag on the fact that Edward Cullen is a creepy stalker.