Ken Johnson writes about the MOMA exhibit, running through November 5, 2012.

Childhood, it is often said, is a recent invention. Children used to be treated as small adults to be put to work as soon as possible. Education meant discipline and punishment. Then came the 20th century and the idea that children are fundamentally different from adults and should be treated accordingly. The ideal child, a creature of terrific potential, became an inspiring symbol of futurity, and the care and education of actual children exercised the minds of great thinkers, including many from the fields of art and design

“Century of the Child: Growing by Design, 1900-2000,” a big, wonderful show at the Museum of Modern Art, examines the intersection of Modernist design and modern thinking about children. A rich and thought-provoking study of a great subject, it is loaded with intriguing things to look at — some 500 items, including furniture, toys, games, posters, books and much more.

 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/27/arts/d…

And here’s a link to the website for the exhibit, with a list of related film screenings: Night of the Hunter, Palindromes, and other greats.

 http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/exhib…

I’ll be there on Sunday!

http://www.nbcolympics.com/video/2012/opening-ceremony-olympic-bedtime-story.html

How perfect to have J.K. Rowling, author of the book about the boy who lived, read from Peter Pan, the book about the boy who would not grow up, to open the Olympic Games.

And don’t miss Simon Schama’s irreverent review of Danny Boyle’s opening ceremonies spectacle, in which he declares: So whatever else Bob Costas tells me over the next two weeks, it was his voiced reminder that J.M. Barrie, the creator of Peter Pan, handed over the royalties from his story to the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children (one of Britain’s best loved places) that will stick in the memory.

 http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/20…

Here’s Schama’s bouquet tossed to British authors of books for children:

No one does the darkness of childhood, its realm of startled pathos, its deep hauntings, like the Brits, from Alice and Peter Pan to Harry P., all of whom had an airing in the show, along with Kes (another glory of English cinema) and Bill Forsyth’s adorable Gregory’s Girl.

 http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vi…

With Disney in production on a Sleeping Beauty film with  Angelina Jolie starring Maleficent, producer Neal Moritz is moving forward with a comedy take of  the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale that turns the slumbering sweetie into a pesky stalker.

The 21 Jump Street producer is developing a modern-day retelling that finds the male protagonist accidentally awakening Sleeping Beauty and finding that he can’t get rid of the lovestruck heroine.

Hollywood Reporter‘s description (not verbatim since it was filled with typos) sounds too much like a repeat of the smackdown between Snow White and the Huntsman and Mirror Mirror, and we all know who won that one.   In my NEH Seminar on Fairy Tales and Fantasy Literature, we looked yesterday at Gustave Dore’s illustrations for “Sleeping Beauty” and noted the stark contrast between the luminous sleeping princess and the dark, almost shadow-like representation of the prince.  The light streams in through the window on him but it illuminates the sleeping princess.  It was fascinating to see how this illustration is one of the few from the 19th century that does not orientalize and aesthetisize the figure of Sleeping Beauty.

If anyone is stalking anyone in the early versions of the tale, it’s the prince/king, so there is a certain logic to reversing roles, as happens so often in modern rescriptings.  And in some ways, it seems intriguing to turn a sleeping beauty, the most passive fairy-tale creature imaginable, into a predator bent on pursuing the man who kissed her awake (or raped her, as in Basile’s version of the tale).

Wizard of Oz

Click link above for the trailer and the url below for Lamar’s article.

 http://io9.com/5925635/check-out-the-fir…

Cyriaque Lamar writes about the new Wizard of Oz:

We saw James Franco discussing the finer points of wizardry recently — now watch the first teaser trailer for Evil Dead and Spider-Man director Sam Raimi’s Oz: The Great and Powerful. Will there be any flying monkeys with broomsticks? Did Army of Darkness actually take place in Munchkinland? We’ll receive answers to such pressing questions next March. The synopsis:

When Oscar Diggs (James Franco), a small-time circus magician with dubious ethics, is hurled away from dusty Kansas to the vibrant Land of Oz, he thinks he’s hit the jackpot-fame and fortune are his for the taking-that is until he meets three witches, Theodora (Mila Kunis), Evanora (Rachel Weisz) and Glinda (Michelle Williams), who are not convinced he is the great wizard everyone’s been expecting. Reluctantly drawn into the epic problems facing the Land of Oz and its inhabitants, Oscar must find out who is good and who is evil before it is too late. Putting his magical arts to use through illusion, ingenuity-and even a bit of wizardry-Oscar transforms himself not only into the great and powerful Wizard of Oz but into a better man as well.

Thanks to Holly Hutchison for sending me the links!

 http://www.flavorwire.com/307604/pop-for…

Rohin Guha writes about music videos that contain allusions to fairy tales, myths, and the inner child.  Katy Perry’s video seems to be channeling the story of Theseus and the Minotaur, which is of course a story about entanglement and abandonment as well as about slaying a monster and finding your way out of a maze.  What I like best about the video is the crossed fingers of Prince Charming and his comeuppance!

Katy Perry is just the latest pop star to cash in on tropes inspired by The Wizard of Oz and Alice In Wonderland. In the video for “Wide Awake,” Perry ends up tapping into her inner child during a weaker moment in her adult life. It’s a theme that finds her character navigating a hedge maze with this young girl, who ends up clearing some major obstacles for her — like slaying a couple minotaurs — and giving her the strength to punch out Prince Charming, an obvious reference to her split with Russell Brand. Ultimately, the singer and her inner child part ways and there is the grand a-ha! moment that finds Perry is in her dressing room, buoyed by this ability to connect to a more fearless version of herself.

watch?v=k0BWlvnBmIE&feature=player_embedded

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/entertainment/news/article.cfm?c_id=1501119&objectid=10814807

Dominic Corry writes about Hollywood’s feeding frenzy when it comes to fairy tales.  The upcoming Sleeping Beauty film (Angelina Jolie wears Maleficent’s headdress) will evidently retell the story from the wicked queen’s point of view.  It may be time to go back to Basile’s “Sun, Moon, and Talia” to figure out exactly how the new cinematic version could play out.  In that story, the first literary version of “Sleeping Beauty,” the title figure is raped by a king–yes, while she is slumbering:

After a time, it happened by chance that a king was out hunting and passed that way. One of his falcons escaped from his hand and flew into the house by way of one of the windows. It did not come when called, so the king had one of his party knock at the door, believing the palace to be inhabited. Although he knocked for a length of time, nobody answered, so the king had them bring a vintner’s ladder, for he himself would climb up and search the house, to discover what was inside. Thus he climbed up and entered, and looked in all the rooms, and nooks, and corners, and was amazed to find no living person there. At last he came to the salon, and when the king beheld Talia, who seemed to be enchanted, he believed that she was asleep, and he called her, but she remained unconscious. Crying aloud, he beheld her charms and felt his blood course hotly through his veins. He lifted her in his arms, and carried her to a bed, where he gathered the first fruits of love. Leaving her on the bed, he returned to his own kingdom, where, in the pressing business of his realm, he for a time thought no more about this incident.

And, as we know from Italo Calvino, the winds of myth pass through the forest of fairy tales, and the king’s wife plots her revenge:

Now the king’s wife began to suspect that something was wrong from the delay of her husband while hunting, and hearing him name continually Talia, Sun, and Moon, she became hot with another kind of heat than the sun’s. Sending for the secretary, she said to him, “Listen to me, my son, you are living between two rocks, between the post and the door, between the poker and the grate. If you will tell me with whom the king your master, and my husband, is in love, I will give you treasures untold; and if you hide the truth from me, you will never be found again, dead or alive.” The man was terribly frightened. Greed and fear blinded his eyes to all honor and to all sense of justice, and he related to her all things, calling bread bread, and wine wine.

The queen, hearing how matters stood, sent the secretary to Talia, in the name of the king, asking her to send the children, for he wished to see them. Talia, with great joy, did as she was commanded. Then the queen, with a heart of Medea, told the cook to kill them, and to make them into several tasteful dishes for her wretched husband. But the cook was tender hearted and, seeing these two beautiful golden apples, felt pity and compassion for them, and he carried them home to his wife, and had her hide them. In their place he prepared two lambs into a hundred different dishes. When the king came, the queen, with great pleasure, had the food served.

And here’s Dominic Corry on fairy-tale fatigue:

With the modern film market driven by name and brand recognition more than ever, it makes a large degree of cynical sense that films based on fairy tales would proliferate.

These are, after all, arguably the most famous stories of all-time, and the digital special effects revolution means they can be sold with more grandiosity than ever before. But it doesn’t always make for good movies.

Beyond the obvious name recognition aspect, the other factor driving all these fairy tale movies is the ridiculous success of Tim Burton’s 2010 version of Alice In Wonderland.

That movie – which I cared for very little – made more than a billion dollars worldwide and just got pushed down to the eleventh spot on the list of all-time box-office champs by new No. 3 The Avengers.

Those kind of numbers send studio execs into a frenzy, and before long we had Red Riding Hood, the two Snow Whites, and plans for live action films inspired by Sleeping Beauty and Hansel and Gretel.

“Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim.”

Nora Ephron was my hero and one of the great storytellers of our time.   In films ranging from Heartburn to Julie & Julia, she showed how the “innocent persecuted heroine” of traditional tales can regain agency and make something of her life.  Heartbreak (and heartburn) are part of life, and we live happily ever after when we turn them into opportunities for heroic behavior.

Here’s an excerpt from Nora Ephron’s Commencement speech, delivered at Wellesley College in 1996:

 http://www.wellesley.edu/PublicAffairs/C…

So what are you going to do? This is the season when a clutch of successful women — who have it all — give speeches to women like you and say, to be perfectly honest, you can’t have it all. Maybe young women don’t wonder whether they can have it all any longer, but in case of you are wondering, of course you can have it all. What are you going to do? Everything, is my guess. It will be a little messy, but embrace the mess. It will be complicated, but rejoice in the complications. It will not be anything like what you think it will be like, but surprises are good for you. And don’t be frightened: you can always change your mind. I know: I’ve had four careers and three husbands. And this is something else I want to tell you, one of the hundreds of things I didn’t know when I was sitting here so many years ago: you are not going to be you, fixed and immutable you, forever. We have a game we play when we’re waiting for tables in restaurants, where you have to write the five things that describe yourself on a piece of paper. When I was your age, I would have put: ambitious, Wellesley graduate, daughter, Democrat, single. Ten years later not one of those five things turned up on my list. I was: journalist, feminist, New Yorker, divorced, funny. Today not one of those five things turns up in my list: writer, director, mother, sister, happy. Whatever those five things are for you today, they won’t make the list in ten years — not that you still won’t be some of those things, but they won’t be the five most important things about you. Which is one of the most delicious things available to women, and more particularly to women than to men. I think. It’s slightly easier for us to shift, to change our minds, to take another path. Yogi Berra, the former New York Yankee who made a specialty of saying things that were famously maladroit, quoted himself at a recent commencement speech he gave. “When you see a fork in the road,” he said, “take it.” Yes, it’s supposed to be a joke, but as someone said in a movie I made, don’t laugh this is my life, this is the life many women lead: two paths diverge in a wood, and we get to take them both. It’s another of the nicest things about being women; we can do that. Did I say it was hard? Yes, but let me say it again so that none of you can ever say the words, nobody said it was so hard. But it’s also incredibly interesting. You are so lucky to have that life as an option.

 http://movies.nytimes.com/2012/06/22/mov…

Manohla Dargis has a well-done review of Brave, and appears to give Merida’s hair an A+, while the film itself only gets a B.

The riotous mass of bouncy curls that crowns Merida, the free-to-be-me heroine of the new Pixar movie, “Brave,” is a marvel of computer imagineering. A rich orange-red the color of ripe persimmon, Merida’s hair doesn’t so much frame her pale, creamy face as incessantly threaten to engulf it, the thick tendrils and fuzzy whorls radiating outward like a sunburst. There’s so much beauty, so much untamed animation in this hair that it makes Merida look like a hothead, a rebel, the little princess who wouldn’t and didn’t. Then again, Rapunzel has a supernice head of hair too.

Dargis gets at the heart of the problem with the film when she writes about the nature/culture divide in ways that remind me of the big themes taken up in Snow White and the Huntsman.

The association of Merida with the natural world accounts for some of the movie’s most beautifully animated sequences, and in other, smarter or maybe just braver, hands it might have also inspired new thinking about women, men, nature and culture. Here, however, the nature-culture divide is drawn along traditional gender lines. The slim, tidy Elinor serves as the custodian of a dreary feminine realm, which for Merida means hours indoors, being groomed and learning lessons, while the freakishly large Fergus represents a rambunctious, barely domesticated masculine world of huge appetites, tall tales and unruly laughter. Fergus gives Merida a bow and teaches her to shoot in the great outdoors; Elinor primly (and amusingly) tells her daughter, “A lady does not place her weapon on the table.”