Harvard’s Commencement is today, and the sun is shining on the Class of 2011.  Here’s my Harvard Crimson valedictory for a wonderful group of seniors.
 http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2011/5…

Two Snow White films are scheduled for release in June 2012.  Kristen Stewart of Twilight fame stars in Snow White and the Huntsman, with Charlize Theron as her mother and Chris Hemsworth as a hunter, distraught by the death of his wife.  Johnny Depp, Viggo Mortensen, and Hugh Jackman all turned down the role of the huntsman.

My bet is with The Brothers Grimm: Snow White, directed by Tarsem Singh.  Nathan Lane and Robert Emms have just joined Julia Roberts and Armie Hammer (he played the Winklevoss twins in Social Network) for this re-imagining of the class fairy tale, but another critic has already cast his vote with Snow White and the Huntsman.

From the Indie Movie Guide:

The Story: Comedy vs. Kick Ass!
Relativity’s Snow White—which is supposedly about Snow and her dwarfy pals violently reclaiming the kingdom—is described as a “spirited adventure comedy” (tho sources close to the picture tell us the laughs are kinda few and far between), while Universal’s Huntsman takes a much more serious, kickass approach to the series. If you’re looking for serious fight sequences and the chance of some steamy scenes between Hemsworth and Stewart, your best bet is the latter.

NBC’s Grimm is filming its pilot episode in Portland, Oregon, and has made it into the fall 2011 schedule.  In the trailer we hear a voice-over: “This is no fairy tale–the stories are real–what they wrote about really happened.  You are one of the last Grimms.  We have the ability to see what no one else can.”

A detective learns that he is descended from the Brothers Grimm and therefore has the ability to identify the monsters and ogres that once menaced the innocent heroes and heroines of fairy tales.  It looks like the first episode will, surprise, surprise, take “Little Red Riding Hood” as its point of departure.

Here’s more from DreadCentral.com:

Detective Nick Burkhardt (David Giuntoli) thought he was ready for the grim reality of working homicide in Portland, Oregon. That is, until he started to see things…things he couldn’t quite explain. Like a gorgeous woman suddenly transforming into a hideous hag or an average Joe turning into a vicious troll. Then, after a panicked visit from his only living relative, Nick discovers the truth about his visions: He’s not like everyone else; he’s a descendant of an elite group of hunters known as “Grimms” who are charged with stopping the proliferation of supernatural creatures in the world. And so begins his new life journey – albeit a reluctant one at first – as he solves crimes with his partner who knows something about Nick has radically changed but can’t quite put his finger on it. Along the way, Nick finds himself unexpectedly getting help on some of the more difficult cases from Monroe (Silas Weir Mitchell), a guy who seems normal at first but is soon revealed to be what you might call a “big bad wolf.” Literally!

Freud tells us that jokes are never really innocent and that they are designed to serve aggressive or self-defensive purposes.  There’s a little bit of both in Adam Mansbach’s bedtime story for adults trying to get children to sleep.

Samantha Murphy writes: TechNewsDaily spoke with Mansbach and illustrator Ricardo Cortes about how social media shot “Go the F**k to Sleep” (Akashic Books, 2011) to No. 1 on Amazon’s best seller list a month ahead of its publication and how the book’s message has captured the hearts of parents with a sense of humor everywhere.
 http://www.technewsdaily.com/social-medi…

Here’s a sample verse:

The cats nestle close to their kittens now.
The lambs have laid down with the sheep.
You’re cozy and warm in your bed, my dear
Please go the f**k sleep.

Shades of “Down will come baby, cradle, and all.”  In a study of lullabies, Nicholas Tucker concluded that some of the melodies sung to children over the centuries were “exercises in controlled hatred.”  One British lullaby warns a “squalling baby” that Bonaparte will “beat you, beat you, beat you, / And he’ll beat you all to pap. / And he’ll eat you, eat you, eat you / Every morsel snap, snap, snap.”

Why does the word “desperate” come up so often when parents describe the experience of reading their children to sleep?

Does life imitate art?  Not exactly.  But clever swapping of hair and dress/uniform colors is uncomfortably close to reality.

The threesixty Theatre production of “Peter Pan” is now in Chicago.  It features “an ambitious hybrid of live theater, aerial arts, puppetry, and supremely advanced computer-generated visuals.”  The project was launched in London and is now on a US tour.  The show seems to have solved the Spiderman problem–kids stay in the harness and the computer images move!

Here’s an excerpt from a review of the show in the Chicago Sun Times:

Above all there is a breathtaking flight to Neverland that carries the audience on a vertiginous journey over London rooftops, through the Marble Arch, along the River Thames and high into the clouds before a rough landing on a Caribbean island where a pirate ship hovers.

If something is lost along the way in all this it is the clarity of the storytelling. For as it happens, Barrie’s story (and it’s all there in Tanya Ronder’s adaptation), speaks to children on one level, and adults on another, and it is a great deal more complicated than it appears on the surface. Unquestionably, the sheer sensation of flight has an endless allure, and there are other stunning sensations here, too, including being under water, on a pirate ship, or being surrounded by the dense vegetation of a tropical forest. But the intimacy and clarity of the human relationships, which is what ultimately makes any “Peter Pan” fully tick, sometimes gets blurred in this elaborate production.

I appreciate the reviewer’s understanding of the story’s complexities.  My Annotated Peter Pan will be published by W.W. Norton in October 2011–just in time for the 100th anniversary of Peter and Wendy. Writing that volume led me to discover just how weighty, packed, and fiendishly complicated the story really is.  And the backstory about Barrie and the five Llewelyn Davies boys is equally compelling.