Breezes from Wonderland

 http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/wb/ja…

From the makers of X-Men (yes, you heard it right) comes Jack the Giant Killer.  Thanks to the wonderful Jessica Fox for sending me the link to the trailer.

Jack the Giant Killer” tells the story of an ancient war that is reignited when a young farmhand unwittinglyopens a gateway between our world and a fearsome race of giants. Unleashed on the Earth for the first time in centuries, the giants strive to reclaim the land they once lost, forcing the young man, Jack, into the battle of his life to stop them. Fighting for a kingdom, its people, and the love of a brave princess, he comes face to face with the unstoppable warriors he thought only existed in legend–and gets the chance to become a legend himself.

Dorothy Ko’s Cinderella’s Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding has been the standard work on the ancient practice for several years now.  Ko’s premise is that footbinding was “an embodied experience, a reality to a select group of women from the twelfth to the twentieth centuries.”  Instead of denouncing it, she aims to understand “the powerful forces that made binding feet a conventional practice . . .  The reality of the practice lies not only in the screams and tears on a girl’s first day of biding, but also in the assiduous maintenance and care she had to lavish on her feet every day for the rest of her life.”  Ko points out that Hill Gates and Laurel Bossen, featured in the link below, offer an explanation of footbinding based on fieldwork in Sichuan and Fujian: “Peasant women with bound feet routinely performed such tasks as spinning and weaving, oyster shucking, and tea picking, which required strength and skill in her hands but not her feet.  Footbinding lost its raison d’etre when factory-based textile production replaced home-based spinning and weaving.”  Ko points out that footbinding is not a uniform and timeless practice “motivated by a single cause” and that monocausal explanations misfire, failing to grasp the complexities of the social practice.
 http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/20…

In the Grimms’ “Cinderella,” the stepsisters famously cut off their toes and heels to make the shoe fit.  I’ve often been asked whether that episode has a contemporary analogue in plastic surgery and other cosmetic practices.  Here’s one answer:

Here’s a description of the 2 episode series, with Part 1 airing tonight!

Neverland, a prequel to author J.M. Barrie’s classic, Peter Pan, sweeps in time from the turbulent seas of the pirates of the Caribbean and the back alleys of Dickensian London to a world of pure imagination. The cast includes Rhys Ifans (Pirate Radio, Notting Hill) as James Hook,  Oscar nominee Keira Knightley as the voice of Tinker Bell, Anna Friel (Pushing Daisies) as Captain Elizabeth Bonny, Oscar nominee Bob Hoskins as Smee (who previously played the character in Steven Spielberg’s feature, Hook), Raoul Trujillo (Tin Man) and Charlie Rowe (Pirate Radio) as one of literature’s most cherished characters, Peter Pan.

Peter (Rowe), along with his pals of young pickpockets, have been rounded up by their mentor Jimmy Hook (Ifans) to snatch a magical orb which transports them to another world – Neverland.  Filled with white jungles and imposing cities formed out of trees created by Dr. Fludd (Dance) and inhabited by a colony of tree spirits led by Tinker Bell (Knightley), this mysterious realm welcomes unknown friends and enemies snatched from time.  These include power-mad Elizabeth Bonny (Friel) and her band of 18th century pirates who search for the answer to eternal youth, a secret guarded by a Holy Man (Trujillo).  As the fight to save this strange and beautiful world escalates, Peter and his crew consider that growing old somewhere in time could be less important than growing up—right here in their new home called Neverland.

Great cinematography and the opening sequences with Jim and the pickpockets are excellent.  I have a small quibble about Tinker Bell, who is said to get her name from the rapid movement of her wings, though nothing wrong with some poetic license.  I’ll tune in tonight for Part II.  Hoskins’ reprise of Smee is sublime.

The NYT weighs in:
 http://tv.nytimes.com/2011/12/03/arts/te…

A.O. Scott reviews a new “Sleeping Beauty” film made by Julia Leigh:
 http://movies.nytimes.com/2011/12/02/mov…

At a certain point Lucy wants to find out what happens while she is under the spell of Clara’s potion, and she buys a small video camera for the purpose. We already know, of course, but the gap between our perception and Lucy’s emphasizes the film’s deeper secret — or perhaps its most effective tease — which is what goes on in her mind.

In a video interview, Julia Leigh describes how the camera is more or less on the fourth wall of the cinematic space, allowing the viewer to see more than Lucy sees and making us complicit in what appears on screen.  I would add complicit with the filmmaker’s  fetishizing of the female body.
 http://video.nytimes.com/video/2011/12/0…

Here’s a report from the screening at Cannes:
 http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/movies/2…

With its title, its dreamlike moments and a madam whose personality wouldn’t be out of place in a Grimm Brothers tale, Leigh’s movie also has a fairy-tale quality, continuing a theme that has transfixed Hollywood lately. For her part, Leigh was not shy about mentioning her influences, which she said include King Solomon (like the characters in the film, she said, he had young women keep him warm in his old age), Gandhi (he tested his chastity by doing same) and “the shady world of the Internet” and its escort services.

Thanks to my student Wendy Chang for calling my attention to the film.