Fairy Tale

Re the review of "Beauty and the Beast" ("It Sounds Like a 'Beauty,' " April 14), I realize that Times theater critic Laurie Winer had to cover all aspects of the production, but I take exception to her criticism of the set. As a primary-school teacher and mother of six, I have seen/read many fairy-tale books, and, from the "curtain up," I felt I was being drawn into the pages of a beautiful fairy-tale book. Wasn't that the intent of the designer? KATHARINE FORRESTER Anaheim

SAN FRANCISCO - Even in the annals of over-the-top celebrity weddings, Sean Parker's planned nuptials may take the cake. The Facebook Inc. billionaire who also co-founded Napster is dropping nearly $10 million on a fairy-tale wedding in Big Sur that includes a whimsical fantasy world featuring faux ruins, waterfalls, bridges and a gated cottage, a person familiar with the plans said. Just the stone dance floor in the woods surrounding the Ventana Inn & Spa will set the 34-year-old back $350,000, according to the website TMZ. The plants and flowers will cost $1 million.

All grown up, Hansel and Gretel return to the forest to exact revenge on their childhood tormentors. Snow White escapes the Evil Queen and takes up with a group of Shaolin monks. And after leaving Kansas, carnival barker Oscar Diggs remakes himself as a wizard in the Emerald City. Childhood classics as seen through a fun-house mirror? Well, yes. But for the film business, it's also something far more consequential: its future. Movie studios are taking timeless stories from authors such as the Brothers Grimm and L. Frank Baum and reimagining them with a modern, playful sensibility.

Following hard upon "The Artist," "Blancanieves" is the second silent black-and-white feature to emerge from Europe in little more than two years. A pair of films don't exactly make a trend, but "Blancanieves" has enough going for it to make you wish it did. A major critical success in its native Spain, where it won 10 Goyas (the Spanish Oscar), including best picture, "Blancanieves" is different in tone from "The Artist. " The title translates as "Snow White," and Pablo Berger (who made the wonderful comedy "Torremolinas 73" a decade ago)

For my daughter, Sophie, it was like finding the goose that laid the golden egg. "Today was a Fairytale," Taylor Swift was singing from the stage at Staples Center, and Sophie, age 11, was singing every word along with her, waving a colored light stick back and forth above her head. Her grin was electric, her attention sharply focused; she wasn't missing anything. For the last year or so, Sophie has been a Taylor Swift obsessive ("I am Taylor's No. 1 fan!" read the sign she brought to the concert with us)

The beautiful young socialite slipped the businessman a note scrawled in eyeliner on a crumpled napkin. "Help me," it pleaded. She was a teenage Indonesian model who had married a Malaysian prince, but Manohara Odelia Pinot says her life with him was no fairy tale. Press accounts of her allegations of abuse and tales of her escape from an unhappy marriage have captivated this country, and further divided two nations that have long been Southeast Asian rivals. Known across Indonesia by her first name, which means "thief of hearts" in Sanskrit, Manohara is viewed here as a tragic heroine mistreated by an obsessed suitor who became outraged when she would not yield to his demands.

Costume designers for period films and fairy-tale flicks dominated the nominations for best achievement in costume design for the 85th annual Academy Awards announced this morning, including previous Oscar winners Colleen Atwood and Eiko Ishioka, nominated for "Snow White and the Huntsman" and "Mirror Mirror," respectively. In addition to Atwood, who took home Oscars for her work on "Chicago," "Memoirs of a Geisha" and "Alice in Wonderland,"  and Ishioka, who won for 1992's "Dracula" (and who passed away in January 2012 from pancreatic cancer)

Strange but true: The British public is simply not that excited about the royal wedding. According to the Economist, only a third of the population is definitely going to watch the nuptials on TV, while close to half are actively uninterested. My own secret source on the English streets (OK, it's my mum, who lives in a small town called Tring) reports that "people seem much less bothered" about Will and Kate than about Charles and Di in 1981. FOR THE RECORD: Americans on Britain: A commentary in the April 25 Calendar section about Americans' fairy-tale impression of Britain said that PBS is largely responsible for "maintaining the illusion that Britain is a country where everybody takes afternoon tea. " However, the headline erroneously referred to "high tea," which is a different meal.

Once upon a time - and by that we mean just a few months ago - it was the old-school horror genre that was being dusted off and repurposed into 21st century popular culture replete with wizards, werewolves, zombies and the hollow-cheeked vampires of the vanities. Today it's not horror stories but fairy tales seizing the collective imagination. For evidence, one need look no further than the fall TV schedule, where NBC rolled out "Grimm" (recasting fairy tales as crime procedurals)

Re "Obama's real fairy tale," Opinion, Jan. 15 Jonah Goldberg seems to dismiss Barack Obama's articulating hope. He claims it is a "fairy tale" that this nation can get beyond disagreement, and that democracy is about disagreement. Is Goldberg oblivious to the polarization that has thwarted the legislative process? I don't think Obama wants us to join hands and sing "Kumbaya," but he does want people to work across the aisle to resolve crucial issues. In striving to achieve that, we may again be inspired about who we are as a nation, where now so many of us are disillusioned.

Jodi Picoult is a familiar name to those of us who race through the Hudson News stores at LAX just before we board a plane. We are smug in our certainty - we know what we're getting when we pluck one of her novels from the pile. Her prose goes down easy, and she fills her stories with characters confronted by moral quandaries and life-changing decisions. That's certainly the case in "The Storyteller," which opens with the narration of Sage Singer, a lonely young baker who befriends a 95-year-old man in her grief support group.

As a kid, I watched "The Wizard of Oz" when it was broadcast annually, but the story always struck me as out-of-date. It felt as if the stakes were not high enough, as if, for all of Margaret Hamilton's spirited caterwauling as the Wicked Witch of the West, the fate of Dorothy and her compatriots - the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman and the Cowardly Lion - was never fundamentally in doubt.  Yet this may have been exactly what Oz's creator, L....

Pity poor Jack. There he was, minding his own business in some dusty fairy tale book when the powers that be dragooned him into active service as the front man for the would-be blockbuster "Jack the Giant Slayer. " Of course, Jack's been through the Hollywood shuffle before. Research reveals that he appeared in an Edison film as far back as 1902 and that his story has been embraced by talents as diverse as Gene Kelly, Chuck Jones and the Three Stooges. But there may never have been a Jack tale that delivered so little pleasure for so many dollars as what we have here.

When screenwriter Darren Lemke first proposed the idea of contemporizing the Jack and the Beanstalk fairy tale with CG technology, it was 2005. Tim Burton had not yet jumped into the rabbit hole with "Alice in Wonderland. " Amanda Seyfried had yet to don the cape for "Red Riding Hood. " Snow White had no Huntsman. But due to development delays and changing technology, Warner Bros. and its New Line division didn't start production on "Jack the Giant Slayer" until early 2011. By that time, Disney's PG-rated "Alice" had earned more than $1 billion at the box office and the once-novel idea for "Jack" had some huge expectations to fulfill.

Two costume designers. Two ends of the spectrum. Two totally different Oscar experiences. On Thursday morning, Joanna Johnston landed her first Academy Award nomination for her costuming work on Steven Spielberg's period biopic “Lincoln.” Colleen Atwood, meanwhile, picked up her 10 th Oscar nod - on the heels of three previous Oscar wins - for her efforts outfitting nearly 3,000 actors on the fairy-tale thriller “Snow White and the Huntsman.”...

Costume designers for period films and fairy-tale flicks dominated the nominations for best achievement in costume design for the 85th annual Academy Awards announced this morning, including previous Oscar winners Colleen Atwood and Eiko Ishioka, nominated for "Snow White and the Huntsman" and "Mirror Mirror," respectively. In addition to Atwood, who took home Oscars for her work on "Chicago," "Memoirs of a Geisha" and "Alice in Wonderland,"  and Ishioka, who won for 1992's "Dracula" (and who passed away in January 2012 from pancreatic cancer)

video platform video management video solutions video player Bethenny Frankel feels she's gone from fairy tale to failure, and she's really busted up about it. The reality-TV star, Skinny-girl businesswoman and future talk-show maven kept a date on Ellen DeGeneres' show Wednesday in the wake of her split from Jason Hoppy, despite the host's ability to produce a pile of gossip mags that had her guest on the cover....

The inspiring story of this season's Indianapolis Colts has captivated the sports world. It's not just that the team rebounded from a 2-14 record last season to make the playoffs, or that the Colts did so with a rookie quarterback in Andrew Luck. But they have gotten this far after losing their head coach, Chuck Pagano, to nearly three months of cancer treatments. Pagano returned for the regular-season finale, a home victory over Houston, and now he brings his team back to Baltimore, where last season he was the Ravens' defensive coordinator.