Fairy Tales

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.

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.

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.

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)

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)

Once upon a time, there was a studio in Burbank that spun classic fairy tales into silver-screen gold. But now the curtain is falling on "princess movies," which have been a part of Disney Animation's heritage since the 1937 debut of its first feature film, "Snow White. " The studio's Wednesday release of "Tangled," a contemporary retelling of the Rapunzel story, will be the last fairy tale produced by Disney's animation group for the foreseeable future. "Films and genres do run a course," said Pixar Animation Studios chief Ed Catmull, who along with director John Lasseter oversees Disney Animation.

Moby, as DJ and singer-songwriter Richard Melville Hall is known, has purchased Wolf's Lair, a Hollywood Hills castle-like fortress with views of the Hollywood sign, downtown and the ocean, for $3,925,000. The sellers are Lionsgate Entertainment's Jay Faires and Debbie Matenopoulos, former co-host of "The View" (1997-99). Wolf's Lair was built in 1927 by Hollywoodland developer L. Milton Wolf. Moby, who will be moving from the East Coast, plans to restore the walled and gated property in keeping with its period charm.

The brothers Grimm, recipients of today's Google Doodle, published a book of fairy tales 200 years ago that would come to define bedtime reading for millions of children over two centuries. Thursday's doodle tells the story of Little Red Riding Hood. Twenty-one different slides depict her journey from town, to woods, to Grandma's house, to wolf's belly, to freedom in the arms of a burly woodsman. The story is universally known -- one we grew up on, and our parents grew up on, and their parents before them.  But Google could have chosen half a dozen other stories published by the German brothers that are similarly embedded in our culture.

A group of elementary students from the Santa Clarita Valley held a mock trial where the Three Little Pigs sued the Big Bad Wolf for damages. The trial was the culmination of a series of classes on ethics in fairy tales. The students who participated are enrolled in an after-school gifted students program. The mock trial, held at the Newhall District Municipal Court Thursday night, was conducted by two attorneys, Gonzalo Freixes and his wife, Graciela, who played the judge.

Hundreds of parents in East Whittier and Hacienda La Puente school districts, following previous protests in Oregon and Washington, want school boards to purge the classrooms of a series of books that they believe are morbid and promote magic and devil worship. Before they get too upset, they might want to revisit some of the tattered storybooks they used to read at grandma's house. Here's one passage they would find in "Snow White": "Take the child into the darkest part of the forest.

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.

David Giuntoli plays Det. Nick Burkhardt on NBC's "Grimm," which is one of the struggling network's bright spots. The supernatural procedural tells the tale of a Portland police detective who discovers that he's a descendant of the Grimms, who not only chronicled strange beasts in their fairy tales but also hunted them to keep the human world safe. He can see these creatures, called Wesen, even when they hide in human form, and many of them are out to get him. Show Tracker was able to talk to the busy actor before the second half of the season begins March 8. Your earliest fairy tale memories are ... Either seeing drawings or watching movies where I was physically attracted to Cinderella or Snow White.

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.

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)

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.

Curse of the Thirteenth Fey The True Tale of Sleeping Beauty Jane Yolen Philomel: 256 pp., $16.99; for readers 10 and older -- We love fairy tales. Every culture offers them up: Scandinavians, Nigerians, Indonesians. Their commonality -- and the constant on-passing from parent to child -- attests to their endurance. It's as though they are somehow encoded in our DNA. Theories abound about their importance in our social evolution: Tales of abandonment, death and monstrous behavior allow children to deal with their fears in an age-appropriate manner.

Fairy Tales From the Brothers Grimm A New English Version Philip Pullman Viking: 400 pp, $27.95 Freudian, Marxist, feminist - fairy tales have famously been put through any number of academic paces, mined for their politics, their unconscious symbolism, their cultural freight and transformative powers. These tales, nearly allegorically flat, cut to the chase of human nightmares: hungry wolves and evil stepmothers. Here are life's fundamental anxieties by proxy, what Harvard professor Maria Tatar called "the great existential mysteries, in a miniature and manageable form.

It's not hard to explain the appeal of magic. Got to clean your room? Wave a wand! Hungry? Utter a spell and a table appears, loaded with all the foods you like. Of course, there are always complications. What spell turns the pot off, so you won't drown in oatmeal? How should you word the wish for riches, so you don't get clobbered by a falling bag of gold? No one needs the moral spelled out: It's not that simple, stupid. There are rules. And the rules are what make stories about magic work.

The brothers Grimm, recipients of today's Google Doodle, published a book of fairy tales 200 years ago that would come to define bedtime reading for millions of children over two centuries. Thursday's doodle tells the story of Little Red Riding Hood. Twenty-one different slides depict her journey from town, to woods, to Grandma's house, to wolf's belly, to freedom in the arms of a burly woodsman. The story is universally known -- one we grew up on, and our parents grew up on, and their parents before them.  But Google could have chosen half a dozen other stories published by the German brothers that are similarly embedded in our culture.

Rothko vandal sentenced A Polish man who defaced a Mark Rothko painting in London's Tate Modern gallery with black ink to promote an obscure artistic creed was sentenced Thursday to two years in jail. Wlodzimierz Umaniec, also known as Vladimir Umanets, was arrested after visitors discovered a scrawl across the bottom of Rothko's "Black on Maroon" on Oct 7. The 26-year-old later said he had written the words "a potential piece of yellowism" on the abstract painting to draw attention to Yellowism, an artistic movement he co-founded.