ENTERTAINMENT
April 17, 2011 | By Steven Zeitchik, Los Angeles Times
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.
ENTERTAINMENT
April 29, 2012 | By John Horn, Los Angeles Times
Early in"Snow White and the Huntsman,"several droplets of blood fall to the frozen ground in extreme slow motion, a sample not only of the menace to follow but also of first-time director Rupert Sanders' truly painstaking attention to detail. The shot was the last sequence filmed by the veteran commercial director, and no matter how hard the crew tried, the production's artificial serum never had the proper viscosity or splatter. "It just looked like raspberry jam," Sanders said.