Gregory Maguire had no idea what he was unleashing when he wrote Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West in 1995. Since then, a tremendous amount of energy has been spent on revisiting the antagonists from fairy tales to modern fiction in an effort to explain their motivations. Quite often, the opponent is more interesting than the protagonist so there’s an appetite to understanding what made them “evil”.
Another trend has been taking the classic fairy tales and first making them into palatable Disney animated fare followed by live-action adaptations and stage editions. By combining the above, we arrive this year with Maleficent. Perhaps the single most arresting visual in the Disney rogues gallery, this cunning sorcerer has given generations nightmares since the cartoon version arrived in 1959.
With Angelina Jolie as the title character, this had the making of a fascinating character story hidden under layers of action,...
Another trend has been taking the classic fairy tales and first making them into palatable Disney animated fare followed by live-action adaptations and stage editions. By combining the above, we arrive this year with Maleficent. Perhaps the single most arresting visual in the Disney rogues gallery, this cunning sorcerer has given generations nightmares since the cartoon version arrived in 1959.
With Angelina Jolie as the title character, this had the making of a fascinating character story hidden under layers of action,...
- 11/2/2014
- by Robert Greenberger
- Comicmix.com
At its simplest, Maleficent, starring Angelina Jolie, is the live-action retelling of Sleeping Beauty from the sorceress's perspective. What it wants to be, however, is something much more ambitious. Dark, brooding and with a decidedly feminist bent, the film attempts to represent all facets of womanhood, punish the patriarchy for trying to usurp female power, upend fairy-tale clichés and - very occasionally - be funny. It's no surprise the violent fantasy film (for kids!) can't quite get its muscular wings around all that. As is often the case with villains, Maleficent wasn't born bad. The young fairy (played as a...
- 5/30/2014
- by Alynda Wheat, PEOPLE Movie Critic
- PEOPLE.com
All I could picture as the closing credits began for "Maleficent," the big-budget fantasy picture that Walt Disney Studios is releasing on Friday, was a whole generation of women explaining how deeply and permanently broken their view of men was by Angelina Jolie when they were just princess-crazy little girls. It is safe to say I will not be taking my kids to see "Maleficent," a film that is so swollen with psycho-sexual subtext that I felt like I was watching a true hijacking of the mainstream. But… by who? Robert Stromberg, who directed the film, is a production designer who has been involved in creating some of the richest, most detailed fantasy worlds on film over the last decade, and who worked in visual effects for 20 years before that, and he certainly brings that skill set to bear on how he establishes a sense of time and place in "Maleficent.
- 5/29/2014
- by Drew McWeeny
- Hitfix
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