Globetrotting Kids: Into the Woods Review
Looking for a film to watch over the holiday break? I saw Into the Woods and loved it!
This movie once again showed me the magic that Disney is capable of. This movie starring: Meryl Streep, James Corden and Emily Blunt is about a baker and his wife on a journey to break a curse so they can have a child but they have to find ingredients that the other characters contain. It is about a couple of classic fairy tales mixing together to show how the characters meet and interact with each other in many scenarios that happen in their stories.
Into the Woods is an amazing musical that is meant for the whole family with some funny parts that keep you interested. Disney also added amazing special effects to enhance the main goal of the movie; making it more realistic. I also liked the actors in this movie. They showed me that they put all their effort into making this movie interesting for everyone who likes Disney movies or wants to see a divine musical with their family. I cannot think of anything that I did not like throughout the movie.
In my opinion, Disney did a great job in making it as realistic as the movie could possibly be (ex: adding smoke and fog when in a gloomy situation, using sunlight in happy situations). I also liked that they added a couple twists so that you could refer to the original story and spot these special differences and spot the events that actually happens inside of the fairy tales. In conclusion, this movie is a must-see if you want to spend an amazing time with your family. If I had to rate it, I would rate it five stars because it had special touches in the movie like the differences in the background and the ways that the characters got along in the movie.
Take a look:
I avoided reading any reviews before seeing this film, so I’d have no expectations or prejudices. And in the opening moments, I thought I’d been rewarded. This was clearly nothing typical from Hollywood. The characters in period dress, singing their dialog, and the surprise of seeing Tracey Uhlman! I was delighted to see her attached to this project. It bode well! The camera focused on the actors, and not the CGI. Since I knew nothing of the story, I wondered if it would be another LES MISERABLES. But as it unfolded, the “sing-song” lyrics that I hoped would evolve into grand musical numbers got a bit tiresome, and a slow leak began to hiss from my enthusiasm. It needed more…something. OK, so we’ve been introduced to childhood fairy tale themes, and maybe they’re going to weave them together somehow. Well they attempted to, but not in an imaginative way. Merle Streep as the witch. I thought there might have been a dash of Margaret Hamilton in her initial appearance, but no…Streep was taking it elsewhere. The first glimmer of genuine music came with Johnny Depp as The Big Bad Wolf. Cheesy makeup, but I can overlook that, the scene still works. I thought Chris Pine as the Prince was the stand-out performance. My guess is that this characterization is what the screenwriters had in mind for the entire project…funny, hammy, over the top, but enjoyable. And consistent. But the other characters, with their occasional surprisingly bad dialog, never attained it. Streep’s performance became irritating. The other characters bounced between light comedy and out-of-place drama. I gave up any hope of this being an actual musical, and over half-way through, the sing-songy dialog ceased all together, for no apparent reason. It was like the assistant director took over while the big guy went to lunch. Eventually, we the audience stumbled out of a forest of confusion, and see what looks like the end of the story. I resisted looking at my watch the whole time, and thought, well that wasn’t bad, but…wrong. The story plunged back into an irritating forest of heavy-handed seriousness, with thorns of what again attempted to be musical dialog. I had had enough. This could have been spin on the PRINCESS BRIDE, but it got LOST (somewhere) IN TRANSLATION. On the plus side, I was impressed that this thing got the green light from an industry that loves formulaic stories that at least promise to get production costs back. I hope they will with this one. Thirty minutes too long, and btw…Stephen Sondheim? Really?