Movie Box Review

ABC's ONCE UPON A TIME is one of the few no-question-about-it hits of the current television season, and the gathering at today's PaleyFest session, while enormously enthusiastic, was less raucous and more comfortably pleased than last night's crowd for Community.  (If Community's fans sometimes had the air of an Occupy rally that had actually won something, the faithful for Once were more like the fans of a sports team that usually makes it to the playoffs.)  Even moderator Matt Webb Mitovich was hard-pressed to treat an upcoming Season 2 as anything other than a certainty, and creator/showrunners Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz made it clear with their responses that they're already looking forward to the continuing arc of a successful show.

All season long, Once Upon A Time has very cleverly--much more so than some of us expected--accomplished the trick of creating 2 overlapping and parallel universes for its story.  One is a fairy tale kingdom where Snow White (Ginnifer Goodwin), Rumpelstiltskin (Robert Carlyle), Beauty (guest star Emilie De Raven) & the Beast (who happens to be Rumpelstiltskin),Jiminy Cricket (Rafael Sbarge), Prince Charming (Josh Dallas), and of course an Evil Queen (Lana Parilla) are among the characters living their fantastic lives.  The other is Storybrooke, Maine, where it turns out that the Queen, now the Mayor (Parilla again) has cursed all the fairy tale inhabitants to a dreary, change-less everyday existence without any happy endings.  But all that begins to shift when the somewhat mysterious Emma (Jennifer Morrison) comes to town, having discovered she's the birth mother of the Mayor's adopted son (Jared Gilmore), who has a book of fairy tales that's convinced him of what's actually going on.  The ingenuity of the conceit is that each episode cuts back and forth between the worlds, and what happened in the fairy tale land informs the characters and storylines in Storybrooke.

The potential pitfalls on such a complicated, multilayered project are infinite, and while the show has been dramatically absorbing and lots of soapy/supernatural fun so far, eventually things will have to be explained and concluded--making it a little scary that Kitsis and Horowitz hail from Lost, since we all know how well that one worked out.  For now, though, it's a well written and performed weekly pleasure.  (And, incidentally, despite pre-season comparisons, in an entirely different league from NBC's far less ambitious Grimm.)

The PaleyFest panel began with a screening of tonight's episode, which mostly bypasses the main series mythology to tell the story of Leroy, a janitor in Storybrooke but better known as dwarf Grumpy in his other identity.  Although there are a few B story steps forward on the Queen/Mayor's plot against David, the town's Prince Charming, the episode is more charming than essential.  (It does, however, provide a nice overlap of Once Upon's land with the Whedonverse, as Grumpy's true love is played by Whedon vet Amy Acker.)  The first act of next week's episode was also screened, enough to let us know that it will center on waitress Ruby (Meghan Ory) and a Big Bad Wolf.

In the Q&A, Kitsis and Horowitz provided little in the way of meaningful spoilers.  (Remember, they're from Lost.)  The most specific tidbit was that both Charming and Rumpelstiltskin will find their way to Jiminy's Storybrooke psychologist's couch this season, and that Barbara Hershey will appear as the Queen's mother.  Apart from that, it was all fairly hint-y:  for example, before the season is over, we'll know why the Queen hates Snow White and what the mototcycling stranger is doing in Storybrooke.  We may also not have seen the last of the Sheriff, dead in Storybrooke but not in fairy tale land.

The cast, almost all of whom attended the panel (the only notable absence was young Jared Gilmore), and all of whom have steady paychecks to look forward to for quite a while, seemed to be having a good time, although from the sound of it, Vancouver (much rain, cold winds and snow) has its limitations as a shooting location.  There was also some discussion of the "green stage" used to accomplish the show's seemingly vast sets in the fantasy sequences:  the actors stand on an almost barren soundstage, only able to know what the room around them looks like by checking the director's video monitor that has the pre-vis artwork (that will later be added via CG) loaded on.  It's apparently all too easy to walk through invisible walls--which, as it happens, is a worthwhile metaphor for the risks of serialized and mythological TV writing, as well.  Only the future will tell if Once Upon A Time can satisfyingly stay within its boundaries..

Nest up at PaleyFest, the season's other unarguable hit:  New Girl.  

ONCE UPON A TIME -  Sunday 8PM on ABC:  If Nothing Else Is On...


ABC's ONCE UPON A TIME certainly gets points for originality.  When other shows talk about their "mythology," they mean a general set of rules for some overarching story structure, but this show means business.  Pay attention, there'll be a quiz:  the tale by Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz (of Lost) begins in a fairy tale kingdom, where Snow White and Prince Charming are about to be married; the kingdom also includes such characters as Rumplestiltskin, Little Red Riding Hood and her Grandmother, Geppetto and Pinochio, etc.  Before the wedding can happen, though, the local Evil Queen storms in to announce that she's placing a horrible curse on the kingdom... and we're suddenly in modern day New England.  Where we meet the show's actual heroine, Emma Swan (Jennifer Morrison), a bounty hunter confronted on her birthday by Henry, the son she gave up for adoption 10 years earlier.


Emma wants no part of this, and drives Henry back to his home in Storybrooke, Maine, and his adoptive mother, who turns out to be Regina (Lana Parrilla), the town's Mayor.  Along the way, Henry tells Emma that in fact Regina is the Evil Queen of the stories, and the entire town of Storybrooke consists of fairy tale characters living under her curse, which has placed them into stultifyingly ordinary lives, completely unaware of their magical selves.  So Snow White is now a schoolteacher (Ginnifer Goodwin), Rumplestiltskin is a greedy landlord (Robert Carlyle), and so on.  But wait, there's more:  Emma herself is the daughter of Snow White and the Prince, sent away to the "real" world to escape the catasrophe, and destined to battle the Queen and end the curse.  Emma is understandably skeptical about this, but once she meets Regina, it's clear enough that she's an evil something, so Emma will be hanging around in Storybrooke for Henry's sake (and, along the way, presumably fight for the soul of the town).

Got it?  Now, here's the problem with trying to judge Once Upon A Time as a continuing series:   half the pilot is set in fairy tale land, with opulent sets and special effects, but by the end of the hour, the Queen's curse has taken effect and that kingdom no longer exists, which--I assume--means that the show itself won't have the dual-world structure that's enlivened Fringe, but will basically take place in the modern day town of Storybrooke.  So the characters will be, along with Emma and Henry, ordinary people like the Mayor, the schoolteacher, the landlord, etc.  We get very little sense of what that show will look like in the pilot, but shorn of its fantastic elements, it may not be much more than a small town soap opera with a bitchy villainess and a plucky heroine, plus some fanciful underpinnings.

Viewed as a self-contained hour of television, the Once Upon A Time pilot is interesting, but thin.  Morrison and Parrilla deliver their good and bad girl personas in roles that, as written, don't seem to be designed for any kind of psychological complexity.  The very appealing Goodwin, in her modern day scenes, is blandly nice (she gets more to do while she's still Snow White), and the only character to really make an impression is Rumplestiltskin, who's apparently as nasty in 2011 as he was back in the day.  Mark Mylod's direction is most impressive in the fairy tale scenes; the modern day sequences that seem to be the real basis for the show are less notable.

It's hard to discern what the intended audience is for Once Upon A Time:  although it will air at 8PM and features fairy tale motifs, it's not a kid's show. and without the characters knowing they're magical and doing fantastic things, it's not going to attract geeks.  Paired as it is with Desperate Housewives and Pan Am on the night, it's probably aimed at women, but other than the fact that the antagonists are female, there's not much to attract them (certainly it's not on a level with Vampire Diaries or True Blood, two supernatural fantasies built on female fans).  The show will be airing against Amazing Race, The Simpsons and (NBC hopes) football, and Mitch Metcalf's projections have it mired behind them all.  Without any clear constituency, Once Upon A Time seems ill-placed to find its happily ever after.

As romantic comedies with Kate Hudson go, SOMETHING BORROWED isn't so bad.  After her spectacular debut in Almost Famous, Hudson's become something of a brand name for dreadful rom-coms that nevertheless make money (How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days, You, Me & Dupree, Fool's Gold, My Best Friend's Girl and Bride Wars are among her milestones), getting to the point where you might want to groan just seeing her face in a trailer.  In recent years she's tried to branch out a bit with The Killer Inside Me and Nine, neither of which worked out too well at the boxoffice.  In Something Borrowed, she relinquishes the leading role to Ginnifer Goodwin (although she still takes first billing), opting for the more colorful foil part, and she seems as relieved as we are that she isn't the one pining for true love.

 

In Something Borrowed, based by Jennie Urman Snyder on Emily Giffin's novel, Goodwin plays Rachel, whose life is essentially defined by two relationships:  her childhood best-friendship with Darcy (Hudson) and her romantic longing for Dex (Colin Egglesfield--his name is like a James Ivory wet dream), whom she met and fatally introduced to Darcy when they were in law school.  (Also she has her confidant friend Ethan (John Krasinski), who behaves so much like the "gay best friend" in old movies, it seems odd that he's heterosexual.)  Rachel, who never stands up for herself and has always let the boisterous, self-centered Darcy take the lead, allows Dex to slip through her fingers when Darcy shows some flirtatious interest in him, and now Darcy and Dex are engaged and Rachel is vastly exceeding her quota of longing looks.  But one night a drunken, self-pitying Rachel reveals her pent-up feelings to Dex, and it turns out he feels the same way, and--welcome to the plot.  From then on, it's a mix of farce--Rachel, Dex, Darcy and Ethan all share a Hamptons summer house, where everyone has something to hide and Darcy is trying to fix Rachel up with hunky idiot Marcus (Steve Howey)--and low-boil drama, as Rachel tries to come to terms with her feelings about Dex and Darcy.

Movies like this aren't really about their storylines, which tend not to hold up to much examination.  They work (or don't) based on style and charm.  Here, Luke Greenfield (he directed The Girl Next Door, the picture that featured Elisha Cuthbert as a porn star but was mostly notable for Timothy Olyphant's turn as the villain) handles the cast well and keeps the train moving.  Goodwin is an enormously appealing actress, who as viewers of "Big Love" know is capable of much more than the wet-eyed, adoring glances and anxious tics asked of her here; after this and He's Just Not That Into You, she needs to diversify before she falls into Hudson's trap of becoming her own cliche.  Krasinski is the funniest person on screen, just as he was in It's Complicated; is there some Hollywood conspiracy keeping him from leading man roles?  Hudson, taken in small doses, is perfectly good as the monstrous Darcy.  (She and Goodwin have a late-night dance bit that makes you wish the movie would spin off its rom-com axis and take some risks.)  Egglesfield is somewhat a block of wood as Dex, which isn't unusual for the love object in these movies, but makes the very conventional ending feel even more dull.  

The one thing that's slightly refreshing about Something Borrowed is that none of its characters behave well; even our heroine is trying to steal her best friend's fiancee, however she may rationalize it.  There are even brief moments when the movie reaches for a taste of Woody Allen-ish emotional complexity... until it remembers its target audience.  In the end, it's just counter-programming, a little summery romance and laughter to balance the mighty hammer blows of Thor's opening weekend.  As the parade of 3D summer action spectacles commences, though, a Kate Hudson comedy that's bearable is a special effect that shouldn't be too lightly dismissed.

(SOMETHING BORROWED - Warner Bros - 110 minutes - PG 13 - Director:  Luke Greenfield -  Script:  Jennie Urman Snyder, based on the novel by Emily Giffin - Cast:  Ginnifer Goodwin, Kate Hudson, Colin Eggleston, John Krasinski, Steve Howey, Ashley Williams - Wide Release)