"Eh, oh, I got ya poison apple right heah!"

Hollywood’s pulling a Dante’s Peak/Volcano with us in early 2012 when it releases two Snow White movies within a few months of each other. Rupert Sanders’ Snow White and the Huntsman stars Charlize Theron as an evil queen who’s deathly jealous of Kristen Stewart’s beauty, which does tend to stretch the bounds of credulity. Meanwhile, Tarsem Singh’s Mirror Mirror seems to be much less concerned with sword fighting and magic, and much more concerned with lavish costumes and foppish dandies. Julia Roberts plays the queen, jealous of ingenue Lily Collins, who, in addition to being Phil Collins daughter, has gnarliest eyebrows in all the land (she comes from a magical place called Armenia), and likes to rock out to Bollywood dance numbers. Soft rock royalty or not, mean old Julia isn’t about to be upstaged, so when Armie Hammer, the WASPiest prince in all of New Haven shows up, uh… some other stuff happens. Like with dwarves and junk. Exciting!

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Snow White Fever has hit Hollywood, with two (possibly three) Snow White movies set to hit next year. One, Snow White and the Huntsman, stars Kristin Stewart as Snow White, has battle sequences, and will be one of the dumbest movies ever made, if the 15 pages of the script I made it through are any indication. Meanwhile, a batch of photos from the version Tarsem Singh directed just hit the web, and say what you will about Tarsem Singh’s movies (I actually really liked The Fall), his visuals are always “off the hook,” as the kids like to say.

However… it’s possible he may have overstylized this time. Snow White looks like she raided Björk’s closet, and on the next page you can see the new seven dwarves, Napoleon, Frenchy, Cowboy, Beardguy, Spaniard, Caveman, and the Asian. They look like a bit like Cirque Du Soleil’s take on the Village People.

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The swimming elephant scene in The Fall is one of the coolest scenes I’ve ever seen, and now director Tarsem Singh is taking his knack for amazing visuals and preposterous costumes to mythical ancient Greece in The Immortals, starring Mickey Rourke and some other people. Basically, if you saw 300 and thought, “Neat, but could use more dramatic slo-mo,” or saw Clash of the Titans and thought, “Cool, but could it be more like 300?”  Then this is the movie for you.

“The Immortals is like 300 for people who like 300!” -Accurate Pete Hammond.

Note: Not to be confused with the actual sequel to 300.  I predict a gritty 300 in the style of 300.

Director Tarsem Singh deserves to be a lot more well known solely on the basis of the swimming-elephant scene in The Fall (just imagining the logistics of that make me happy), which was a surprisingly good movie. I say surprisingly because his previous film was The Cell.  Singh’s latest is Immortals, starring Mickey Rourke in whatever the hell that is in the banner picture.  It looks if the bunny from Donnie Darko turned into a snap dragon and opened up to reveal Mickey Rourke’s face, which I imagine is the kind of hallucination that would put you off whatever drug had induced it.  Immortals looks like your basic, The-gods-are-angry-at-the-shirtless-men-in-skirts premise, but at least with Singh directing, you know it will look neat. It takes a lot to impress with visuals alone in this day and age, and Singh is one of the few who can manage it. Oh, and there seems to be a fight scene that takes place in some sort of gravity-free, Sistine Monty Python-esque sky purgatory. What the hell? This movie looks bonkers

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The Fall (“presented” by David Fincher and Spike Jonze) was directed by Tarsem Singh, the director of The Cell – a movie that had some pretty crazy visuals, but also Jennifer Lopez.  From what we’ve seen of The Fall (opening May 9th), it has some pretty crazy visuals, but also a little chubby girl with an annoying accent.

For some it’s snakes, spiders, or midgets, but everybody has their irrational fears.  Mine happens to be little kids with speech impediments.  They creep me the hell out.  Back when I was a substitute teacher, a kid came up to me to ask if he could go to the bathroom, but when he opened his mouth he had an atrocious lisp.  Next thing I knew I was standing on top of my chair hitting him in the head with a rolled up newspaper.  

[Thanks to RoboPanda for the tip]