Word: cinderella
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...time-space confuscation. "Elvis" escorts a dorky librarian to the future, where his mission is to prevent a militaristic presidential candidate from winning and fulfilling his alliance with a disco-dancing tele-evangelist by outlawing rock'n roll. They do so by transforming a stuttering barber-woman into the Cinderella candidate destined for victory. What follows is a synchronic allegory of post-revolutionary American history only thinly disguised as an innovative commentary on gender roles in the 90s. Each character represents an associative metonym in American history, grounded in the contiguity of time and space. Some even double as personifications...
...talk to me about ideas or cinematic flair. The basic, and simplest, pleasure of art will always be that of the recognition. I recognize that this movie is based on the Cinderella prototype. Set in a trendy and capricious L.A. high-school, She's All That is a fairy tale about the undoing of the golden age of senior class president, honor student and captain to the soccer team, Zack Siler (Freddie Prinze, Jr.). His status is threatened when his prom queen shoo-in girlfriend (Jodi Lyn O'Keefe) returns from spring break with a tattoo and a new boyfriend...
Worst of all, marketability has a measurable effect on the athletic contests themselves. In college football last year, for example, Kansas State, a Cinderella team which was only double-over-time loss away from college football's national championship game, was knocked out the four most prestigious bowl games because the Wildcats did not have the drawing power of big-name football schools like Florida and Texas A&M. This in turn hit the university in its pocketbook: Kansas State, which would have made $12 million in a top-tier bowl game, instead drew a $1 million payout...
...anyway, as I was saying... We leave this place, bags in tow, Heidegger in our hip-pockets, and who sweeps in to fill our vacuum but all these old people? This year, they did so to an old-style British "Panto," a comical take on the fairy tale "Cinderella"; a traditional "St. George and the Dragon" mummers play; lots of familiar carols and rounds, including the ceremonial "Boar's Head Carol" from Oxford; Susan Cooper's classic solstice poem "The Shortest Day" and a spectacular rendition of "The Twelve Days of Christmas" you'll never forget. And, as always, Revels...
Having Richard Schickel write about Walt Disney is the equivalent of having the wicked stepmother critique Cinderella. What were you expecting from a noted anti-Disney author like Schickel? Disney, a man who made us laugh, who was called "Uncle" by generations of American children, who built an empire with his brother and revolutionized corporate America (Where would the 1990s be without synergy or branding?), deserved better. JOSH P. EDWARDS Naples, Maine