Into the Woods (2014)
Directed by Rob Marshall
In a woods filled with magic and fairy tale characters, a baker and his wife set out to end the curse put on them by their neighbor, a spiteful witch.
3 connections found
View:
3 films that influenced Into the Woods
What critics say influenced Into the Woods
Adapted – and very heavily sanitised – from the 1986 stage hit by Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine (the latter provides the new screenplay), Rob Marshall’s revisionist fairytale mash-up comes on like Neil Jordan’s Company of Wolves with songs by Eric Idle, leaving you longing for the musical wit of Enchanted , and making you wonder whether you’d been a bit harsh on Tangled .
There’s also the live-action side, including Tim Burton’s “ Sleepy Hollow ” (1999) and “Alice in Wonderland” (2010), the lovely “ Enchanted ” (2007), and this year’s “Maleficent.”
During that time, “Woods” was revived twice on the New York stage (including director Timothy Sheader’s brilliant open-air production in Central Park in 2012) and could be felt as an influence on the “Shrek” movies and (especially) Disney’s “Enchanted.”
With music and lyrics by Sondheim and book by frequent collaborator James Lapine, “Into the Woods” often is cited as an influence on such self-aware fractured fairy tales as DreamWork’s jokey “Shrek” (2001), Disney’s “Tangled” (2010) and ABC’s ongoing “Once Upon a Time”; nevertheless, the play’s sometimes literally thorny content proved resistant to movie-studio pruners for years.
We’ve become all too accustomed to fairy tales as mainstream Hollywood material—partly as a result of the old stories being re-ironized and re-booted by Shrek , which itself arguably took several lessons from Sondheim’s show.
Like previous fairy tale mash-ups such as Shrek, Into the Woods pulls together a collection of well-known storybook characters in an original storyline, this time centred around a baker (James Corden) and his wife (Emily Blunt), who are desperate to have a baby.
It's only funny because it's meta in that broad Shrek way.
About that tonal shift: The first half of the film is a giddy romp through the fairy-tale landscape, a knowing poke at tropes that, given the age of the original production, foretold such future mash-ups as "Shrek."
It is strange to watch a film like “Into the Woods” in a post-“Shrek” world.
A cackling Meryl Streep plays the central villainess - a witch with deep self-esteem problems - to a terrific, youthful cast including Anna Kendrick (Pitch Perfect), Emily Blunt (Edge of Tomorrow), Chris Pine (Star Trek), James Corden (TV's Gavin & Stacey) and Johnny Depp (Ed Wood).