Word: shrek
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...even better--particularly for the movie industry. The first two Shrek movies, which upended every fairy-tale cliché they could get their meaty chartreuse paws on, grossed more than $700 million in the U.S. alone; there's little reason to believe that Shrek the Third won't fill its hungry Scottish maw with hundreds of millions more after it is released...
...Shrek consciously rebelled against the sentimental Disney hegemony of fairy-tale movies. But today the outlaw is king: parodying fairy tales has become the default mode of telling them. 2005's Hoodwinked! reimagined Little Red Riding Hood as a crime Rashomon, while this year's Happily N'Ever After sent up Cinderella. Broadway smash Wicked posits that the Wicked Witch of the West was misunderstood. This fall Disney (et tu, Mickey?) releases Enchanted, in which a princess (Amy Adams) is magically banished by an evil queen to modern New York City, where she must fend for herself, parodying her princess...
...post-Lenten fast lately. Last weekend's total take at the domestic box office was only $77.7 million - a most unlucky number for the studios dumping their clearance-sale titles on an apathetic market. For filmgoers, this was the purge before the binge. A heady month is ahead, with Shrek the Third and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End ready to pick the public's pockets. And this weekend: Spider-Man 3, which on its own is guaranteed to top last weekend's cume. Anything under a $100 million launch would be disappointing for a threequel with...
...Worth it? The jury's out. With so many other big films competing for attention this summer, like Shrek the Third, The Simpsons Movie, Transformers and Ratatouille, some people will inevitably tire of spectacle by July and do something radical, like go to the beach instead...
That describes Rupert Everett's character in Shrek the Third: Prince Charming, who forms an anti-ogre posse of all the other fairy-tale losers, including Cinderella's stepsisters, Rumpelstiltskin and the whole sad crowd of fabled flops. Charming is their perfect ringleader; his very name suggests he was supposed to be destined for hero status. "He's a victim of circumstance," Everett notes. "He was brought up spoiled and good-looking in a culture of envy. He's quite naive and he never gets anything right. He just wants to get his happily-ever-after." And he would crush...