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Into the Woods (1 Viewer)

Citizen87645

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It's adapted from the celebrated Stephen Sondheim musical (one of my favorites), but you can't really tell it's a musical based on the trailer...

 

Ejanss

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That's generally the way it is with Sondheim. (Even the opening "I Wish" number now seems to have been downgraded to dialogue.)

Sweeney Todd may have been carefully promoted to avoid the S-word, Jersey Boys' trailer tried to look like GoodFellas, and Annie's heavily pushing the kiddy-comedy, but I don't think the Once Upon a Time: the Movie target audience here will mind if there's a bit of singing now and then.
Ten bucks says the series follows suit and puts in a "musical episode" at some point.
Mike Frezon said:
Looks like it has great potential. The presence of Depp worries me, though.
He's only playing the Wolf, who's out of the story early. Basically a quirky-indulgent cameo.
(Had me worried, as I thought they were going to keep the stage premise of the Wolf and Cinderella's Prince being the same actor.)
 

Mike Frezon

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i gotta agree Cameron.

if that's the only trailer people were to see, there would be a lot of surprised people in the audience when the cast started to sing. :biggrin:

Looks like it has great potential. The presence of Depp worries me, though.
 

Citizen87645

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I'm not so worried about Depp since the film's not directed by Tim Burton, who seems to give him free rein.
 

John Kilduff

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I love Disney's animated movies, but I'm puzzled as to why they're producing the film version of a musical that subverts the tropes of Disney's versions of these fairy tales. I probably shouldn't be, since Disney did "Enchanted" in 2007, which was a cynical swipe at the first seven decades of Disney movies or what I once described as Disney's version of "Shrek". Although I shouldn't be surprised, I still am. I hope it will be good, but I figured this would be more of a DreamWorks movie than a Disney movie.

Sincerely,

John Kilduff...

Then again, Touchstone Pictures, a division of Disney, now only exists to distribute DreamWorks titles, so it would probably have a Disney pedigree no matter what.
 

Citizen87645

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I thought Enchanted was not subversive or cynical enough, but merely good-natured ribbing about fairy tales vs. reality.

I won't make the same mistake with this one, especially when I heard they wouldn't be making the wolf as lascivious as he is in the stage version.

I do look forward to Anna Kendrick as Cinderella though.
 

Mike Frezon

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Cameron Yee said:
I'm not so worried about Depp since the film's not directed by Tim Burton, who seems to give him free rein.
Yeah, it's just that everything he seems to do now is a variant on Captain Jack Sparrow. Johnny Depp is quickly becoming a Johnny One-Note.

He needs to do some serious drama or something to get out of his funk.
 

Ejanss

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Cameron Yee said:
I thought Enchanted was not subversive or cynical enough, but merely good-natured ribbing about fairy tales vs. reality.

I won't make the same mistake with this one, especially when I heard they wouldn't be making the wolf as lascivious as he is in the stage version.
Enchanted started out as Eisner kissing up to the princess-bashing section of what was then Shrek 2 mania, but it didn't stay that way--
In the original script, Giselle would've landed in a much less nice part of town, found a blue-collar plumber, and had to have gotten a "real" job.
Then, after Eisner was out and Lasseter was in, all of a sudden princesses were back "in" again, and Enchanted's script quickly had to change its gears to being "good-natured ribbing" that princesses might be a little silly but the little girls love them anyway...Whew, got out of that one. ;)

As for Woods, a lot of the rumors of "heretical" changes were busted by Sondheim himself, and it's pretty well intact.
Sondheim is infamous for picking highbrow stage concepts, and the idea in this one was to play on Bruno Bettelheim's psychological essays, but Disney was attracted to its suspicious resemblance to OUAT. Don't think much thought went into it outside of that.
(The movie idea, like Chicago, had already been around for twenty years of limbo; it just became another example of "Let Rob Marshall do it!")
 

Wayne_j

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Disney took a similar approach to Frozen. You could watch the trailer and never guess that it was a musical. I hope they had the actors speak their lyrics just for the trailer and that the original opening number is intact as a song.
 

classicmovieguy

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The scoring of "Stay With Me" in the background gives me chills. The film should be good - provided Disney hasn't done any tinkering with major plot points. People who have no concept of this musical are already giving it a good old thrashing (there are some hilarious articles emerging on the 'net), but if Sondheim has given his seal of approval, that is good enough for me.
 

Edwin-S

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John Kilduff said:
I love Disney's animated movies, but I'm puzzled as to why they're producing the film version of a musical that subverts the tropes of Disney's versions of these fairy tales. I probably shouldn't be, since Disney did "Enchanted" in 2007, which was a cynical swipe at the first seven decades of Disney movies or what I once described as Disney's version of "Shrek". Although I shouldn't be surprised, I still am. I hope it will be good, but I figured this would be more of a DreamWorks movie than a Disney movie.

Sincerely,

John Kilduff...

Then again, Touchstone Pictures, a division of Disney, now only exists to distribute DreamWorks titles, so it would probably have a Disney pedigree no matter what.
Considering that Disney is run by a bunch of people with zero respect for the company's roots, it doesn't surprise me at all. I mean we're talking about a group of people who completely abandoned an 86 year history of producing handdrawn 2D animation, not because "Princess and The Frog" lost money but due to it not making enough to satisfy the money snuffling pigs in Disney management.
 

Ejanss

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Then, um....don't go. :unsure:

One rumor floating around IMDb is that the Narrator/Mysterious Man has been written out of the story (so that the Baker can narrate), along with some of the recitative-songs and the bridge between the Act 1 finale and the Act 2 opening.
Just how they'll handle
who gets thrown to the Giant's wife as "scapegoat"
or the Mysterious Man's identity (which, thematically speaking, is something serious), remains to be seen.
 

classicmovieguy

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Ejanss said:
Then, um....don't go. :unsure:

One rumor floating around IMDb is that the Narrator/Mysterious Man has been written out of the story (so that the Baker can narrate), along with some of the recitative-songs and the bridge between the Act 1 finale and the Act 2 opening.
Just how they'll handle
who gets thrown to the Giant's wife as "scapegoat"
or the Mysterious Man's identity (which, thematically speaking, is something serious), remains to be seen.
If the Mysterious Man is gone, that means "No More" will sadly lose some of its impact... provided it hasn't been cut as well.
 

Aaron Silverman

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Holy crap, I wonder if the changes really were phony or whether the Powers that Be restored 'em after the outcry! A statement from Sondheim:
An article in The New Yorker misreporting my "Master Class" conversation about censorship in our schools with seventeen teachers from the Academy for Teachers a couple of weeks ago has created some false impressions about my collaboration with the Disney Studio on the film version of Into the Woods. The fact is that James (Lapine, who wrote both the show and the movie) and I worked out every change from stage to screen with the producers and withRob Marshall, the director. Despite what the New Yorker article may convey, the collaboration was genuinely collaborative and always productive.
When the conversation with the teachers occurred, I had not yet seen a full rough cut of the movie. Coincidentally, I saw it immediately after leaving the meeting and, having now seen it a couple of times, I can happily report that it is not only a faithful adaptation of the show, it is a first-rate movie.
And for those who care, as the teachers did, the Prince's dalliance is still in the movie, and so is "Any Moment."
 

GlennF

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We know it is going to be different from the stage play. Every successful movie musical pretty much is. Numbers are often cut out - even in Rofgers and Hammerstein shows like Carousel and The King and I and Oklahoma. I hope the movie is good because every time a musical under performs it puts another nail in the musical coffin and that is like a knife in my heart. Marshall's CHICAGO gives me hope. NINE...not so much. (I didn't hate it, but I found the excessive cutting during the musical numbers incredibly distracting and it isn't a great score. My 2 cents.)I do find it interesting the way they choose to show nothing musical from the film in the trailer. It's like they are trying to "trick" people into getting there and then "Ah ha. It's a musical". It's like when you see promos for foreign films and they try to avoid showing characters speaking so you won't find out it is subtitled. I guess they feel this makes a difference.Again, we live in hope!
 

Malcolm R

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GlennF said:
I do find it interesting the way they choose to show nothing musical from the film in the trailer. It's like they are trying to "trick" people into getting there and then "Ah ha. It's a musical". It's like when you see promos for foreign films and they try to avoid showing characters speaking so you won't find out it is subtitled. I guess they feel this makes a difference.
Disney followed the same strategy for the early marketing of Frozen apparently afraid that no males would show up, and that worked out OK.
 

Citizen87645

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Showing the wolf's furry junk would definitely earn the film an "R" as well as be quite horrifying. :)
 

Malcolm R

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Rated PG for thematic elements, fantasy action and peril, and some suggestive material.
 

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