Cinderella Redux

Okay, in all honesty Apocalypse Now Redux is much more my style. But desperately needing something light and airy last night, I watched Enchanted on DVD. To me, life is much more like one big napalm storm than one big fairy tale. However . . . I have to admit, I had a big time watching Enchanted.

Amy Adams as Giselle, a cartoon storybook maiden waiting for her Prince to come, is perfectly cast. The movie starts in cartoon mode where Giselle sings and works with all the little creatures of the forest to clean house and do whatever else it is that fairy tale cartoon characters do. She then meets Prince Edward (James Marsden) when he rescues her from a maiden-eating troll. They immediately prepare to get married and live happily ever after. Prince Edward's mom, however, is the current Queen (played by one of my favorites, Susan Sarandon), and she has no intention of letting some other girl come along and take her Queenly crown from her. She's a totally evil Queen of course. Giselle shows up at the castle the next morning for her wedding with all her animal friends putting the finishing touches on her wedding gown, which they of course helped fashion for her. The Queen, disguised as an old crone, lures Giselle to a "wishing well" where she promptly pushes the young bride-to-be in. (Old crones really get a bad rap.) Giselle falls and falls, and then ends up popping out of a manhole in Manhattan in the real world, as a real person.

For my part, the whole cartoon sequence related above could have been a good bit shorter. I found myself getting impatient for some real world action. Okay, maybe what I really was getting impatient for was some eye candy in the form of her real world prince-to-be, Patrick "McDreamy" Dempsey. Not being a Grey's Anatomy fan, I don't get much McDreamy. Dempsey's character is a world weary, love worn, divorce attorney and single father of a 6 year old girl. When she asks for a book of fairy tales, he brings her a book about the most important women of the 2oth century instead, wanting her to grow up a strong, independent woman with no illusions about any "happily ever after" nonsense. The 6 year old is so not impressed. The two of them end up finding Giselle perched atop a billboard franticly knocking on the door to a palace pictured thereon begging for entry. Why they didn't take her straight to the Bellevue Psych Ward I don't know. Artistic license I suppose.

I'm sure you can guess where the action goes from there. Prince Edward, Giselle's chipmunk friend Pip, an evil denizen of the Queen (a now apparently typecast Timothy Spall--Peter Pettigrew of Harry Potter fame) and finally the Queen herself all eventually come to the real world. Despite some very silly and I thought unnecessary singing and dancing, the movie is a lot of fun and has some genuine laughs. (I can still see Prince Edward in full fairy tale prince regalia, sword and all, with one of those green foam Statue of Liberty crowns on his head.)

And, guess what! Ultimately, everybody lives happily ever after. On a scale of five talking chipmunks, I give this 3.75 of the little buggers.

Now, normally this type of thing would make me want to dig out my own eyes with a nail file. But last night, just for a while, I needed some make believe, and Enchanted delivered. Nothing wrong with that. I wasn't afflicted with any long-term delusions.

When I awoke this morning, I was right back to loving the smell of napalm.