Streaming Shuffle
More audiences should embrace this joyful live-action fairy tale.
It’s Christmas, and if you celebrate and read this site, I assume you have a personal roster of holiday movies. (I’m a traditionalist, by the way: It’s a Wonderful Life reigns supreme. But the second tier of favorites is crowded with titles as varied as Miracle on 34th Street and Bad Santa.)
If you’re not from Eastern Europe, Václav Vorlíček’s 1973 film Three Wishes for Cinderella may not make your list of Christmas classics. But it should at least be in the running.
There’s nothing explicitly Christmassy about this enchanting fairy tale, but its wintry landscape, sense of joy, and history of holiday airtime all make it feel of a piece with the season. The film glows with high spirits, creating a world where enchantment—doves that sort out lentils and corn, hazelnuts that crack open to reveal silks and velvets, an owl with a fairy godmother’s eyes—feels like a natural extension of the affection and liveliness already on display. And the ordinary parts of the story—a snowball, a beloved horse—are shot with so much obvious love and attention that they become magical too.
None of it would work without a nineteen-year-old Libuše Šafránková as Cinderella. She absolutely sparkles in the role, making you feel her character’s freshness, her eagerness to be delighted by the world. This Cinderella isn’t passive, she’s playful. Her sweet romance with the Prince (Pavel Trávníček) shows her to be a young woman learning—and savoring—the fun of love and flirtation, experimenting with when to play (literally) hard to get, when to challenge, when to demur, when to dance, and when to declare herself. She tries out the role of princess and the role of huntsman, and in the end, she claims them both. This is an effervescent, deftly done coming of age story on top of everything else.
It never makes much sense to recap the plot of a fairy tale adaptation, especially one that, plus or minus a few new glittering strands in the embroidery, stays true to the pattern. So instead, I’ll enumerate some of the movie’s charms. (I suppose I should also disclaim its one real flaw, which is that there’s a touch of “fat people: inherently hilarious!”) The costumes are adorable, caught halfway between lovingly designed fantasies and Star Trek extras in glittery New Year’s hats from Party City. I would suggest this is a perfect intersection for this level of production, because there’s always something to look at, and whether you’re admiring or boggling, you’re enjoying yourself. If you can tolerate a hunting scene featuring a slain fox and bird of prey, the animals are terrific: this is a movie that was made for horse girls everywhere, but you’ll also get a beautiful owl, a deer, doves, and a dog, all forming the natural world that Cinderella can exist in readily and that her wicked stepmother can’t rule over. The snowy landscape is stunning and beautifully photographed, a natural winter wonderland of whites, cool blues, and dusky pinks and browns.
Disney’s own live-action Cinderella may evoke childhood nostalgia, but this is the version that will really make you feel young again. That quality alone makes it perfect for Christmastime.
Three Wishes for Cinderella is streaming on the Criterion Channel.
About the writer
Lauren James
Lauren James is a writer who wears many different hats (and pen names). She lives in Connecticut with her wife and two cats.
Lauren James’s ProfileTags for this article
More articles by Lauren James
Anthologized
Dan Duryea gets a shave and a second chance.
Anthologized
A little slice of American folklore that feels like it's been here all along.
Streaming Shuffle
You make your royal bed, and you lie in it.
Anthologized
Alone in vast space and timeless infinity: one man in a ghost town.
Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
Hacks, Season Three, Episode One, “Just For Laughs”
– They got me with that opening shot.
– Deborah’s too successful now, I love it. This is pretty funny as a demonstration of someone who, to their own frustration, needs something to fight. Despite what you’d think, she doesn’t actually want people who suck up to her.
– That is an incredible economy of storytelling, showing Lewis in poster and then the guy himself looking completely different.
– Ava is hilariously mechanical about her politics now.
– I don’t think you could get a funnier “character realises another character is near” beat than “Ava recognises the perfume a guy is wearing as something Deborah would make him wear”.
– The two of them meeting again a) came much earlier than I expected and b) has exactly the same weight as Ava reading her email, if in a very different key.
– Never thought about it until now, but part of what makes these two work is that Ava thrives on psychoanalysing someone and Deb thrives on the attention of that.
– Ava is finally able to be honest and say something meaningful and inspiring, like she always wanted.
“I just thought you put a child’s wig on backwards.”
Great episode, and it’s really impressive how the two of them meeting again feels so huge, even though they haven’t been apart that long from an audience POV. It really sells you on their perspective of it. (And I love the contrast between the stilted, “nice” reunion vs. the real, rawer one where Ava gets to vent and Deborah gets to be bitchy.)
Did you catch that’s Helen Hunt as the network executive?
Oh shit, I didn’t. I thought ‘man, she looks familiar’ but then didn’t put any further thought into it.
Charade – Between my back and an eye doctor appointment that left me blurry, I wanted something comfortable and familiar to watch. And it’s hard for me to go wrong with this one. Always a delight to watch “the best Hitchcock film Hitchcock didn’t make” (though Gaslight might be a better choice for that title), always fun to see the unlikely but successful chemistry of Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant. And I seem to be having a James Coburn festival of late (my third in two weeks).
MST3K, “The Horrors of Spider Island” – The film is 85 percent sexploitation and 15 percent cheezy horror, and also 100 badly made. Thankfully, Mike and the Bots managed to riff this successfully without falling too badly into misogynistic humor. The sketches for the final season are ever more absurdist, and I am not sure what to make of them.
Kojak, “18 Hours of Fear” – A woman who helped to steal printing plates from the Canadian mint is on the run after her boyfriend is murdered. Can Kojak find her and the plates in time to save her? Sadly, no, which is part of what makes this show interesting. The good guys always bring the bad guys to justice, but there are not too many happy outcomes otherwise. Also of note is that Kojak and his people spend the titular 18 hours without any sleep, and we get that special feeling of “everyone is exhausted and the audience can feel it.” Guests include comedian Chuck McCann, trying his hand at something more serious, and Jack Colvin before he spend four years chasing Bill Bixby on The Incredible Hulk.
Lingua Franca — in some ways this feels like a fairy tale as well, but with the addition of both realism and something that is not revisionism but reframing. In the broad strokes, writer/director/producer/editor Isabel Sandoval is a lonely housecleaner looking for her prince; the specifics are that she is an undocumented Filipina trans woman in 2017 in Brighton Beach, with the Trump administration looking to deport anyone like her — a husband is her ticket to safety but her passport is under her old name and gender and her bought guy cancels the deal. While this is happening Sandoval starts a friendship and then relationship with Eamon Farren, the charming but callow grandson of the woman with advancing dementia Sandoval is working as a home aide for. There is an expected conflict here and Sandoval the writer enters it, but then quickly twists it into something darker and far more complicated. Because Sandoval the character is both hungry for passion and romance but understanding of the work that goes into everything, even love; and Farren is a guy who believes in fairy tales, and believes the villain can be redeemed by a pure heart. Sandoval the director uses a lot of frames within frames but is not afraid to get very close indeed and the movie is unobtrusively well-shot (Panavision! Texture!) while creating an atmosphere of unease and fear. It builds to a moment of decision and then a brief epilogue that is somewhat ambiguous (the last scene in particular could be read in a very sad or a slightly not sad way); I’ve seen some criticism of it but I think it works. The fairy tale is over, the story is not. Still on Criterion for another week, very much worth watching.
The Shield, “Recoil”
A Christmas classic! Seriously, though, my wife had to work on Christmas Eve (and tomorrow; retail life sucks), so until she got home I just went with my regular non-holiday watch plans. You might call this “the one where Billings puts a surprising amount of thought and effort into something, and where Shane puts an unsurprising impulsive lack of thought into something else.”
Hawai’i Bowl
I wasn’t planning to watch this once South Florida got up 21-10 at the half, but then I put it on late when San Jose State stormed back to take the lead. South Florida tied the game at the end of regulation with a DOINK that went through the uprights, then ultimately won in the fifth overtime.
Bad Santa Director’s Cut
Still my preferred version, although I wish there was more John Ritter. Like Elf, I’m surprised with how quickly it moves (especially this version, which excises most of the cheap and broad humor). Also, this is one of the few Christmas movies to have three Oscar winners in the cast! Along with It’s A Wonderful Life, um… Love Actually, and… egh… Bad Santa 2.