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Julia Roberts, left, and Lily Collins in Mirror, Mirror. (POSTMEDIA)

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Jane Fonda as a free-loving astronaut in Barbarella, a futuristic sex comedy that was released in 1968.

Barbarella

THE only extra on the Blu-ray edition of this '60s futuristic sex comedy is a movie trailer, which is a bit of a tragedy. I'd love to hear Jane Fonda doing a commentary track or an interview reflecting on her most overtly sexy role.

The most interesting thing about Fonda's attitude towards her titular heroine is that she's never disowned it. Critics like to place the character of the free-loving astronaut Barbarella as an eye-candy role that stood in high contrast to more overtly feminist heroines in her films of the '70s and '80s. For her part, Fonda enjoyed the film and presumably felt her character's easygoing sexuality was plenty liberated, thank you very much.

Released in 1968, the movie is very much of its time: The breasts aren't plastic, but just about everything else is.

After a zero-gravity striptease during the title sequence (the quality of the Blu-ray image allows us to see that Fonda is actually lying down on a glass surface), our heroine is assigned by the president of Earth to track down the missing scientist Durand Durand on the mysterious planet Tau Cet, where, she is warned, the inhabitants may be warlike. ("So they could still be living in a primitive state of neurotic irresponsibility?" Barbarella asks.)

Barbarella heads to the distant planet, encounters a hairy hunter (Ugo Tognnazzi), an eye-patched assassinatrix (Anita Pallenberg), a blind angel (John Phillip Law), a sadistic henchman (Milo O'Shea) and a coiffed revolutionary named Dildano (David Hemmings).

Fonda was hitting some kind of peak of sexiness here as the plucky heroine, and the movie does boast the occasionally inspired bits, including an assault by creepy dolls, and frequent insertions of witty dialogue. (Upon the prospect of being pecked to death by birds, Barbarella observes: "This is a much too poetic way to die.")

Alas, as a filmmaker, Roger Vadim was a bit of a hack, and he fills the screen with gaudy, ugly production design and psychedelic visuals out of a Jefferson Airplane concert of the period. The music is particularly loathsome: acid rock as conceived by some Hollywood square.

In short, there is as much to hate here as there is to love. In the last decade, Drew Barrymore, Rose McGowan and Anne Hathaway have been rumoured to be in the running for a remake. As long as it's properly R-rated and the star is as daring as Fonda was, I'm all for it. When it comes to remakes, it is better to try to correct a flawed film than duplicate a perfect one. HH1/2 out of five

Mirror Mirror

DIRECTOR Tarsem Singh's previous films, including The Cell and Immortals, showed no indication the director would ever have a talent for child-friendly comedy, and Mirror Mirror demonstrates conclusively he has none whatsoever.

This G-rated entry suits up to give Disney's classic animation chestnut Snow White and the Seven Dwarves a run for its money. Alas, the film, if not a poison apple, is a bit of embarrassment: The narrative purity of the Brothers Grimm is smudged with arch performances, camp dialogue and, instead of natural beauty, digital artifice up the wazoo.

Lily Collins is both pretty and girly as a pretty-girl Snow White, a princess who has been kept out of sight in the castle she should have inherited from her father the king, missing and presumed dead for a decade. The king has essentially been deposed by the Queen (Julia Roberts), a vain monarch who taxes the populace dry to satisfy her craving for luxury.

As Snow grows more beautiful, the Queen grows desperate to be rid of her, so she can hook up with the wealthy Prince Alcott (Armie Hammer). But when she sends her court toadie Brighton (Nathan Lane) to kill the princess, he instead frees her to find shelter with seven highwaymen-dwarves.

The bedtime story has an overlay of catty-bitchy humour: Imagine the Disney movie given a script polish by Joseph L. (All About Eve) Mankiewicz and you get lines such as the Queen playing down Snow White's snowy complexion: "Her skin has never seen the sun, so of course it's good."

The director, never one to be hampered by restraint, takes it all too far, especially with the film's elaborate visual effects. The Disney version may not have had a single frame of actual forest, yet its use of nature imagery feels positively lush compared to the sterile digital environs of this film.

When done with wit, intelligence and a satiric sensibility, the reinvention of a classic tale might yield something like the Broadway hit Wicked, a sharply entertaining do-over of The Wizard of Oz.

If you want to see it done without any of those redeeming qualities -- well, just look into Mirror Mirror. HH

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

1. 21 Jump Street

2. Safe House

3. Project X

4. Sherlock Holmes - A Game of Shadows

5. Journey 2 - The Mysterious Island

6. Alvin and the Chipmunks - Chipwrecked

7. Ghost Rider - Spirit of Vengeance

8. Wrath of the Titans

9. Wanderlust

10. Man on a Ledge

-- MTS Video on Demand, week ending July 1

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition July 5, 2012 E4