Into the Woods 2014
I didn’t get to see this movie when it first came out. I wound up getting the Blu-ray using Disney Movie Rewards, which I usually save up for animated features. But a live action movie about fairy tales with an outstanding cast based on a Stephen Sondheim musical seemed like a pretty good bet (though I guess I wasn’t crazy about Sweeney Todd). I didn’t know much about the movie, but I knew it was a mash-up of several different fairy tales (which you find out in the first couple of minutes anyway). For the first hour, they work on weaving together those well known stories and as they are concluding and about to live happily ever after, you realize the movie is only halfway through. The second half is a like a sequel to all of those fairy tales. The songs weren’t familiar, but they are good if not as catchy as some Disney hits. Some of the songs have fast-paced rhyming lyrics (or rhyming without a song sometimes) that had to be really challenging, but are done flawlessly, along with some really good singing by some stars I didn’t know had that kind of talent (I had to check and see if Emily Blunt and Chris Pine were really singing, and they were). The movie, like the stories, can be a little dark. And sometimes the set looks a little too much like a set, but still much more realistic than the staged versions could ever have been.
I enjoyed the movie and could see watching it again to focus on and enjoy some of the performances as well as the songs now that I have been through them once before. Some critics didn’t care for the cuts made from the stage version (a lot of cuts were made to get the movie down to two hours), but everything seemed to work fine to me.
Written: 22 Apr 2018
Owned on: Blu-ray, Digital