Genevieve Valentine ([info]glvalentine) wrote,
2008-01-04 15:38:00

Red Shoes!

I'm getting more and more excited about The Red Shoes. For an example of why this movie is so gleefully fucked in the head, here's the video box:



This is the image they used in the children's section of the video store to advertise the very best of the movie and make you want to rent it for your child.

My memory is not perfect, but I saw this movie on VHS about four years ago, so it's all pretty fresh. Key elements:


  • Hans Christian Anderson is summoned to his friend's house; she's recently lost her husband, and her kid is pretending to be sick to get out of school. (They never even ask if she's freaked our that her dad is dead; they just think she's wicked for pretending to be ill.) She is, of course, playing with dolls on the sly, because little girls are never acting out; they're just wicked.

  • She's supposed to be about 10, I think, but the actress was older, and so when he calls her "Little Karen" it gets a little...statutorylicious.

  • He asks her to help him tell a story, which turns into playing a game with him, and the game consists entirely of trying to catch her being willful or indepedent/demonstrating any kind of self-love or self-interest/changing her story, Law and Order style/not being penitent enough. The game takes the form of a puppet show that we see as a ballet. I cannot tell you how creepy it is to watch this guy delight in manipulating a girl into saying something, and then immediately punishing the puppet that represents her.
    This was in the children's section.

  • He finally stops the game when the puppet representing her is footless, destitute, and begging an archangel asking him to forgive her or kill her because it's all she deserves. Little Karen bursts into hysterical sobbing and runs into her mother's arms, screaming she'll never be wicked again.

    Please remember, this is a 10-year-old whose crime was claiming to be too sick to go to school.


    • Also remember that none of this even touches on the actual fairy tale, in which an orphaned girl is forced by The Devil Himself to dance forever in a pair of red shoes that she liked because they reminded her of her DEAD MOM.


Who can't wait?! Oh, that would be me.
Tags: movies, questionable taste, questionable taste theatre, reviews, the red shoes

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  • 25 comments

[info]ecmyers

January 4 2008, 21:06:00 UTC 4 years ago

I keep confusing this with that Showtime porn series, The Red Shoe Diaries :)

Maybe if someone who owned this DVD wanted to do a screening I might want to see it...

[info]glvalentine

January 4 2008, 21:07:42 UTC 4 years ago

Maybe someone who owned this DVD will totally think about a screening.

Fair warning: the DVD was made in a Russian mob-front video store, transferred from a VHS copy I had four years ago and have been unable to watch since (because, you know, VHS not really hit with the kids these days), and the sound and video quality are one step up from pure trash.

But, hey, the whole movie's pure trash!

*ponders*

[info]ecmyers

January 4 2008, 21:19:14 UTC 4 years ago

If you'd rather skip supporting the Russian mob, I have a DVD recorder and would be happy to transfer VHS to DVD anytime. I could even run this one again if you think the VHS is higher quality than what you ended up with on DVD.

[info]glvalentine

January 4 2008, 21:26:29 UTC 4 years ago

Oooh, this is very useful knowledge.

Sadly, I don't think the quality was compromised much - the VHS was a previous rental from 1983 that I spent way too much money on, and it's just about what you'd expect for a rental tape from 1983. ;)

[info]liminalliz

January 4 2008, 21:06:03 UTC 4 years ago

OH RITE.


BUT IT'S TOTALLY, TOTALLY AWESOME. HAHAHAHA. I forgot how totally twisted that relationship was and how evol puppet Karen is a bit more hactually evil than not-so-Little-Karen is. I remember it being all about loving your mother right and vanity and really wonderful dancing. Hahaha, I remember the scene where she's all destitute and sad and stuff and trying to tell all the young maidens to not be as vain as she was, etc, and the young maidens being all "...o.O...WHATEVEZ, OLD UGLY PERSON. *waltz off*"

oh my heart. I WANT TO SEE IT AGAIN. I remember being in church thinking about my shoes and then feeling SO TERRIBLE ABOUT IT.

[info]glvalentine

January 4 2008, 21:09:33 UTC 4 years ago

Okay, here's the deal, as soon as I can figure out how to transfer the super-sketchy DVD into some usable file, I will find a way to get it to you.

[info]ecmyers

January 4 2008, 21:19:38 UTC 4 years ago

Can help with that too :)

[info]glvalentine

January 4 2008, 21:27:14 UTC 4 years ago

Even more useful!

My usual procedure is not working, which is why i've been flummoxed. If tonight's efforts are fruitless, I will be messaging you big-time.

[info]upstart_crow

January 4 2008, 21:27:36 UTC 4 years ago

I kind of want to see this now... just for the WTF factor.

[info]glvalentine

January 4 2008, 21:31:16 UTC 4 years ago

The box pretty much does it, right? Like, nestled right in the middle of a bunch of Strawberry Shortcake videos is this little gem!

I'm seriously considering uploading it to YouTube. It's impossible to believe this movie until you've seen it; four years ago when I showed it to a friend to prove it existed, he said afterwards, "I've never been so disturbed by a movie so short." ;)

[info]upstart_crow

January 4 2008, 21:32:21 UTC 4 years ago

Please do!!

[info]squirrel_monkey

January 4 2008, 21:30:37 UTC 4 years ago

I remember the original fairytale, which is really, pure Andersen with its fuckedupness. But the movie? Must. See.

[info]glvalentine

January 4 2008, 21:32:38 UTC 4 years ago

The fairy tale is messed up in its own right, but really, that's not what makes this movie so frightening. It's that when the horrible fairy-tale breaks, you go back to even-more-horrible frame story. Bleakest kiddie movie ever. Just check out the box!

[info]buymeaclue

January 4 2008, 22:15:01 UTC 4 years ago

...is there a polar bear?

[info]glvalentine

January 4 2008, 22:19:24 UTC 4 years ago

HA!

There's a church congregration made entirely of living, human-size clothespins?

[info]buymeaclue

January 4 2008, 23:50:08 UTC 4 years ago

I wonder if my library has this one, too...

[info]buymeaclue

January 4 2008, 23:51:42 UTC 4 years ago

THEY DO!

[info]glvalentine

January 4 2008, 23:54:43 UTC 4 years ago

HOLY CRAP what library do you USE?!

[info]buymeaclue

January 4 2008, 23:58:51 UTC 4 years ago

Somerville Public!

http://www.somervillepubliclibrary.org/

(I did have to go ILL to get the polar bear movie, though.)

[info]glvalentine

January 5 2008, 01:14:51 UTC 4 years ago

How soon will you have it?

Also, didn't The Polar Bear King teach you never to watch a movie I recommend because it will be hilariously bad? ;)

[info]buymeaclue

January 5 2008, 19:59:16 UTC 4 years ago

I picked it up today. *g*

I love hilariously bad!

[info]glvalentine

January 5 2008, 20:12:54 UTC 4 years ago

If you love hilariously bad, you are allll set. ;)

[info]glvalentine

January 4 2008, 23:54:24 UTC 4 years ago

I would also be really interested to know that; it's not a very popular movie, for, um, obvious reasons. ;)

[info]vschanoes

January 5 2008, 05:47:49 UTC 4 years ago

OK, and you haven't even touched on the ravingly sexist "Red Shoes" from 1950, in which a ballet dancer is unbelievably talented and lands her dream job as a principal ballerina for this company, so very brilliant that they compose a ballet based on "The Red Shoes" to showcase her brilliance. She falls in love with the company's composer, who falls out with the company's director and quits and demands that she go with him. Of course she does, and he rises to fame and prominence as a composer, while she, apparently, moons around the house staring longingly at her ballet shoes while he doesn't give a shit that he's completely crushed her as an artist. She then runs into the ballet company director who asks her to return to dance "The Red Shoes." She does without telling her husband, who shoes up in her dressing room on opening night demanding that she return to London for the premier of his opera THIS INSTANT and abandon the dancing and she, torn between her love for dancing and her scumbag patriarchal husband, throws herself out a window, surviving just long enough to beg her husband to remove the wicked red ballet shoes from her feet, and the company does a version of the performance without her, spotlighting the wicked, wicked power of those red shoes that make a woman stray from the path of total obedience.

[info]glvalentine

January 5 2008, 05:56:34 UTC 4 years ago Edited:  January 5 2008, 05:56:53 UTC

HA!

Well, 1) Now I don't need to;

2) That's a whole different crazy - sexist-50s-crazy. This is ACTUALLY INSANE. Like, it feels like a special production of Bellevue Acres Hospital and Mental Ward.
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