I Don’t Know Why, But Snow White Is Totally About Lefty Infighting

I don’t actually know how to judge these live-action Disney remakes on any relative scale of quality. The bar is so low, and what people seem to want from them — a tickle of nostalgia, the familiar rendered new on a technicality, 109 minutes of child-friendly distraction — feels so different from the usual standards. So: Snow White is not as bad as it could be, while not being anywhere near good? It’s better than, say, 2019’s Aladdin, which was awful but nevertheless made a literal billion dollars. It’s garishly ugly and padded out with new tunes from Pasek and Paul that are as smooth and unremarkable as river rocks, all of which may or may not matter to its target audience, who could just be basing their decision about whether to see the movie on how unacceptably woke social media has informed them it is. But while the movie itself is devoid of delight, there is something delightful about getting to actually see the thing after the years of culture-war skirmishes that have preceded its release like a wrathful red carpet and discovering it’s about lefty infighting.