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(Photo courtesy © 2007 Walt Disney Pictures)

I saw Enchanted with my son, who liked it. He tends to like virtually any film roughly targeted at his age range, which scares me. If I had my druthers, we would be having mother-son screenings of The 400 Blows at the Plaza Theatre, but I’m in the minority on that one. The whole film rubbed me the wrong way, maybe because though prissy, I was not exactly a princess-y kind of little girl, nor am I a princess-y woman. All of those little girls in tulle and crowns at the screening freaked me out. The whole princess-ification of girl culture in general disturbs me for playing into rescue fantasies and uber-girliness I thought contemporary women were beyond but appear to enjoy nurturing in their daughters.

I loved Amy Adams in Junebug, but her wide-eyed princess act (above) in Enchanted and those Barbie-hands she kept making made my teeth ache, as did the film’s heavy emphasis on matchmaking. I don’t remember so much cultural reinforcement on boyfriend-girlfriend when I was a young’un, but kids now seem spoon-fed the message of heterosexual coupling.

Enchanted just left me feeling tired and vaguely irritated at the film’s lame meta-attempts at tweaking the standard-issue fairy tale, though in the end it felt like more same old-same old.

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