"Cinderella" (2000)

I love a good Cinderella tale.  From Leslie Caron in the 1955 "The Glass Slipper" to Julie Andrews in the 1957 "Cinderella" TV special, I've been known to spend a day watching one Cinderella after another.  Which made this film ... painful.  Rarely have I seen such a simple story so badly mangled.  Set in the Middle Ages -- or 1920s -- or 1950s -- or 1970s??? it liberally steals from Shakespeare (Lear and R&J), "Beauty and the Beast", "Mary Poppins", "The Wild One", "Misery", the original Grimm tales and more.  It comes off like some weird acid-trip/film noir version of the tale with cheap porn music scoring.  Brilliant actors like Kathleen Turner and David Warner are awful.  She's fake and over-the-top, he's flat.  Not as flat as lead actor Marcella Plunket who, long before Botox, manages to spend nearly the entire film without making a single expression.  Prince Valiant (really) is just as lackluster.  He actually says "Girls aren't cool".  OMG, who wrote this tripe?  Oh, and Daddy never dies.  It's ... weird.  Kind of robs the lady of her raison d'etre, you know?  And don't get me started on what they do to the glass slipper part of the story.  The ball has all the subtley of the 1960s Batman TV show mixed with your average teen horror film.  In the end, the milquetoasts end up together, of course, but it reads more like "The Graduate" than "Happily Ever After".  Tomorrow I'm clearing my palette with "Slipper and the Rose" or "Cinderella" (1965) with Leslie Ann Warren.  I need to forever wipe this atrocity from my mind.