Once upon a time there was an actress called Julia Roberts, who lived blandly and bad-accentedly ever after.
Once upon a time, a little-known actress played a beautiful prostitute who fell in love with Richard Gere, and it seemed like the actress would live happily ever after. Her incomparable smile won her adoration everywhere she went, and upon the dawning of the new millennium, her talent was rewarded with a magical golden Oscar statue.
But as we all know children, all that glitters is not gold, and this beautiful trinket was cursed. Though the actress continued to work, it was only in films written by evil, mindless, misogynistic trolls.
Tragedy struck again in her 44th year when she fell under the spell of King Tarsem Singh who, while not evil, was often misguided in his ruling over immortals. And so when she agreed to play the evil queen in a retelling of Snow White, little did she know that she was doomed, not least because Singh’s magic caused the actress to forget her greatest weakness: an inability to do accents.
But the actress’s appalling “British” twang wasn’t her only problem, as Singh had also managed to cloak his entire kingdom in a thick cloud of blandness. Like its young star Lily Collins – whose bizarrely emphasised eyebrows must make her the lovechild of Colin Farrell and Frida Kahlo – his film was undeniably pretty, but stuck in an eternal state of boredom. Devoid of genuine humour, warmth or excitement, it was so insipid that it put Sleeping Beauty back into a coma.
The actress herself was unable to play evil, merely sarcastic, while Princess Lily and loverboy Armie Hammer were banished to live a passion-free existence. The seven clichéd dwarves suffered an even more patronising fate; they were magically transformed into normally-proportioned actors during every badly-directed stunt. The desperate King Singh tried to awaken his subjects with a bizarre Slumdog Millionaire dance routine during the end credits, but to no avail.
Little did he know that he held the power to end this tedium all along – all he had to do was look deep within himself and find some originality, energy and effort. But until that fateful day of discovery, the people of Mirror Mirror would live anaemically ever after.