Topline:
The remake Snow White has been criticized for its "woke" take on the original movie by its actors and political voices.
The backstory: "The cartoon was made 85 years ago, and therefore it's extremely dated when it comes to ideas of women being in roles of power and what a woman is fit for in the world," Actor Rachel Zegler said.
Go deeper...to read more on what has been said about the new trailer...
Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it’s off to online uproar factory we go. The first teaser trailer for the upcoming live-action remake of Disney's Snow White is here.
Starring Rachel Zegler as Snow White and Gal Gadot as the Evil Queen, the pair introduced the highly anticipated teaser at Disney’s D23 Expo Friday evening, with a release scheduled for March 21, 2025. Featuring first glimpses of Zegler singing "Whistle While You Work" and Gadot talking to her mirror, mirror, the trailer also showcased seven CGI dwarfs.
Written by Greta Gerwig (Barbie) and Erin Cressida Wilson (The Girl on the Train) and directed by Marc Webb ((500) Days of Summer, The Amazing Spider-Man), the people behind the film have emphasized that this latest adaptation features several 'modern' twists, alongside new songs from the duo Benj Pasek and Justin Paul (Dear Evan Hansen, The Greatest Showman).
Could this update to the 1937 classic be the — erm — fairest of them all? It may be a tough sell for Disney fans and other extremely online critics, whose scrutiny of the latest adaptation began years before today's trailer drop.
Here is a brief overview of their grievances, explained.
When news broke in 2021 that Zegler, who had her breakout role as Maria in Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story remake, would be playing the titular character, it provoked a string of racist comments on social media. People questioned why an actress of Latin descent would be playing a character with "skin white as snow."
Zegler, who is of Polish-Colombian background, responded to the comments on X by saying she didn’t want to be dragged into the "nonsensical discourse"about her casting.
"I really, truly do not want to see it," Zegler wrote in a post that included photos of her as a child dressed as a princess. "I hope every child knows they can be a princess no matter what."
In another interview with Variety in 2022, Zegler and Gadot talked about how the story of Snow White was being adapted with a "modern edge" — one that would nix the part about Snow White being saved by a prince.
"She’s the proactive one," Gadot said. "She's the one who sets the terms. It's [these factors] that make it so relevant to today."
"She's not going to be dreaming about true love. She's dreaming about becoming the leader she knows she can be, and the leader that her late father told her that she could be if she was fearless, fair, brave and true," Zegler said.
In another interview, Zegler referred to the prince as a "stalker" and said the messaging would be updated to reference a woman's power in the modern world.
"The cartoon was made 85 years ago, and therefore it's extremely dated when it comes to ideas of women being in roles of power and what a woman is fit for in the world," Zegler said. "So, when we came to reimagining the actual role of Snow White, it became about the 'fairest of them all' meaning who is the most just and who can become a fantastic leader, and the reality is Snow White has to learn a lot of lessons about coming in to her own power before she can come into power over a kingdom."
The comments provoked a wave of backlash on social media, notably from "anti-woke" accounts and from several conservative media outlets including the Daily Wire, which responded by saying it was producing its own version of the classic that would be written "in line with the values in which it was written."
It just gets worse and worse....
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) August 13, 2023
The new Snow White says that the Prince was a creepy stalker and suggests that all scenes of the Prince could be cut
She’s a walking PR disaster for Disney pic.twitter.com/7QJGDIx5er
Others, like TikTok user @reubenwoodall, criticized Disney's attempt to turn Snow White into a "girl boss."
"The point of Snow White's fairytale isn't that she's going to try and become a leader," Woodall said in a video that amassed more than 1.3 million likes. "She's not supposed to be this girl boss, leader, queen, feminist icon. And I don't know why every reimagining, it has to be that the woman is in a position of power, otherwise it's not feminist."
In an interview with the British newspaper The Daily Telegraph in 2023, David Hand — the son of the 1937 animation’s original director — told the paper he felt it was a "disgrace" that Disney was "trying to do something new with something that was such a great success earlier."
"There's no respect for what Disney did and what my dad did … I think Walt [Disney] and he would be turning in their graves," Hand said.
In a 2022 interview, the actor Peter Dinklage criticized Disney over its plan to release the live-action remake, stating he was "taken aback" by the studio's celebration of casting Zegler as a Latina lead while revisiting a story with an unflattering representation of dwarfs.
“It makes no sense to me. You’re progressive in one way and you’re still making that f—ing backwards story about seven dwarfs living in a cave together, what the f— are you doing, man?" said Dinklage, who has a form of dwarfism called achondroplasia, during an interview on the WTF With Marc Maron podcast.
Dinklage’s comments prompted Disney to release a statement saying it had decided to take a "different approach" with the seven character. "To avoid reinforcing stereotypes from the original animated film, we ... have been consulting with members of the dwarfism community," a Disney spokesperson told Variety.
Copyright NPR 2024
Topline:
San Diego's North County has been undergoing a restaurant renaissance in recent years, with several restaurants now recognized with Michelin stars. Here's our guide to seven locations worth trying.
Why it matters: Just two hours away from L.A., in gorgeous coastal towns, these restaurants offer some of the best food in SoCal right now.
What's on offer: Try sea urchin tongues atop a crisp English pea tartlette, charred onion with glossy caviar in a pitch-black tart or scallop and shrimp siu mai dumplings, paired with pickled blueberries.
You may have driven through North County on a scenic detour on the way to San Diego, or even stayed at one of its idyllic coastal communities like Oceanside, Carlsbad, Encinitas, Solana Beach and Del Mar. But you may not have been aware that this sun-soaked corridor has been undergoing a restaurant renaissance in recent years, with both seasoned chefs and newcomers making their mark.
“San Diego was labeled the home of the fish taco for many years,” said William Bradley, the chef of three-Michelin-starred Addison, which opened inside the Fairmont Grand Del Mar resort in 2006. “We didn't have our identity because it was always San Francisco, L.A. and Napa. It was tough for San Diego to show what they can do. ”
Over the past 20 years, Bradley, who grew up in San Diego’s South Bay community of Chula Vista, has witnessed the region’s transformation firsthand. He attributes San Diego’s inclusion in the Michelin Guide California in 2019 as a turning point for the local dining scene.
“They'll find a restaurant that doesn't have all the glitz and glamor, doesn't have the PR machine and a celebrity chef,” he said. “They find these diamonds in the rough.”
In 2022, Addison became the first restaurant in Southern California to earn three Michelin stars, the guide’s highest honor. Neighboring restaurants Jeune et Jolie and Lilo in Carlsbad, along with Oceanside’s Valle, have each earned and maintained a Michelin star in recent years.
“I think we're at a time now that we've got great restaurants, great chefs, and the accolades to support the talent that's here,” Bradley said.
Restaurants will know if they’ve kept, lost, or earned additional stars at the annual Michelin Guide California awards ceremony on June 24.
For road-trippers planning a weekend jaunt down the coast or food obsessives plotting a drive-there-and-back feast on the town, here are seven dining destinations defining North County’s culinary scene right now — listed in alphabetical order.
At 24 Suns, chefs Nic Webber and Jacob Jordan take an experimental approach to Chinese food, a cuisine with a deep history in California dating back to the Gold Rush.
Ever since the first Chinese immigrants established restaurants in 1849, traditional recipes have adapted to local ingredients and palates, resulting in dishes with a distinctly Chinese American flair, like chop suey and egg foo yong. This nearly 200-year-old culinary tradition continues to evolve inside a squat building in Oceanside that most recently served as a German dive bar (and a strip club before that, according to a server).
Here, the two chefs, who met while working on the line at Addison, serve their take on Chinese food inspired by local micro-seasons. Snow fungus and king oyster mushrooms mimic the slippery texture of a traditional tripe-and-tendon cold appetizer, while plump scallop and shrimp siu mai dumplings are paired with pickled blueberries and served in a luscious puddle of buttery fermented habanada (spiceless habanero pepper). Though the menu at 24 Suns changes often in accordance with ancient Chinese solar terms, Webber and Jordan’s cooking remains dependably earnest with every iteration.
Location: 3375 Mission Ave., J, Oceanside.
Hours: Wednesday through Sunday, 4 to 10 p.m.
Arriving at Addison is reminiscent of approaching a stately chateau while navigating through the French countryside. The impeccably manicured 400-acre Fairmont Grand Del Mar — with its Mediterranean Revival architecture full of Corinthian columns, abundant arches, and red clay tile roofs — provides an opulent and tranquil backdrop befitting of the restaurant’s culinary ambition.
Inside a newly renovated dining room overlooking the property’s sprawling golf course, chef William Bradley and his team deliver a three-Michelin-starred fine dining experience that attracts a global audience nightly — everyone’s hungry to experience the chef’s expression of French-rooted Southern California cooking.
A bright shot of pineapple tepache lightly sweetened with piloncillo welcomes diners before the parade of 10 courses ($395 per person), punctuated by exquisite Japanese seafood and more quenelles of caviar than one can count, begins. Nods and winks to local foodways, like a chicken-liver churro and a lemony “fish” taco, give the menu a sense of whimsy and place.
Location: 5200 Grand Del Mar Way, San Diego.
Hours: Tuesday through Saturday, 5 to 9 p.m.
Veteran restaurant-goers (and Anthony Bourdain stans) tend to roll their eyes at brunch, with its tired Benedicts prepared by hungover cooks for tipsy crowds. But chef Andrew Bachelier’s Atelier Manna in Encinitas makes a compelling case for the daytime meal.
After cutting his teeth for over two decades in fine-dining kitchens, including six years at Addison and leading the charge at Jeune et Jolie and Campfire in Carlsbad, Bachelier opened the breezy 25-seat restaurant seeking the ever-elusive work-life balance — and brunch time will never be the same again.
Bachelier’s standout French toast starts with an entire third of a sourdough loaf locally sourced from Prager Brothers that’s steamed until pliable, saturated with sweetened custard, soaked overnight, and baked to order. Ordinary poached eggs get the Turkish treatment under the chef’s care: cradled in herbed yogurt, bathed in chile-garlic butter, strewn with parsley, dill, and mint, and served with toast.
To wash everything down, there are non-alcoholic “vitality tonics” from bar manager Nick Sinutko, including a refreshing carbonated cold brew spiked with red ginseng, cinnamon, and holy basil, and bubbly dragonfruit juice laced with juniper and ginger.
Location: 1076 North Coast Highway 101, Encinitas.
Hours: Wednesday through Sunday, 9 a.m. to 2 p.m.
An inspired four-course pre-fixe menu ($120 per person) unfolds with elegance and ease at Jeune et Jolie , stationed on a quieter stretch of State Street in downtown Carlsbad, in one of the prettiest dining rooms in North County. The Michelin-starred restaurant’s menu is grounded in French tradition and seasonal sourcing, while Paris’s bistronomy tradition informs its sensibility.
Chef Eric Bost, who decamped from Los Angeles to North County when his critically acclaimed restaurant, Auburn, shuttered in 2020, is picking up where opening chef Bachelier left off.
Jeune et Jolie’s choose-your-own-adventure menu allows diners to curate meals to taste, selecting individual dishes from a handful of choices that change often to reflect peak seasonality. In the midst of springtime’s splendor, supple sea urchin tongues topped a crisp English pea tartlette, and caviar, dill, and wasabi accompanied chubby stalks of verdant asparagus.
“This is French cooking through a Southern California lens,” servers tell diners as they settle in for a spirited evening.
Location: 2659 State St., Suite 102, Carlsbad
Hours: Wednesday through Sunday, 5 to 10 p.m.
There are no bad seats in the house at Lilo in Carlsbad, where 22 diners are seated along a U-shaped counter overlooking hushed, hunched-over, and hyper-focused cooks collectively assembling and delivering the night’s many courses.
Opened by chef Bost in a former boogie board factory after the success of Jeune and Jolie, Lilo serves an intricate tasting menu ($300 per person) featuring a dozen courses that are as beguiling to behold as they are to consume.
Locally caught spiny lobsters, prettied with charred cucumber and blackberry, arrive on an icy vessel surrounded by native plants. A savory-sweet quenelle of orgeat ice cream heaped with kaluga caviar has appeared on the menu since day one. Lilo’s seasonally-driven, technically precise cooking, coupled with warm yet expert hospitality, earned the restaurant a Michelin star just 10 weeks after opening.
Location: 2571 Roosevelt St., Carlsbad.
Hours: Tuesday through Saturday, 5 to 10 p.m.
While many of North County’s most notable restaurants are chef-and-seasonally driven, Valentina Restaurant in Encinitas bucks the trend and leans into tradition instead.
Named after the daughter of owners Mario and Morgan Guerra, Valentina has garnered a passionate local following for its modern Spanish cooking since opening in 2019. The restaurant’s black and white interior — featuring white-washed booths, subway tile walls, and honeycomb floors — provides a duotone backdrop for a dazzling parade of tapas.
Traditional patatas bravas are reimagined as French potato pavé, daintily dolloped with spicy tomato sauce and chive aioli. A pristine plate of raw local bluefin tuna, steelhead trout, and scallop is served with olive oil, paper-thin red onions, and fried capers, riffing on San Francisco’s Swan Oyster Depot’s winning formula. Artichokes, trimmed of all their fibrous bits, are smashed and seared to golden perfection and served with a rich aioli for contrast. Valentina’s small plates deliver big, bold flavors.
Location: 810 North Coast Highway 101, Encinitas
Hours: Open daily from 5 to 9 p.m. (10 p.m. on weekends)
For anyone who’s ever dined in and around Valle de Guadalupe, Mexico’s wine country, the magic of the experience rests as much in the surroundings — undulating vineyards and hilly vistas — as what’s on the plate.
The dynamic spirit, characteristic of Baja dining, is brilliantly captured inside chef Roberto Alcocer's Michelin-starred restaurant Valle, located steps away from the Oceanside pier on the ground floor of the Mission Pacific Hotel. Polished service is delivered with ease, while the dining room pulsates with the kind of vibrant energy often missing from fine dining temples.
Valle’s 12-course, $220 menu is a celebration of modern Mexican cooking, full of visual twists (see: charred onion meets glossy caviar in a pitch-black tart), nods to tradition (see: nixtamalized local vegetables served with white mole), and utterly delicious mashups (see: miniature blue corn huaraches embellished with A5 Japanese wagyu). The culinary conversation between San Diego and Baja California is continually evolving with Alcocer as a trusty translator.
Location: 222 N. Pacific St., Oceanside
Hours: Tuesday through Saturday, 5 to 9 p.m.
Topline:
For LAist correspondent Adolfo Guzman-Lopez, the current soccer tournament reminds him of the crossroads he stood at as an undocumented teen in San Diego during the 1986 World Cup.
Why now: It's forty years since that consequential year, but the memories remain strong. And Mexico is once again hosting the games, along with the U.S. and Canada.
Go deeper: A list of World Cup watch parties in L.A. County.
The 1986 World Cup couldn’t have come at a better time.
I was a junior at Mission Bay High School in San Diego, and the uncertainty of life after high school was hitting me with a weight most teens didn’t have to bear. I was undocumented, so college admission was unclear at best, while job prospects were dim without a social security number or legal authorization to work.
My mother was undocumented too. We didn’t talk about Plan B — staying in the shadows.
How did I stay motivated and hold on to hope for college, and what would become a decades-long journalism career, without knowing that soon the federal Amnesty bill would regularize me and many others?
I have one of the undisputed stars of Mexican and European soccer to thank: Hugo “Hugoool” Sanchez.
Hugo Sanchez was about a decade older than me and had worked his way up in Mexican soccer. By the mid 1980s his proven goal-scoring skills as a forward had landed him at the famed Real Madrid soccer club in Spain.
Let me back up a bit. I didn’t even like soccer as a kid. My heroes in elementary school slugged on the diamond and threw touchdowns. But then came Sanchez, from Mexico City, where I was born. The weekend sports shows I watched on Mexican TV from Tijuana played his goals over and over.
But the highlight reels were missing something darker. Sanchez was not welcomed with open arms by the Spanish. Instead, he faced prejudice as a lone Mexican in a culture that labeled him an “other.”
At that time, California’s simmering tensions over immigration made me and other immigrants feel something similar.
Sanchez’s perseverance and accomplishments were inspiring to me. I put him ahead of my other sports heroes: slugger Tony Gwynn with the Padres and Chargers’ quarterback Dan Fouts. I felt much closer to Sanchez.
What does that have to do with the World Cup? Everything.
Organized sports were out of reach for me as a kid. My parents were busy working multiple jobs, and they needed me to babysit my younger siblings when school was out. They would have laughed at me if I asked them to drive me to anything other than school.
But seeing Sanchez's prowess on the soccer pitch and anticipating all the goals he'd score for the Mexican national team in the 1986 World Cup, in his home country, motivated me to start playing soccer at weekend pick-up games. I discovered I loved playing.
By then I was older, and no longer needed a ride to games, so I tried out for the Mission Bay High School varsity team. I was in good shape, but far behind in soccer-smarts compared to those who’d played as kids in San Diego’s youth soccer leagues. Despite that, I made it. I felt overjoyed; my determination and work paid off. I had some great practice games, one with a chipped goal over the keeper’s outstretched arms, but the truth is that I was on the bench most of the season.
The disappointment that I didn't play much during the season didn't lead me to give up on soccer. I had made it on the team, showed up to play, and put in a lot of effort, and that was rewarding in and of itself.
And by achieving this goal, by following Sanchez’s example of perseverance, I had something even more important — a sense of fulfillment.
My life changed rapidly after that. The 1986 World Cup was in June. In November, after passing through Congress, President Ronald Reagan signed the federal amnesty into law.
Soon after, my mother and I received our green cards. That allowed me to file for a Social Security number, which meant I could apply to college. I was accepted to U.C. San Diego, where I got bit by the journalism bug while working for Voz Fronteriza, one of the student newspapers. That led to where I am today, decades later, an LAist correspondent.
I’ll be watching this World Cup thinking of my 1986 self, the crossroads I faced, and how “the beautiful game” was there to uplift me when I needed it.
Topline:
The Orange County Board of Supervisors has directed its public works department to look into alternatives to using chemicals and pesticides to control overgrowth in flood control channels.
Why this matters: The chemicals clear overgrowth of vegetation, which helps prevent channels from backing up during storms. But critics say it poisons waterways and washes out into the ocean. Supervisor Katrina Foley said she wants to find a better way: “I remain encouraged by the overwhelming public support in exploring nontoxic solutions for our waterways."
What's next: The board will revisit the issue — and the public works department's findings — at a later meeting.
Biking on river trails, going on picnics and surfing in the ocean are activities California residents cherish every summer. But headlines about the use of toxic chemicals in flood control channels around Orange County have created anxiety for those looking forward to their favorite activities this summer.
Dozens of environmental activists and Orange County residents packed the Orange County Board of Supervisors meeting this week to urge the county to halt the routine use of toxins they say poison waterways and wash out into the ocean.
But several supervisors said it wasn’t that simple. The chemical prevents overgrowth in flood control channels, and that overgrowth could lead to backups and flooding, affecting neighborhoods and businesses during heavy rains.
Controversy over the chemical use led to an announcement last month by Orange County Supervisor Katrina Foley, declaring that chemical usage would be halted for the moment. The issue then came before the board this week for further discussion.
Supervisors decided to study the issue and revisit it in the months ahead, and directed the OC Public Works department to evaluate methods for clearing overgrowth of vegetation that crowd flood channels, and look for alternate methods of doing so.
Brent Linas, founder of the Orange County Creek Team, which has succeeded in bringing the environmental issue to the public’s attention through salty Instagram posts and other social media tactics, blasted what he described as the board’s inaction.
He feels that the board is “deeply dysfunctional” and plans on using the meeting as momentum to spread awareness about the chemicals' negative effects on the environment. “There’s palpable outrage in Orange County right now around this and we fully intend to tap into that,” Linas said.
Foley also plans to reintroduce public noticing requirements at the next meeting June 23. The notices would alert residents to the planned use of any pesticides and herbicides. “Orange County residents deserve transparency to help make informed decisions about where their families recreate,” Foley said in a statement released the after the meeting. “I remain encouraged by the overwhelming public support in exploring nontoxic solutions for our waterways.”
One of the best things you can do to hold officials accountable is pay attention. Your city council, board of supervisors, school board and more all hold public meetings that anybody can attend. These are times you can talk to your elected officials directly and hear about the policies they’re voting on that affect your community.
Topline:
In a rare rebuke from voters, Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Robert Draper, who’s facing several allegations of violating ethics rules, has lost his seat to deputy district attorney Tal Khan Valbuena. While a small margin of ballots are left to count, Valbuena has maintained a comfortable lead with more than 50% of the 1.7 million votes cast.
The background: This was a challenging race for voters because the California Commission on Judicial Performance, the state watchdog of judges, hasn’t yet reached a decision on the allegations against Draper — some of which he denied and others he admitted to in an interview with LAist. Draper was appointed by former Gov. Jerry Brown and has spent 15 years in Office No. 2, while Valbuena’s career has focused on mental health court.
What the candidates say: On Thursday, Draper conceded over text, telling LAist that serving as a judge has been “the greatest honor and joy” of his career and that he congratulates Valbuena. He said he’s going to try to make sure that what the commission “did to me will not be done to Tal or any of the wonderful young and older Judges now serving of whom I am very proud.”
In a statement to LAist, Valbuena said he’s “deeply humbled” by voters’ trust and thanked Draper for his service. He said he’ll bring his lived and professional experience to the bench, where he’ll work to earn more of the public’s trust.
What’s next: The vote still needs to be certified by the California Secretary of State, which happens on July 10. The California Commission on Judicial Performance members could come to a decision before then, including to possibly remove Draper or clear him of wrongdoing. In the meantime, Valbuena is expected to take office in January.
