Drive-In Double Header: SNOW WHITE AND THE HUNTSMAN and BATTLESHIP

Snow White and the Huntsman (2012) – Directed by Rupert Sanders – Starring Kristen Stewart, Charlize Theron, Chris Hemsworth, Sam Claflin, Lily Cole, Sam Spruell, Ian McShane, Bob Hoskins, Johnny Harris, Toby Jones, Eddie Marsan, Ray Winstone, Brian Gleeson, and Nick Frost.

Battleship (2012) – Directed by Peter Berg – Starring Taylor Kitsch, Liam Neeson, Alexander Skarsgård, Rihanna, Brooklyn Decker, Tadanobu Asano, Hamish Linklater, Jesse Plemons, John Tui, Gregory Gadson, Adam Godley, Peter MacNicol, and Peter Berg.

According to yesterday’s Google Doodle, June 6, 2012 was the 79th Anniversay of the First Drive-In Movie. The first drive-in opened in Pennsauken, New Jersey and the first film was Wives Beware. Seventy-nine years later, I was at the West Wind Drive-In in Reno to watch a doubleheader of SNOW WHITE AND THE HUNTSMAN and BATTLESHIP, an seemingly odd pairing of films that actually ended up complimenting each other rather well.

I love the drive-in; I can remember seeing Star Wars for the first time at a drive-in, as me and my brother sat in the back seat of my dad’s Ford Granada. I wasn’t even old enough to be in kindergarten, yet I can remember all kinds of things from that night – not just the movie but the snack bar, the playground, the clunky metal speaker you had to attach to your windows, and even the bathrooms. I love that every drive-in I’ve been in over the years (which, admittedly, probably barely touches double digits) seems stuck in the ’50s. Even last night, in a drive-in with four screens going, the snack bar and bathrooms don’t look like they’ve been updated in at least four decades. (Though they were clean, which is the important thing.) The prices were reasonable and the popcorn was really tasty – as long as you got a piece that had been hit by the butter.

Looking around at the other screens, I had The Avengers followed by Dark Shadows to my left, The Chernobyl Diaries and the Dictator to my right, and Men in Black 3 and The Hunger Games behind me. I have no idea how these movies were selected to be paired with one another, but I was happy about our pairing because I hadn’t seen either film before tonight.

Both SNOW WHITE AND THE HUNTSMAN and BATTLESHIP were pretty good films and they ended up complimenting each other rather well. SNOW WHITE is a bit of a feminist, fairy tale power fantasy while BATTLESHIP is a straight-up masculine, military stroke-fest.

Both films are heavy on CGI spectacle, but they use the technology differently; in SNOW WHITE, it’s done to enhance the natural world while in BATTLESHIP, it’s done to enhance the technological gang bang going on between the Navy and the alien ships. While the Drive-In experience doesn’t provide the best screen experience, both films looked beautiful, and it’s to the credit of all the CGI artists involved that these films looked so different from one another, but both were still beautifully rendered.

While both films were more hit than miss, they moved in opposite directions; SNOW WHITE started strong and then sort of petered out, while BATTLESHIP started out as horribly derivative and predictable as you can imagine and then somehow rebounded into a highly enjoyable second half. It’s not hard to pinpoint the reason why, either, because while BATTLESHIP perfectly understood what it’s here for, SNOW WHITE takes itself way too seriously for a summer movie experience. WHITE feels like a November film as it just stubbornly refuses to let us have any fun. It’s fine that WHITE wants to take itself seriously; I truly admire the attempt at what director Rupert Sanders is attempting, but if you’re going to send a movie out to the public in the summer and you’re going to play things this seriously, you’d better deliver something truly special and while WHITE is good, it’s not special.

Everyone in WHITE is dour. Snow (Kristen Stewart) is understandably miserable after being trapped in a tower prison while her stepmother Ravenna (Charlize Theron) rules the kingdom after murdering Snow’s dad. Ravenna doesn’t get to have much fun because she’s obsessed with staying young and beautiful, which means she’s always killing young people to regenerate herself. Her brother Finn (Sam Spruell) is eternally grumpy because the worst haircut in the kingdom. The Huntsman (Chris Hemsworth) isn’t a happy because because he’s in debt, and he’s a drunkard, and his life has basically just been in a downward spiral because his wife was murdered by the Queen’s forces. After Snow escapes and Ravenna forces the Huntsman to get her back, and then the Huntsman tells Finn to go screw and promises to get Snow to a castle where the opposition forces are hanging out, the two of them rush through the Dark Woods meeting all sorts of unhappy people: a troll, an all-woman sanctuary shrouded by fog, and the dwarves, who are not called names like Grumpy and Dopey, but rather names like Beith (Ian McShane) and Gort (Ray Winstone).

WHITE is so set on taking itself seriously that’s there no wink to the audience with the dwarves beyond one reference someone makes to whistling. No, these dwarves wandered out of Middle Earth at some point and got lost in the Dark Forest. It’s a shame because the film needs some levity, and the dwarves could have provided it.

The Hunger Games is not a bucket of chuckle monkeys, either, but that film does a much better job lightening the mood from time to time. Even in serious films you need to provide a few beats for the audience to catch their breath and exhale or open up another line of thought, and WHITE never does that. Truthfully, the film fails all over the narrative board – while the basic structure is perfectly sound, it’s the little decisions that catch up with the film. The relationship between Snow and the Huntsman never really comes together. It’s his kiss that awakens her from Ravenna’s poison apple spell, but there isn’t a romance between them. In fact, after his drunken monologue that ends with the kiss that awakens her, the Huntsman’s role is severely diminished from their on out

The movie is a chase film during the middle portion as Finn and the Queen’s men hunt Snow down, but Sanders utterly fails to make them a consistent threat. If you’ve got pursuers, you need to feel their presence pushing the protagonists forward (like in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid), but I never felt that threat. Instead, they just show up every so often and shoot people.

The best scene in the movie comes after they’ve met up with the dwarves. Snow awakens early and follows some fairies into a clearing in the woods, and all the animals are drawn to her. We get honest-to-goodness beauty here, and it’s a much needed change of pace from all the greys and browns that permeate the film. Snow has been brought before the White Hart, who blesses her before getting shot by Finn’s men. There’s a real sense here of Snow as the woman who can make the world a better place, and in a few minutes of seeing rabbits look cute and stare at her we get a better sense of her importance than in all the times people tell us she’s important.

Show don’t tell, kids.

Unfortunately, no one in the film is really called up to act – Kristen Stewart simply has to look pained and driven, Hemsworth has to breath hard and swing an axe, and Theron has to look gorgeous and proclaim death. They can all manage this but I wish they’d been given more to do. I wish that the people and animals and trolls whose lives Snow touched during her chase through the Dark Forest came back and fought with her at the end, but they don’t.

SNOW WHITE is a film that’s good but could have been something much more with a defter narrative touch and some brighter moments sprinkled in.

As for BATTLESHIP, the movie is exactly what it says it’s going to be – a big war movie between Navy ships and alien ships. The film starts out laughably bad as we’re introduced to bad boy Alex Hopper (Taylor Kitsch), who’s 26 and doesn’t have a job and who thinks it’s a good idea to break into a convenience store after hours to get a burrito to give to Samantha Shane (Brooklyn Decker). There’s all kinds of ridiculous implausibilities here, but why wouldn’t there be in a film like this?

The whole opening half-hour or so just felt like one big homage to Top Gun, except with less homo eroticism. (They play shirts-on soccer here instead of shirts-off volleyball, for instance.) We get all sorts of completely unnecessary and pointless subplots about Hopper’s relationship with his brother and that Samantha isn’t just a hot blonde who’s into burritos, but the daughter of the Big Cheese Naval Man in Hawaii, Liam Neeson. We have to sit through Hopper getting dressed down by his brother for being a loser and Hopper psyching himself up (not once, but twice) to ask Liam Neeson for permission to marry Sam.

When the aliens show up and things start blowing up, that’s when BATTLESHIP becomes entertaining. Unlike WHITE, BATTLESHIP knows that it’s good to lighten the mood every now and then.

But really, sh*t gets blown up. That’s what BATTLESHIP sells, and that’s what BATTLESHIP delivers. It’s a clumsy story at times, but there’s enough little things here, like the alien’s artillery looking like the plastic pieces from the board game or for a sequence in which the Navy has to try and attack the alien vessels in a manner similar to the game, as the soldiers need to try and guess where the enemy will be. I love these bits, just like I love how Hopper and the rest of our heroes end up asking some World War II vets for help during the final battle.

As great as these bits are, however, don’t let yourself think BATTLESHIP is anything but pro-military masturbation.

If I was going back to the movie theater tomorrow, I’d probably pick watching BATTLESHIP over SNOW WHITE, but I have a greater fondness for what WHITE is attempting.

HERCULES: Where Else Are You Gonna Watch a Dude Toss a Bear Into Space?

Hercules (1983) – Directed by Luigi Cozzi – Starring Lou Ferrigno, Sybil Danning, Brad Harris, Ingrid Anderson, William Berger, Rossana Podesta, and Mirella D’Angelo.

HERCULES has existed for 29 years without me seeing it, and my life was worse for it. Why?

Because if you haven’t seen Hercules battle against a giant, stop-motion robot, you really haven’t lived, have you?

To be clear, HERCULES is a horrible movie, but it is so dedicated to its vision that it becomes a movie you absolutely want to see despite that horribleness. Luigi Cozzi’s 1983 take on the Hercules legend is rooted in the cinematic tradition of swords and sandals but the whole movie is infused with a science-fiction vibe that makes it, if not good, certainly distinct and memorable.

And honestly, with 8 gazillion movies in the world, don’t you have 100 minutes to give to a movie that looks like almost nothing else?

I’ve been tempted to watch HERCULES for months now as it’s readily available on Netflix, but it never seem to properly fit with a monthly theme. In truth, it doesn’t completely fit with the “space movies” theme of June, either, but I honestly thought it did. I’d been told this was a bit of “Hercules in space” and while Herc doesn’t take to the stars, that’s where the gods live, and that’s where Hercules occasionally tossing things like bears to make the constellations.

In one of the early action scenes, Hercules’ adopted father (there’s a definite Superman vibe in Hercules’ origin here) is being attacked by a bear. The sequence is cut together with close-ups shots of a huge bear standing up and bellowing and obscured shots of Lou Ferrigno fighting some dude smaller than him in a furry outfit, and it ends with Hercules hurling the bear into space.

All of that really happens. I feel like I need to say that after every single thing I write about this movie, so let’s play a game. Which of the following statements about HERCULES is NOT true. Understand? Which is NOT true?

A) The planets were birthed from Pandora’s Jar, a giant space jar.

B) During his trials to prove himself to Cassiopea’s dad, little bursts of light explode when he hits people.

C) Hercules and Circe cross the Rainbow Bridge – you know, the one from, Norse mythology.

D) A narrator steps in at odd and infrequent times to gives us history lessons we need to know and exposition we don’t.

E) As a baby, Hercules kills two large water snakes by crushing them in his hands.

F) Circe dresses like a superhero. Or like an extra from Xanadu. Your choice.

Go ahead, think on it for a second. Which one of those statements is NOT true. Ready for the answer?

They’re all true. And that’s the joy of watching HERCULES – it’s utterly absurd, at times, but it’s a committed absurdity. In one scene, Hercules is cleaning out the Augean Stables old school style and at other times he’s being turned into a giant or battling a giant robot or tossing, all the while Zeus and the rest of the gods watch from the moon. It makes the movie feel both traditional and derivative.

One of the aspects of HERCULES that makes it an easy watch is that the film is always moving forward. Yeah, some individual scenes drag a bit (the scene between Herc and Cassiopea and the Augean Stables seems to take as long to watch as the stables would have been to clean by hand) but the film does an impressive job of stitching one action sequence to the next. After the Kryptonian opening act and the Augean Stables second act, Herc and Cassiopea (Ingrid Anderson) are playing kissy face when Ariadne (Sybil Danning) shows up and sends the virginal Cassiopea off to her dad to get sacrificed and dumps Herc in the sea.

Hercules ends up hanging with Circe (Mirella D’Angelo), a witch who casts spells and stuff. She’s not totally honest with Hercules, but she cons him into helping her get a magical amulet in exchange for her getting him to Cassiopea. The problem is that Circe can’t actually get him to Cassiopea, which means Hercules had his arm go from being roasted in flames to chilling in ice in order to get that amulet. When Hercules finds out Circe can’t do what she promised, he wants to hurl the amulet really far away (I’m guessing space since that’s where he likes to throw things), but Circe promises she’ll get him as close as she can and that’s good enough for Hercules.

They need to get to a beach to get close, and they get there by …

I think this might be my favorite part of the movie. They get there by a magical chariot, and the chariot doesn’t fly with horses or goats or magic, it flies by a two-part method. Part one has Circe using her magic to tie a rope around the chariot and a big rock. Why they need magic to tie a rope is beyond me, but maybe I missed the part where it wasn’t allowed for Hercules to use his hands. So we get stop motion work to watch the rope get tied around the chariot, and then Hercules picks up the rock and hurls it across space.

Love. It.

Ferrigno doesn’t have much of a personality and his voice has been removed and another dude’s voice dubbed over him, but he’s not bad. His sort of permanent blank expression is rather consistent, at least, so he feels like an actual person, if an boring one.

I ain’t gonna lie on this, though – one of the reasons why HERCULES is an enjoyable watch is the assembled ladies. Sybil Danning does her usual fine job of being evil and barely fitting into her costume, Mirella D’Angelo somehow manages to keep her dignity in that ridiculous bad Dazzler cosplay outfit, and Ingrid Anderson … stunning. She looks a bit like a young Barbie Benton and they make her prance around for the back half of the movie in this ridiculous white costume with flowing white ribbons and seashell pasties. She’s basically naked and I’m not complaining about that.

As the film goes on, the science vs. magic angle becomes a stronger part of the movie, but it’s a bit like that loud guy at a baseball game who starts randomly talking about how the DH is the way to go and watching pitcher’s hit is an abomination, and he just won’t shut up about it, even though it has no real effect on the players on the field. It’s not like Hercules or Cassiopea give a crap about any of that.

Anyway, Hercules ends up saving Cassiopea, but before he can commit to her (“commit” meaning “make out on the beach”) he has to know if she’s really Cassiopea or Circe or Ariande. Her answer? “I am all of them,” she explains, “and none of them.”

What?

But hey, I’ve been lucky enough to have really beautiful women say nonsensical things to me before making out, so I get where Herc is coming from – just roll with it and figure out the crazy tomorrow.

Look, this is not a great movie but it is a movie you have to watch at some point. It’s a B-movie that just embraces everything about its concept and works it. Pino Donaggio’s score is really good at taking a John Williams sound and making it work for this sword and sorcery and science flick. While the story might not make the most sense and while the acting might not win much critical acclaim, it somehow works. Watching HERCULES is like eating an average chicken pot pie – there’s just enough of all the little things you expect to be there to make it work, plus some other stuff you weren’t expecting that makes it an interesting dish.

Plus, let’s be honest, where else are you gonna watch a dude toss a bear into space?

RED SONJA: I Will Tell the Future in Your Entrails, Red Woman!

Red Sonja (1985) – Directed by Richard Fleischer – Starring Brigitte Nielsen, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sandahl Bergman, Paul L. Smith, Ernie Reyes, Jr., Ronald Lacey, and Pat Roach.

Arnold Schwarzenegger has called RED SONJA the worst movie he’s been in, and joked that when his kids are bad, he punishes them by making them watch this movie.

RED SONJA is not a good movie, and watching it on an endless loop certainly qualifies as punishment, but it’s hardly one of the worst films ever made. It’s clunky, obvious, dumb, slightly homophobic, and full of truly atrocious acting from Brigitte Nielsen, Sandahl Bergman, and Schwarzenegger, but it’s usually a “so bad it’s fun” movie, and there’s some genuine warmth between Sonja (Nielsen) and Prince Tarn (Ernie Reyes Jr.) that keeps SONJA from being completely without merit.

Queen Gedren (Bergman) wants to have sex with Sonja, but the young woman refuses, and as punishment Gedren kills her family, burns her house, and lets her troops have their way with Sonja. Wanting revenge, a spirit visits Sonja who gives her magic strength to accomplish this task, and the film is simply Sonja’s quest to kill the Queen.

Sonja has a sister who’s a priestess and she’s nearly killed when Gedren and her right hand man Ikol (Ronald Lacey) steal a glowing ball of green that’s super powerful. Varna (Janet Agren) is found by Lord Kalidor (Schwarzenegger), who’s like Conan except with a different name, better manners, and a slightly better ability to speak English. Varna begs Kalidor to go find Sonja, which he does, and then Varna convinces Sonja to go after Gedren and the Talisman, Kalidor wants to come.

Sonja says no because Kalidor is a man, and all men are evil.

She sees a storm in the distance and heads for it, knowing that the storm signifies the big ball of green is being used by Gedren. Along the way, she runs into Prince Tarn and his flunky Falkon (Paul L. Smith), who have seen their kingdom destroyed by Gedren and the Talisman. Tarn is a right little bastard, full of ego and orders. He treats Falkon like a slave and offers Sonja a chance to join him as a cook. Sonja refuses, of course (she’s not on the poster holding a frying pan, after all), and tells Falkon to put Tarn over his knee and give him a spanking.

Next up is Brytag (Pat Roach) and his men of the mountain pass. Brytag wants Sonja to give up her goods for payment, but she refuses, so they fight and she wins and all his men gang up to attack her. Luckily, Kalidor doesn’t listen to women who tell him they don’t need his help, and together they escape.

Then there’s more fighting and more “flirting” between Kalidor and Sonja. She tells him that no man can have her unless he can best her in a sword fight, so Kalidor challenges her to a sword fight. These are not complicated people. They fight to a draw and Arnold and Nielsen engage in some of the worst acting I’ve seen when it comes to being tired. It’s like they couldn’t even be bothered to go for a quick jog to work up a sweat. Nope, they just start to half swing and then go to the ground, gasping for air like a couple of five-year olds pretending to be tired in gym class.

They reunite with Tarn and Falkon and there’s a huge final battle scene that’s rather blah, but all the good guys survive and the bad guys die. Kalidor and Sonja play kissy face and Tarn and Falkon go on their way.

Yay.

The only thing I really like about the film is the relationship between Sonja and Tarn. Brigitte Nielsen is not a very good actress, but she’s actually better at playing parent with Tarn than she is warrioress with Schwarzenegger. When Sonja first meets Tarn she wants him scolded. When they meet up a second time she offers to teach him a bit of swordplay. At the end, they’re companions in the battle against Gedren. Ernie Reyes, Jr. is the best part of the film, and if we had ever gotten a sequel, I would have preferred it to be about Tarn than Sonja.

Look, RED SONJA is a below average movie. I watched it once as a kid and not again until the other night. I didn’t get much out of it then and I didn’t get a whole lot out of it now (except for a pretty darn good Ennio Morricone score), but it’s one of those films I’m guessing most sci-fi/fantasy fans have seen over the years and I don’t think it left any of us particularly scarred. It’s not good but you could do worse than team RED SONJA with Hawk the Slayer for a night of personal MST3King.