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.

DOOMSDAY: The Hounds are Hungry

Doomsday (Unrated version; 2008) – Directed by Neil Marshall – Starring Rhona Mitra, Bob Hoskins, Malcolm McDowell, Alexander Siddig, David O’Hara, Craig Conway, Adrian Lester, Chris Robson, Darren Morfitt, MyAnna Burning, and Sean Pertwee.

We live in the Age of Hyperbole. It seems one cannot turn on the TV or radio or look on the internet without some new movie or television show or sports team being heralded as the Greatest or Worst Thing Ever. There are some things, however, which are immune from hyperbole, which still live up to whatever lofty praise or abyssal condemnation even the most adjective- and hype-addicted hack lays at their feet:

The transcendent exaltation of Beethoven’s 9th.

The magnificent roar of the spectacle that is the start of a Formula 1 race.

The call to arms of the St. Crispin’s Day Speech from Henry V.

The heavenly grace of the Pillars of Creation.

The hotness of Rhona Mitra.

If there were a way to digitally insert the 2008-2009 version of Ms. Mitra into every movie ever made, I might be offended, but I wouldn’t complain.

I offer this as evidence of my own potential insanity. DOOMSDAY is Neil Marshall’s third film and it is not well-loved by critics or the public. Over at Rotten Tomatoes, DOOMSDAY has a 50% rating with critics and a 46% rating from the public. In contrast, I kinda love it. While not the greatest movie ever made, DOOMSDAY has plenty to appease me: Rhona Mitra in a post-apocalyptic setting fighting refugees from both Mad Max and King Arthur, plenty of stylistic violence, and a pretty decent car chase featuring a Bentley Continental GT jumping through a bus.

DOOMSDAY is not a funny movie to watch as there’s precious little humor spread throughout the tale, so I wouldn’t call it a great popcorn flick, but if you’re looking for a good, serious, sci-fi actioner, DOOMSDAY will foot the bill. There is a definite “throw everything against the wall” feel to the film as plenty of scenes in this movie make you think of other films: Mad Max, Escape from New York, Omega Man, A Boy and His Dog, etc. (Heck, even two characters are named “Carpenter” and “Miller” as nods to the directors John Carpenter and George Miller.) It works for me, though, because Marshall makes them all his own. Even though there are nods to other movies, it’s all filtered through Marshall’s lens and DOOMSDAY’s worldview.

The premise here is that Scotland was infected with the Reaper Virus, which spread like crazy, turned people nuts, and then killed them. The British government put up a wall and locked all the Scottish inside to quarantine the virus. The last person out is a little girl, who only got out because a soldier jumped down to offer her his seat. Twenty-seven years later, the little girl is all grown up. She’s a bad-ass cop and looks just like Rhona Mitra, so when it’s discovered that the Reaper Virus has reappeared inside London, Prime Minister Hatcher (Alexander Siddig) and his right hand man, Canaris (David O’Hara) ask Top Cop Bill Nelson (Bob Hoskins) to send his best man into Scotland to look for a cure, his only real option is Major Eden Sinclair.

The goal for Sinclair and her team is to track down a scientist named Kane (Malcolm McDowell), who was the top scientist working on a cure from inside the Scottish quarantine zone when the nation was sealed off. The reason Hatcher and Canaris think Kane has developed a cure is that three years ago they discovered there are still people walking around so, obviously, there must be a cure.

Sinclair and her team go through the wall and into Scotland in a vehicle that looks like was leftover from Aliens. DOOMSDAY doesn’t do too much messing around as the first building they enter they’re quickly attacked by the Marauders (the Mad Max refugees). The Marauders attack style is to show up in massive numbers, scream, yell, charge, and die.

Sinclair’s team starts dying out quickly so you don’t have to bother learning their names, and to the film’s credit, Sinclair is captured by the marauders in this first encounter. She’s taken to their stronghold, where Sol (Craig Conway) beats her up a bit and then tells her she’s their ticket out. Kane has told everyone that there’s nothing left alive in the outside world, but Sol doesn’t believe him. After he does his crazy man routine on Eden, he goes outside where they roast (literally) Dr. Talbot (Sean Pertwee) alive, and then carve him up like Sunday dinner and eat him.

Because they’re cannibals.

Eden escapes, because she’s a bad ass, and kills Sol’s main squeeze Viper (Lee-Anne Liebenberg), because she’s a bad ass, and then takes a fellow prisoner with her, because that prisoner is Cally (MyAnna Bunning), because Cally happens to be Kane’s daughter. After they get out of the city, they head into the woods, which leads them to Kane and his King Arthur leftovers for a medieval repeat of what we just saw. Kane tells them he never developed a cure, but they were naturally resistant to the virus.

Whoops.

They escape here, bust a Bentley out of storage, and then head out on a car chase, which ends with the bus exploding and Sol losing his head. Eden calls in Canaris (Hatcher killed himself when he feared he was infected), gives them Cally (they can derive a cure from her blood) and the one remaining member of her team, but Sinclair stays behind because she wants to track down her mother’s old house. At the end of the film, she delivers a disk to Nelson that she recorded with her fake eye (did I forget to mention she has a fake eye?) that helps bring Canaris down, because Canaris was all in favor of not using any cure until after enough people in London have died to cull the herd that is the population of London.

The film ends with Sinclair claiming leadership of the Marauders, which doesn’t really sound like an awesome time to me, but does set up a sequel we’ll never see because not enough people liked it or saw it.

Assh*les.

In truth, there’s nothing special about DOOMSDAY that makes me hate you for not liking it, but for me, it hits enough notes that it makes for a good, solid, post-apocalyptic action film. I just bought the Blu ray out of the $8 bin (actually, the $7.88 bin) at Walmart and it’s a slick watch. DOOMSDAY moves fast, hits hard, looks great, and it has Rhona Mitra kicking ass. It doesn’t have the style or narrative strength of something like 28 Days Later, but if you like these post-apocalypse stories like I do, DOOMSDAY delivers.

DISNEY’S A CHRISTMAS CAROL: The Ghost of Animated Christmas Performance Capture

Disney’s A Christmas Carol (2009) – Directed by Robert Zemeckis – Starring Jim Carrey, Gary Oldman, Cary Elwes, Sammi Hanratty, Colin Firth, Bob Hoskins, Robin Wright Penn, Ryan Ochoa, and Molly C. Quinn.

When I watched Mister Magoo’s Christmas Carol the other night and wasn’t remotely moved by it, I began to wonder if maybe I’d hit my limit on adaptations of Charles Dickens’ classic. Combine this with my general dislike of Jim Carrey and my general dislike of performance capture and my hopes weren’t too high for DISNEY’S A CHRISTMAS CAROL adaptation to win me over. In fact, I only watched it because Netflix had it streaming and I wanted something playing in the background while I wrote the review for Love Actually.

It was to my incredible surprise that by the time Jacob Marley (Gary Oldman) had threatened and warned Ebeneezer Scrooge (Jim Carrey) about what his future held for him I was totally engrossed in the film, and by the time it ended I was willing to rank DISNEY’S A CHRISTMAS CAROL among my favorite adaptations of Dickens’ tale.

This is a prime example of why I like doing these themed months; without spending the month purposely looking for holiday films to watch I wouldn’t bother with a film starring Jim Carrey and made with performance capture, especially when there are other versions of this story that I wanted to see more. (Like Scrooged. How I managed to go all this time without seeing Scrooged is beyond me, but it’s an oversight that’s since been corrected. Expect it to be the next film reviewed.) But because I’m on the lookout for holiday movies this month and because it was streaming on Netflix I’ve found a great film to add to the holiday rotation. DISNEY’S adaptation strikes the perfect balance between being a kid’s movie and an adult’s movie, and Robert Zemeckis has wrung seemingly every bit of humor, fright, and action possible out of this story.

But did it have to be performance capture?

Performance capture is just generally pretty creepy-looking. I enjoyed Zemeckis’ previous movies made with this technique (The Polar Express, Beowulf), but my enjoyment was in spite of the performance capture and not enhanced by it. After seeing several movies made with this technique now, I still have to wonder … why? It’s not as good as live-action, it’s not as good as hand-drawn animation, and it’s not as good as CGI. It just looks … off. If the movie is good I’ll suffer through it, but it’s usually not a pleasant watch.

It’s to Zemeckis’ credit that A CHRISTMAS CAROL is the best performance capture I’ve seen; it looks good enough that I actually didn’t mind watching most of it. I’m not sure why most of the actors play multiple roles (Carrey is not only Scrooge, but all of the Ghosts of Christmas; Oldman is Bob Cratchit, Jacob Marley, and Tiny Tim) except maybe to save some cash for the studio, but it can be a bit disconcerting to see vaguely familiar faces popping up on multiple bodies.

What helps keep things righted, however, is that Zemeckis just might have done the best job in any Christmas Carol adaptation of making London look interesting.

Because honestly, mid-nineteenth century London normally looks like a wet fart – stinky, soggy, and brown.

That’s nothing against the city, but a city that big from that era was awash in greys, browns, and blacks. When you combine that with the general dreary tone of the story, there’s not a lot of room for color in A Christmas Carol, but Zemeckis has done a masterful job of infusing Scrooge’s adventure with a real vibrancy. This adaptation moves, and it moves in loads of color. London is still the same drab, dreary place it always is, but Zemeckis has infused every possible aspect of the story that he can with color and movement.

Zemeckis wisely builds off the cold, muted, dull colors of London by filling out the palette with the Ghosts. As the film progresses, Zemeckis brings more and more color into the film as the action picks up. The Ghost of Christmas Past, for instance, is a flickering, white candle person, while the Ghost of Christmas Present is a big, fat redhead. The first is wispy and quiet while the second is rotund and loud. By the time we get to the Ghost of Christmas Future, Zemeckis slams the palette all the way back down with the midnight black ghost and his nightmarish horses.

There’s plenty of action, too. I absolutely love the way the film treats the ghostly visions, with Scrooge’s contemporary environment often dissolving to reveal the vision. The best example of this comes with the Ghost of Christmas Present as the floor of their ornate room dissolves to reveal the city of London. The room goes swooping over the city, giving us a wonderful and rich vision of the bright, warm room and the harsh, cold city. As creepy as the human characters can be to look at, the environments look amazing.

As for the story itself, it’s A Christmas Carol, and importantly, Zemeckis keeps Carrey contained inside his characters. Maybe Carrey’s at a point in his career where he just can’t go crazy for the entire shoot, or maybe the performance capture process forces him to play roles rather than allowing his roles to become a Carrey caricature. Whatever the case, he’s rarely been better than he is as Scrooge. He’s so good you rarely notice it’s him, whereas the Past and Present Ghosts see Carrey’s features shine through. I like how Zemeckis decides to have Scrooge spend Christmas dinner with his nephew, even if the performance capture version of Colin Firth is creepy to look at.

And that’s what it really comes down to with DISNEY’S A CHRISTMAS CAROL – it’s a really good adaptation that is, at times, really creepy to look at. It’s a bit disconcerting to see Carrey’s and Oldman’s image shining through so many characters, but the story is really well told, and it’s perfectly paced. Even with the creepiness of performance capture, this is a gorgeous film to watch and completely engaging from start to finish.

Be sure to check out the Holiday Review Index for all the Holiday-themed reviews to be found at Atomic Anxiety.