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.

RANGO: Don’t You See, It’s Not About You, It’s About Them

Rango (2011) – Directed by Gore Verbinski – Starring Johnny Depp, Isla Fisher, Abigail Breslin, Alfred Molina, Bill Nighy, Harry Dean Stanton, Ray Winstone, Timothy Olyphant, and Ned Beatty.

Sometimes a story takes you where you might not want to go. I think anyone who’s written a story can tell you that; you think you’re writing a murder mystery about a young female detective and the next thing you know it’s a horror story about a trapped demon because the story just pushes you in that direction.

That’s happened with my own writing, though not to that extent. When I wrote DREAMER’S SYNDROME, I had no intention of making the Frederic Kornell character an active part of the narrative. He was a character introduced to get Kelly Reed from Point A to Point B, but as anyone who’s read the book knows, Frederic became a central character. ADVENTURES OF THE FIVE was supposed to be ADVENTURES OF FARM, but when I was writing a few short stories to flesh the character out before I wrote a novel with the half-wolverine, half-fox, I fell in love with his co-stars and decided to give them all equal billing.

I bring this up in regards to RANGO because while this is most obviously a kid’s movie, it works far better as a love letter to old westerns, marking RANGO as able to work for kid’s with all it’s bright, engaging characters and action, and for older folks who just flat out love movies, and will see in RANGO a movie soaked in the history of the cinematic western.

The only down part of RANGO comes in the middle, right at the point where you’re starting to decide just how much you’re going to like or dislike a movie. Up until the arrival of Balthazar the Mole (Harry Dean Stanton), RANGO has been an enjoyable, endearing more than engaging kid’s flick. Rango (Johnny Depp) is actually an unnamed chameleon who falls out of the back of his human owner’s car as they drive through Nevada. He makes his way to a small town named Dirt that’s drying up from, literally, the lack of water. The chameleon ends up in a saloon and takes on the name “Rango” from the longer word “Durango,” and fashions himself as a bad-ass gunslinger.

The mayor of the town (Ned Beatty), who’s the story’s villain as he’s buying up all the land from the financially struggling townsfolk as part of his plan to build an animal version of Las Vegas, sees in Rango a person he can use to continue to manipulate the town, and so he names him the sheriff. Through this point, the film is still trying to find its legs, offering you several possible paths and not really coalescing into anything substantial. Even the character of Rango himself is still forming; we see that he likes to put on shows inside his terrarium with a naked female torso and a wind-up, plastic fish, and that he’s understandably thrown into a bit of a panic when he’s dropped from the safety of his owner’s car, but because he’s always putting on an act, we’re seeing the outside of him more than the inside. Eventually, this pays off but at the start it gives the film a bit of a topsy-turvy feeling as we struggle to understand who this character is, and what this story is about.

When Balthazar shows up and Rango tries to act like the cool sheriff by giving him and his accomplices a permit for prospecting, and then tells them where the bank is, allowing them to rob it of the last of the town’s water reserve, the film falls into “predictable kid’s film territory.” Rango ends up leading a posse out to get the water back, and they run into an entire hillbilly community of prairie dogs. It’s just a typically lame moment that seems driven by the desire to have an action sequence with some stereotypical characters (let’s make fun of poor hillbillies!) and I feared that the film was going to end up being a disappointment.

That quickly changes, however. It turns out the water jug that Balthazar stole didn’t have any water in it, adding a layer of complexity to the plot that was very much welcome. I mean, yeah, we know the mayor’s the bad guy but RANGO is a much better film when it adheres to the conventions of a western as opposed to the expectations of an animated kid’s movie.

From there on out, RANGO does what it’s seemingly wanted to do all along – be an animated love letter to westerns. Rattlesnake Jake (bill Nighy) shows up to play the mayor’s #1 henchman, the biggest, baddest hombre in these here parts, and exposes Rango as a fraud in front of the townsfolk. Our hero gets sent back into the desert, his assumed identity and name stripped from him. Nighy is fantastic as Jake, channeling his inner Jack Palance for the part.

Rango ends up meeting the Spirit of the West, who looks like Clint Eastwood and talks like Timothy Olyphant doing Clint Eastwood. The Spirit fills a doubting Rango with all sorts of westerny inspiration. “Is this heaven?” Rango asks.

“If it were,” Spirit/Clint/Timothy growls back, “we’d be eating Pop Tarts with Kim Novak.”

A nervous Rango tells the Spirit that “they used to call you the man with no name,” to which S/C/T replies, “it doesn’t matter what they call ya. It’s the deeds that make the man.”

When Rango complains that he came all this way and didn’t find what he was looking for, S/C/T admonishes him with the truest essence of the western hero: “That’s right. You came a long way to find something that ain’t even out here. Don’t you see, it’s not about you. It’s about them.”

Lesson learned. Before he leaves, S/C/T tells Rango that “no man can walk out of his own story,” which sends Rango back for the final action sequence. He learns that the town is drying up because of humans commandeering the water to build and run Las Vegas and realizes the mayor hopes to replicate this technological feat.

The mayor is thus marked as a man of progress, and he marks Rango and Rattlesnake Jake as relics of the past. Jake and Rango team up for the final fight, and the last we see of the mayor he’s being dragged out of town by a very angry rattlesnake.

I have no idea what kids think of anything from Jake exposing Rango to the end, but the film seems to have made its peace with both halves of itself, and RANGO finishes incredibly strong. On the whole, this is a fantastic movie, a completely enjoyable western that’s also a kid’s film.

INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL: How Much of Human Life is Lost in Waiting?

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) – Directed by Steven Spielberg – Starring Harrison Ford, Karen Allen, Shia LeBeouf, Cate Blanchett, Ray Winstone, John Hurt, and Jim Broadbent.

I don’t know what’s happened between 2008 and 2011 but I’ve gone from hating INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL to enjoying it immensely. My life isn’t appreciably different now than it was three years ago, and I don’t remember being in a bad mood that night in the theater when I watched it originally, or in a particularly good mood the other night when I popped it into the DVD player. In fact, I was more in a mood to not like it than like it because I put it in late at night, wanting only to finish it so I could drop it in the outgoing mail Saturday morning instead of having to wait until Monday morning.

My opinion can change quite a bit about movies I watched as a kid and then rewatch now, but I honestly can’t think of any film to have undergone such a radical transformation in three years as CRYSTAL SKULL.

What happened?

The easiest answer is that my expectations were so much higher in 2008 than 2011; back then it was the first Indy film in 19 years and SKULL had the accumulated weight of all those years waiting for the next chapter. Combine that with the general lack of satisfaction from the STAR WARS prequels, the general asshattery of Lucas and Spielberg in constantly tweaking and editing their old films, the inclusion of Shia LeBeouf, and the ridiculous “atomic refrigerator” sequence right near the start, and perhaps it’s simply a matter of my hopes being too high.

If you buy that line, however, then you have to also recognize that I wasn’t a massively huge Indiana Jones fan as a kid, so waiting for INDIANA JONES 4 came in well below the anticipation for the new Star Wars movies, the Spider-Man films, the Batman movies, and especially the Lord of the Rings movies. It was more like, “Hey, new Indy, new Harrison Ford? Let’s go eat some popcorn and watch this sucker.”

I was let down but not crushed in the way I was when THE PHANTOM MENACE festered in move theaters in 1999. I felt betrayed by PHANTOM – like Lucas had personally not only let me down but abandoned me in his insistence that he was making a kid’s movie and so some of the stupidity inherent in the film was okay. I hated that Lucas didn’t allow his films to grow up with me – it’s a selfish response, of course, but when you give all of those years of fandom to a movie you do feel, justified or not, like it was made for you and so you expect that future chapters of the story will be made for you, too. In hindsight, it’s completely silly to think this way, of course. I was a wee lad in 1977 and an adult by 1999, but Lucas was an adult that entire time. And even if he wasn’t, it’s his stories, his characters, his universe, so if he wants to make Star Wars into a kid-movie franchise, that’s his call, not mine. I don’t have to like it, but I was fooling myself if I thought anything else.

I typically like to name my reviews after a line from the movie, which is why I grabbed “How Much of Human Life is Lost in Waiting?” for this review. The line is spoken by Harold Oxley (John Hurt), who took Marion and Mutt in and then went nutty when he gazed too long into the crystal skull. Anticipation can be a great thing, but when it comes to movies or books or TV shows there’s a difference between waiting for the next season and waiting for the potential, hypothetical next Indiana Jones or Star Wars or Police Academy movie. If the people in charge of the franchise aren’t in a rush to get a movie made, you might as well go find something else because if you’re waiting, someone else is waiting, and they might actually have access to enough money to do something about it.

This belief is what led to my oft-repeated, snarky line back around the turn of the century that, “The best Indiana Jones movie ever made was called RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK. The second was called The Mummy. The third best was called The Mummy Returns, and no one cares what the fourth best was.” It was (mildly) funny, but I really believed that the Mummy movies were better than the latter two Indy films. I wasn’t going to mourn the lack of a new Indiana Jones movie because I had the two Mummy movies, so when CRYSTAL SKULL came out in 2008 I was just as excited about the third Mummy movie.

Both sucked. So it goes …

Perhaps history will be kind to THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL, because what we have here (when stripped of everything that went into me sitting in a theater three years ago) is a perfectly enjoyable adventure film. It’s not close to perfect, it’s still probably the worst of the four, and it feels trapped in a tug-of-war between Spielberg, George Lucas, and Harrison Ford, but it’s become an enjoyable, if overlong, watch.

As I mentioned, there is a sense of the film being caught between its three creators. From Spielberg, I get the sense that he just wanted to make a mass-appealing roller coaster ride that gave Indiana Jones a happy ending. It’s Spielberg directing from a place of aged contentment; whatever ups and downs Spielberg has experienced over the years, one gets the sense that he’s settled in comfortable with himself and his art at this stage in his life, but not necessarily the world we inhabit. SKULL is set in the late 1950s and it’s easy to see the political unrest in the country – with the (perceived) threat of Commies everywhere – as a stand-in for the “patriotic” discourse fueled by Fox News and the Republicans at the end of the George W. Bush administration.

Lucas, of course, seems to be mentally regressing, using “it’s a kid’s film” as an excuse for crappy film making, yet he’s also clearly the most concerned about his legacy. He initially expressed an interest in seeing this franchise push forward with Shia LeBeouf in the lead (God help us) and there’s more Star Wars content out now (or in the pipeline) than there ever was in the past. The film regrettably dabbles in a bunch of “old man” rhetoric between Mutt and Indy, but luckily neither the film nor the franchise becomes LeBouef’s.

Then there’s Ford, who comes off as something of a curmudgeon these days, his understated demeanor now seeming tired and bored more than anything else. Ford has become, in his own way, a relic of past glories, much like the B-movies that Spielberg and Lucas celebrate with the Indiana Jones series. It’s nice to see him relax a bit here, and he plays the aging archaeologist as a man saddened by what’s happened personally (the deaths of his bad and Marcus Brody) more than nationally (the red scare).

Make no mistake, however, this movie works because of Harrison Ford’s acting more than anything else.

As annoying as LeBeouf can be, Ford is at his best when it’s just him and Mutt on-screen together. Mutt is Indy’s kid, but we don’t find that revelation out until the film is halfway gone. Prior to that revelation, Ford and LeBeouf work well together. LeBeouf’s Mutt Williams is a Brando-esque greaser – exactly the kind of cheap regurgitation of the past that Lucas seems to love so much – and he’s quick to fly into a temper. Indy remains calm, telling Mutt that he doesn’t have to pretend to act tough all the time by getting angry. (It’s advice LeBeouf the actor would do well to heed, too.)

While the initial chase scene across campus with Mutt and Indy goes on too long, the chemistry between them is firmly established and the grave robbing sequence in Peru is effectively produced. I actually enjoyed the Mutt/Indy dynamic fine prior to the revelation of their relationship. When Mutt tells Indy he wants to be a mechanic and that his mom is angry with him for dropping out of school, Indy tells him he should do whatever makes him happy. Contrast that to his post-revelation response, which is delivered to Marion: “Why didn’t you make him finish school?”

I love Karen Allen and I love the character of Marion Ravenwood, but once she shows up in CRYSTAL SKULL the adventure movie we’ve been watching takes an unwanted shift over into a campier realm where bickering is the main conversational tone. Prior to that, what we’re seeing with Indy and Mutt is an extension of the Indy/Short Round relationship from TEMPLE OF DOOM, and it’s a shame that Indy changes into such a parenting dick when he finds out Mutt is his actual kid and not just any old kid.

They’ve dumped the Nazis for the Soviets and it’s a wise choice, with Cate Blanchett’s Irina Spalko serving as the main bad guy. Blanchett plays Spalko as cold and calculating and because of that there’s not really anything memorable in the character. She’s much closer to Julian Glover’s Donovan than Paul Freeman’s Belloq in terms of her overall effectiveness. There’s a whole plot here, of course, that Spalko drives concerning the maybe-alien crystal skulls but it’s all insignificant to the Indy-Mutt and then Indy-Marion relationships.

There are still massive idiot moments in the movie – jumping in the fridge to survive a nuclear bomb test, Mutt’s Tarzan romp through the jungle – but on the whole KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL has become an enjoyable film to me. I like the pacing, I like Ford’s take on Indy, and I like Ray Winstone’s Mac. It’s a tad too silly at times, but it’s also highly enjoyable at other times, too. I wish the film had stayed less busy with the clutter of characters, but on the whole the good far overwhelms the bad.

But I’m not going to hold my breath for INDIANA JONES 5 – there’s plenty of other great films out there needing to be watched for me to wait around waiting for Lucas, Spielberg, and Ford to agree on something new.

Here’s the Full List of Indiana Jones movie reviews:

RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK: Asps. Very Dangerous. You Go First.
TEMPLE OF DOOM: Two Hours of Kate Capshaw Shrieking Like a Harpy
THE LAST CRUSADE: You Lost Today, Kid. But That Doesn’t Mean You Have to Like It.
THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL: How Much of Human Life is Lost in Waiting?