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.

THE HUNGER GAMES: You Call That a Kiss?

The Hunger Games (2012) – Directed by Gary Ross – Starring Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson, Liam Hemsworth, Woody Harrelson, Elizabeth Banks, Lenny Kravitz, Stanley Tucci, Donald Sutherland, Wes Bentley, Toby Jones, Alexander Ludwig, Willow Shields, Amandla Stenberg, and Paula Malcomson.

THE HUNGER GAMES is an extraordinary film, thanks primarily to Gary Ross’ superb direction and Jennifer Lawrence’s totally engrossing performance as Katniss Everdeen. Gorgeously shot, expertly paced, with a script that hits all the right notes, HUNGER GAMES never forgets that at its center sits the horrible truth of children killing children for the entertainment of the elite.

And, by extension, us.

Let me state a few things plainly right off the top. If you hate this movie because Jennifer Lawrence is too “fat” to play Katniss, f*ck off. If you hate this movie because you didn’t realize Rue was black, f*ck off. If you hate this movie because, quote, you liked it better when it was called Battle Royale/Lord of the Flies, unquote, f*ck off. None of you will find anything of interest here, so your life will be better if you spend the next five minutes doing anything but reading this review.

Now, if you genuinely dislike, or even hate this movie because you think the script is dumb, the direction overbearing, the acting wooden, or anything else, please stick around. I’m not suggesting I’m going to change your mind, because I’m really not interested in changing your mind. I’m just here to give you mine and if you don’t agree, well, there’s nothing wrong with that. There’s plenty of people out there who dislike HUNGER GAMES for completely valid reasons and I respect all of those people and all of those opinions.

I just don’t have time for anyone who wants to caustically dismiss a movie because it’s not something else, or because of one small item. I mean, great, Battle Royale had kids killing kids, too, but do you know what it didn’t have?

Just about everything else THE HUNGER GAMES does. It’s too easy to play the, “I liked this story better when it was called ________” card. Are there ripoffs? Sure. THE HUNGER GAMES isn’t one of them.

In the post-apocalyptic, rebuilt world of Panem, the United States (or maybe it’s all of North America) has been divided into twelve separate districts. Each year, a male and female kid (between the ages of 12 and 18) from each district is chosen at lottery to travel to the Capitol and kill each other in the Hunger Games. There’s only one winner. Everyone else dies. The lottery is called the Reaping, and all of the of-age kids gather in a town square to see the name pulled at random from a bowl. On this year, for the 74th Hunger Games, the female tribute from District 12 is Primrose Everdeen (Willow Shields), a mousy 12-year old in the lottery for the first time.

Unable to bear the thought of her sister in the Games, Katniss Everdeen rushes forward to volunteer to take her sister’s place. Gary Ross does a phenomenal job quickly building up this moment. Prior to Katniss’ volunteering, we see how tough life is in District 12. Food is not guaranteed, and Katniss hunts with her friend Gale (Liam Hemsworth) to put dinner on their table. Katniss and Prim’s father has died in a coal mining accident and their mother has bouts of uselessness as she’s overcome with her husband’s absence.

Ross shows us the poverty of District 12 and the beauty of the surrounding natural landscape. (The districts are cordoned off and going outside the district gates is forbidden.) The district has a washed out, muted look, full of greys and browns and dull blues. Clothes are old. Houses are ramshackle cabins. The whole vibe is like a late-19th/early-20th century community built on coal mining. In the middle of it sits Katniss, a proud teenage girl who’s had to assume the mantle of leadership in her family after her father’s death. She talks to Prim, keeping her as calm as possible, and helps her dress in her Sunday best for the Reaping.

When Prim’s name is pulled out of the lottery bowl by Effie Trinket (Elizabeth Banks), Ross masterfully depicts Prim’s horror and the gravity of this decision by having the girls around her slowly back away, instantly isolating her from the community. Katniss steps forward to volunteer and we begin to see the disconnect in Panem between the residents of a lower-class place like District 12 against the upper-class elitists that actually enjoy the Games. To Katniss, Prim, male tribute Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson), and the rest of this community, the Reaping is the annual Worst Day of the Year because everyone in D12 knows that they’re sending off two of their children to die.

All because of a failed rebellion 74 years and the government’s insistence on never letting them forget it.

From the Capitol side of the equation, however, the Reaping is the start of the annual Best Time of the Year. Effie is all smiles and bubbles greeting Katniss to the stage, while the young girl is completely shocked and overwhelmed by what’s just transpired. This disconnect between how the poorer districts and the Capitol treat the Games is seen repeatedly in the film. It’s an artful balance on Ross’ part between the kids who largely don’t want to be here killing each other and the Capitol’s elite who love watching them kill each other.

After Katniss says a quick goodbye to her sister, mother, and then Gale (who promises to look after Prim), she and Peeta are hurried onto the train that will take them cross country to the Capitol. You can feel how uncomfortable Katniss and Peeta are among all of the opulence on the train. We see Katniss, the girl who has to hunt for squirrels to feed her family, suddenly surrounded by all manner of ornate and beautiful food. On the train, the tributes are introduced to their coach, the last Hunger Games winner from District 12, Haymitch (Woody Harrelson), who’s a bit of an uninterested lush.

Once they get to the Capitol there’s lots of public interviews and training and trying to find themselves amid all the glamour of the Games and the stark reality of what’s coming. It’s this middle section that’s the weakest part of the film for me, but it’s also sort of perfect because it reminds us of the absurdity of this situation and the fact that Katniss and Peeta are still kids. It’s hard enough knowing who you are when you’re 16, let alone when you suddenly find yourself a celebrity in a strange land about to put your life on the line. The film perfectly places Katniss and Peeta (though it should be noted the film is really Katniss’ film, and Peeta occupies the role of lead secondary character) in between the “Careers,” the tributes from the richer districts who spend their life training to volunteer for the Games, and the younger kids who know they have no chance. Katniss and Peeta are somewhere in between, good enough to not be easy meat but not good enough to be immediate favorites.

Things start to change when Katniss catches the eye of the crowd. The folks of the Capitol treat this as a spectacle, with Caesar Flickerman (Stanley Tucci) and occasionally Claudius Templesmith (Toby Jones) emceeing the festivities. Katniss is uncomfortable being transformed into “the girl on fire” as her stylist Cinna (Lenny Kravitz) creates elaborate costumes for her that win the crowd’s attention. Katniss does her part, too, like when the Games’ oddsmakers don’t pay attention to her so she shoots an arrow through an apple in a pig’s mouth on a table in the judges’ area.

All of this spectacle and selling oneself is important to gaining sponsors among the elite that can help a tribute survive the Games. It’s an important part of the novel and an important aspect of the absurdity of the Games, but it also bogs the film down just a bit. What works in this section is the confusion between Katniss and Peeta. During his solo interview with Caesar, Peeta reveals that he’s always had a crush on Katniss, which casts the two of them as “the starcrossed lovers” for the audience. Katniss is not happy with this turn because she’s unsure if Peeta is being truthful or if it’s just a ploy to build a bankable narrative for the crowd.

When we get to Act 3 and the actual Games, Ross proves himself capable of filming a decent action sequence. The violence is largely minimized – the film sacrificing raw brutality for emotional response. It’s a strategy that works for me, though there is something to be said about forcing the audience to witness the deaths. Getting to see the kills in quick glimpses works for me, though, because the violence of the Hunger Games is there to be enjoyed by the interior audience of the Capitol and reviled by the interior audience of the various districts around Panem. For us out here in the exterior, I don’t think we need the violence reinforced; what we need to see is how the deaths effect Katniss, and we get that in abundance.

The most emotional part of the film comes when Katniss befriends Rue (Amandla Stenberg), the youngest female tribute. Katniss sees a bit of her sister in Rue, but Rue is much more capable of taking care of herself. When the Careers trap Katniss in a tree overnight, it’s Rue who shows Katniss how to save herself by dropping a nest of tracker jackers into the middle of the sleeping Careers. Katniss gets stung, too, and Rue helps her heal and watches over her. Katniss concocts a plan to strike back at the Careers, but the plan goes awry and Rue ends up getting killed by Career tribute Marvel (Jack Quaid), who then gets killed by Katniss.

Rue’s death devastates Katniss, and she honors the death of the young girl with a song and flowers, then looks into the camera and flashes a sign that causes a riot in Rue’s home district. There’s no moment in the film that matches the intensity of THE HUNGER GAMES like this one, and as much as I’d been enjoying the film and as much as I’d been carried along with the story, it was this moment of a devastated, defiant Katniss looking into that camera and connecting with the citizens of District 11 that I knew I was watching a truly special film.

Growing wise in the ways of audience manipulation, Katniss cares for an injured Peeta, taking advantage of a rule change that allows for two winners of the Games as long as they’re from the same district. She channels her own growing confusion over her feelings for Peeta into a performance for the people at home. Instead of coming off as a romance, Katniss’ manipulation of Peeta serves as a bookend for Peeta introducing the whole starcrossed-lovers story line. Her kiss for the camera is the film’s most downbeat moment as it reveals a new side of Katniss, a maturing girl who is learning how to treat the very deadly Games as a game in order to curry favor with potential sponsors. It’s a true loss-of-innocence moment for Katniss as the transformative power of the Games is revealed. Katniss and Peeta win the Games, but then the rules change again, reverting to the “one victor only” dictum. Refusing to fight, they threaten to go all Romeo and Juliet double suicide before the Gamesmaster Seneca Crane (Wes Bentley) steps in to allow them both to survive.

From start to finish, THE HUNGER GAMES is a beautifully shot and acted film. Gary Ross’ direction is simply fantastic, knowing when to let the camera linger and when to use a shaky cam to enforce the chaos of the situation. I love the technique of going quiet in loud moments, and Ross uses it a couple times here to great effect. I generally despise weird costumes and weird haircuts in my sci-fi, but HUNGER GAMES makes it work because it highlights the wide disconnect between life in the Capitol and life in District 12. There are an entire host of good performances by veteran actors here, led by a quietly menacing Donald Sutherland as President Coriolanus Snow. I have so much respect for actors like Woody Harrelson, Liam Hemsworth, and even Lenny Kravitz for hitting the perfect notes in smaller roles. Ross gets the exact performance he needs out of all his actors, but these three are vital to showing how Katniss manages to connect with people.

Jennifer Lawrence is magnificent as Katniss, instantly drawing me into the movie and making me believe fully in this character. Katniss is tough, resilient, and continually overwhelmed by the Capitol, by Peeta’s love for her, for the Games, but she’s never defeated. She manages to take her own personal pain and give it to the world, and even though she turns manipulative later in the Games, you can also see that she’s genuinely confused by her growing attraction towards Peeta and bothered by playing to the audience at home.

I love nearly everything about THE HUNGER GAMES. Gary Ross and Jennifer Lawrence have combined their talents to produce a very special movie. THE HUNGER GAMES is incredibly moving, heartbreaking, and uplifting. It’s also an incredibly serious film, deeply disturbing in its content, but also insightful about contemporary culture. Truthfully, THE HUNGER GAMES isn’t a great time at the theater in the conventional blockbuster sense; this isn’t a big, fun, action romp of a popcorn flick, and if you go in expecting that I think there’s a very good chance you’ll leave disappointed. I saw this film and The Cabin in the Woods on back-to-back days and while both movies share a similar premise (adults manipulating the death of teenagers), Drew Goddard’s film is the better popcorn film.

Make no mistake, however, that THE HUNGER GAMES is the better movie and a brilliant film.

THE ADVENTURES OF TINTIN: I’ll Not Be Doubted by Some Pipsqueak Tuft of Ginger and His Irritating Dog

The Adventures of Tintin (2011) – Directed by Steven Spielberg – Starring Jamie Bell, Andy Serkis, Daniel Craig, Nick Frost, Simon Pegg, Tony Curran, and Toby Jones.

I don’t have much history with Hergé’s Tintin, so I come to this movie rather clean – no preconceived notions, no emotional history, no expectations of any kind. I have so little history with the character that if you had shown me a picture of Tintin, I could have told you his name, I could have told you he was a Hergé creation, and … that’s it. I knew so little about Tintin that I didn’t know the name of his dog. I didn’t even know Tintin was a journalist. Heck, I didn’t even know he was an adult; I thought he was a 15-year old kid or something.

So, yeah. I’m rather blank on this topic.

That said, it’s hard not to get excited about a project that features the combined talents of Steven Spielberg (director), Peter Jackson (producer), and Steven Moffat (co-writer), especially when all three men have plenty of other projects on their creative plates. Since they’re working with an established property, it’s a pretty easy leap to see that this project must have been a labor of love for them.

And that’s really what ADVENTURES OF TINTIN feels like to me – a love letter to a character and series. (Hergé and his drawing of Tintin even make an appearance in the film’s opening scene.) TINTIN is a beautifully rendered film and a completely satisfying adventure about a journalist (Jamie Bell) and his sidekick dog (his name is Snowy) who track down a missing treasure. What I love about the movie is how it manages to feel both large and small at the same time. For all of the globe-trotting and treasure hunting, it’s also a simple story about a dude and his dog who get caught up in something beyond what they had ever anticipated would come from buying a model of a 17th century ship at an outdoor market.

Tintin buys the model of the Unicorn and instantly one man (Barnaby, an FBI agent is disguise) tells him to get rid of it and another man, Ivan Ivanovitch Sakharine (Daniel Craig), offers to buy it from him at any price. There’s no reason for Tintin to keep the model other than he likes it, but the efforts of these two men make him realize there’s something unique about the model. He takes it home to study it, but the ship is broken when Snowy and an interloping cat get in a tussle and tear through the apartment. A small metal cylinder falls out of one of the broken masts, but Snowy isn’t able to get Tintin to see it and it slides under a dresser.

After heading to the library to do research (with Snowy in tow) on the ship, Tintin returns home to find the model stolen and his apartment ransacked. Tintin’s response is to do the pure boy adventurer move – he goes to Marlinspike Hall, the country estate of Captain Haddock, the former captain of the Unicorn. There’s a great bonding scene between Snowy and the estate’s guard dog which allows Tintin to break into the estate, and once inside he is set upon by the estate’s butler and Sakharine. Tintin sees a model of the Unicorn and assumes it’s his, but then Sakharine reminds him that his model was broken, while the one before him is in perfect condition.

Upon returning home, Snowy is finally able to get Tintin to look under the dresser, where he finds the cylinder. Inside the cylinder is an actually a rolled-up parchment that contains a clue to a missing treasure. The FBI agent returns but gets shot by unseen assailants, and Tintin gets kidnapped and brought about Sakharine’s ship. The best part of this sequence is Snowy’s determination to not let the kidnappers get out of sight, and the loyal dog ends up sneaking about the ship and helping Tintin escape and partaking in the adventure.

On the ship, Tintin meets Captain Haddock (Andy Serkis), who’s kept in a state of permanent drunkeness in order to all Sakharine full run of the ship. A whole slew of adventures happen after this – on the ship, in a boat, on a plane, in the desert, on the docks … it all moves swiftly and effortlessly as Sakharine and Tintin compete to find the third model of the Unicorn for the final piece of the riddle. There’s an historical parallel at play in TINTIN: Haddock is the descendant of the original Captain Haddock, who sunk his ship so it wouldn’t fall into the hands of Red Rackham, who just so happens to be Sakharine’s ancestor. Eventually, Sakharine is captured and Tintin and Haddock find a part of the sunken treasure in Marlinspike Hall, and agree to keep looking for the rest, setting up a sequel that Peter Jackson has said he wants to direct.

ADVENTURES OF TINTIN is a wonderful film, fun and fanciful, full of life, energy, and brilliant color. TINTIN is Spielberg’s first animated movie (though he shot much of the film using motion capture), but the world he (and the digital artists at WETA) create is alive and beautiful. While I didn’t read the TINTIN stories as a kid, it feels familiar to the stories I did read. The adventure narrative is preposterous but the characters are grounded, and because they feel real it’s easy to follow along with them on this crazy ride. Despite all the darkness at play in the film with the near-constant threat of violence, a wondrous sense of optimism and permeates the movie.

I’ll be buying TINTIN for the collection and I’m already looking forward to Jackson’s sequel.