Snow White and the Huntsman

It sounded like an easy story. Snow White, the Evil Witch, attractive Huntsman, and decent cast. What could go wrong?

Everything! The script was poorly developed—and staid, stock set (beautiful Irish landscaping, dreary, unexceptional interiors, villages, and dark forest), flat characters, too many characters, characters and sub-plots that added nothing to the overall plotline. And the acting was not good.

And by not good, I mean it was bad. I’ve seen Kristen Stewart in two movies now: Snow White and the Huntsman and Twilight (the first one), and in my opinion, she should get a day job.  Her acting is flat, dreary, monotonous. She might as well be serving fries at McDonalds. “I’ve seen what she sees. I can kill her,” “would you like fries with that?”  It’s all the same to her. She wasn’t Snow White, she was Kristen Stewart playing Snow White—earning a paycheck.  And she certainly doesn’t qualify as “fairest of them all,” not in my book anyway!  Who else could have done the role? Taylor Cole? Rooney Mara? Annie Wersching? Emma Stone? Emma Watson—she’d have rocked. She’s beautiful, experienced working in films with a magical element, and, you know, she can act.

But no, we have Kristen Stewart with her less than perfect posture and dead eyes. She traipses around the beautiful Irish and Welsh landscape looking like she just wants to get through it; she has rent to pay, or something. She’s just going through the motions. Her Aragorn-at-the-gates speech is an abysmal failure. It should be used in theater arts classes: this is what not to do.

At one point M., my movie-buddy leaned over and said, “They should have asked us to write the script.” because the movie holds no surprises. Snow White, Evil Queen, the repressed brother figure, the tortured hero. Seven dwarves—ok the dwarves were good. But their angst and attitude wasn’t unexpected, I’ve seen Fairytale Theater.

Charlize Theron, usually an amazing actress, was overdone. She didn’t come off as an evil queen so much as a hormonally imbalanced wretch. I suppose stealing youth has its drawbacks—perpetual pms? The nature of evil queen-ness requires cold and calculating, not screaming tantrums. I wasn’t afraid of her, I wanted to offer her a Midol, maybe some hot tea. She did have the best clothes in the movie…

And then there was Snow White’s love interest, the Huntsman, played by Chris Helmsworth. The Huntsman does what a character is supposed to do in a movie; he grows and is changed by his experiences. He’s the movie’s only surprise—because he play his part well. It’s not a surprise that the Huntsman is going to be the love interest, the title tells me that.

And what’s with the Duke’s son? That character—and whole story line–is extraneous to the film. I know from the beginning Snow White’s not going to end up with him. He poses no threat to the well seasoned, rough and tumble Huntsman, he’s not a foil for the Queen or her insipid brother. He wasn’t even all that cute or charming.

It is, unquestionably, the worst film I’ve seen this year. I paid $5.50 (a Carmike 7-days a week 4-5:30 matinée special) and despite the beautiful Irish landscape, despite the eye-candy (both masculine and feminine) I feel like I was robbed. Wait for the late-night B-movie midnight TV showing, because that’s this Snow White’s destiny.

Men in Black III

Sunday we went to see MIB3. Will Smith is older, and Tommy Lee’s old. The storyline, like almost all time travel movies, was sketchy. But it was, you know, Men in Black: imminent disaster, save the world as the clock ticks. Dark, deadpan humor (I like that part), Smith and Jones (wasn’t that a TV show in the 70s?—I think it was), are good, because, well you know, they are. The familiar banter, Smith saying something witty, Jones raising an eyebrow, snarky minor characters, amazing effects, it was all there.

Enter Josh Brolin.

Don’t get me wrong; he was good; almost perfect. It was neat—as in tidy and not amazing. He was a softer, gentler, less jaded and cynical K. And if I hadn’t known the Tommy Lee Jones K, I might have liked it just fine. But I do know the elder K, and his previous-version-created-more-than-a-decade-later, doesn’t measure up. He was just too nice to J.

The bad guy, Boris, looked like Worf in the throes of jak’tahla whilst trapped on Vulcan. Really, even if I weren’t in the middle of a Star Trek marathon, this would be my description. Or maybe he could be described as a semi-intelligent Uruk-hai, with some funky bug fetish on a chopped space-Harley. Yeah that works too. To make it worse, Boris was pretty insecure in his bad guy-monster image. I think he may have been bullied as a child by the real bad guy monsters.

And then there was the time travel thing, sketchy. Sketchy. How could the same person inhabit the same space in two different bodies? Yeah. It all falls apart for me right there. How can you talk to your former self? And if you’re both there together co-existing, doesn’t that mean you have changed the time/space continuum – and that both beings would be functioning independently from that moment forward? Yes, I thought about this in the theater.

When you have time to consider the meta-fictional physics involved in a plot, it’s not a movie you should have spent $10 to see. Stay home, wait for Netflix.

Alias Smith and Jones—that was it, with Pete Duel and Ben Murphy. 71? Maybe later. I wonder if I can instant watch that…

Dark Shadows.

I went to see yet another movie that’s getting bad reviews, Dark Shadows. I’ve heard things like, It’s not very Tim Burton.

I’m not sure what that means, and I’m not sure if it’s good or bad. That there weren’t characters with cone or football shaped heads? I think that I am ok with that. I’m not usually a Tim Burton fan, but Johnny Depp’s another story.

So despite the reviews, we went. The preview trailers were disappointing—Frankenweinie? Really? Mary Shelley, I am so sorry, the modern world has taken a great piece of literature and reduced it to this. Please forgive the diminishing capacity of the human spirit. But then the opening scene to Dark Shadows was set to The Moody Blues, Nights in White Satin, I decided it might have promise, or at very least a good soundtrack.

I came away ambivalent, thinking, well I just don’t know. Depp plays Barnabus well. Jonathan Frid would have been proud of him. He’s villainous, creepy, contrite, and just the right mix of humorous (dark humor of course). But, Angeluqie doesn’t travel in time, she has lived the two hundred years… Burton creates a composite character out of Maggie/Victoria/Josette—and I still don’t know how I feel about that. Not that I’m a purist about these things, but, generally speaking, composite characters diminish the strength of the story. It’s hard to be a writing teacher sometimes.

And Quentin never showed up. This made me sad. I loved Quentin.

Elizabeth Collins Stoddard is perfectly played by Michelle Pfeiffer. But the only allusion to her back-story is when her daughter, Carolyn, does an intro to an Alice Cooper song, The Ballad of Dwight Frye (great soundtrack, by the way, did I say that already?); Mommy, where’s Daddy? He’s been gone for so long…

The movie almost challenges the viewer, do you know where Daddy is?

I knew. And I think that was important, I got the joke. I got all the jokes; about the story, and about the era. I laughed out loud a lot.

I laughed at the details; Deliverance playing at the local theater; the VW bus; the perfectly timed music; like the original series, in some places the imperfect sets; the actors hesitating just long enough to make you wonder if perhaps, like in the TV show, they had forgotten their lines.

I got it.  And I laughed. I enjoyed it. Like the show it was based on, the film Dark Shadows reminds us to lighten up! Stop looking for hidden meanings, some things you either get, or you don’t. Just enjoy the ride. Listen to some good music and, for God sake, laugh a little!

Don’t go to this movie expecting a remake of the show. Don’t go in search of answers to life’s questions. Don’t go with expectation. If you remember the era, go for the nostalgia, the music—the things about life we couldn’t laugh at then, but we can now. Go because Gothic doesn’t mean what it meant in 1972. But what it meant then is worth remembering.

And go for the music!

Look out Rocky Horror—Dark Shadows is a cult classic in the making!