Day: June 3, 2012

Like several others, I thought Rupert Sanders‘ Snow White and the Huntsman was at the very least handsomely shot and not too bad as far as it goes. It’s an emotionally primitive CG goth fairy-tale smothering with sterling visual panache. It looks good, and at times even mesmerizing. So I wasn’t in pain, although I felt a bit bored during the middle section in the forest.

The method, I suppose, was to pay tribute to the Peter Jackson way of making mythical films of this sort (which Sanders does, in spades) and to make sure everyone gets wet and muddy and then throw in as many CG morphings and monsters as the narrative can stand, and then throw it all at the wall and hope most of it sticks.

It stuck this weekend, at least, mining bigger-than-expected box-office coin so nobody’s complaining that much and nobody’s embarassed.

I just can’t respond with any real passion to corporate carnivals like this, but at least Snow White holds to a certain grimness of mood and attitude, and that’s something, I suppose. Then again there’s an awful lot of showy, eye-catchy stuff that’s been thrown in because films like this are expected to be showy and eye-catchy. Very little feels thought through or truly felt. It’s really all about design.

Snow White and the Huntsman has been shot with discipline and formality, and with an attractively grim and grayish palette. So it feels solemn and “serious”, in a sense — no winks or self-regarding smirks or asides. But the tone of it is still so damn primitive and arranged along cliches and belief systems that are intensely black and white, good and reprehensible, oozy and beautiful and always “ooh, wow!” It’s a movie for kids with above-average chops.

I didn’t think Kristen Stewart‘s Snow White was too bad — in her usual moody and shirking way she makes “Snow” seem emotionally grounded and more than just a window-mannequin idea of a sweet lassie who’s been badly kicked around and has to learn how to stand up and beat the ogres. I agree with Dana Stevens and others that she loses her authority during the battle scene at the end. She’s too elfin to wear a breast plate and swing a sword in a way that even half-competes with Laurence Olivier in Henry V.

With her smallish face, upturned nose and her damp hair tied back, Stewart reminded me of a certain baby sitter who used to come over when I was seven and eight years old. Face facts — Jennifer Lawrence would have been better in the role.

Chris Hemsworth‘s Huntsman isn’t too bad. He holds his own and knows how to stand his ground and look others in the eye and say his lines with the right tonalities and inflections. And a tip of the hat to production designer Dominic Watkins and costume designer Colleen Atwood and the CGI team. The eight dwarves are…look, man, I can’t do this, all right? I really can’t get into the dwarves.

Charlize Theron‘s evil queen is a lounge act, not a performance — she’s completely vile and egoistic and cruel for the sake of cruelty because simple-dick movies require villains to be vile and egoistic and cruel for the sake of cruelty. For the 637th time, a villain isn’t worth spit unless he/she is (a) someone you know and (b) has something good or at least pitiable about them. If they’re only about extreme venality and monstrousness, my eyes glaze over.

I paid hard korunas to see this Universal release at the Cinema City on Na Prikope. Nice theatre, comfortable seats, good concession stand.

Whoever creates a Bluray of William Friedkin‘s Sorcerer (which for years you weren’t allowed to mention without automatically declaring that Henri-Georges Clouzot‘s The Wages of Fear is a much, much better film) will have to include the Tangerine Dream overture. I heard it the first and only time I saw Sorcerer on a big screen, which was a day or two after it opened on 6.24.77 at the Post Road Cinema in Westport, Connecticut.

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“At first, there were cheers,” writes New Yorker correspondent Wendell Steavenson in a 6.2 posting. “Hosni Mubarak, President-Dictator of Egypt for thirty years, had been declared guilty, responsible for the killing of protesters during the January 25th revolution last year, and sentenced to life. Then the fine print of the verdict came down, and the mood of those gathered outside the court house, many of them families of the martyrs, shifted. Misgivings gave way to outrage.

“Mubarak and his Minister of Interior, Habib el-Adly, had been found guilty not of conspiracy to murder but of a failure to prevent the killing. Six senior Interior Ministry officials, the heads of various police divisions that had coördinated the response to the protests (water cannon, tear gas, bird shot, running people over in police vans, live bullets fired from police stations and in defense of the Ministry of Interior), were acquitted. The judge said that the prosecutor had failed to provide evidence that those shot had been killed with police bullets.

“Then there was the dismissal of the corruption charges over property acquired by Mubarak and his sons, Alaa and Gamal. According to the judge, the statute of limitations for this kind of fraud had expired.

“In his opening remarks, the presiding judge floridly praised the revolution, saying that Egypt’s youth had brought the country out of thirty years of darkness, and emphasized the court’s efforts to adjudicate fairly. But his rhetoric seemed in retrospect an exercise in ‘the lady doth protest too much.’ Last week, I spoke to a human-rights lawyer, who observed that although it’s sometimes possible to get a ruling against the interests of the state in one court or another (appellate, cassation, administration, civil), ultimately, in another court, the regime tends to prevail.

“‘You can win a battle, but not the war,’ the lawyer told me, wearily.

“Analyzing today’s verdicts, I have a sense that the deep state — the alliance between the military, the security services, the interlocking fiefdoms of ex-generals, senior bureaucrats, governors, and some businessmen — had served its interests.”