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.

“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.”

“If you want to be in good standing with the international elite film snob community, you have to be down with even the most arcane Nicholas Ray film, just like you have to swear by the coded soap-opera kitsch of Douglas Sirk. This is a non-debatable clause in the dweeb contract. It’s there because Ray was a highly skilled and passionate filmmaker, yes, but also — primarily? — because Jean-Luc Godard once wrote that ‘Ray is cinema!’, or words to that effect.

“My favorite Ray films have always been Rebel Without A Cause, In A Lonely Place, On Dangerous Ground and They Live By Night. Yes, I know — a boring thing to say. I’m very sorry to offend the high priests of the temple but I hated Bigger Than Life when I saw it at the Film Forum a couple of years ago, and I’ve always been ‘meh’ on Johnny Guitar.

“Ever notice how the snobs never include Ray’s 55 Days at Peking or King of Kings in their retrospectives? Or mention them in their articles? (Except for this Glenn Kenny piece.) That’s because they’re regarded as somewhat embarassing paycheck gigs and not ‘genuine’ Ray films. But I kinda like 55 Days at Peking. Ray reportedly collapsed during shooting of that Charlton Heston war-siege drama; the offshoot was that he had trouble finding work for a long time after.

“My favorite Ray moment of the ’70s? When he kicks that paint can across the loft floor in The American Friend.” — from an 8.10.11 post titled “Remnants of Ray.”

The Olive Films Bluray of Johnny Guitar is out on 8.7.12. Amazon’s page says it’ll be presented at 1.37 to 1, but you can never trust them on aspect ratios. Presumably it’ll be Furmanek-ed at 1.85 to 1, especially since it opened on May 27, 1954, or more than a year after the industry-wide 1.85 mandate.

Pre-order now and a three-pronged Prometheus package — Bluray, DVD + digital copy — is yours for only $27.99. Are Fox marketers presuming that online U.S. buyers might be slightly more intrigued now, a week before the 6.8 opening, than later? It would appear that the idea of a theatrical debut being a singular, stand-alone event that warrants everyone’s attention and respect without the baggage of hustling other formats is out the window.

Corporate arrogance and swagger didn’t start to manifest big-time until the robber baron era of the 1890s. The idea of Lincoln toying with this notion while the Civll War was still raging would have been uncannily perceptive.

Two years ago I wrote that the popularity of the MTV Movie Awards (which airs this evening) “derives from its blatant goof-off attitude and being 100% opposed to the idea of movie theatres as churches. Movies are celebrated instead as things you might watch on your iPhone or iPad while farting and belching during a McDonalds break.”

Forget the communion aspect, the notion that movies at their best are about shared uplift and transportation — a chance for everyone to hold hands and occasionally feel who and what we really are deep down. No awards show is better at expressing glitzy 20something quarter-of-an-inch-deep Eloi values. Tonight Hollywood’s empty Coke bottles will get all trussed up and renew once again their balls-out determination to banalicize an art form. The worst people in the film industry, all gathered together in a single room.

Gold Derby‘s Tom O’Neil‘s Gold Derby has posted speculative rundowns of 2012 Oscar nominees, as I did a few months ago when I posted the 2012 Oscar Balloon. I’m perplexed by the prediction that Laura Linney‘s performance in Roger Michell‘s Hyde Park on Hudson is the leading contender for Best Actress. Has anyone anywhere seen any portion of Linney’s performance? Or read the Hyde Park script? Or anything?

In a highly droll, deliciously phrased 6.1 piece in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Dave White assesses “Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars.” The Old Hollywood tell-all by Scott Bowers and Lionel Freidberg has been out for about four months. Read my riff about it, which was posted last January, and then savor White’s article, which is called “Town Pump.”

The book claims, says White, that Bowers and his “horniest, neediest, most open-minded pals, both male and female, serviced en masse all manner of Hollywood hot shots, names both above and below the title, with Bowers using his legendary penis to satisfy more of the rich and famous than anyone could count, himself included. The way he tells it, the scene was a non-stop, barely contained bacchanal. Orgies of every stripe, down-low gangbangs arranged in a wink, you name it. Right out in the open. Vice squad eluded. Everybody getting all the hot monkey sex any human being could want or even contemplate handling. Then everyone got up at five o’clock in the morning to make their call time.

“Sound impossible? No. It’s a big world, anything’s possible. But implausible? Hell yes.

“Think of it like this: you happen to live in Los Angeles where casually noticing celebrities in the supermarket, at the multiplex, at the gym is just something you’re used to. Now imagine each and every one of those celebrities not only noticing you in return, but laser-focusing their sights on you, hitting on you, offering you money for the sex, then becoming your close pal and subsequently fixing you up for more money and more sex with all of their famous friends, as well. If my life worked that way I’d have already been paid for sex by Jody Watley, Jennifer Beals, Patton Oswalt, Sandra Bernhard, Adam Sandler, Werner Herzog, Reese Witherspoon, Miranda July, Jim J. Bullock, and Johnny Mathis. But every one of those people ignored me, just like they’ll ignore you. In return I allowed them to buy their pork chops in peace.

“It’s a story of revelations — Tony Perkins was gay, Errol Flynn was drunk — that don’t feel revelatory any more. Stalker-y internet gossip site TMZ is its own TV show now and they’ve got a bus that runs all day long so tourists from Indiana can see where Chris Brown beat up Rihanna. Those tourists will pay attention to it for a few moments, walk away, forget it and then shop at the Hard Rock Cafe store, provided none of it makes them late for their shuttle ride back to the hotel in time for the Cirque du Soleil show at the former Kodak (now Dolby) Theatre.

“It’s a time in Hollywood history when Mel Gibson takes up with his mistress, puts a baby in her, screams weird racist things on the phone, they laugh about it on The View and then Jodie Foster turns around and puts him in her next movie. Charlie Sheen chases hookers around hotels and gets endorsement deals and a new sitcom out of it. Actors like Neil Patrick Harris simply announce their gayness and move on, rightly separating their professional, personal, and private experiences — no shame, no worries, no big deal.

“Scandal isn’t scandal anymore unless there’s murder involved, and Bowers’s book, out now these past few months, is just a badly-written blip in the entertainment news cycle, another tell-all sex book by someone you’ve never heard of. No lids ripped off. No eyebrows scorched from the burning shock of the page. It may all be true, but Gore Vidal is wrong when he calls it ‘startling’ on the jacket. It’s just repetitive, empty and, because the dead can’t be offended, harmless.

“If it has any value, it’s in its unstated, unexamined theme: That life used to be much, much harder for anyone whose desires fell outside the norm. Unless they were rich, of course. Then they called Scotty Bowers and he kept them in orgasms until the sexual revolution kicked in for everyone, including run-of-the-mill nobodies.”