Category Archives: Movies

2012 Movie Reviews

‘Snow White and the Huntsman (2012); 100 Movies in 90 Days part II

#11 of 100 on my 100 Movies I’ve Never Seen Before Challenge (part II)

The only thing worse than remakes is dealing with multiple remakes of the same source material in the same calendar year. Okay, so “Snow White and the Huntsman” isn’t exactly a remake, per se. It’s a live action telling of the classic Brothers Grimm fairy tale, which just happened to be made famous by the 1937 Disney classic “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”. Of course, there was the other version of the Snow White story just a few months ago, Mirror/Mirror.

In “Snow White and the Huntsman” we get a darker version starring that zombie chick from Twilight, Kristen Stewart; and Chris Hemsworth, who played Thor in “Marvel’s The Avengers”, as well as Charlize Theron (Prometheus). Let this be a lesson, that darker is not always better. The film looks cool. The effects are solid. But it’s kinda boring. Part of the problem is Stewart, who fails to make us believe that she is “fairer” than anyone.

It’s glaringly obvious from the get-go that Stewart has been miscast here. The entire movie we’re told the kingdom loves this girl because of her fiery spirit but we never really see it. As with every other movie K-Stew has been in, she is in full zombie mode, nearly sleep walking through every scene. It may have been more fun if someone like Mila Kunis was cast as Snow White. Kunis has proven adept at action and comedy and would certainly have had more chemistry with Thor than Stewart.

The good news is that Charlize Theron is amazing in this movie. She’s the only one who seems like she was allowed to have fun with her role. Even though her character gets a little muddled by a mid-movie attempt to make the audience feel sorry for her, she’s terrific from start to finish.

“Huntsman” also treads dangerously close to trying to be a new “Twilight” series for Kristen. No doubt Universal will go forward with a sequel and “SWATH” is left with an ambiguous ending that never settles which man, the Huntsman or the Prince, this girl will end up with.

There is so much going on in “Snow White and the Huntsman”, but it never slows down enough for you to care about any of it. A lot of things feel forced and wedged in to add depth but if there is not heart to begin with, it doesn’t matter how deep it goes. Blame Rupert Sanders for that, as this movie is his directorial debut. He seems very comfortable with making the movie look good– and it is beautiful– but never really knows what to do with these characters.

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Check out my Examiner review of “Snow White and the Huntsman”.

1930s Movie Reviews

‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’ (1937) review

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Seeing “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” is one of my favorite childhood memories. A theatre in Kansas City used to screen these old Disney movies around the holidays and my dad would take my sister and I, along with aunts, uncles and cousins to see these. I’ve always had a special appreciation for the fact I got to see these classics in theatres. At that time (I’m dating myself here), owning movies on home video wasn’t that big of a deal, so this was about the only way to see it. Continue reading ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’ (1937) review →

1986 Movie Reviews

‘Aliens’ (1986) review

Over the years, there has been some debate as to what makes a great sequel. “Aliens”, the high action follow up to the 1979 classic “Alien”, has been generally considered one of the best sequels ever. But is it really? The movie was James Cameron’s follow up to his first directorial hit, “The Terminator”. While, this is a solid follow up as sequels go, I’d argue its far from being the greatest sequel of all-time. It actually has all of the flaws of a sequel that audiences generally feel plague the sequel movies of today.

“Aliens” features the return of Sigourney Weaver to the role of Ellen Ripley, again considered to be one of the best female action heroes ever. It also stars Michael Bien (Terminator), Bill Paxton (Titanic) and Paul Reiser. The action picks up 57 years after the first flick. Ripley’s escape pod is discovered and she soon is faced with accusations that she is to blame for the death of everyone aboard the Nostromo. She learns the planet she landed on and found the face hugging alien has now been colonized and terraformed. Soon, though, contact is lost with the colony and Ripley is recruited to join a team of space Marines to go and wipe out the alien threat.

The first problem with this movie is the problem with every James Cameron movie– it’s just too long. The special edition has a running time of over two and a half hours. The second is a problem that only sticks out in retrospect. The characters here are pretty much the same characters we’ve seen in every Cameron movie since, making one wonder if Cameron can write good characters at all. He gets a lot of credit for developing Ripley, but she isn’t exactly his creation. He just put a flame thrower in her hand and gives her one classic line of dialogue. Other than that “Aliens” really just feels like a bloated copy of the first movie. It skips over what might be the most interesting part of the story– what happened to the colony after the aliens found them– and jumps right to the rescue. But you can only listen to Bill Paxton freak out for so long before it gets tiresome.

Entertainment Weekly once called this movie the greatest pure action movie of all time and there is some good action but really it’s just a lot of running and screaming over machine gun fire. The best part of “Alien” was the suspense that was built up as the one creature hunted the crew members down one by one. Here the one thing to look forward to is Ripley finally grabbing a weapon and going after Newt, the little girl who is the only survivor of the colony. It results in the one great line of the movie, “Get away from her you bitch”. Other than that, this movie has pretty much the exact same ending as the last movie.

Check out some of my other movie reviews at Examiner.com.