PC Movie Reviews

Now I want to give first-time directors as much of a chance as the next guy. But of course there’s always a fear that in being a novice, their first picture may just end up spinning its wheels. So it’s probably best to just start out small and make your way up the ladder from there. Snow White and the Huntsman is in no way a small project, and yet first-time director Rupert Sanders manages to pull it off for the most part, albeit with a few snags.

If there’s one thing to take away from this new Snow White, it’s that Sanders most certainly has a keen eye for visual aesthetic. The film looks beautiful from beginning to end. That he has a keen eye for what looks good, I have no doubt. Watching this movie is basically like just sitting at a long dinner table and eating every sort of confectionary and sweet for 127 minutes. It’s basically the cinematic equivalent to eating in Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory until you turn into Violet Beauregard and get rolled away by Oompa Loompas. I’m a big fan of dark fantasies and gothic fairy tales, so this felt right at home in my ballpark. Most fairy tales before they were ever given the Disney treatment were actually quite horrific and disturbing affairs. So it was nice to see a return to that. But yes the original Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs from 1937 still remains a classic to this day.

Outside of the visuals, the other thing that Sanders does right is the cast. In particular being Charlize Theron. From the minute I found out she was cast, I knew she would completely rock the role. Then I saw promotional pictures way before its release and was doubly assured. Like I had expected all along, Theron is the perfect embodiment of evil. But she doesn’t just play evil, because she does a lot more than that. She creates several layers underneath all of the hatred and anger and at times I actually felt sorry for her character. And that ladies and gentlemen is good acting. Cool factoid of the day: Because she spent so much time yelling when filming, she actually tore a stomach muscle in the process. Gotta suffer for our art I suppose.

The rest of the cast is pretty solid as well: Chris Hemsworth and Sam Clafflin played their parts of The Huntsman and William respectively quite well. And then of course there are the dwarfs who are made up of a who’s-who of fantastic actors: Ian McShane, Bob Hoskins, Ray Winstone, Nick Frost, Eddie Marsan and Toby Jones. While they weren’t given nearly enough to do, it was just really nice to see them there.

And then there’s Kristen Stewart. Initially I had my reservations, because of her past credentials and her well, large inability to act. That is outside of doing her three mandatory mannerisms: biting her lip, playing with her hair and making weird gasping noises every so often. Surprisingly though, she actually toned it down. While she did sneak in a lip bite here and there, at no point did I notice that she ever played with her hair or breathed weirdly! Great! You’re two thirds of the way to being an actor! While it’s not her best performance (that’s still in Welcome to the Rileys), she did a lot better than I expected her to.

With that being said however, the film does run into a few problems with its writing and occasional directing. The weakest part of the film is definitely the writing. The story definitely takes a backseat to the visuals, so that tends to be a problem. The plot is itself not bad, but I mean it’s basically your typical story, that just looks really nice. Style over substance. And it doesn’t matter how great your visuals are, you can’t cover up annoying plot conveniences or sloppy holes in logic. Sanders as a director probably could have cleaned up some of those problems if he had more experience.

Some of the dialogue is a little overtly cheesy as well. And there definitely needed to be more character development. The romance subplot is basically shunted to the back-burner. While it was great to see those wonderful actors play the dwarves, they didn’t really do a whole lot, except just be there. And did anyone actually remember what any of their names were? Yeah I didn’t think so. I mean sure there was Gus, because they said his name like five times, but that was it. Just call them Sneezy, Sleepy, Dopey, Doc, Happy, Bashful and Grumpy. Then we’ll remember them.

As well, despite how great the film was with all of its dark themes throughout, a little bit of humour injected here and there wouldn’t have hurt. They tried to do that with the dwarves at certain moments, but most of them fell flat unfortunately.

I do have one question to ask though. I mean seriously, in what possible universe could anyone think that Kristen Stewart was fairer than Charlize Theron? Not believable at all. Charlize Theron is far more attractive in my opinion. But I guess that has something to do with beauty being “in the eye of the beholder”. Oh wait…they’re talking about inner beauty…like of the character. Oh…

Well for what it’s worth, this is the best that Kristen Stewart has ever looked in a movie. So there’s that.

(3.5/5)

My love for gloriously campy, trash movies pretty well knows no bounds. Tarantino and Rodriguez did it in 2007 for their Grindhouse Double Feature: Death Proof and Planet Terror (with Terror being the better film). There was Snakes on a Plane, one of my all-time favourite guilty pleasure movies which was only good because Samuel L. Jackson was in it who delivers one of the greatest movie one-liners ever. There was Hobo with a Shotgun, one gleefully sadistic Canadian-grown, blood-bath splatter-house of fun. There was also the wonderfully ridiculous in every way possible Drive Angry with the ubiquitous Nicolas Cage.

And then of course there was Piranha 3D. Now say what you will about that film, but I enjoyed it. A LOT. Get over it. It was delightfully trashy and that’s all it ever needed to be. Director Alexander Aja mixed the perfect amount of blood, gore, women and camp in a delightful ode to classic B-movie schlock that the wonderful Roger Corman was famous for. It made decent bank back in 2010. So of course a sequel was inevitable. Two years later we’re given Piranha 3DD (snort, I see what they did there…). So how does the sequel compare to the first film? Well let’s just say that while not nearly as awful as it could have been, it at least gets a passing grade. While it doesn’t quite manage to surpass or even come close to the original shameless film’s greatness, 3DD is a bloody good time. Sort of.

Going into this film, you know exactly what to expect. Yes the story is almost non-existent, and yes none of the characters are well developed. Most of the writing feels like it was done on a first draft. These are all things that normally I would be bothered by. And I mean yes they are obvious flaws that are bothersome, but it’s still a fairly fun film when all is said and done. And by that I mean, moments here and there. There are some really great moments in this film, but that’s just the problem. There are only moments of brief greatness interspersed throughout.

In reality though, it’s basically a mess. It’s as if director John Gulager missed the point of the original film. Aja knew exactly what he was doing with 3D. But here 3DD is verging on the “so bad it’s bad territory”. It flirts with films like Megashark vs. Giant Octopus and Crocosaurus. Gulager doesn’t seem to understand that there is a very subtle art to making “so bad it’s good” films. As a film itself, it almost doesn’t work. I mean he has pretty well no concept of building suspense or tension. The first film knew exactly how to do this. But here he just doesn’t hold the right structure. And enough of the totally unnecessary under-water shots! Just because you’re showing an underwater POV shot, does not make it scary. Like everything, they need to be motivated. You can’t just show five or six underwater shots and show a campy looking piranha floating by. It just doesn’t work that way.

As well the cast here isn’t nearly as good as the original film. There was Elizabeth Shue, Adam Scott, Jerry O’Connel, Ving Rhames, Christopher Lloyd, Kelly Brook, Paul Sheer etc… Here only Rhames, Lloyd and Sheer reprise their roles. But the great thing about the original film is that none of them took it seriously. They just all kind of rolled with it. Whereas here I mean sure Gary Busey pops up, Katrina Bowden has a really great line after her big piranha ordeal, David Koechener is great as always and David Hasselhoff is hilarious as himself. But other than that, none of the people really stand out. But at least they make a really great outtakes segment during the credits.

And as far as the whole piranha thing goes, it’s actually kind of a letdown. The original film had a wonderfully over-the-top blood bath with some really cool inventive gore moments thrown in. Aja applied his blood where it should have been. But Gulajer just doesn’t really bring it. The whole film is building up to this giant human slaughter in the seedy water-park, but it’s honestly really anticlimactic. Don’t get me wrong, there are some really great laugh-out-loud gorehound-appeasing moments that are warranted. But by the film’s end, it just kind of feels lame overall.

And you’re putting TWO D’s in the title! Count ‘em! Two! I expect some awesome 3D moments that should be doubly as cool. But nothing pops out and grabs you like it should. Lame!

The tagline for the film reads “Double The Action. Double The Terror. Double the D’s.” The first movie was awesome, so by all accounts the sequel should be twice as good, right? Right? Try more like half. It has its issues, of which there are plenty. It has many flaws throughout its scant 82 running time and it’s half as good as its predecessor. But at least it’s half watchable. Maybe they should have called it Piranha 1.5D instead.

(2.5/5)