The Last Drive-In Picture Show

This past weekend, we headed about an hour and a half north of Austin (stopping on the way to pick up Jessica's sister Molly and her boyfriend Tyler. That's Molly's boyfriend, not Jessica's. Otherwise that might have been awkward...) to the town of Gatesville, and more specifically to "The Last Drive-in Picture Show". For those of you who have never been to a drive-in movie, they're fun, and the fact that they still exist is a minor miracle. Yet they do, hiding out in random fields across the country, just waiting to be discovered. Granted, they are not all equally great. Some will charge per person, don't allow outside food or drink, and only show one movie. If that's the case, you may as well go to a theater. At least the sound quality will be better. The LDPS does it right though. You go see a bad movie in the theater with 4 friends, you're out $40 and 2 hours. You go to the drive-in, you're out $5 and, if you brought enough to drink, even a bad movie might end up being entertaining. And if the movie has no redeeming factors, you can always watch for shooting stars.



As for the movies, we saw WALL•E and Hancock. One I really liked, the other I could have left halfway through. Here are my thoughts:

WALL•E (click for trailers):
PIXAR has taken nothing and created something incredible. With a script containing maybe 250 words of dialogue, they devised a character you empathize with and that seems to have all the best parts of human nature without even being human. You cheer for him, you fear for him, and you want him to succeed because you care.

At the most basic level, WALL•E is a love story. Unlike most love stories, it is purely about the connection between two beings and the feelings they have for each other. This aspect of the film seems to work because there are two robots, not in spite of it. If it were two people, the connection would seem contrived without any physical connection, yet with robots we accept that they might not have those same desires.

The entire story occurs 700 years after all human beings have abandoned Earth, showing a bleak future where one giant conglomerate controls everything, thus destroying the world. People have become Far Side-ish, floating around in self-propelled chairs with monitors in front of their faces. One woman best summed up people's awareness when her monitor broke and in looking around she was surprised: "I didn't know we had a pool!" While extreme, the similarities to our own society where obesity has become the norm and everyone walks around plugged into an iPod or cell phone are uncanny. One can only wonder how far off this depiction is from our own fate.

Hancock:
(SPOILER ALERT)
Having seen and enjoyed Iron Man earlier this summer, I was hoping Hancock could provide a similar thrill. The premise presented in the trailers seemed promising enough: a man has superpowers but isn't perfect. Several interesting questions about superheroes are brought up (most of which are shown in the trailer), which has the movie going in the right direction. Then, about halfway through the movie, the question is raised, "How did you get your superpowers?" Initially, Hancock says he doesn't know, that he was simply found unconscious and woke up with his powers. And if they had left the question at that, they would have been fine. Instead, they bring in a second superhero who is the soul mate of Hancock and reveal that they have been lovers throughout history and in the past they were called gods and now they are called superheroes but when they become lovers they start to lose their powers and become mortal and so they can't be together but then they try to be together and bad guys happen to show up at the right time and attack them and they're dying except Hancock runs away so that they both get their superpowers back and live happily far apart in L.A. and New York. NOOOOOOOOO! Why does Hollywood have to make up a complex and contrived solution to ruin a perfectly good premise? Initially they took real life, added one twist (a superhero that wasn't perfect), and they were good to go. Work within those confines. Find a way to solve your problems using those guidelines. When they add this whole complex storyline halfway through the movie it's like they're cheating. They're saying, "We're too lazy to actually solve this problem so instead we'll make up something and pretend like we meant it all along." Lame. And to boot, the fight scenes that follow the revelation halfway through aren't anything special. It's a combination of blurry, fast-moving superheroes that somehow conjure snowfall in L.A. (a.k.a. Storm from X-men) and an indoor fight scene where both superheroes can get hurt. If I were you, and I really wanted to see the movie, I'd leave about 45min. through when the superwoman shows up. Save yourself the hour of time. Maybe go look at the stars...