If I hadn't known better, I would have thought that the Tri-Town Drive-in was one of those long abandoned relics of yesterday. The screen was not at all visible from the road, and the dilapidated sign was embedded in an overgrowth of trees. Only the fact that the skewed letters on the marquee spelled out current releases was there any hint that this was active outdoor cinema venue.
The website had advertised 17 bucks a carload, but when I handed the woman at the booth a twenty dollar bill, she gave me back a five spot with a generic roll ticket. There were already well over a hundred cars in the plaza, a good crowd for a Saturday night. Over half the cars were minivans, and in many cases, the families had pulled out the interior seats and placed them outside.
Most of the time at the movies, I don't buy concessions, simply because I'm on such a tight budget. But in the case of drive-in theaters, I consider it mandatory to kick in a few bucks for munchies, given that drive-ins are such an endangered species.
The concessions stand was a definite throw-back. It had a full grill that looked at if it hadn't changed at all in twenty-five years, right down to the Centipede video game. Eight bucks got me a cheeseburger, small fries, and a small Pepsi---a lot more than you'd get an one of the chain multiplexes.
I ate my meal while sitting in my front seat during the trailers, until I realized that I had still had the folding chair from my camping trip. I took it out from the back seat and sat in front of my car as the sky grew dark. It occurred to me later that one of the reasons that the drive-in had the feeling of an outdoor music festival was that so many of the cars and minivans had full stereo systems, which they had turned up while keeping the doors open. This meant you could sit outside and still hear the movie soundtrack quite easily in the open air.
As for the movie, what can I say? It was pretty much as dumb as I expected it would be, so it didn't really let me down.
I've grown very tired of magically driven plot lines, and this would seem to qualify, but like I said, I'd already accounted for it. Besides, comedies always get to play by a looser set of rules. A quick look at Shakespeare should be evidence enough of that.
But I would remiss if I didn't restate the Law of the Destruction of Museums in contemporary cinema: if a museum appears as part of the story, it must be partially or completely desecrated or destroyed. In some sense, this movie and its predecessor are the canonical examples, not because the exhibits come to life, but because plenty of the interior gets smashed and wrecked along the way. These movies seem to cater to the some phillistine aspect of our culture in which certain people go to museums and fantasize about cool it would be just to wreck everything inside.
But there is something more deeply offensive that the destruction law. It had to do with how the exhibits behaved when they came to life. Simply put, it was almost as if they were intended to be insulting to anyone with any knowledge of history.
It's not because the brought-to-life characters spoke in anachronistic dialect. It more to do with the fact they were as dumbed down as they possible could get.
I'm not just being a curmudgeon here. In the old days of Hollywood, the people who ran studios had a consciousness of the lowered status their industry held among the "high culture" types, including in academia. Partly out of a desire to be taken seriously, they made movies that often could be appreciated by anyone of any educational level, even as they completely made up history out of whole cloth.
Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian reflects how far we have fallen from this idyllic state. Let me give you an example. Over the last couple months, I've been reading Will Durant's The Age of Napoleon. As it happens, Napoleon is one of the characters who comes to life in this movie.
But did I recognize the Napoleon in the movie? Not at all. Napoleon himself is one of the most written-about people in history, but like the other characters in the movie, the Napoleon here was seemingly not based on any actual historical description, but rather on other stereotypes of Napoleon. Because of this, it was possible to appreciate the humor only if you had never read anything about the real Napoleon, or if you were willing to switch off your brain completely.
This reflects a fundamental breakdown in the distinction between knowledge and ignorance in our culture. It's as if in making this movie, it never occurred to writer and director that historical personnages brought to life in the museum needed to be anything other than the crudest depictions possible.
It's not suprising therefore that when Rodin's Thinker came to life, he was not at all erudite, but rather spoke in a stupefied Brooklyn accent. Likewise the bobble-headed Einstein could assert that pi is "3.141592...to be exact." As any mathematics student knows, pi is irrational, and thus cannot be expressed exactly by an finite sequence of digits.
But what about the story? Was it possible to appreciate the narrative despite the fact that you had to turn off your brain to appreciate it? Unfortunately not, at least after the mid point of the movie, when the narrative degenerated into a mish-mash retread of the Mummy series.
The clumsiness of the story was reflected in the mistimed use of the giant Lincoln from the nearby memorial, who show up at what appears to be the climax, only to disappear before the real climax arrived. By that time, I was barely interested in what was going on.
Nevertheless I was still following it, for one simple reason: Amy Adams, the pride of Boulder dinner theater. Last year I'd come to be a huge Adams fan, but I had noticed in her last few movies that she had tended towards the mousier, soft-spoken roles. Here we get to Adams in all her glory, as potent as in Enchanted. She pretty much carries this movie on her back, and everytime she was on screen (as Amelia Earheart) , my attention was rivetted.
Years from now, when they do a retrospective of her career, they can trot out this movie as example of how a superb actor can make even an inferior movie watchable. Did it save the movie? No, because you still need a good story, which this didn't have. But like I said, it was still enjoyable.
Finally I should mention that a couple weeks ago, I bought my nephew the Wii game of this movie. Since then I've been watching him as he makes his way through the levels. What surprised me after seeing this movie is that the story within the Wii game was far superior to the movie itself.
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