Drive-In Theaters

In the past, I’ve written about the importance of attending actual movie theaters instead of just watching at home, the luxurious delight of old fashioned single screen movie theaters, as well as the lovely, grimy humanity of video stores. 

 Today, I’d like to say a few things about another underappreciated movie-going venue: the drive-in. Eighty four years ago this summer, a guy named Richard Hollingshead patented the first drive-in movie theater in Camden, New Jersey. As the story goes, Hollingshead devised the idea because his mother didn’t enjoy movies because she found theater seats uncomfortable but he noticed she was able to rest easy when going for drives in the car. Hollingshead experimented in his own driveway, pinning a sheet to nearby trees and strapping a projector to the hood of his car. He sketched out ideal parking arrangements to maximize the number of cars with an ideal view of a screen. He tried to come up with shelters to protect movie goers from bad weather. Ultimately, in June of 1933, Hollingshead opened Park-In Theaters, Inc. He charged 25 cents per person and 25 cents per car up to one dollar, and his first film was the Adolphe Menjou starrer Wife Beware. Even though he was the one to patent an idea that eventually became a national phenomenon, he didn’t have great success with it. His Camden drive-in failed to make a profit after three years and so he sold it to another theater owner. In 1949, Hollingshead’s patent was overturned and by the late 1950s, there were over four thousand drive-ins across the country. All the post-war couples who now had kids and a family car could pay a few bucks and spend a warm summer night out among friends but still comfortably seated in their own vehicle. What could be more American than getting together with people from your community but never having to get out of your own car? Parents liked drive-ins for the easy, relatively cheap family entertainment, kids liked them because it meant they got to stay up extra late and enjoy the playground usually located right below the glowing, multi-story screen, and teenagers – well, they had their own reasons for liking the drive-in.

At the height of drive-in popularity, there was one, The Johnny All-Weather Drive-In in on Long Island, that was 29 acres with parking for 2500 cars, a full service restaurant with screen-viewing seating on the roof, and a trolley to transport people around the lot.

Nothing gold can stay, of course. The advent of affordable color television and the eventual development of the VCR took a toll on all movie-going attendance, and the oil shortage crisis of the 1970s hit drive-ins especially hard. Many of them closed or became swap meets by day and theaters by night. At their zenith, drive ins accounted for a quarter of all movie screens in the country, but now they represent less than two percent.

 However, not only are there still ten operating drive-ins here in Michigan, including one just down the road in Flint, but I found in my research that with the advent of portable digital technology, the outdoor theater is making a bit of a come back. Beginning in the early 2000s, groups armed with portable LCD projectors and micro-radio transmitters have taken over parking lots, warehouses, and bridge pillars for guerilla drive-in movie screenings. Happening primarily on the west coast, these pop-up theaters mostly show cult, art house, and experimental films. While that kind of film is a far cry from what somebody may have seen at a drive-in in 1959, I have a sense that the impulse is the same. Whether you’re a family with six kids watching the latest Disney offering or a bearded hipster watching a Jodorowsky retrospective, sitting out under the stars in your car on a warm summer night with a movie screen glowing in the darkness is a universal pleasure, one that everyone should try to enjoy at least once while the weather’s warm.

Dazed and Confused + Everybody Wants Some!

After a long, wet spring, summer seems to have finally arrived in Michigan. Kids are out of school, the weather is warm, and the longer, slower days have begun. Even though I watch movies year round, obviously, I have always associated movies with summer. Maybe because it’s blockbuster season or because it’s easier to get to the movies when my workload is lighter and the weather is nicer. 

Certain movies just feel like summer, and no two films do it better than director Richard Linklater’s sister films, Dazed and Confused from 1993 and Everybody Wants Some! from 2016. Even though they were made 23 years apart, the two movies are unified in tone and approach, and both evince a feeling of summer better than almost any other movies I’ve seen. 

 Dazed and Confused is set on the last day at a suburban Austin, Texas high school in 1976. There’s very little in the way of plot, per se, as the rambling, shaggy narrative follows close to a dozen main characters as they navigate the end of the school year and beginning of summer. Football players wrestle with whether or not to sign a pledge to not do drugs over the summer, while freshmen desperately try to escape the brutal hazing being administered by outgoing seniors. There are pervs, jocks, stoners, bullies, and wannabees everywhere, and each character is unique, fleshed out, and engaging. The film had early performances from Matthew McConaughey, Ben Affleck, Parker Posey, Renee Zellweger, Adam Goldberg, and Mila Jovovich. What’s great about the film is how is perfectly captures the frightening and exhilarating finality and possibility of the last day, how summer just stretches out in front of you completely unmapped. You’re slightly sad to be leaving what’s become comfortable but excited by who you may become in the next year. The film also does an excellent job of conveying how terrifying and untethered adolescence can feel. It never clubs the viewer over the head with it, but you finish Dazed and Confused simultaneously glad you were a teenager once and overjoyed that you’re not anymore. 

 Everybody Wants Some! takes place during the final days of summer leading up to the first day of school at a Texas university in 1980. Like Dazed and Confused, the film doesn’t really have a central conflict but rather follows around a large ensemble of characters – in this case, members of the university baseball team as they adjust to each other as roommates and teammates, and try to meet girls and have a good time.

The period details throughout are spot on without being overbearing. The feathered hair, unironic mustaches, cars, and music all combine to transport audiences back to the waning days of the Carter administration and “Who Shot J.R.?” For those of us who lived through those days, it’s a pleasant, sometimes amusing journey back. Like Dazed and Confused, Everybody Wants Some! features some great performances from young performers who undoubtedly will go on to bigger and better things later. Interestingly, two of the actors are children of well-known Hollywood. Zoey Deutch, who plays Beverly, the closest the film comes to a main female protagonist, is the daughter of Back to the Future’s Lea Thompson and director Howard Deutch. Wyatt Russell who plays the stoner/philosopher/pitcher Willoughby is the son of Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn. Both are standouts of charm in a film that’s filled with engaging performances.

Everybody Wants Some! does a good job at showing how life can be simultaneously profound and utterly mundane. At the film’s close, after a week of practicing all day and partying all night, school finally begins and two baseball players find themselves in the same class where the professor has written “Frontiers are where you find them.” Contemplating this deep thought, the two party-exhausted players promptly fall asleep as the lecture begins.

Both of Richard Linklater’s films are good natured, profane, funny, and nostalgic without being cloying. Both are a good reason to get out of the heat and enjoy a movie this summer. 

Wonder Woman

There are plenty of reasons to see the new Wonder Woman movie. Yes, it is a superhero film directed by and starring a woman. In the testosterone sea that Batman, Captain America, and Iron Man have floated upon for years, supporting Wonder Woman sends a message to the producers saying, “Women can also direct action. Women can also be the center of this kind of story. This genre doesn’t need to be a boys club in front of or behind the camera.” This is a good reason, for sure. Noble.

But this is not actually the first big budget, big screen female superhero movie, however, and I would no more recommend that anyone go see Catwoman, Elektra, Sheena, or Red Sonja than I would suggest sending a 20 dollar bill through a paper shredder or eating gas station sushi. Any of those experiences would waste money and likely leave you feeling queasy. So even though sending a message of equality to movie studios is a good thing, what good would it do if the female-centric films made were bad?

So this brings me to the other reason to see Wonder Woman: it’s good. Very good, actually. I can safely say it’s the best DC-based superhero movie since the Christopher Nolan Batman trilogy and the first two Christopher Reeve Superman movies. In its characterization, cinematography, plot, humor, and action, it is every bit superior to the muddy, pouty Man of Steel and Batman vs. Superman as well as the ridiculous, Hot Topic-flavored Suicide Squad.

The key ingredients to the film’s success are the economical direction from Jenkins and the human Roman candle that is star Gal Gadot. Jenkins establishes the story quickly with enough detail to satisfy longtime fans but not so much that it bogs down the film, quite a trick for a character over 75 years old.

Gal Gadot is the perfect combination of strength, intelligence, innocence, and fierceness. Like Superman, Wonder Woman is a character with so much baggage and so many interpretations, it’s near impossible to cast someone who satisfies everyone. Gadot, a little-known actress and former Miss Isreal prior to being cast as Wonder Woman, turns out to be as close to perfect as possible. You believe her naivety, having been raised on a completely isolated island, and she is also convincing as a butt-kicking warrior driven by compassion and a desire for justice.

Set during World War I, the film is about Diana’s quest to stop Ares, the god of war, before he destroys the world with battle that will never end. It takes her to the front of the fighting, inside muddy trenches where soldiers have been stuck for over a year. When she finds out there are innocents on the other side of the so-called No-Man’s Land, she strides out into the blasted, pocked wasteland to move the battle forward. Of course, the symbolism of a strong woman moving across No-Man’s Land is lost on no one, and the sequence is electrifying.

As good as the film is, it’s not perfect. It does fall victim to Zach Snyder-itis by the end. The climax is a fiery nighttime battle between Wonder Woman and Ares. There are explosions, slow-mo action, and a sense of let-down in that neither the writers nor the director could do something more inventive than what was done in any of the other most recent DC superhero movies. A movie like this needs a bang at the end, but why does it have to be the same kind of bang every time?

The supporting cast is uniformly charming and engaging. Chris Pine continues his streak of affable, sensitive performances as Steve Trevor, the U.S. spy who is the first man Wonder Woman ever meets. And Lucy Davis as Trevor’s secretary Etta Candy provides wonderful comic relief. Knowing that Davis probably won’t be in future Wonder Woman projects is one of the other small disappointments in an otherwise excellent film. Whatever your reason for seeing Wonder Woman is, you should definitely go.

P.S. This is a comment I wrote in response to someone on Facebook. It gets at something I neglected to talk about in the review:

The thing I wish I had said more about in the review but didn't have space for is that it hits at the heart of what superheroes are actually about. Recently, Marvel has been largely about snark. DC has been about darkness and moodiness. WW is about someone strong, powerful, fast, and smart who believes in compassion, goodness, truth, fairness, and helping those who can't help themselves. Superheroes are often Christ-figures - and sometimes that symbolism is too heavy handed and on-the-nose (Superman Returns) - but here, it is a woman (and not just a male character rewritten to be female) who believes in and does Good. That is why superheroes are so resonant, I think. They echo what it is we need in our lives - someone bigger and more powerful than us to intervene when life is too overwhelming for us. Superheroes can represent the Divine or merely the Divine within each everyday joe or jane when we choose to reach out and help those who are trapped "behind the enemy lines" of life, so to speak. I loved Wonder Woman because she believes in acting fiercely and unquestioningly for the benefit of those in need. It's not about the costume, the special effects, the witty banter - ultimately, it is about being willing to delve into the fray and even sacrifice yourself entirely for the greater good.