The Culture Beat

We saw the latest Jerry Bruckheimer-produced blockbuster film last night. And by we, I mean my son Benjamin, age 16, and I. Usually, my wife is part of our movie-going trio but we were going to Ben’s first drive-in movie experience, and Judith wasn’t particularly interested in the film, plus, she knew she’d be in the back seat of the mini-van and wouldn’t be able to see as well. We guys batched it the two-mile trek down to the Lake Worth Drive-In. We’d passed numerous time before while I wondered when we could finally introduce Benjamin to the outdoor movie experience that had been so popular in the postwar era before falling to the onslaught of proliferating multiplexes in the 1980s.

Drive-in movies had been popular in the 1950s affluence as they satisfied the population’s desire to not just see a movie but to recreate, to get out of the house into the great outside. A drive-in was sort of outdoors but with the added mobility of sitting in your big American car with the goodies you’d brought with you in the trunk cooler or picnic basket. The speakers hung on the rows of posts that looked toward the great white screen. Some drive-ins had sloped grass and gravel parking lines so that your car was angled up toward the screen to enable better viewing. I saw Walt Disney’s Swiss Family Robinson as a child as my first drive-in experience and will never forget the opening scene of a wooden ship desperately tossed on a stormy sea against the night sky behind the screen. The speaker box hung on your open car window with the tinny soundtrack playing.

The best part about a drive-in was that you could get out of the car and walk to the concession stand while able to turn to watch the movie, and perhaps still hear the audio playing from nearby speakers, never missing a thing. Of course for the youth demographic, drive-ins weren’t family affairs so much as infamous passion pits where heavy petting and more could occur in the privacy of a car’s cabin. As car culture faded in the 1970s oil crisis, so did the popularity of the drive-in as the seasonal nature of its outdoor venue and less than theatrical quality of the picture gave way to the blockbuster era of special effects and Dolby sound and variety of the new multiplexes.

Living in south Florida, there’s no winter to shut things down so the Lake Worth Drive-In, like others in the region does fine with the right kind of movie. We drove in and could see that there were two screens, one with its back to the road, and the other in the far corner of the large lot. We paid $6 for each ticket, not bad for an evening show. The box office clerk told us we were at screen 1 and to tune our FM radio to 93.7 for audio. We drove down and onto the large paved lot with painted lanes and parking slots. I found a place just off center and on the third “row” back out of four row. We could see plenty of cars already there, most of them either mini-vans and SUVs, most of them with their rear facing the screen–as in this picture, taken during the last Indiana Jones movie’s release–at first, this was a little disorienting because it looked like they were facing an invisible screen opposite screen 1, but I quickly caught on that with the vehicle’s hatch doors open, passengers could spread out cushions and blankets to lay down and watch. Many folks had camp and lawn chairs set out besides their vehicles to stretch their legs and get comfortable.

Ben and I headed to the concession stand (pictured here) to check out the goodies. It was a crowded structure on the first floor with a smaller projection booth on the roof where images could be shown at both screens at right angles to each other. Ben ordered some cheese nachos and I got a small buttered popcorn for $3.00, still better than a regular theater concession price. We got back in plenty of time to tune our radio to the right station and soon the movie began.

It was strange watching a relatively small image behind our windshield, less bright than a theatrical screen, but the sound was fantastic coming through our car’s speakers; my seat vibrated with low frequency hums during the action sequences. And the movie?

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time is a typical summer blockbuster wanna-be, a good number of CGI special effects at the end and peppered throughout, but it was surprisingly straightforward in tone, lacking the tongue-in-cheek attitude I was expecting. The story of a street urchin, Dastan, adopted by the wise king of Persia and made the youngest of three royal brothers, it’s actor Jake Gyllenhaal’s second foray into blockbusterdom after being part of the ensemble of the disaster film, The Day After. Lots of actors who make their reputation in small independent films will do blockbuster rolls to earn big bucks while they take a pay cut on their more artistic endeavors, and as Johnny Depp showed playing Captain Jack Sparrow and Robert Downey Jr. did playing Tony Stark/Iron Man, one can have one’s artistic integrity and blockbuster fortunes too. Jake’s body is super toned up for the athletic role of the adventurous prince based on the video game from which the movie draws both its name and much of its plot.

A mystical dagger is the sought for object since it can be used to roll back time and thus change history so there are plenty of chases, fights, battles and derring-do but although it doesn’t take itself very seriously, it isn’t nearly as campy as Pirates of the Carribean. In fact, its plot is borrowed from recent current events. The Persians, led by Dastan’s oldest brother, invade a sacred city based on a spy’s false report that the city is forging weapons to use against Persia. These false pretenses are part of a larger scheme but somewhere in the writing stage, someone must have noticed the resemblance to the U.S.’s invasion of Iraq based on intelligence reporting Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. But there seems to be no deeper ideological message so this isn’t Avatar. It did occur to me that none of the Caucasian featured players are close to being any ethnicity played on the screen and everyone talks in some type of British accent (to avoid sounding stereotypically “Arabic?”) so one really can’t take this Hollywood hoohaw with anything but a block of salt historically.

The script seems very much by-the-book in it’s structure and this familiarity may be too predictable for some, but the treasured object at the core of the story allow the climax to be surprisingly moving and heartfelt. It felt somewhat like an Alladin story in its style and lack of snarkiness. Benjamin liked it and thinks its the best movie adaptation of a video game, a task full of failures as moviemakers have so often missed what makes a successful adaptation from interactive to straight cinematic narrative. And he liked the drive-in experience but I’m not sure when we’ll find just the right movie to fit the exterior conditions and altered viewing conditions, but at least now he knows something of the wider American filmgoing experience.