The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1

Without an extended sequence in the Hunger Games Arena, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1 is merely half of a dystopian revolutionary thriller. 

That said, it’s a *good* half of a dystopian revolutionary thriller, thanks to its cast.

I’ve been on the Jennifer Lawrence train since Winter’s Bone.  While I still haven’t quite forgiven her for Silver Linings Playbook, there’s no denying that she’s a movie star through and through: whenever she’s onscreen, she’s the most interesting thing onscreen.  Surround her with supporting players like Rachel McAdams (having a wonderful time), Stanley Tucci, Woody Harrelson, Jeffrey Wright, Julianne Moore, and the late (and legitimately great) Philip Seymour Hoffman, and you have a cast that could elevate a soap commercial to the realm of high art.


And elevate they do, for while this is only half of a story, they fill it full of interesting moments.  I look forward to viewing the other half and seeing how the whole thing hangs together.

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire is an outstanding example of big-budget Hollywood filmmaking. It offers an engaging story, an outstanding cast, and production design that's second to none.

The story picks up from the first Hunger Games movie, opening with a beautiful shot of Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) silhoutted against a sunrise, quiver on ther back and bow in her hand as she scans a nearby riverbank for game. Struggling with PTSD and trying to get back to normal, our heroine is in no condition to enter the whirl of celebrity life as a Hunger Games survivor. Enter it she must, however, and she soon finds herself the nexus of a nascent revolution.

This is just the first act, but it does an outstanding job of reorienting the audience to its world, laying down the story's themes, and setting up the larger conflicts playing behind the scenes of the smaller scale, yet no-less important, conflicts awaiting our heroine as she's thrust back into the world of the games and forced to compete again. In effect, it shifts the focus of the franchise from “Teenager sticks it to the The Man” to “Scrappy rebel comes to grips with her new status as a leader.” It's wonderful, and wonderfully realized. And we haven't even met most of the supporting cast.

Speaking of which, look at that cast: Amanda Plummer (who Can Do No Wrong), Donald Sutherland, Elizabeth Banks, Stanley Tucci (CDNW), Jeffrey Wright (CDNW), Philip Seymour Hoffman, Toby Jones, and Woody Harrelson, just to name a few. Folks, these are the big guns: the top-shelf talent a studio is willing to pay for when it knows it has an almost certain hit. They do not disappoint, and neither does Lawrence (CDNW), once again proving that she's as capable of carrying a major studio sci-fi action franchise as she is anchoring a moving and horrifying modern noir (That last sentence brought to by Winter'sBone, which you should see right away.). That said, I'd like to take a moment to single out the always wonderful Stanley Tucci (What? You haven't seen Big Night? What's wrong with you?). Here, he plays a television personality who's all spray-on tan, ultra-white teeth, silly hair, and bull$#!^. Watch him closely, however. Beneath the veneer, his character is a consummate professional who happens to be extraordinarily good at his job. It's a layered, subtle performance for a character who could easily be nothing but a two-dimensional placeholder. That's what the best can bring.

But wait – there's more. This film's costume, makeup, and set design, as well as its computer-generated animation, is seamless, beautiful, and brilliantly realized. It delivers the spectacle one expects of a major blockbuster combined with the care and artistry required to deliver a convincing, organic, yet slightly alien world. This picture is nothing short of marvelous, and marvelous to behold.

In my review of TheHunger Games, I wrote that I looked forward to the further adventures of Katniss Everdeen. Catching Fire did not let me down. Bring on more sequels!

Source Code

With his first feature, Moon, director Duncan Jones established himself as a filmmaker capable of creating the kind of fascinating, challenging science fiction we associate with Golden Age writers like Asimov, Bradbury, and Leiber.  With Source Code, his second feature, Jones delivers a science fiction thriller offering an intriguing premise, riveting execution, and a satisfying denoument.  Jones not only sticks the landing, he sticks the entire film.

Here’s the setup:  Captain Colter Stevens is an Army helicopter pilot who awakens strapped in a kind of time machine.  This machine comes with a twist: it puts him in the body of another man, and it can only send him to one 8-minute stretch in the man’s life: the 8 minutes before he dies.  Colter’s mission: discover who’s responsible for killing the man and everyone on the commuter train the man happened to be riding when it exploded. 

Go.  Fail.  Die.  Try again.

It’s a great premise, mixing aspects of Groundhog Day, “Quantum Leap,” and Day of the Jackal.  Jones fleshes it out with a strong cast, starring Jake Gyllenhaal (a favorite since October Sky), Michelle Monaghan, Vera Farmiga, and Jeffrey Wright.  He complements them with direction and photography that reveal enough to keep us oriented and in the game, but hide enough to keep us questioning and worrying our nails.

And it works.  We share Colter’s disorientation, his desperation.  We want what he wants, we feel what he feels, and we walk out of Source Code exhilarated, satisfied, and ready to live those 90 minutes over again.

With Moon and Source Code, Duncan Jones is officially two for two.  I can’t wait to see where he goes for number three.

The Ides of March

The Ides of March reminds me of the (very good) Robert Redford film The Candidate.  Where The Candidate focused on Robert Redford’s candidate for Senate, The Ides of March focuses on Ryan Gosling’s consultant to the presidential primary campaign of George Clooney.  Both films are about ambition and compromise, and both succeed.

The Ides of March, based upon a stage play, relies upon its performances to sell its dialogue-heavy running time.  This works, and it works thanks not only to the aforementioned Gosling and Clooney, but to pros like Paul Giamatti, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Jeffrey Wright, and Marisa Tomei.  Watching them perform, we feel like we have seats to an all-star production on Broadway.  Granted, it’s a production that feels earnest even while it tries to plumb the depths of self-interest and manipulation (Clooney, the Democratic Primary candidate, gets off all the Democratic talking points and zingers that left-leaning writers shout at their televisions during news conferences.), but I welcome earnestness when done well.

Does the plot twist and turn?  Yes, in ways both expected and surprising.  Do we feel for the characters?  Yes, though our loyalties shift.  When the credits roll, are we glad we spent 90 minutes with these people?  Yes, because they’re played by world-class actors speaking interesting dialogue in a story that, while not dazzling in its originality, benefits from being one well told.  I enjoyed The Ides of March.  If you like smart stories about interesting people, you probably will, too.

W.

W bounced on and off my Netflix queue a number of times. I knew that Oliver Stone is a major director, but I didn't particularly care to sit for a two-hour tomatofest directed at our 43rd president

Yep, I expected a hatchet job, and some blademarks are clearly visible: Dick Cheney's Strangelove moment in the War Room, the mannequin that stood in for Condi Rice. But the movie got at what I perceive to be the fundamental nature of its subject: a good man out of his depth. Josh Brolin was phenomenal, making us believe in his character at every step in his journey, and taking all those Bushisms and weaving them into the natural language of a guy whose brain often outpaces his mouth.

While watching the film, I wondered why it needed to be made in 2008. I think there's a difference between a sitting president and and an alumnus, no matter how recent. As the Obama team has learned with the lack of traction of its "blame Bush" public strategy, unless the last guy in the job was a towering figure, he may as well be Jim Garfield. W was urgent during 43's presidency because then, he formed a member of our perceived "circle," those people in our daily lives who have the greatest impact on us. Now, he's like a member of that circle who has since moved away. He's a person in whom we're still interested, but that interest lacks the immediacy it once had.

Immediacy aside, W is still a film worth watching. It's a take on a man and a time by a master filmmaker with a surprising point of view. It looks great, most of the supporting cast is terrific, and it was over before I knew it.

Cadillac Records

CADILLAC RECORDS is your basic music biography, but the twist here is that it’s the biography of a company, Chess Records, rather than an individual. The film centers on two men, Muddy Waters and Leonard Chess. Muddy is the natural blues man, a gifted musician with no head for business, while Leonard is the natural promoter, a gifted businessman with an ear for quality commercial music. When Muddy plays Leonard’s club, Leonard knows he has lightning in a bottle: all he needs to do is record it. And record it he does, founding Chess Records and signing, in addition to Waters, people like Howlin’ Wolf, Little Walter, Chuck Berry, Etta James, and Willie Dixon. Everything’s champagne and Cadillacs, at least for a while, but anyone who has seen an episode of “Behind the Music” knows how things will go from there.

Sure, CADILLAC RECORDS has a familiar arc, but it has a few things to recommend it. First, there’s the music: if you don’t like the blues, there’s something deeply wrong with you. Second, there are the performances: what’s not to like about a cast with people like Jeffrey Wright, Adrien Brody, Gabrielle Union, Mos Def, and the duly beringed Beyonce Knowles? Not to mention this other guy, this guy who comes out of nowhere, Eamonn Walker as Howlin’ Wolf, a force of nature who blows everyone off the screen just by walking into a room. Third, and perhaps most importantly, there’s the history: there is no rhythm and blues, there is no rock and roll, there is no soul, there is no hip hop without Chess Records.

So, hey, if you like good music and you enjoy seeing excellent performers do their thing and you want to learn some history, CADILLAC RECORDS is for you. Think of it as reading a particularly engaging biography, and enjoy.

Quantum of Solace

QUANTUM OF SOLACE is an action movie whose action sequences are so incomprehensible as to be outright boring. Seriously. Whoever directed and edited these sequences are terrible at their jobs, utterly unable to string together something so simple as a fistfight without a hundred jump cuts and reaction shots that, at times, had me
wondering who was hitting whom.

The story's fine, I suppose - it's a mystery wrapped in a revenge thriller, with plenty of granola-eating throwaways for the Guilty Hollywood crowd (The next time I hear someone complain about "the corporations," I'm gonna throw my Nerf brick at the screen.). But I didn't care because not only did I not know what was going on, it
became apparent that this iteration of Bond has no fear of death. How can we thrill to the courageous exploits of a man who doesn't need courage because his wiring's screwed up?

Yeah, QUANTUM OF SOLACE is loud and lots of stuff blows up and Bond outflies a fighter in a DC-3, but it just doesn't work. Maybe if I knew what was going on.

The Manchurian Candidate

THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE remake offers a twist on the paranoid thriller. It's a hippie paranoid thriller. Unfortunately, the hippie element so intrudes on the paranoid element that I had difficulty discerning whether the film wanted me to gnaw my fingernails, laugh out loud, or just peace out, man.

While the film hits many of the beats of the original, it also takes time to tap on pretty much every board of the Democratic Party's then-current platfom. From the Prescription Drug Benefit to Halliburton to G.W . Bush himself, THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE sets 'em and knocks 'em down, one after another, to such an extent that it actually becomes a distraction. I mean, c'mon, Al Franken as a nightly news reporter?

That's not to say that THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE doesn't have anything going for it. Jeffrey Wright is, as usual, phenomenal; Denzel Washington is, as usual, so good that we don't notice how good he is; and Liev Schrieber makes me wonder why the hell that Mr. Clark movie never happened. None of them, however, are a match for Meryl Streep. Not only does she blow every one of them off the screen, but I bet that when this thing was running in the multiplexes, she blew everyone in all the other movies off their screens, too. She's evil, she's creepy, she's smothering, and she is 31 different flavors of awesome.

While THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE is a bit slight and more than a bit hamhanded, it's worth watching for Streep's performance alone. And who knows? Maybe the hippies are right.

Broken Flowers

The blog has been relatively quiet lately; sorry for that. With a famly vacation and various summertime activities, it's been hard to break off the time to write up my impressions of the movies I've seen.

That said, something's better than nothing, so here's a quick jot about Jim Jarmusch's BROKEN FLOWERS:

I'd like to take a moment to celebrate one sequence from the movie.

When Murray visits old flame Sharon Stone, he finds himself in the middle of a Nabokov novel. Thing is, he realizes it; but neither Stone nor her eminently available daughter (aptly named Lolita) are in on the joke. Murray's deadpan delivery acts as the perfect counterpoint to the ridiculousness of his situation, and the whole affair is entirely successful.

Much like the rest of the film.

Casino Royale

CASINO ROYALE is the first James Bond film I’ve liked since Timothy Dalton left the franchise. But something about it bothered the hell out of me.

Don’t get me wrong: Pierce Brosnan was a fine Bond, keeping the character just this side of self-parody while clearly having fun with the role. Problem is, he was a fine Bond in terrible movies. Denise Richards as a nuclear physicist? Invisible cars? “He’s the best there is”? Give me a break – he’s one of nine. Sure, I saw every one of his movies, but I walked out disappointed every time. It got to the point where, as with Star Wars, I was ready to leave the franchise behind. Daniel Craig, on the other hand, got lucky with his first film in the role. CASINO ROYAL’s stunts looked practical, its villains seemed plausible, and its story seemed reasonable. This gave the film a sense of urgency that the others lacked, and it helped to keep me entertained throughout its running time.

But here’s the thing that bothered me: I finally realized that the Bond franchise is basically wealth porn. It dangles before us, bright and shiny, a world of fabulously wealthy people living fabulous lives in fabulous locations. Even its working stiffs, its spies and accountants, get to live fabulously on their governments’ tabs (he writes, looking around his serviceable but decidedly non-fabulous government-funded hotel room). It equates wealth with conspicuous consumption, two things that have proven, time and again, to be fundamentally incompatible, and it does so while burying us in advertising for watches, cars, beverages, hotels, and nearly every other consumable a profligate spender might reasonably purchase. I have a problem with wealth porn, because it encourages the kind of irresponsible behavior that leads to people purchasing vehicles whose value outweighs that of their retirement plans, all for a taste of what they perceive to be “the good life.” Why did this particular installment trigger that connection? I suspect that it was the sight of James Bond driving to a posh location alone in a Ford, then driving away in a fabulous sports car, beautiful woman at his side, because he had basically won the lottery. My first reaction? “Frack! I need to win the lottery!” (Legal Disclaimer: So I can put the beautiful woman to whom I’m married in a fabulous sports car. Let’s make that perfectly clear.) My second reaction? “What am I thinking? I need to make another contribution to my Roth IRA!”

So while I enjoyed the movie, I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was selling me an attractive lie. It’s the blemish on an otherwise entirely enjoyable film. I wouldn’t let a little wealth porn turn you away.