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!

Margin Call

Margin Call takes place in 2008, on the night before the global financial system went into free fall. It begins with an analyst in a major financial firm's Risk Management department smelling a rat, snowballs into late-night and early-morning meetings of increasingly powerful and terrified members of the firm, and culminates in the run that was the next day's market activity. It's terrifying stuff, way more terrifying than any number of dudes in any number of masks chasing any number of college kids through the night.

It's also annoyingly writerly. Many of the characters get big speeches, and those speeches nearly always sound more like the finger-wagging of hippie writers than the misgivings of mathematicians. Whenever Margin Call pulled me into its world through its spot-on set design and world class performances, it pulled me right back out again when some character started moaning about how he could have been building bridges instead of getting rich.

Nevertheless, the film's sense of mounting dread giving way to panic was effective; and its snappy editing and kinetic (for a film that felt like a stage adaptation) photography kept things moving along. Margin Call caught me up in its narrative in spite of its preachiness. Further, even though I knew how it was going to end, I wanted to know how it was going to end. Overall, I call this one as a good film. But I'd rather see the play.

The Hunger Games

The Hunger Games is a ridiculous film made plausible through its singularity of vision and the brilliant casting of Jennifer Lawrence, an actress who is rocketing her way toward Can Do No Wrong (CDNW) status.

The film is a take on the conceit of Battle Royale, which was a take on The Most Dangerous Game.  In The Most Dangerous Game and all the films that copy it, people are the quarry for hunters either rich or alien, which is basically the same thing as far as the films are concerned.  In Battle Royale, contemporary Japanese high school kids are trapped on an island and must hunt one another until only one remains.  In The Hunger Games, a random selection of teenagers from the provinces of a dystopian future America are forced to fight for survival amongst themselves in a high-tech dome that happens to replicate our heroine’s home environment of Appalachia.

By backing off from Battle Royale’s unflinching brutality, The Hunger Games allows the audience to maintain a kind of distance.  We know that kids are killing kids, but Battle Royale puts the horror front and center through grisly, unsettling practical effects.  The Hunger Games, on the other hand, shows us enough to get the point across while keeping enough back to maintain its tone as a grim adventure, vice nightmare-inducing horror show.  Further, The Hunger Games creates distance through its setting in a ridiculous future, one in which the ruling class prances about in laughable costumes and makeup that we barely accept only because its members are portrayed by gifted professionals such as Stanley Tucci and Elizabeth Banks. 

It keeps the distance in check through its conviction.  The film never winks at the audience, it builds and maintains its world consistently, and it shines in the casting of its star, Jennifer Lawrence.  Lawrence, who broke out in the magnificent independent film Winter’s Bone and showed that she could hold her own with performers like Kevin Bacon and Michael Fassbender in the tentpole X-Men: First Class, brings an earthy realism and courage to her role as Katniss Everdeen, a young woman who volunteers to compete in the eponymous games in place of her younger sister.  She comes across as smart and resourceful and completely engaged, and she takes us along with her because if she buys in, why shouldn’t we?

The result is a successful film, one that creates a consistent world, populates it with interesting people, and makes us care about what happens to them.  I understand that The Hunger Games is to be the first of a franchise.  I look forward to the further adventures of Katniss Everdeen.  This film made me believe in her.   

Captain America

Captain America failed to capture my imagination.  It never made me feel like I was watching people, even extraordinary people, in dangerous situations.  It made me feel like I was watching characters go through the motions of yet another ‘origin story’ that really served as a prelude to the big Avengers movie the studio has planned for next year.  Its perils didn’t feel organic, its villain struck me as silly (The villain’s someone called Red Skull, who’s a really evil Nazi because – what? – regular Nazis aren’t evil enough?), and Captain America’s “super-special good guy team” just looked goofy.

Hey, I like star Chris Evans, who was the best thing about the Fantastic Four movies and Sunshine.  I like Hugo Weaving and Tommy Lee Jones and Stanley Tucci; and Hayley Atwell is easy on the eyes.  But I never believed in what I saw, and it wasn’t long before Captain America had me looking at my watch.  I hope The Avengers will surprise me with something wonderful.  Based on what I saw in Iron Man 2, Thor, and now this, I’m not holding my breath.

Easy A

In Easy A, Emma Stone plays the daughter of Stanley Tucci and Patricia Clarkson.  I was already a Stanley Tucci fan and a Patricia Clarkson fan – I’m now an Emma Stone fan, as well.

Here’s the setup:  Stone plays Olive, a nerdy high school girl who’s embarrassed to admit to her best friend that she stayed home all weekend.  She concocts a story about a first sexual experience with a college boy, and she soon finds herself with a “reputation.”  One thing leads to another, and before she knows it she has a client list of social outcasts for whom she provides stories of imaginary sexual acrobatics in return for things like Bed Bath & Beyond gift cards.  As one can imagine, things spin out of control.

Holding it all together is Ms. Stone, who gives Olive a sweet combination of brains, comic sensibility, and pluck.  Stone, who was fantastic in Superbad and Zombieland, rolls into the A-list here, holding her own with Tucci and Clarkson and lighting up every minute she holds the screen.

Easy A is funny and brisk and thoroughly enjoyable, and much of that is due to Stone’s Charisma.  I understand she’s going to play Gwen Stacy in the new iteration of Spider-Man.  For the first time, I’m interested.

Space Chimps

On Friday, we found out that my wife is pregnant. As we sat down for a pre-movie lunch on Saturday, she opened two bottles of a charming Sicilian brew called Birra Morretti Rosso, one for me and one for her. Then we both remembered – no alcohol for the duration.

Thus it was that I rolled into “Space Chimps” with two drinks under my belt. I strongly recommend that you do the same.

You know your movie is in big trouble when Patrick Warburton can’t save it. Warburton plays the foil, a champ chimp who treats the new guy like a chump (By the way, if you think that was funny, see this movie today. You’ll love it.). Warburton chomps (!) into the role with his usual gusto, but not even he can breathe any real life into a character whose primary role is to (a) serve as a comic foil and (b) make jokes that consist of inserting the word “chimp” into other words. It’s chimpdiculous. Andy Samberg, batting 0 for 2 in comic films, voices the Chimp Out of Water, Hal III, who’s forced to leave his circus gig to join NASA. His delivery is limp. Perhaps he’d make a good gimp. Even better if he dressed like a pimp.

Aw, to hell with it. “Space Chimps” is poorly written, poorly animated, poorly executed rubbish. Every lame joke I’ve made in this post is better than the entirety of the film. Chimp this one out.

Conspiracy

In January of 1942, General Reynhard Heynrich convened the Wannsee Conference to force various factions within Hitler's government & military to buy in to the Final Solution. CONSPIRACY is drawn from the minutes of that Conference, is of both historical, psychological, and artistic interest as a reasonably accurate depiction of the Conference as a study in management, group dynamics, and power of peer pressure.

Kenneth Branagh stars as General Heynrich, the "Blonde Beast" who was the #2 man at the SS. By turns charming, threatening, officious, and chummy, he uses every tool at hand to ensure the compliance of the men around the table. Stanley Tucci plays Heynrich's right-hand man, Adolf Eichmann, as a cold, hyperorganized, and imposing figure. Only a lieutenant-colonel at the time, Eichmann's competence and obvious closeness to his boss lend him an authority far beyond his rank. There are a number of excellent performances in this movie, but these two guys deserve their above-the-title billing. They're absolutely fascinating, and absolutely terrifying, and the movie does an oustanding job of showing us how, together, they maneuver and manipulate the balky group of men around the table into assistance with one of history's greatest crimes.

As history, as case study, or as art, CONSPIRACY is time well spent.