Podcast Episode 40: MOCKINGJAY PART 1 Kicks Off The Revolution

I couldn't help but walk out of Mockingjay: Part 1 feeling a bit disappointed.

The first Hunger Games movie left a real bad taste in my mouth, but Catching Fire actually kind of won me over with its liberal dose of sassy Jenna Malone and its promise of legit rebellion and the outright warfare to come.  That's the shit I was all excited to see in the first half of the final installment of this franchise.  Sadly I was let down on both fronts, with Malone sidelined off screen for all but five seconds of the movie and the rebellion whittled down to two and a half skirmishes spread out over two hours of screen time.  Those skirmishes are pretty cool in their own right, but I would have gladly taken more scenes of rebellion in the districts over Katniss staring pensively out over a brook.

There's plenty to like here, including Katniss's inability to perform in a propaganda video (I refuse to acknowledge this franchise's inane fixation with Suessian lingo), every word out of Elizabeth Banks' mouth, a well staged rescue operation, a horrific field of corpses and one last chance to enjoy Philip Seymour Hoffman.  But the biggest problem with Mockingjay: Part 1 is that it simply doesn't feel like a complete story.  We're not quite in Deathly Hallows* territory here, but everything that happens in this movie is merely the prologue to whatever's coming in Part 2.  It's enjoyable, but not exactly satisfying in its own right.  It reminds me of Episode 7 from any season of Game Of Thrones, one of those episodes that's more about moving the chess pieces into place so they can strike the killing blow later on down the road.

Bart and I talk to avowed Hunger Games fanatic Jamie about all this as well as her own wild-eyed theory that Peeta is secretly the boring version of Johanna. (I'm paraphrasing here.)  We also talk about the recent Peanuts trailer, the upcoming Star Wars trailer and casting rumors for both Jean Grey and Jessica Jones.

Next Week: Foxcatcher and/or Horrible Bosses 2


*Or, as I call it, Harry Potter And The Campsite Of Sadness

The New MOCKINGJAY PART 1 Trailer Looks Like A Movie I Might Finally Enjoy

I've always suspected that the best parts of the Hunger Games story would be found in the last installments and from the look of this trailer those suspicions seem to be correct.  We've finally moved past the pretense of the Games, which have only been marginally successful on screen, and now we're digging into an all out rebellion against the Empire.  Err, the Capitol

I feel like most people were pretty unhappy about the way things wrapped up when Mockingjay came out, but those are just the half-remembered whispers I overheard while I was busy not reading any of the books.  This certainly looks like the most cinematic of Katniss's adventures so far and I'd be lying if I said the idea of an authoritarian dictatorship and a plucky rebellion each pitting their own puppet warriors against each other didn't sound like fun.  I could go without the love triangle stuff, but what are you gonna do?  If nothing else, it's a chance to see a new Phillip Seymour Hoffman performance on the big screen and we don't have many more of those left to enjoy.

I expect to come home and find my wife watching this trailer on an infinite loop from now until November.

Here Is Your First MOCKINGJAY Teaser

Lots of people (particularly my wife) have some VERY strong feelings about The Hunger Games.  I am not one of those people.  The first film is fairly dull and seems to focus on all the least interesting stuff, and while Catching Fire was a significant improvement, I still find myself struggling to muster up any genuine excitement for this franchise.  I'll grant you that Katniss Everdeen is a total badass and Jennifer Lawrence does great work in the role.  Plus I'll support most anything that introduces the idea of creepy dystopian sci-fi to new audiences.  But at the end of the day it's hard to shake the feeling that it's really the love triangle melodrama that's driving a lot of the interest here, relegating the weird future stuff as mere window dressing.  It's like trying to argue that Twilight converted teenage girls into fans of non-sparkly vampire movies.

But whatever.  I'm not trying to slag Hunger Games or its fans.  (And it's certainly a huge step up from Twilight.)  I think it's just fine and I expect the franchise will only get better as it comes to a close.  I'll certainly be seeing Mockingjay Part 1 when it hits theaters this fall and I'll probably enjoy it, at which point I will promptly forget all about this franchise until Part 2 comes out a year later.

Anyway, here's a creepy teaser trailer for all you folks who are waiting for this film with baited breath.  You can even watch it in 4K, if you are appropriately equipped!

I say the more devious Donald Sutherland we get, the better.  But that's a good rule for life in general.

The Biggest Scam In AMERICAN HUSTLE Is The Idea That It's A Great Movie

"It's perfume, but there's also something rotten."

There comes a day in the life of every film fan when you realize that all awards shows are complete bullshit.

In my younger days I used to get all excited about the SAG Awards, the Golden Globes and the Oscars because I was laboring under the delusion that the quantity of trophies won somehow corresponded to a film's quality or value within the industry.  My mistake was confusing film awards shows for an honest and objective competition based upon skill and merit as opposed to what they really are, a socio-political popularity contest.  I think for me, the curtain was really pulled back in 2000, when Julia Roberts won the Best Actress Oscar for Erin Brockovich over Ellen Burstyn's astounding performance in Darren Aronofsky's Requiem For A Dream.  Quite frankly, I'm still astounded that anyone would even put the two performances on the same level, let alone hold Roberts' paint-by-numbers portrayal as superior to one of the single greatest female performances I've ever seen in a film.  (Julie Christie's work in Away From Her just might edge out Burstyn.)  In that instance it was clear that the Academy members were simply voting for Roberts because they all really liked her and it was a reasonable excuse to give her an Oscar because she didn't have one yet.  They were voting for the performer, not the performance.  The same thing happened the following year when Denzel Washington won a Best Actor performance for Training Day, mostly I suspect because the Academy forgot to give him one for Malcolm X.  (At this rate, it seems likely that DiCaprio will suffer a similar fate, getting snubbed for truly deserving work like The Wolf Of Wall Street only to win for some far less impressive movie years from now once guilt finally gets the better of Academy voters.)

These days I care very little about awards.  In fact, the only show that I still watch regularly is the Oscars, mostly because I think the results at the end of the night still have a fairly significant impact on the kind of movies that studios choose to greenlight in the immediate aftermath.  There's still a historical significance to the Academy Awards that simply isn't present in something as insular as the SAG Awards or as downright silly as the Golden Globes.  But even that significance is incredibly relative, and just because a movie ends up winning Best Picture, that doesn't necessarily guarantee it a place of standing and influence within the larger popular culture.  There are more than a few movies that lost out on the big night and yet continue to reverberate throughout the collective unconscious years after they left the big screen, while plenty of Best Pictures have withered down to mere historical footnotes; we're all familiar with Citizen Kane while next to nobody remembers How Green Was My Valley.  If you want a more modern example, Jesse Eisenberg will forever be remembered for his indelible portrayal of Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network, a film whose lead actors have gone on to play such iconic roles as Spider-Man, The Lone Ranger and soon Lex Luthor.  Meanwhile, when's the last time you heard someone talk about The King's Speech?

In fact, I'm gonna call it right now: American Hustle is the new King's Speech/The Artist. (Be honest, you forgot that movie ever happened until right now.)  Hustle a film designed to win awards and then be promptly dismissed by the public at large.  It's got David O. Russell behind the camera, a talented director who's improbably morphed into a prestige artist despite a multi-year absence after the huge pile of weird that is I Heart Huckabees (probably my favorite Russell film) and the epic crash and burn of Nailed.  (Poor, poor Jessica Biel.)  The cast is chock full of fabulous A-List movie stars clad in a wide range of flamboyant period clothing and silly hairstyles.  The story is part con-man deception, part corrupt government sting operation, part sexy love quadrangle.  This movie's got everything going for it...

...and yet, I just don't care.

There are plenty of legitimate problems with the film, from the muddled structure to Jennifer Lawrence's muddled Long Island accent, but what's most frustrating is that it seems to operate on an almost cynical level of apathy.  No one seems to care about the actual story being told so much as they do the artifice and hollow style choices through which it is told.  Case in point: Christian Bale and Amy Adams are introduced as con artists who are incredibly successful and good at what they do, and yet their actual scams are presented as downright pedestrian, when they're being presented at all.  You'd wonder why the FBI would choose to depend on these two small-timers to bring down multiple U.S. Congressmen, but you don't wonder for very long because after about 45 minutes the movie gets bored with the con artist thing and almost completely drops the entire storyline.  When the movie suddenly tries to dive back into it in the last 20 minutes, not only do I no longer care but the big "surprise reveal" is executed with such neolithic incompetence that I don't even know why they bothered.  The final nail in the coffin for me came about 2/3 of the way through the film when a surprise big name cameo suddenly arrives in a key scene.  It's only a brief appearance, but considering the actor in question and the role they're portraying, that should have been a stand-up-and-cheer moment, a real highlight of the movie.  In a more engaging film, that would have been the point where my excitement and enjoyment shot through the roof.  In American Hustle, it felt like nothing more than an empty gesture, a calculated maneuver that capitalized on an actor essentially owing the director a favor.

The whole movie just sort lays flat on the screen, content to merely exist without pushing any kind of boundaries or doing anything remotely interesting.  Everyone, save Louis C.K, (inarguably the best part of the movie) is operating on complete cruise control, letting the Zeppelin soundtrack and feathered hair do all the work while they sit back and wait for the awards to come pouring in.  Which leads me to my biggest problem with American Hustle: it's simply not an awards caliber film in the absolute powerhouse that was 2013.  In a weaker year it would snag a bunch of nominations to pad out various categories and probably come away with a few isolated wins and you wouldn't care.  Years later you'd simply remember it as "that movie where Christian Bale got really fat and Jennifer Lawrence won another kinda bullshit Oscar."  But there's just no way to argue that Hustle belongs in the same conversation with Her, Wolf Of Wall Street, Gravity, 12 Years A Slave, Captain Phillips or even movies that weren't nominated like Inside Llewyn Davis, Stoker, Short Term 12 or Fruitvale Station.  Those are all movies that have a profound effect on the audience.  You simply don't walk out of the theater the same way that you walked into it.  American Hustle is the opposite of those movies.  It's Teflon.  Had it been released in May or August, it would have been considered the highbrow hit of the summer, a pleasant alternative to superheroes and explosions.  Instead, it's coasting through award season on the reputation of the players involved regardless of the actual film they've created.

And yet, when/if American Hustle ends up taking home a truckload of Oscars, I'll likely be filled not with righteous fury, but instead with mild annoyance.  I long ago realized that whether or not a movie wins trophies, that has no serious bearing on my enjoyment of the film going forward.  If a movie is really great, it will persist for years and even generations, no matter the ultimate tally of little golden men.  I'm going to be watching Wolf and Her over and over again for years to come, while American Hustle will quickly become relegated to the kind of movie you stumble into on cable some Saturday afternoon and leave playing in the background while you check your email and eat a grilled cheese sandwich.  I trust that history will appropriately sort it all out in the end.  The real crime here is that there are smaller movies like Inside Llewyn Davis, Nebraska, Dallas Buyers Club and Before Midnight that are never going to get the same kind of wide release and marketing platform as a slick awards ringer starring the likes of Bradley Cooper, Amy Adams and Jennifer Lawrence.  Those movies actually depend upon the buzz generated from Oscar nominations to expand into more theaters and extend their theatrical runs.  It almost doesn't even matter if they win anything or not, as it's the simple act of being nominated which often determines how many people get the chance to actually see the film in a theater, which in turn plays a big part of how the film is eventually rolled out on home video.  So when I see the Academy lavishing praise upon Hustle while leaving Llewyn Davis twisting in the wind, I can't help but feel depressed about it.

So fuck it.  American Hustle certainly isn't bad, but it certainly isn't great either.  It is, at best, decent.  And it'll probably continue to win many awards.  My best prediction?  No matter what happens, in five years time Wolf Of Wall Street will still remain shorthand for excess and/or rampant nudity, with dumbass frat boys having Wolf-themed parties.  (They're doing it wrong.)  Meanwhile, you'll have completely forgotten that American Hustle ever existed in the first place.

Good riddance.

(Footnote: I watched American Hustle on Christmas Day with my parents, the first time we've ever made that particular holiday excursion.  It's pretty goddamn awkward watching a coked out Bradley Cooper try to fuck Amy Adams from behind in a grimy bathroom stall.  Then again, we almost went to see Wolf Of Wall Street.  So...bullet dodged.)

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Title: American Hustle
Director: David O. Russell
Starring: Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence, Jeremy Renner, Louis C.K., Jack Huston, Michael Pena, Shea Wigham, Alessandro Nivola, Elisabeth Rohm
Year Of Release: 2013
Viewing Method: Theatrical - Mashpee Commons (4K)

THE HUNGER GAMES: CATCHING FIRE Improves The Franchise On Almost Every Level

"Remember who the enemy is."

My wife recently finished a master's degree in Children's Literature, so suffice it to say that YA fiction is totally her jam these days.  She LOOOOOOOOVES her some Hunger Games, having read all three books multiple times and watched her Blu-ray of the first movie more frequently than I can count.  I haven't read any of the books (it's doubtful that I ever will, simply by virtue of the fact that I don't have time to read a lot of books these days) and I think the first movie is kind of fine, but it certainly doesn't get me all hot and bothered.  It felt like that movie wasn't really interested in exploring any of the parts of its universe that seemed the most fascinating to me.  While Jamie has been waiting for Catching Fire with baited breath (and even took a bus to NY to see it with a friend) I've just been hoping the second installment would expand the world of Panem in a way that would make me give any kind of a shit.

Mission accomplished!

I am still not entirely won over, but now I'm at least interested in this franchise.  The thing is that I feel like I'm interested in all the wrong stuff, or at least none of the stuff they want me to like.  I fell instantly and madly in love with Jena Malone's punk rock warrior Johanna Mason, a former victor who's straight up PISSED to be back in the arena and she doesn't give a shit who knows it.  She's angry and funny and sexy and injects some sorely needed energy into a story full of largely morose characters.  Johanna is my favorite of the new crop of competitors, but in truth most of them are pretty great.  The "careers," aka the Abercrombie models who don't want a rebellion to spoil their cushy lives in the Capitol, continue to be virtual non-entities, a collection of beautiful faces for our heroes to kill off in a frustratingly bloodless fashion.  But Jeffrey Wright and Amanda Plummer are delightfully odd additions and I must admit that Sam Claflin brings a surprising level of complexity to Finnick Odair.  Phillip Seymour Hoffman's gamemaster Plutarch Heavensbee is a HUGE step up from Wes Bentley's Facial Hair, and while it's fun that they keep him at arm's length to make him more enigmatic, I really wanted to see more of him.  I'm glad that he'll be sticking around for at least one more film.  (Book three is split into two parts.)  Stanley Tucci remains fabulous with his blue hair and giant teeth, and Woody Harrelson continues to entertain as the mentor who's alcoholic but in a fun way.  Above all, I am totally in awe of Elizabeth Banks, who took her ridiculous, shrill clown of a character and imbued her with emotional depth and genuine soul.  After the last film I would have been happy to see her take the first bullet in the eventual revolution, but now I'm legitimately fond of Effie, who makes an adorable mother to the ragtag (quasi-incestuous) family from District 12.

I also found myself wondering more about the greater world of this dystopian future.  I know that the fictional nation of Panem is supposed to be located in North America (my understanding is that District 12 is somewhere in the Appalachians?) but what about the rest of the planet?  Is Panem the only remaining populated continent, or are there people in Europe and Asia that simply don't give a shit about what's happening across the ocean?  And how did Panem happen in the first place?  What happened to the good old US of A?  Is this the result of a nuclear war?  Ecological disaster?  Perhaps the incredible wealth/resource gap of Panem implies there was some kind of bloody civil war.  This stuff is often the most interesting part of a story set in a future with such a dramatically different status quo than the present, so of course I'm never going to get the answers to any of these questions.  Apparently Suzanne Collins was far more interested in coming up with a list of character names that feel like a Mad Libs compilation of the mispronunciations of a four year old.

I remain utterly ambivalent about the love triangle because, while Katniss is a badass, both of her male suitors are utterly boring.  And that's coming from someone who's been a big supporter of Josh Hutcherson since he was 13 years old.  But Peeta Mellark is lame sauce, pathetically pining away for the girl who doesn't want him and also apparently incapable of holding his own in a fight.  The amount of time he spends being critically injured, rescued and carried around like a sad sack of potatoes is bordering on laughable.  (According to Jamie it's even worse in the book - dude can't even swim.)  I've been assured that Peeta gets way better in the third installment, so here's hoping.  Liam Hemsworth doesn't fare much better as Gale, a character who feels like he's only had about ten scenes over the course of both movies.  At least he gets to take some kind of heroic action this time around (although his most heroic deed takes place entirely off screen) but Gale just isn't a fully developed enough character for me to invest any kind of emotion in him.  And while I like the idea of President Evil Donald Sutherland, in reality he spends the majority of his scenes simply sitting around watching TV screens while making menacing insinuations.  This may be intended to make him look like some kind of Machiavellian manipulator, but instead it feels like Sutherland had a rider in his contract stipulating that he would stay seated through 90% of his scenes.

On the flip side, Jennifer Lawrence continues to completely own this franchise.  I think they made Katniss a bit too wishy-washy this time around, miring her in a "refusal of the call" storyline that goes on far too long.  It's ends up being intrinsic to the film's final reveal in which we discover that Katniss has been purposely left out of the loop for some extremely important stuff, but I can't help thinking she would have been far more useful if she wasn't being kept in the dark.  It feels too much like a clunky attempt to adhere to a rigid story structure, as opposed to something that's organic and character driven.  But Lawrence is so strong in the role that most of those complaints don't really hit you until the drive home.  And, if the film's final shot is any indication, this whole movie essentially serves as Katniss's last attempt to play by the rules of the Capitol before fully embracing her role as hero of the rebellion, so they've got to push her patience to the limit before she swings back around to the other side.  Katniss Everdeen is the Luke Skywalker to a whole generation of young girls and that's something that can only have awesome results for the future.  It's great to see such a strong female role model that not only anchors this franchise, but elevates it practically through sheer force of Jennifer Lawrence's will.

This is easily director Francis Lawrence's best film, and I quite liked Constantine and the first two thirds of I Am Legend.  He brings some much needed scope to the world of Panem and directs the action with far greater confidence (and far less shaky cam) than previous director Gary Ross.  It surely helps that Lionsgate significantly pumped up the budget this time around and it absolutely shows on screen, as opposed to the Twilight movies that always looked like they were being shot in the producer's backyard even after they were killing it at the box office.  I was hoping that we'd get a bit more brutality in the arena this time around, especially considering how traumatic the games are to everyone who manages to survive.  (Haymitch is a drunk and Katniss definitely has PTSD.)  But the violence remains sadly restrained, as if they're afraid to alienate their target audience with the central plot device of the franchise.  Hopefully the next films won't continue to pull their punches when the story (hopefully) turns to all out war.

I'm now realizing that this piece comes off pretty negative, but I really did enjoy Catching Fire.  It's exciting purely on a surface level, but the story also managed to keep me guessing throughout; the big reveal at the end I did not see coming (except for the "shocking" part that happens off screen, which was very clearly telegraphed ten minutes into the movie) and once the games began, I was constantly trying to puzzle out the motivations of the various tributes in an effort to figure out who was trustworthy and who was not.  I've always suspected that this was a franchise I was going to enjoy more at the end than the beginning, and this is such a significant step up from the first entry that my theory feels vindicated.  

The Hunger Games is probably never going to be a franchise I get legitimately excited about, certainly not in the same way that my wife does.  But it's now officially been upgraded from "watchable" to "interesting," for whatever that's worth.

Bring on the revolution.


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Title: The Hunger Games: Catching Fire
Director: Francis Lawrence
Starring: Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson, Sam Claflin, Liam Hemsworth, Woody Harrelson, Donald Sutherland, Elizabeth Banks, Stanley Tucci, Lenny Kravitz, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Jena Malone, Jeffrey Wright
Year Of Release: 2013
Viewing Method: Theatrical - Jordans IMAX