Review: Hunger Games

This review was originally published in my column at Towleroad. Congratulations to Towleroad for winning Outstanding Blog at the GLAAD Awards

"The Hunger Games," now in their 74th year, began as a way to punish an uprising against the government. The totalitarian regime of Panem (in what remains of the former United States) maintains total control over the outlying districts. Each of the 12 districts is required to send forth two "tributes" annually, a boy and a girl between the ages of 12 to 18 chosen by lottery. They are shipped to the Capital where they are paraded about and then shipped off to die for the amusement of the masses. Everyone in the nation watches. There are no alternatives in this dystopia. Only one adolescent will live bringing supposed honor (and maybe food?) to their starving district... or so claims the capital. What honor there is in forcing teenagers to kill each other is not a question the Capitol asks itself.

Any similarities that The Hunger Games has to the Japanese classic Battle Royale (2000), which also features schoolchildren forced to kill each other by a totalitarian regime -- only one survivor allowed -- are, according to The Hunger Games author Suzanne Collins, entirely coincidental. Another film in this subgenre, the little seen Series 7: The Contenders (2001) also features mandatory lotteried killing for televised amusement. In short, the ideas are nothing new, just the treatment; these are topics we're obviously grappling with in popular culture in this era of televised "reality" and winner takes all capitalistic vice. The gap between the haves and have nots grows and this dystopia gives it steroids.

"The Reaping" Effie chooses tributes from District 12

When 12 year old Primrose Everdeen (Willow Shields) is named as tribute in "The Reaping" ceremony, her protective sister Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence) volunteers to take her place. The district also sends Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) a sweet strong baker's son who Katniss knows a little. Will they kill or be killed? 

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Hit Me With Your Best Shot: "Ladyhawke"

Time for Season 3 of Hit Me With Your Best Shot. Wednesday evenings.

from left to right: Goliath, Navarre (Rutger Hauer) and Isabeau (Michelle Pfeiffer's stunt double)

I thought we'd kick off this season with a personal favorite from the 80s. I use the word favorite emphatically because in many ways, Ladyhawke (1985) is a movie with a confusing relationship to objective quality. It's both great and bad, the score arguing that it's a feature that absolutely should not exist outside of 1985 while the mythic story fights for timelessness. The sound (Oscar-nominated) has wonderful details, maximizing the earthly details of fluttering wings, wolf howls and horse hooves while also embracing the transcendently romantic voices (Rutger Hauer and Michelle Pfeiffer) but it's marred by jarring score cues that take you out of the action and weird post-production "comedy" vocal work from extras. It feels, at least for its first half, like it's a movie with several authors and endless studio interference from people who didn't believe in a romantic fantasy epic in a time long before fairy tales were hot commodities and sword and sorcery epics were the furthest thing from bankable. So, would you laugh at me if I claimed I thought it was thisclose to being a classic? People are always reediting the Star Wars prequels to try to make them into the movies they should have been but the fantasy with the easiest fix to nudge it from punchline to greatness is Ladyhawke.

The one area where Ladyhawke can lay legitimate claim to greatness without lengthy conditional explanations is in the cinematography of three-time Oscar winner Vittorio Storaro (most famous for Apocalypse Now and various Warren Beatty epics). Many films throughout history have used sunsets and sunrises for their sheer beauty but Ladyhawke's reliance on light is more than vanity; it's storytelling.

Pfeiffer's beauty and Hauer's pain after the jump

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Naked Gold Man: Final Oscar Predictions !

I've never been good at math so predicting this year's Oscar race feels especially challenging. You can tell me that a picture requires 5% of #1 votes or that it's 10% or 406 votes or that you need #2 or #3 placements on 69.3% of ballots with odd #1 choices that weren't already tossed aside... None of it will really sink in. For the first time in well over a decade, I had a flashback to my high school algebra class and how my friends (who were in calculus) kept teasing me about my "polynomials?" confusion.  I hate math!*

But in the end what does it matter? Buzz, also an abstraction, is more fun to play with and closer to the truth for non-mathematicians. Best Picture nominations have long required #1 votes, maybe not in the same configurations but they've always required them. And as Joe recently pointed out on the podcast, we're tricked into thinking too deeply about this each and every year. Who thought Frost/Nixon was the best movie of 2008? Who would ever have voted for Chocolat as the best film of 2000? And yet it happens year in and year out. Focusing too much on #1 votes can cloud this certainty: Any film still being discussed as a possibility this late in the game has a fanbase. The question is just 'is that base big / loyal enough within the Academy to secure it a best picture nomination?'

Mo'Nique reading the Best Picture nominees last year!

What Happens With The Screens Behind the Presenters?
For the first time in modern history we'll have no idea until the names are read whether there will be five, six, seven, eight, nine or ten nominees. In past years when they announced the nominees you'd see the blank boxes where the nominees would be revealed while they read out the names. You knew, for instance, if there would be 3 or 5 animated nominees by how many boxes were there even if you hadn't been paying attention to the number of eligible pictures released.

My current hourly obsession is wondering whether we'll be tipped off to how many pictures there are seconds before we hear the titles...

When we knew there would be ten they simply appeared as they were read but there weren't actually boxes behind the announcers to be filled in as there were in years with five. You follow? So this year if there are, say, 6 nominees will we first see the empty boxes and KNOW there will be six before the names are read? 

PICTURE
If we only had five nominees, this race would be easy to call. Our nominees would be: The Artist, The Descendants, The Help, Hugo, and Midnight in Paris. And in that order of likelihood. (My preference order, just as reminder from my year in review, would be The Artist, Midnight in Paris, The Help, Hugo and The Descendants.) I believe the nomination tally hierarchy is going to be Hugo, The Artist, and The Help way out in front of other films. Moneyball would, I think, be the spoiler in a traditional shortlist year. No matter how you feel about those films on an individual basis, as a group that's a pretty beautiful spread of the film year: message movies, family dramas, cinematic novelties, smart comedies and releases stretching from summer to Christmas, from critical triumphs to sleeper hits. It's representative and we like the Oscars that way.

More after the jump...

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Linking Out

The Wrap delivers the lightning-fast raves and the deafening silence for Tin Tin and J Edgar respectively.
Vanity Fair remembers super agent Sue Mendes (RIP)
i09 on a news item about modern research on The Black Death that will make Contagion even scarier!
In Contention Will Super 8 and Tin Tin win Sound Editing nominations? 
L.A.M.B. held a little movie of the month / blogathon about Bronson (2008) starring Tom Hardy. That's a good movie to check back in on given what's become of both Hardy & its director Nicolas Winding Refn. You'd certainly never see Drive's (2011) exquisite control coming in this earlier picture... though you can easily see Refn's oversized personality reflected therein. 

Finally, I'd like to say congratulations to Zachary Quinto (Heroes, Star Trek) who finally came out this weekend. Quinto has been one of those 'everybody knows' celebrities for quite a while and I have to admit that when he starred in the recent revival of Angels in America last year (which I thought he was quite good in) and especially when he did his own "it gets better" video, I was getting uncomfortable. It seemed strange to star in such a defining gay work and to chase it with an "it's totally okay to be gay!" message of tolerance while staying closeted.  But... that's all past tense now. Good on him for doing the right thing. I especially like this bit on his official site:

...living a gay life without publicly acknowledging it - is simply not enough to make any significant contribution to the immense work that lies ahead on the road to complete equality.

Damn straight! I mean... er.... yes, well, carry on. Well done Zachary! Live long and prosper.

Unsung Heroes: The Sound Design of 'Searching for Bobby Fischer'

Michael C here from Serious Film to showcase an achievement in a film that has been near and dear to my heart for almost two decades.

What is the sound of a person thinking?

Most of us probably don’t often consider such lofty questions, but when you are a sound designer dilemmas like that crop up all the time. The sound design team behind Stephen Zallian’s 1993 chess prodigy drama Searching for Bobby Fischer faced that challenge and then some when they set out to make a chess story work on screen despite it being the least cinematic subject imaginable, give or take the Dewey Decimal System.

Zallian’s solution was to ignore the intricacies of the game, constructing the matches as stylized montages that emphasize the emotions of the players over tactics. The sound designers – under Head Sound Editor Beth Sterner - outdo themselves in these scenes, building crescendos out of the furious clacking of pieces and the occasional island of stillness. Not only does this make chess palatable for general audiences but, more importantly, it gets to the heart of the material.

For a serious chess player, especially a seven-year-old one, the stakes are life and death. When, for example, a queen is blundered away, the echo of the piece against the table perfectly captures the sudden pit of the stomach realization of an irrevocable screw up. Without a moment spent explaining the rules, much less the advanced strategy at play, the sound design allows us to the grasp the changing balance of power every step of the way.

Beyond sidestepping the tedium of the game, the sound team deserves praise for creating a series of distinct aural environments to show the journey of the young chess genius. During the first joyful scenes of play in the park the soundtrack is bursting with life. The main action has to jostle for room in the mix with the sounds of players, passerby, and city life. The more Josh is pulled into the insular world of serious chess the more the life is leeched out of the soundtrack. By the time young Josh is having his final confrontations with his teacher, you would think they were playing in a monastery the way each sound echoes in isolation. From the sound design alone we can understand the sacrifice that is being asked of this boy in order to be the best.

At one point, the chess hustler played by Laurence Fishburne insists Josh remember that his opponent is not the pieces on the board but the flesh and blood person sitting across from him. The filmmakers take their lead from this, letting the emotions of the characters, and not the strategy of the game, take center stage. In its own modest way the sound team, with help from the stellar editing of Wayne Wahrman, does for chess what Scorsese did for Raging Bull, abandon the literal reality of the sport in order to get at the subjective experience of what it feels like to be in thick of the battle.