Mother! (3/5 Stars)

The last two movies of writer/director Darren Aronofsky, “Noah” and now “Mother!” Present a point of view that is rarely posited. Believers of God generally think of the deity in an absolutely positive light, whether as fully good or at least fully just. Whereas non-believers don’t have an opinion about God (though they may hold a generally negative of organized religion) because they don’t believe that the deity exists to have an opinion about. Darren Aronofsky, at least in his last two films, believes in God, and finds the deity lacking. For example, in “Noah”, God decides to kill almost everybody on Earth. Some characters in that movie were quite articulate as to the unfairness of it all. If there was a such thing, that movie and this new one would be heretical works.

“Mother!” is an extending and ever-developing metaphor of all the crimes ever committed against Women/Nature. I myself did not quite grasp the overall metaphor until about two thirds of the way through and upon reflection noticed I missed many things early on. Then again, I went into this movie blind. Just reading that its a metaphor will likely help you catch on to the biblical parallels earlier. “Mother!” has received a Cinemascore of F which should give a hint as to what an unpleasant experience this movie can be. However, an unpleasant movie does not necessarily a bad movie. “Mother!” is technically proficient, well-acted, and has more things to say in ten minutes than most movies have in their running time. I cannot say I liked “Mother!”, but when I exited the theater I had a feeling that reminded me of the feeling I had when I exited the theater after watching Charlie Kaufman’s “Synecdoche, New York.” It is an intense proceeding.

The movie takes place entirely in a fixer-upper mansion in a picturesque landscape. Here Jennifer Lawrence, doing her best impression of a Renaissance Madonna, works on renovations while her older husband, played by Javier Bardem, tries to get out of a writing block. Nobody actually has names as who they are and what they represent seem to more or less explicitly change over time.

The movie can be broken into three parts: the first is about the neuroses and concerns of a married couple trying to decide when and if to have a child, the second is about fame and what happens to a couple when one of them starts spreading their love in a not exclusive fashion, the third is quite explicitly about God and Mother Nature. In the background, making things complicated and then throwing the whole world into squalor and chaos are the humans. The movie takes a dim view of the humans, and through this dim of view of the humans, places the ultimate blame for the troubles on God, who made them in his image. The only innocent here is Women/Nature. At least that is what I believe this movie is about. Aronofsky does not feel the need to be explanatory. I think that wound in the floor is Original Sin, but there is no way to know for certain. Javier Bardem it should be noted is quite good as God. Not sure how that sort of thing is pulled off, but he does it.

I can’t recommend this movie to anyone who wants to see a movie with anyone else. You are going to have to see this one alone. It’s not a good time. However, it will make you think. It is quite literally a challenging movie. I for one never considered what Mary, mother of Jesus, may have felt about God giving up his only son through martyrdom for our sins. I mean it’s not like God asked Mary for permission or even her opinion on the matter.

X-Men: Days of Future Past (5/5 Stars)

The Great 20^th Century Mythos

X-Men: Days of Future Past is the seventh X-Men film and like nobody has ever said before, the sevent movie finds the series really hitting its stride. It is made special not only because on its own particulars but also because it feeds off the goodwill of several previous good films and because it seems to completely ignore (as if it didn’t even exist) the worst movie in the series, “X-Men: The Last Stand.” I actually wrote a review for X-Men: The Last Stand in 2006. Here is what I wrote then, “This movie, the third installment of the X-Men series, literally killed the franchise. I mean seriously, everyone's dead.”

What an astute observation, Max, because in that movie several very main characters died amongst them Cyclops, Jean Gray, and Professor Xavier. So many died in fact that the next several movies either focused solely on Wolverine while he was not part of the X-Men or took a trip back in time to when everybody was still alive. Now ten years after that fateful movie, Bryan Singer, the original director of the very good first two X-Men films, has presented the audience with a bit of revisionist history. “Days of Future Past,” simply pretends that “The Last Stand” never took place. There is Professor Xavier still alive and breathing as if he wasn’t torn to a million pieces ten years ago. Does anybody care? The answer: a resounding no. “The Last Stand” has faded like the general multitude of inferior movies into the world’s collective amnesia unmourned. This is a hopeful thing. I think we can all think of a couple of movies in our favorite series that were just plain bad and should never have existed in the first place. And now “The Last Stand,” doesn’t. Thank you Bryan Singer.

The Last Stand’s inferiority stemmed from its assembly line of mutants and lack of depth. It had plenty of special effects but had no moral weight. It broke the promise of the X-Men series made when Bryan Singer decided to open the first X-Men movie in Auschwitz during the Holocaust. Magneto, as a young child, realizes his powers for the first time at the moment his parents are taken away to the gas chambers. He reaches out to his parents and the metal concentration camp gates between them twist and bend to his budding mutant power of magnetism.  That scene is strong serious stuff and it is also acts a promise that the following movies will be good enough to deserve such drama because if they turn out to not be very good movies it is a dishonor to the memory of the Holocaust.

“Days of Future Past” makes good on that promise. That even though it is a action blockbuster with plenty of special effects and extraordinary mutant powers, it is also a sober metaphor for intolerance whether it be racial, religious, or class. The mutants are beset with persecution by the outside world for their differences. They are viewed as dangerous threats to humanity. Professor Xavier, in a wheelchair like FDR, has a mentality of Martin Luther King Jr. and works pragmatically to heal the divisiveness of the world. Magneto, using terms that parallel Malcolm X, speaks of doing whatever is necessary to achieve protection for mutants even if that means violence with humans. Mutants line up on either side, some attending and teaching at Professor X’s academy and others arming themselves and joining Magneto’s army. Take away all the boyish dazzle of a comic book blockbuster and you have a great 20^th century mythos tackling the most important questions of the last 100 years. How do we live peacefully with people who are different from us?

Of course this is a boyish comic book blockbuster so we also get to have lots of fun as well. There are outlandish spectacles based on mutant powers, big action pieces, and at least one Nixon impersonator. But at its heart ‘X-Men’ is great because it is a series that focuses on character. The mutations work like all great science fiction as an exploration into what regular people would do faced with extraordinary decisions. A person has character and now they are presented with these powers usually upon puberty that expose them to a hostile world. Almost none of the powers are welcomed. In the first movie, Rogue realized her mutant power of power absorption by almost killing her boyfriend with a kiss. Wolverine’s power of regeneration basically makes him immortal, not necessarily a good thing.

Because the characters are so strong and the movie is so big, we are treated to some of the best actors in the world all in the same movie. The movie covers two time periods. One in the future where a Sentinel army with mutant powers are covering the world in epic darkness and one in the past (1973) when the events that brought on the bleak future come to pass. This actually brings together the cast from the first two X-Men movies and the last X-Men movie that took place in 1963. Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan, giants of great dramatic parts, are the elderly Professor X and Magneto now facing extinction and united in remorse of past choices. With the help of Kitty Pryde (Ellen Page) they send Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) to the past to stop an assination. It has to be Wolverine because he is the only one that could survive such a trip. His mission is to pull together the young Professor X (James McAvoy) and Magneto (Michael Fassbender) at a time when could not have been further apart to stop Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) from assassinating a scientist named Bolivar Trask (Peter Dinklage) whose work would lead to the Sentinels.

Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence, and Peter Dinklage are some of the most interesting actors to watch on screen for the past five years. They exude screen presence, i.e. the ability to draw your eyes to their part of the screen by simply being there. Mystique larger role in the story comes from perhaps the rising star of Jennifer Lawrence in general who has become in recent years the largest female star in Hollywood not only by being annually nominated for Oscars (winning one) but also by being a box office heavyweight with the “Hunger Games” series. Perhaps no actress since Sigourney Weaver in the 1980s had this kind of streak and I’m pretty sure it is okay to say Jennifer Lawrence has eclipsed even that example. Unlike many other actresses that have their day and fade away, J-Rentz has a dangerous edge to her. In fact, I don’t remember the last time she played someone who wasn’t desperate or veering off in some wild direction. Like Meryl Streep, she seems to have monopolized most of the great roles in her age group and some outside of it. Her normal state is a skin of blue scales, cat eyes, and wild red hair. Her mutant power is her ability to transform into the likeness of anyone she sees. This makes her perfect for anarchy and at heart Mystique is an anarchist.  

One last thing needs to be about Peter Dinklage but not necessarily about him. Peter Dinklage is a little person but is in this movie playing a character that was not a little person in the comic books. That is to say, the part did not call for a little person to play it but Peter Dinklage got the part anyway. Moreover, upon the presence of the Peter Dinklage in the movie there is not the ubiquitous quip or joke or surprised reaction of another character that generally coincides with the presence of a little person in a movie. Peter Dinklage is simply in this movie as this character, period. As far as I know, that is the first time it has ever happened in a movie before. I remember watching the DVD commentary of the “Manchurian Candidate.” The director, John Frankenheimer, was especially proud of this army psychiatrist that was not written as a black person, but for which he decided to cast a black person in the role anyway. Nobody in the movie pays any attention to the man’s race. Frankenheimer said he was proud because never in a Hollywood movie had a black person been cast in a role that wasn’t specifically black. I think Bryan Singer can be proud of casting Peter Dinklage and yes it fits perfectly into the X-Men mythos of tolerance for those of us who are different. 

American Hustle (5/5 Stars)

The feel of this movie reminded me of a great Hall of Fame Rock and Roll concert. You know those concerts where they induct a great musician and all his friends get up on the stage and they play all the great songs songs and everything is great. ‘American Hustle,’ the new movie by David O. Russell feels like that. It has an incredible cast and a plot that allows every actor the opportunity to do some really throw down acting. In essence this movie is acting in that it is about people who are reinventing themselves in order to pull off scams and sting operations. The backdrop of the movie is the late 1970s ABSCAM scandal in which several members of Congress were convicted of taking bribes from an Arab sheik that in reality was an undercover FBI agent. It should be noted however that almost none of the movie is true. The names of the Congressmen are the same but all the FBI agents and con artists are fictional characters. As the movie’s opening subtitle states, “Some of this actually happened.” So expect fiction as a default not the other way around. In terms of storytelling this strategy is an unambiguous success in that it allows the actors to make very broad dramatic choices with their performances without the inherent worry that a movie inspired by real events usually has, i.e. that they are unfairly slighting real people.

The main quartet of actors involves the con artist team of Christian Bale and Amy Adams, Bradley Cooper as the FBI agent, and Jennifer Lawrence as the housewife of Christian Bale. In supporting roles are Jeremy Renner as the main target of the sting, Mayor Carmine Polito, Louis C.K. as Bradley Cooper’s long suffering supervisor, and Robert De Niro as the mobster who appears to get a cut of the deal when the original sting starts getting escalated way out of hand.

This is the third great movie of David O. Russell about redemption and reinvention. “The Fighter” was about a down and out boxer who came back as a champion. “Silver Linings Playbook” was about a manic-depressive fresh from a stint in a mental asylum trying to get his life back on track. “American Hustle” draws from both movies in terms of theme and cast. From “The Fighter” are Christian Bale and Amy Adams and from “Silver Linings Playbook” are Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence, and Robert De Niro. Making their debut in a David O. Russel movie is Jeremey Renner and Louis C.K. It is no mistake that actors in the last two movies were nominated for Oscars (Amy Adams, Bradley Cooper, Robert De Niro, and Jacki Weaver were nominated. Christian Bale, Melissa Leo, and Jennifer Lawrence won) and this movie should be no different. The only question is who gets nominated and who wins because almost every performance is worthy of it.

Christian Bale plays Irving the main con artist. For this role, Christian Bale that most humble/masochistic of actors decided to gain sixty pounds and sport an elaborate comb-over. There are very few actors in movies that would gain an ungainly amount of weight (or lose it!) to portray a fictional character. Perhaps the best thing though about his performance is his willingness to support all his fellow actors. Irving is a soft-spoken kind of guy who spends his time trying to bring everybody else in the cast back from the brink of insane shenanigans. It also helps that he has all that weight because he moves slower than everybody else.

The opposite side of the coin is the manic cocaine-addled performance of Bradley Cooper as the over-ambitious FBI agent that snags the con artists and employs them to catch bigger game. This man is all sound and fury and not so much thinking. Louis C.K. plays his long suffering supervisor and the interactions between the two are some of the funniest in the movie what with Bradley yelling and screaming and Louis C.K. doing the definitive embarrassed put upon Louis C.K. performance. At the same time however, the Bradley Cooper character of Richie Tomaso is the most tragic. I won’t give away how everything turns out but the treatment of the FBI agent says a lot about how David O. Russel probably feels about the ABSCAM scandal in general. It was a bad thing wasn’t it because after all everybody in politics in beholden to money anyway (just not in an illegal way) and what exactly is the point of entrapping people who do not have a history of criminal behavior.

Amy Adams puts in several performances as a stripper from Alburquerque who moves to New York and somehow finagles her way into a job at Cosmopolitan magazine before falling in love with Irving and becoming a British financier with royal connections in their respective scams. After the FBI catches Amy and Christian she pretends to fall in love with Bradley (or does she pretend?) in order to have just one more trick in the bag if things go south. She is playing just about everyone. It is a very bold performance by Amy Adams and perhaps the most complex character she has ever created.

Rounding out the main cast is Jennifer Lawrence, the wildcard. She plays the housewife of Irving whose reckless impulsiveness is guided by the fact that she knows nothing of what is going on. The funniest scene in the movie involves Irving bringing home a new invention, a “science oven,” as a gift from the man he is conning. He tells J-Rentz to not put any metal in it but doesn’t say why. So she puts metal in it almost immediately and microwave bursts into flames all over the house. Here’s the exact quote: “Don’t put metal in the science oven. Don’t put metal in the science oven. He’s always treating me like a fucking child. I do what I want.” BOOM!

As much of a character as anything else are the little details that inhabit the movie: Christian’s combover, Amy Adams revealing dresses, Bradley Cooper’s curlers, J-Rentz furs, Jeremey Renner singing Tom Jones’ ‘Delilah,’ Duke Ellington’s role in two characters falling in love, the thump and grind of Led Zeppelin’s ‘Good Times, Bad Times,’ a trip to the disco with Bradley and Amy, Louis’ story about ice fishing, the Mexican-American Arab sheik, a pool party in the middle of the winter, and the purity and goodness of mayor Carmine Polito and his family. Everything about this movie is exceptional. But above all, “American Hustle” cares deeply about these exciting, fun, and charming people that care deeply about what they are doing and who they want to be. They fight, they laugh, they cry, they sing, they scream, they cheat and tell the truth, and they live and fall in love. It was a wonderful experience to spend a few short hours in their company.

If anything, this will be the Best Original Screenplay of the year. Hands down. It’s great. 

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (3/5 Stars)

There was always something about Harry Potter that I found disturbing. It was always just a little bit off. Here you had a story about an innocent unassuming boy blessed with magical powers and a supremely important mission. They were imposed on him through no actions of his own. He would assume through accident of birth a unique status greater than all in the land. At the same time the hero rejects his unwon fame. He miserates on his unlucky situation and all it means. I am just a normal run-of-the-mill boy he asserts. All I want is the simple things in life like all the good ordinary men and women. In fact, in these stories those who seek fame and fortune above the simple things are looked down upon. In many cases they are the villains. In this way the book has its cake and eats it too. It allows the reader to vicariously live in fame, fortune, and violent glory while assuring themselves that what they really want is simply good friends, family, and love. By reading a book that abdicates the responsibility for all the superficial qualities forced upon the hero the audience earns plausible deniability for their own consciences. A reader can identify with a hero that can handle the fast times but is not defined by them. Or one that can state with a straight face: I could be the greatest most famous most successful person ever but I choose to be one of the people because you know that’s what’s important in life. It works of course just as long as one ignores the insidious subtext: “Please Please Please don’t forget I could have fame, fortune, and glory if I wanted it!” Because, seriously, who would have read Harry Potter if he was just a guy who wanted friends and family. He also has to be something extra. He has to be a wizard and not just any wizard, the best one. (Full Disclosure: I don’t particularly care for Harry Potter).

There is an incredible undercurrent of narcissim in my least favorite genres of storytelling Fantasy and Science Fiction. The Hunger Games a well written, competently acted, and brilliantly produced beauty of a movie is no exception. It stars Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss Everdeen, the blank slate everygirl who is the best archer in the land and has two good-looking men she feels so very guilty for having to choose between. Katniss Everdeen loves her family. Particularly she is fond of her little sister the exquisitely named Primrose Everdeen. To save Primrose and not for fame and glory she volunteered for the annual Hunger Games in the first movie. The Hunger Games is a ‘Battle Royale’-esque gladiator tournament between the thirteen impoverished districts of a futuristic dystopian society that has the totalitarian Captitol city at the head of it. It is a winner-take-all competition, kill or be killed. So Katniss killed everyone (quite honorably I would say) in the first movie, gaining in the process fame and fortune, though she really did not want to because you know she is so ordinary in the ways that count.

So Hunger Games: Catching Fire starts off with the rising celebrity of Katniss Everdeen presenting a problem to the totalitarian government headed by President Snow, played by Donald Sutherland. He intends to discredit her by various means that only encourage the population to revere her in even more rebellious fashion. Because this takes place in the genre of Science Fiction/Fantasy the movie can ignore many many things. For instance, the entire oppressive government seems to be entirely comprised in only one person, President Snow. In the real world, you would need some sort of bureaucracy to oppress a people. This is generally overlooked. Secondly we can overlook the realistic notion that celebrities that gain fame through reality TV contests don’t have any political power. As far as I can tell power (if you choose to distill it down to its essential essence) comes from the ability to hire or fire people, i.e. control over jobs. Think about that definition and see where it can get you. But as this is the future, a TV celebrity can move the world. And please try to forget what the economy of the extravagant Captitol is comprised of given that it has no commercial class or trading partners. Or what it really takes to not only stoke a rebellion but also to competently carry it to realization, see Battle of Algiers. In the real world, inspiration is the least of all problems. In Hunger Games, it seems to be the only thing that’s missing. But because this takes place in some fantastical land (or a long time ago in a galaxy far far away, or on Middle Earth) we can set up a story whose plot functions can rely almost entirely on character whims for better or worse. If you wanted to do that in a realistic genre, you would have to confine all the characters to a house and make the story take place within a day. But you can have interpersonal opera on a grand scale with world changing consequences in fantasy/science fiction because once again, you can pretend that reality does not apply in this far distant land.

We can be very glad that Hunger Games: Catching Fire is not a preachy metaphor designed to make us think about the problems of everyday life. Some movies within this genre do just this and become horribly insufferable monstrosities. Instead Hunger Games is far more concerned with costumes, hair, and makeup. I suppose we will just have to get used to this as studios start paying due attention to the other half of the population. If Hunger Games is a portent of the future of blockbusters though we should be seeing much to appreciate. For instance take a look at these names: Katniss Everdeen, Primrose Everdeen, Effie Trinket, Ceasar Flickerman, Claudius Templesmith, Plutarch Heavensbee, Haymitch Abernathy. Don’t those just roll off the tongue in some perfect mosaic of sound and diction? Or take a look at the great flair in hair of the game show host Ceasar Flickerman (playbed by Stanley Tucci) and his sidekick Claudius Templesmith (Toby Jones). Or consider the Girl on Fire costumes of Katniss Everdeen and her counterpart Peeta Mellark that catch fire during a chariot parade to the delight of the crowd. Or the even more impressive bride/mockingjay costume that not only makes Jennifer Lawrence look great but is also imbued with important story revealing symbology. This is the first blockbuster I know of that gives the hero/heroine a stylist in a major role. Lenny Kravitz does the job here doling out wisdom the way Obi Wan Kenobi would tutor Luke Skywalker in swordplay. The most impressive creature in all of this superficial exuberance is the presence of Effie Trinket, a woman who changes elaborate costumes and hairdos in every single scene. She is played by Elizabeth Banks and in the most markedly superior aspect of this sequel compared to the first movie, we get some depth to the character peeking out of the ditzy cheerleader persona in a way that very surprisingly doesn’t undercut all we have previously seen from her. I haven’t seen anything else quite like her in movies. Effie Trinket is an original.  

Oh and look we have several notable new castmembers. Phillip Seymour Hoffman is the new gamemaster and a fairly competent and entertaining one as we see in the final third of the movie. And there is Jena Malone, who I have spoken good graces of before. She tends to pop her head up from indie stardom in character roles in bigger movies every now and again. She plays Johanna Mason, the warrior woman Katniss Everdeen would be if she wasn’t so like the rest of us. The movie’s third act in a new series of Hunger Games does not dissapoint and ends in a very satisfying way. I am a little interested in seeing the next one.

Here’s another curiousity. Michael Arndt co-wrote this screenplay with Simon Beaufoy (also very good). Michael once won an Oscar for writing one of my favorite movies, Little Miss Sunshine. That movie had an entirely opposite take on the world compared to these types of narcissistic tales. But since then, his career trajectory since then has been almost entirey focused on big budget sequels in the realm of fantasy science fiction (Toy Story 3, Hunger Games, Oblivion, Star Wars). Et tu, Arndt?

Silver Linings Playbook (5/5 Stars)

White-Knuckling It

“Yeah about a week before the incident I called the cops and I told them that my wife and the history guy were plotting against me by embezzling money from the local high school which… wasn’t true. It was a delusion. And we later found out from the hospital that it’s because I’m uh….undiagnosed bipolar.”

- Pat

It turns out that Pat, played by Bradley Cooper, had been white-knuckling his mental disorder for most of his life without the proper help. Then one day he walked in on his wife with another man, snapped, and nearly beat the other guy to death. He was arrested. The court ordered him to spend eight months in a psychiatric institute. As the movie starts just about as he is to leave the hospital. How do you know that he still might have a problem? Well, he is in his late 30s. He has lost his wife, his job, most of his friends, and his home and is moving back in with his parents. The kicker though is that he is very optimistic about his chances of getting all of it back especially his wife even though she sought and received a restraining order against him. His plan involves not taking his medication, getting in shape by running around the neighborhood while wearing a garbage bag (for the sweat you see), and reading his ex-wife’s summer reading list for the high school English class she is teaching. His parents, played by Robert De Niro and Jacki Weaver worriedly try to impose some sort of reality on him to no avail. Until that is he has a couple of rage induced episodes at 4am in the morning brought upon such trivial matters as not being able to find his wedding video and a not-so-happy ending to Hemingway’s  “Farewell to Arms” that end up waking up the entire street and getting the police invited over to the house. And at that point after the subsequent mood swing and humiliation set in, he finally and sadly realizes that he simply cannot white-knuckle it anymore. He still needs help.

The director of Silver Linings Playbook is David O. Russell, a filmmaker who is the preeminent authority in cinema on eccentric slightly crazy families. Other must-see movies he has made about these types of people are “Flirting with Disaster” starring Ben Stiller and “The Fighter” starring Mark Wahlberg and Christian Bale. There is such a degree of authenticity to these off-kilter movies that it would not surprise me a bit if David O. Russell came from an extremely dysfunctional family himself. He has had huge blowups and arguments on the sets of his movies before (George Clooney won’t ever work with him again after “Three Kings” and there is a video on YouTube that involves him getting supremely pissed off at Lily Tomlin on the set of “I Heart Huckabees”) and has freely admitted that one of the reasons he was inspired to make “Silver Linings Playbook” was his own son’s issues with depression. Like the father and son in this movie, I think that it is likely the Russells have mental illness in their genes. But let me be clear: whatever ‘crazy’ David O. Russell does have in him, it is definitely the kind that borders with brilliance.

Great directors tend to have signature styles. Some are so strong that it becomes easy to spot their stories with or without knowing beforehand who directed it. You can’t really mistake an Alfred Hitchcock or Stanley Kubrick movie with any other director’s movie. Contemporary moviegoers should also be able to pick out the latest Wes Anderson, Martin Scorsese, or Quentin Tarantino movie without much help. David O. Russell too has a very recognizable style but it is itself a very unique unique style. Whereas most of the time a great director’s films are characterized by clarity of vision or a certainty in which types of camera movements and angles they use, Russell’s style is impenetrably chaotic. There is a kinetic shakiness and unpredictability to the camera movements that lend his movies a disconcerting rhythm. He is doing something behind the camera that I do not understand. And yet it still works and given the subject matter is perhaps the best way to tell a story.  

And he is an amazing writer too. His movies are always insightful, original, and funny. One of the ways you can tell a movie has very good writing is when awards season comes along and most of the cast is nominated for awards. And right now Bradley Cooper, Robert De Niro (playing Pat Senior), and Jennifer Lawrence (playing Tiffany, a recently widowed and equally damaged love interest) are being considered for all kinds of awards. My favorite scenes include the pharmaceutical shoptalk between Pat and Tiffany at a dinner party about what kind of drugs they have taken, Pat Sr.’s OCD obsession with the Philadelphia Eagles, and the ballroom dancing contest. Yes, there is also some really not that bad dancing in this movie. The writing can be said to be so good that it got Chris Tucker out of retirement. You might remember him. His last movie was a lead role opposite Jackie Chan in “Rush Hour 3.” That was in 2007. His last movie before then was 2001’s “Rush Hour 2.” So basically he has been retired for ten years. Chris is one of those rare cases where a movie star quits after starting to pull in $20 million a movie in salary. He just did not want to act anymore. But, inexplicably, here he is as Danny, a friend of Bradley’s from the mental institution. He pops into the movie a couple of times after illegally breaking out of the asylum.

I would say the only real problem with this movie is the casting of Jennifer Lawrence. She does not do a terrible job but I bet somebody else could have done it better. The character calls for an emotionless deadpan performance sure, but there are emotionless deadpan performances and then there are emotional deadpan performances that nonetheless convey every single emotion the person is feeling anyway. Go ahead and rent an Aubrey Plaza movie, either “Safety Not Guaranteed” or the TV show “Parks and Recreation” and you will see what I mean. Jennifer Lawrence may just get a nomination for this movie, but I figure that has less to do with her talent and more to do with the fact Tiffany is an extremely well written role combined with the fact that the supporting actress category always has notoriously few well-written roles, this year being no exception. Any competent actress probably would have had a chance to be nominated.

Oh and this movie has a much better ending than “Farewell to Arms.”

The Hunger Games (3/5 Stars)

The Reality TV Paradox

Great documentaries are lucky documentaries. The greatness of such films like “Hoop Dreams,” or the “Seven Up” series rely greatly on the unlikely coincidences that somehow were recorded by a camera. Would anybody have cared about the Rolling Stones documentary “Gimme Shelter,” if it did not just happen to accidentally chronicle a murder at a rock concert? Would the mockumentary “Borat” be as hilarious if Sacha Baron Cohen had not coincidentally hitchhiked onto that particular RV filled with those particular outrageous frat boys?

Now at the same time imagine that you were a movie or television studio that is attempting to create a documentary that will be predictably successful. How can you produce a predictably successful product that relies on coincidence? If you don’t do anything you are at the whim of fate and the documentary will either be bad or good depending on what you so happen to record. But if you do things to make sure that dramatic coincidences do occur, you are essentially writing the documentary, which in essence makes it cease to be a documentary. In the end, like much reality TV, you get a product that lacks dramatic effect because unlike real documentaries it is untruthful and manipulative and at the same time lacks the production value and professionalism of a documentary that is sincerely untruthful and manipulative, or in other words, a fictional movie.

I bring this up because, “The Hunger Games,” is a fictional movie about a reality TV show, and as such piles on layers of almost absurd complexity on how the characters are perceived depending on whether it is by us the movie audience, or the TV audience in the movie. In other words, the underlying emotions of a scene are generally undermined by the realization that it is all an act. And how much can you care about a person (even if it was a life and death situation) if you knew they were mugging at a camera at the same time?

I have given this movie three stars because I enjoyed it okay. But I want it also to be known that I have never seen a movie quite like this one, and that affirmation of originality should be seen as a sort of moral victory at least. The story takes place in a future where the United States has split itself into 12 districts and hosts an annual game that pits two randomly selected teenagers from each district into a fight to the death gladiatorial tournament. From district 12, there comes the 18-year-old Katniss Everdeen (played here by the 25-year-old Jennifer Lawrence) who volunteers for the tournament to save her 12-year-old sister from being selected. Also selected from her district is Peeta Mellark (played by Josh Hutcherson). They are whisked away from their poor coal-mining district to the big city where they are mentored by Haymitch Abernathy (played by Woody Harrellson) to be likable, because that is the best way to win these particular games. In other words, the games are not real. They are fake reality TV. Apparently a good old fight-to-the-death would not be predictably exciting enough. There is a whole behind the scenes room of producers here who manipulate the games. This can be done by releasing forest fires or releasing lethal wild animals into the tournament space whenever they feel it will add some spice. The most blatant form of cheating is to get sponsored. If you are “likable” enough, the head sponsors will send you a parachute containing a survival kits that can give you an edge over the competition. In other words, the “Hunger games” are bullshit. And to play into the whole “getting people to like you” survival game, Katniss and Peeta pretend a romance. This is original in that it is the central love story of the movie, and admittedly, I have never seen a movie so willingly and transparently admit that its central love story is contrived bullshit.

I suppose we are now at a point of idiotic media saturation where the only way to seem truthful is to exert the highest amount of cynicism. Everything about “The Hunger Games” is fake. The games are fake. The capital city that the games take place is composed of fake 3D generated architecture. The hairstyles and fashion of the inhabitants are grotesque, garish, and nonsensically exaggerated. (Actually I would admit this is perhaps some of the best effects of the movie. Whoever designed the costume and makeup had a field day with this movie. It is done much better than the action and done so well, that at least three quarters of this movie could be deemed a chick flick.) Every other tribute in combat is a one-dimensional stereotype whether it is the evil Cato (Big Evil Guy) or the innocent Rue (Small Innocent Girl). In fact, the only distinguishable human being seems to be the main character, Katniss Everdeen, played by Jennifer Lawrence, who when you think about it, may be the fakest character of all.

Oh boy, what did I mean by that? Well, Katniss is the type of person that does not like to bend toward conformity or try to get people to like her. She just wants to be herself. Now, whom does that remind you of? If you said you and only you, you’re an idiot. That should remind you of everybody. That description describes everybody. In fact, I would argue that Jennifer Lawrence’s best acting asset is her ability to act blank slate and call it individualism. This character has no foibles or eccentricities. It is just Jennifer Lawrence in her plain/beautiful persona having strong feelings for her family and a survival instinct. You would be hard-pressed to find a human being with neither of those characteristics. Do you think it just may be the best marketing ploy ever to take this one-size-fits-all persona and throw it into a story with so much fakery that it seems real by comparison? It would appeal to every person who feels that they are the only real person in a world of phonies (which I would argue is a real cliché way to feel).

The phenomenal success of “The Hunger Games,” should lead to some hilarious movie studio board meetings. I can just see it now: a bunch of middle aged rich guys brainstorming on how they can capitalize on a trend based on the utter distrust of manipulative media because it is ruled by a bunch of middle aged rich guys bent on manipulating people for profit. Vampires were easy. Now I suppose we will have a slew of movies made expressly for profit that aim to expose cliché and promote distrust in manipulative money-grubbing movies. It’s a shame that irony can’t kill. 

The Beaver (1/5 Stars)

I am not a doctor. So you should take what I’m about to say next with a grain of salt. As far as I know, not all depression comes from the same types of places. The most typical kind of depression I would think can be characterized as a lack of hope. This lack of hope can basically be about anything really and have many psychological or emotional causes. In that case, it should help the patient to have a happy family, a loving wife, and a decent job. Therapy, prayer, social interaction, and the like should have positive effects. A second type of depression is merely a symptom of some other type of physical disease, syndrome, or problem. The best examples I can think of are people with sleep apnea. One case involved this horribly depressed guy that no amount of therapy helped. Turned out he was such a loud snorer that he would consistently wake himself up at night. He hadn’t had a decent sleep in years. In his case horse tranquilizer would have been a better help than therapy ever could be. They performed surgery on his nose to fix the snoring problem and his depression vanished.

Now take the example of Walter Black, played in this movie by Mel Gibson. Walter Black used to be a successful businessman, a loving husband, and a good father to his two sons. Now all he wants to do is sleep. He still is the CEO of his toy company although due to his off performance it has been suffering in the stock price lately. His wife, played by Jodie Foster, still loves him but has just kicked him out of the house as a measure of last resort. Every type of therapy, self-help mantra, and pill has been tried to no effect. Keep in mind that his depression apparently preceded all the problems he now has in his life. Now, knowing all of that, which type of depression profile does Walter Black seem to fit? Does he sound like the type of person that has severe complex emotional and psychological problems or does he sound like he is simply utterly exhausted.

This movie is under the impression that Walter Black suffers from emotional problems. I admit that I don’t get it. I spent the entire movie wondering what exactly his problem could possibly be. The depression itself is never explained or given a cause. I’m just going to assume that the writer of this movie, Kyle Killen, got his inspiration from some very successful and brilliant person he knew that inexplicably fell into a depression. He must think that these things just sort of happen from time to time. (That’s life, alas.) That kind of attitude is a mistake I think because it can lead to some pretty wacky very unhelpful solutions not just in the movies but also in real life. A person suffering from physical depression can’t mentally “snap out of it,” because the problem isn’t a mental thing. No, sticking a beaver puppet on your hand and creating a new personality for yourself is not going to work. To this movie’s credit the beaver solution doesn’t work for the entire movie. However, I find it inexplicable that the beaver would work at all. There are several scenes in this movie where the practical aspects of a grown man wearing a beaver hand puppet with a cockney accent are glossed over to a shameful degree. The most distressing is when Walter Black shows up to work with it on and the beaver starts giving orders. Guess what? Nobody quits that very same day. I don’t find that very realistic. If Walter Black is suffering from neither physical depression (for which the beaver would not help) nor emotional depression (for which the comfort of his wife would be a much better solution), then he must be insane. Except he does not look or act like an insane person in the movie. In effect, the character as written and as Mel Gibson plays him doesn’t make sense. And that might be okay in a comedy, but it is fatal in a serious movie. I can’t have empathy for something I don’t understand. Then again, I’m no doctor.

Then there is this subplot involving his son. He has a business at school where for two hundred dollars he will write your paper and at the same time make it sound like you did it. Quite the skill, the novelty of which the movie takes for granted and never explores. One day the school valedictorian/head cheerleader, played by Jennifer Lawrence, who as I am writing this is 21, comes up to him and offers him $500 to write her commencement speech. She explains that even though she gets straight A’s, is the most popular girl in the school, and excels at everything she has ever done, she still has nothing to say. This is what I would refer to as a clever screenwriting technique that gives the lonely misunderstood emo boy an excuse to be needed by the most beautiful girl in the school. Anyway, even in the presence of such a character as Walter Black, she takes the gold medal for most unrealistic character in the movie. This comes to a head in one scene that seems to be constructed as a revelatory insight into the human condition but comes off as more of a cruel joke. It is revealed that this girl was arrested when she was in 8th grade for tagging, which is slang for graffiti. She hasn’t exercised her art in over four years. And then one night, inspired by a sort of “express yourself” cliché, she decides to take it up again. What she accomplishes in one night after four years of no practicing and apparently with only an 8th grade art education looks like something that would take an accomplished artist several weeks to do. She steps back and nonchalantly remarks that, “I guess I had a lot of things to say.” The art is very modern so its hard to understand what exactly she was trying to say, but I will take a guess that is something along the lines of a huge “F*** You” to every teenager who has ever picked up a pencil or paintbrush, tried art for the first time, and realized that it might actually take some time and practice to become good at it.

Again, these sorts of mistakes wouldn’t bother me in a broad comedy, but a movie that intends to be realistic about mental illness and teen angst can’t be allowed to get away with not knowing what it is talking about. These are serious issues after all. Here are some good movies that deal with depression that perhaps you should watch instead: Lars and the Real Girl, Punch-Drunk Love, and Fight Club. Those may seem to be odd choices but they are the best I have seen at portraying how being in a hopeless funk feels like. If you don’t think “Fight Club” is about depression than may I direct you to the scene where the imaginary friend gets so fed up with his real counterpart that he starts beating the living shit out of him. A similar thing happens with the beaver in this movie, but “Fight Club” did it better.

p.s. If you know someone who seems depressed because all they ever want to do is sleep, it wouldn’t hurt to make sure that they are actually sleeping and not simply lying on a bed hoping to God they could go to sleep but finding themselves physically unable to. Sleep deprivation is a killer. It’s what interrogators use on prisoners to break them. At least 7 hours a night, people. Chances are you’ll feel better.