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?

The Dallas Buyer's Club (4/5 Stars)

Ronald Woodruff wasn’t supposed to be the kind of guy that got AIDS. That was something homosexuals got, faggots as Ron would likely call them. He points to a fresh 1980s newspaper chronicling the death of Rock Hudson and decries the massive shame it was that Rock had access to all that Hollywood pussy and wasted the opportunity by being gay. AIDS was also something intravenous drug users got, and Ron Woodruff wasn’t that either. I mean he snorted cocaine and drank heavily and had unprotected sex with plenty of women (we are introduced to him via a threesome under the bleachers at a Texas rodeo), but none of that had anything to do with needles or homosexuality. So when Ron Woodruff passes out from a massive headache, wakes up in the hospital, and is told that he has a T-Cell count of 9 and 30 days left to live, he doesn’t believe it. “There’s nothing that can kill Ron Woodruff in 30 days,” he declares to the doctors and storms out of the hospital.

“Dallas Buyer’s Club,” directed by Jean-Marc Vallee attempts to do two things with the biographical story of Ronald Woodruff of Dallas, Texas. The first thing it does is demonstrate how his terminal illness and his subsequent business dealings with the gay community opened his eyes to society’s intolerance and indifference towards the “homosexual” AIDS epidemic and broke down his own prejudices. The second is an educational primer on the various drugs that were in the process of being approved by the FDA in response to the AIDS epidemic. One being AZT, a drug that is being championed by the FDA but the movie treats as a killer. The other drugs are the all-natural ones that Ron Woodruff starts peddling to the Dallas community. It was Ron’s unshakable belief (based not only the research he did but the anecdotal experience of taking every drug himself before selling it to anybody else) that his drugs, though they did not cure the disease (nothing could do that we learn), would be able to prolong life. They do this by merely making the body healthier in general, whereas AZT, sort of like chemotherapy, kills everything patient included. The movie does the first thing better than the second.

First things first: this year’s award in stunt acting goes to the acting team of Matthew McCounaaghey and Jared Leto, playing respectively Ronald Woodruff and Rayon, Ron’s transsexual business partner. Both have lost an incredible amount of weight for their roles. McCounaghey is perhaps more unrecognizable here being once upon a time People’s Sexiest Man Alive back when he had superfluous muscales and did nothing but dumb romantic comedies. It’s all gone now as if he has shed all the superficial romcom dumbness and what is left is the emaciated frame of a serious actor. To witness the turn in career choices that McCounaghey has accomplished over the last couple years is quite remarkable. “Dallas Buyer’s Club” is the capper. An Academy Award nomination would not be surprising. It is also a relief to witness the return of Jared Leto (Requiem from a Dream) after a five-year hiatus of pop stardom. In addition to slimming down he has put on a dress. The character Rayon apparently is not based on one real person but rather a composite of the gay community. It is an ingenious strategy concerning the age-old problem of capturing a lifetime within a two-hour frame. In this way, Ron’s changing attitude is reflected through his relationship with one particular person rather in several people and the emotional payoffs are far more effective.

I’m going to take a moment and throw in a political comment here, an indulgence I am happily allowed by writing an anonymous blog that nobody reads. “Dallas Buyer’s Club” is a great movie for the fan of Capitalism. Generally it has been said that Capitalism has no morals. But that is not necessarily true. The morals of Capitalism are honesty, equal treatment, and tolerance. A man may not like a person or a group of people, but if he is a true capitalist he will trade with that person for the right price. Racial segregation, Caste systems, exclusionary zoning, and ornerous governmental regulation: all are great enemies of Capitalism. The “Dallas Buyer’s Club” is a great example of how Capitalism transforms the prejudiced man who takes its ideals to heart. Ron Woodruff is above all else a hustler. When he sees that there is a market for unapproved Mexican drugs in Dallas, he sets out to exploit it with rational self-interest and what is born of the Dallas Buyers Club is an unambiguously good collaboration of buyers and sellers trying to help each other survive. Is it evidence that the Dallas Buyer’s Club was a good thing that helped people because Ron Woodruff was able to make money? Yes, yes it is. 

What is not dones too well is the movies’ treatment of AZT. This comes from the subtitle at the end of the movie. It states that: “A smaller dose of AZT combined with other drugs saved millions of lives.” Given the movie I just watched, that line does not make sense. I had just spent two hours watching Ron Woodruff declare that the doctors doling out AZT were murderors, a hospital administator played by Denis O’Hare (an actor that specializes in white collar sleaze) who cares more about money than good science, and a third doctor played by Jennifer Garner who is sympathetic to Woodruff’s cause and at one point is asked to resign because of it. So what is the deal with AZT? Why is the movie telling us with its last line that it works when it does not offer any evidence to suggest that from in the movie? This is the sort of detail that makes the watcher feel the need to look up on Wikipedia the true story, which I have not done yet because I wanted my confusion to be readily apparent in this review.

In cases like this, I always bring up that Oliver Stone anecdote. He was accused of propaganda and his reply was this: how can you tell that my movies are not propaganda? Because they aren’t boring. Propaganda by definition only shows one point of view, and because of that necessary lack of conflict, it is not exciting. A storyteller may have a point of view. A storyteller may have an agenda. But if that storyteller does not give the other side its full due, the story will not be exciting. “Dallas Buyer’s Club,” has this problem. By the end, we see Ron Woodruff time and again being victimized unjustly by the system for arbitrary reasons. The reasons may have been stupid for all I know, but what I do know from watching the movie is that the other side is not getting a fair shake. They are not given the chance to explain themselves. We see plenty of scenes of Jennifer Garner trying to persuade Denis O’Hare of the ineffectiveness of AZT. Instead of giving Denis the opporutunity to respond, the movie simply has him ignore Jennifer. In the end, we are left with only one side of the argument, and because of that the epitath does not make sense.

What is the truth? I’m afraid you may have to do your own research.  

12 Years a Slave (5/5 Stars)

“It was unearthly, and the men were—No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it—this suspicion of their not being inhuman.”

- Joseph Conrad, Hearts of Darkness

In Joseph Conrad’s Hearts of Darkness, a young British officer travels up the Congolese river to seek out a renegade Colonel named Kurtz. Africa, and this especially undeveloped part of it, was an entirely different world to the educated officer. It is a given in both the story’s authorial voice and in the character itself that the British with all their clothes and technology are superior to the hunter-gatherer savages of Africa. But as the officer contemplates the natives upon seeing them at the start of his journey he is overtaken with a strange discomfort. It isn’t a discomfort born from a sense of racism. No, on the contrary, he recognizes that there is no difference between him and the “savages.” They are obviously of the same species. And this brief acknowledgement of the native’s humanity unnerves him.   

12 Years a Slave, is the third feature by Director Steve McQueen having previously made Hunger and Shame, both collaborations with actor Michael Fassbender. Fassbender in a DVD Bonus feature once referred to McQueen as a man of great empathy. McQueen’s movies are a witness to the truth of that statement. One of the things that make 12 Years a Slave especially remarkable is its treatment of the white characters who are not portrayed as 100% nasty but are allowed brief moments like the one given to the British officer in Conrad’s Hearts of Darkness where they recognize the humanity of those they consider inferior. Apparently this is true not only of McQueen’s adaptation of Solomon Northup’s autobiography 12 Years a Slave, but of the novel itself. Solomon, born a free man in New York, kidnapped, and sold into slavery, repeatedly put himself in the shoes of his slave masters in his account of the ordeal. (I have said before that Django Unchained treated its slave-owners like the Nazis in Indiana Jones. Here I would argue that 12 Years a Slave treats its slave-owners like the Nazis in Schindler’s List, particularly the Ralph Fiennes character, Amon Goeth) Counter intuitively, this does not make the slave owners look better. In fact, it makes them look far worse. In law, it would be the difference between crimes committed knowingly (like murder) as opposed to unknowingly (mere manslaughter). A character like Leonardo Dicaprio’s deluded and indulgent plantation owner in Django Unchained is not shown making moral choices. He considers only one way of doing things. Here, though, the slave-owners can sense what is morally correct if only in that Huck Finn way of feeling ‘something not quite right in the pit of my stomach.’ Then given the choice of whether or not to recognize the humanity that they sense, they choose not to do it. Their behavior comes off as especially cruel, unnatural, and evil. After all, even if they lived by the moral code of the South, Solomon Northup still deserved to be set free. All he had to do to be released was get a letter to his family back home telling them where he was so they could find him and show the local sheriff his free papers. Even in the South this was all the law needed. What stood in the way was the insidious nature of slavery; an institution that oppresses the slave but also warps the moral constitution of the master. It makes cowards of good men as well as enabling the worst impulses of the evil ones.

Is there anything that Michael Fassbender would not do for Steve McQueen? It is a relationship between actor and director that can only be rivaled by the 70s relationship between De Niro and Scorsese. These are all especially hard performances and it speaks to the enormous amount of trust that Fassbender has in McQueen that he is willing to do them. Fassbender in 12 Years a Slave is taking on one of the most notorious of slave-owners, Edwin Epps, in this role. In a world of systematic cruelty, he somehow stood out as being notably more cruel than usual. One of things that 12 Years a Slave portrays that Django Unchained conveniently sidestepped is the subject of widespread rape. (Not to say Django Unchained was not a brave movie, it just seemed that rape was one too many things to consider. And thus Dicaprio lives with his sister, not a wife.) Rape would be one thing, but as Malcolm X liked to point out, most slave-owners were married. And boy how would you feel as a wife if your husband continually raped his slaves? Could you really bring yourself to think the adultery did not count because the women your husband repeatedly raped were black? And thus is set up the most horrific love triangle in the history of cinema between Master Epps, his wife played by Sarah Paulson, and the slave he is in love with Patsy played by newcomer Lupita Nyong’o.

Patsy is perhaps one of the more remarkable slaves in the world, picking an average rate of 500 pounds of cotton a day. Most men in the field pick around 200 pounds. This among other obvious things captures the attention of Epps, who absolutely hates himself for finding her attractive. He rewards her abilities by continually raping and beating her. His wife, fully aware of his philandering, demands that Epps sell her. He will not do so. The wife, who has no power herself in this ridgidly patriarchal society, responds by making Patsy’s life even more of a living hell. Among other things, she denies her soap for cleaning, cuts her rations, and throws a bottle of hard liquor at her face from point blank range. What can Patsy do about this? Commit suicide? That literally seems to be her only and best option.   

I think it would make sense to go ahead and include 12 Years a Slave within the genre of survival movie that is being exceedingly well represented this year with such movies as Gravity, Captain Phillips, and All is Lost. McQueen’s presentation of slavery Solomon Northup's situation absolutely akin to it. There is an extraordinary scene of Northup, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, being almost lynched by an overseer named Tibault, played by Paul Dano, after a mild disagreement. The lynching is in mid-swing when a second overseer stops Tibault not because, you know, it’s murder, but because Northup is property of a different man named Ford, played by Benedict Cumberbatch. Mr. Ford is summoned to make the decision himself. Meanwhile Northup waits all day on his tippy-toes, hands still fastened behind his back, neck still hanging in the noose. In the background all the other slaves go about their business, the situation being that if anybody helped Northup they might be killed as well. Northup may as well be in the middle of the ocean like Old Man Redford or up in space like Sandra Bullock. There is no human community bound by law and order here. All is savage, brutal, and uncaring. 

“Why don’t the black people just rise up and kill the whites?” asks Dicaprio in Django Unchained. Perhaps the fate of one of the newly kidnapped slaves, played by Michael K. Williams, in an ingenious choice of casting, may illustrate the answer to that. Michael K. Williams, best known as one of the more badass characters in TV history, Omar from The Wire, brings up the idea of revolt. He is killed within the space of a couple of minutes. If Omar would last only half a scene, how do you think you would fare?