THE HUNGER GAMES (Gary Ross, 2012, USA)

A society sates its appetite with bread and circuses, spoon-fed with tempting confections that are easy to swallow but offer only empty calories. Here in this bleak future life becomes a violent poetry, where death imitates art. Director Gary Ross adds a superficial realism to the bestselling novel, giving half-life to static text that becomes a stillborn exercise of aborted ideas and purged intellectual afterbirth.

Ross shows little skill in directing, framing a shot, or editing a film. The first half of the film as Katniss is selected and travels towards her fate is pieced together with nauseating flash cuts. The average shot length of about 1.5 seconds barely sustains the narrative integrity. Dialogue between characters becomes a chore to watch, as both actors are rarely shown together in medium shot to establish their physical relationship to each other or the environment. Ross fails to utilize the 2:35:1 aspect ratio effectively, shooting shaky close-ups for no particular reason and failing to create spatial objectiveness within the frame. The film is nearly unwatchable in the first hour and this is a shame: the story is interesting and the acting satisfactory. Fortunately, the second half settles down when the action starts and forgoes the dizzying montage.

Every year, the government takes a boy and girl between the ages of 12-18 from each of the twelve districts as punishment for a civil war 74 years ago. The districts are subjugated to Big Brother-like rule, where citizens are born into this oppressive society with no hope of ever attaining the status of the wealthy few. But there is one exception: win the Game. This random draw pits child against child for the entertainment of the 1%, as hope becomes opium for the masses. But Katniss volunteers when her younger sister is chosen and accepts this choice with a heart wrenching but steely resolve. She is under no illusions as to her chances, as the odds are most definitely not in her favor.

And here begins more an insight than criticism since I haven’t read the books. Why would the districts concede this random lottery? To protect the smallest children, I believe it’s realistic to expect that the elders in each district would create a covert counsel, where they would groom the strongest teenagers to volunteer. This protects the weakest or infirm that would never survive, and offers a glimmer of hope to the ones physically and mentally prepared. Katniss’ decision seems to be the exception: I believe it would be the norm. Also, the technology is ridiculous to the point of “magic”. The arena can create reality from ethereal pixels with the push of a button or swipe of the finger, be it deadly fireballs or monster pit bulls to torment the players. Why do they need fossil fuels when they can seemingly create it?

The film has many ideas that never break the surface tension and dive deep into subtext or metaphor. The story remains bombastically superficial in both its violence and romance, as the characters never develop complex feelings or thoughts. The film becomes a Cliff Notes version of a better story, or at least I hope so: if the novel doesn’t mine these anarchic depths then it fails, becomes just another high school confidential for the TWILIGHT mentality. The film is so superficial one begins to wonder if that’s not the very point that is being made: like Malick, the form becomes the message. In an alternate reality, it would have been interesting to see this novel realized by Ken Russell circa TOMMY or MAHLER, his most insane and visually provocative period. Though contrived and generic in execution, it’s the acting that elevates this above the mundane. I could also argue that these poor oppressed teenagers are pretty darn healthy, their teeth pearly and hair perfect. It’s a minor quibble but one that took me out of the film for a bit. What happened to the time when actors became the part and not the other way around?

THE HUNGER GAMES is a dessert, a treat to be enjoyed and then forgotten. For a main course, I’ll take a BATTLE ROYALE….with cheese.

Final Grade: (C) 

THE STEPFORD WIVES (Bryan Forbes, 1975, USA)

Stepford Connecticut is a Disneyesque nirvana for the patriarchal hierarchy, the template for male entitlement which allows abusive relationships to prosper: a prescient and dire warning concerning domestic violence awareness. The film is a satire about male entitlement, ultimate power and control, representing the social enslavement of the burgeoning feminist movement. 

The film begins with a blind female mannequin being carried by a man: a plastic metaphor foreshadowing the inhuman narrative. As Joanna and Walter leave the city, the film's derivative score plays like some TV soap opera, which will contrast the brooding horror to come. Director Bryan Forbes sets the film amid the beautiful friendly suburbs, bathing the film in bright daytime afternoon delight; he allows the friction between the couple to crescendo as a family melodrama. But monsters lurk in the shadows of Stepford and gather at a dark secluded mansion, home of the Stepford Men’s Association. Joanna befriends Bobbie, another braless newcomer in town; they attempt to subvert the superficial and wholesome aura of this strange environment. When they finally convene a meeting of Stepford wives to create their own feminist association, they discover a mindless and one-dimensional attitude: these women exist only to clean and serve their husbands. They spout commercial jingles and speak earnestly of their housework, like drones…or robots. 

William Goldman’s script builds the suspense like tiny cogs that firmly fit together: from Joanna’s cluttered kitchen to Charmaine’s new attitude, and when Bobbie finally succumbs to the disease that proliferates the town Joanna believe she is going crazy. When Joanna voices her concerns, the horror cannot be explained in mere words, and she veers towards a nervous breakdown. Finally, her buxom doppelganger sees through her eyes darkly, and she is subsumed into the great American Dream. 

Final Grade: (B+)

DEATH IN VENICE (Luchino Visconti, 1971, Italy)

Gustav walks the cloistered streets of Venice amid a Cholera epidemic; like any great Artist, he searches for Beauty’s sublime Form in a world cursed with mortality while Death stalks its prey. Director Luchino Visconti focuses our attention on Gustav von Aschenbach, a famous composer who exiles himself to the past, to the anachronistic city of Venice whose very foundation, like his, sinks deeper and deeper into dark troubled waters. 

We are allowed only brief insight into Gustav’s past through flashback and mise-en-scene: a wife, the death of his child, a young lover, and a career her seems to have purposely castigated. Visconti uses Mahler’s music as the protagonist’s creation and it works to profound effect: the score is like a funeral shroud, the raging and fear against the dying of the light, and this creates a smothering tension that infuses the narrative with an contagious friction between our brief desire to live and the cold infinite void. It is Beauty with a capital B that Gustav searches for: not carnal lust to quench his dying body, a momentary fleshly delight, it is inspiration to breathe, to accept his own demise and possibly compose one last great symphony. 

Visconti’s film is Beauty itself, each shot perfectly framed and each languid camera movement resplendently capturing Gustav’s perceptions. He becomes enamored with a young man, who represents his own salvation, both professionally and spiritually, an objet d’art that stirs the senses: in a world that smells of shit, where children needlessly die, there still exists a sublime grace. But he feels the tomb immure his heart, slowly stealing his breath, and in an unsettling scene a barber dyes his hair and paints his face white, applies rouge to his lips: makeup for a walking corpse. Finally, as Gustav gazes upon Tadzio, he dies as we all must…. alone. 

Final Grade: (A)

THE HIT (Stephen Frears, 1984, UK)

upergrass Willie Parker trades his life for ten years of freedom: knowing that he’ll meet the Grim Reaper some sunny day, don’t know where, don’t know when. After testifying against his accomplices, Parker’s gangster mates recite the Vera Miles classic in open court, damning their traitorous comrade to a life of shadows and paranoia…or so they think. 

Director Stephen Frears shatters Crime Drama genre convention by focuses upon Parker’s existential existence, a man who has come to terms with himself and the world around him. Having no regrets, he accepts his fate when kidnapped. This becomes a travelogue that takes us through the beautiful Spanish countryside, often using long shots as the characters become insignificant in contrast to the lush mountains and waterfalls, journeying upon the long and winding road of inner peace and its eternal struggle with the objective world. Braddock’s (a silently malignant John Hurt) cold and calculating murderous rampage, a man who kills with professional instinct and without emotion offset Terence Stamp’s wonderfully philosophical performance as Parker. But the waters run deep in Braddock and he cannot kill the lovingly innocent Maggie. While Parker sows the seeds of discontent between Braddock and his protégé Myron (a punkish Tim Roth) he never seeks to escape, only to accept his fate with humane curiosity. 

Frears slows the narrative down with minimal crosscutting as the Spanish Police Inspector closes in upon his prey, diluting the suspense in order to peer into this dark abyss of mortality that confronts each character. The wonderful cinematography takes us through this landscape of hope and madness, and renders each as a vital element of human existence, as life and death merge into one temporary experience. When confronted by his demise, Parker loses control and runs, turning his back suddenly upon his ethics, this pure survival instinct rushing through his veins. While Braddock fears his fate, he accepts it with a slight smile and a wink, finding his peace at last. 

Final Grade: (B+)

THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD (Christian Nyby, 1951, USA)

Cold War paranoia as a foreign invader attacks a small research facility, a minor conflict indicative of a growing menace whose malignant seeds could take root and destroy the World. A frightening metaphor concerning the Korean War, as this tiny plot of land becomes the battleground where the future of our world hangs precariously in the balance. 

Though Christian Nyby is credited as Director, this has the pulse of a Howard Hawks film with overlapping dialogue, quick-witted sarcasm and a strong feminist romance. Ben Hecht is uncredited as a screenwriter; his innuendo and double entendre adds spice and flavor to the characters, helping to define each minor participant as an individual. The film begins with a wink and a nudge as Captain Hendry must re-supply an isolated research outpost and confront Nikki, a brief encounter (Re: one night stand) who drank him under the table a few weeks prior. But the joking quickly turns towards fear as the soldiers discover a crashed spaceship and its frozen occupant. Science and morality quickly clash and the military’s bumbling orders puts the entire crew at risk. Though very little violence is shown, the allusions to butchered men hanging from the rafters, their blood feeding the spawns of this alien creature is truly gruesome. 

Hawks films mostly indoors and in medium close-up, packing each frame with multiple characters creating a claustrophobic sense of fear, as the narrow corridors and tight spaces are now prison walls while the creature walks free. The Geiger counter’s clicking alerts reminds me of the device used in ALIENS to heighten the tension as death stalks the base; their brief lives ticking quickly away. The vegetative alien is far more advanced than we are but it still shambles about like a Frankenstein’s monster and acts rashly rather than intelligently…even though it does turn off the heat. Dr. Carrington attempts to communicate with the beast but he is violently ignored while the resourceful soldiers ultimately save the day with lightening quick ingenuity. The story ends with a blossoming romance and a fried vegetable…and this dire warning: Watch the skies, everywhere, keep watching the skies! 

Final Grade: (B+)

LOGAN'S RUN (Michael Anderson, 1976, USA)

Logan 5 is a Sandman, the bringer of eternal sleep who dares perchance to dream otherwise, to wonder what dreams may come. Director Michael Anderson’s allegorical drama is built upon the William F. Nolan novel but becomes a fable of the disco era, dated with obtuse visual references and cues to the addled drug and sex addicted culture of the mid-seventies where life expectancy was barely thirty. The detailed set and costume designs are meant to be futuristic but seem straight out of Studio 54. But fashion always recycles itself and possibly a distant generation will embrace the vapid excess of this self-destructive subculture. 

Logan 5 is assigned to find a mystic place called Sanctuary and destroy it. He becomes a slave to the tyrannical computer that removes the final years from his life-clock in order to carry out the mission. He journeys with Jessica 6 and together they escape the domed city, hunted by his best friend whose zealous loyalty to the State subsumes his freethinking potential. Anderson makes the mistake of opening the film with a tracking shot over fertile forests to the interior of the city, already revealing to the viewer that a habitable outside world exists: a fact that remains unthought-of to the populace. It would have created a palpable tension if this remained a mystery to the audience as we rushed from mortal danger into the great unknown. 

Logan 5 soon abandons his mission and wants to live, to experience life because he finally understands that renewal by Carousel is a lie: that his whole belief system is an illusion and the dome a charnel house for those who turn thirty. The life of comfort and depravity is grand until it’s expiration date…but mankind’s survival instinct has not been totally quelled. Peter Ustinov’s grand soliloquy of T. S. Elliot musings is endearing and amusing, an aging lonely man whose only company is a democracy of cats. Matte paintings of Washington DC engulfed by nature, such as the stony visage of Lincoln peering forever into the void or the Washington Monument like an exclamation point to the end of an era are riveting. But most of the SPFX are a bit cheesy and dated, Box the maniacal android looks to be made of his namesake. Jerry Goldsmith’s score is full of lush strings and bombast, punctuated by strange electronic computer sounds to achieve some futuristic tonal vibrancy. 

Final Grade: (C)

WENDY AND LUCY (Kelly Reichardt, 2008, USA)

Wendy Carroll drifts along a rail thin steel umbilical, barely connected to family and friends, her canine companion Lucy’s unconditional love keeping her from an emotional breakdown. Wendy’s microcosm is representative of those living a fringe existence, her small tragedies ubiquitously expressive concerning the tiniest of lives of our unjust human condition. 

Director Kelly Reichardt utilizes a cinéma vérité approach to reach an ultimately unsatisfying truth (but not unrealistic), bringing her subjects close to the camera while filming on location, forgoing static set-designs and montage which allows the audience direct contact with Wendy. We often "fall through the page" when reading; in Reichardt’s cinema we tumble through the looking glass and into this celluloid world that not only mimics our own…but also becomes it. The minimilistic plot purposely breaks with convention and shows us life with unexpected patterns: Wendy encounters a friendly security guard and blunt mechanic, and finds compassion at the local dog pound. She also meets others like herself who ride the rails, and sees them as human beings to be kept at a distance because she’s content in her isolation, living moment to moment. Reichardt’s observations are non-judgmental. Though Wendy is angry with the local clerk for turning her in, she begins to understand the necessity of which he spoke. 

There is no Deus Ex Machina during her lonely search for Lucy in this strange town. She is lost and afraid of the unknown, which leads her to a bittersweet decision. The clacking rhythm of the train to nowhere is a brittle-steel heartbeat: for love, she sets her companion free and vows to return…when things are better. Someday. 

Final Grade: (A)

TEETH (Michael Lichtenstein, 2007, USA)

TEETH is a post-modern Geek tragedy told not from the perspective of the Hero but from the mythological beast that must be conquered. Dawn is just an ordinary girl who has a rather peculiar evolutionary adaptation: she has the teeth of the Hydra inside her and waits for Hercules to wield his sickle and slay the evil mutation. 

Dawn is a proponent of abstinence and is wracked with guilt when she fantasizes healthily about sex. Tobey is her friend and colleague who also pledged abstinence but he has other darker desires: one day while swimming he rapes her. Of course, the beast that guards the portal to the sacred underworld is awakened and Tobey is emasculated and bleeds to death. Dawn struggles for understanding and unknowingly visits a perverted gynecologist who takes advantage of her too. He’s caught with his hand in the cookie jar and his punishment for thievery is befitting of the Codex Hammurabi. When she finally gives her body willingly to a boy she enjoys the experience and is relieved to exert control over her blossoming womanhood. But he soon gets his cum-uppance. Dawn uses her newly discovered talents to exact revenge against a cruel and tyrannical stepbrother in a scene reminiscent of De Sade’s 120 Days Of Sodom. She learns that indeed sex is a weapon. 

Mitchell Lichtenstein directs with eye for his father’s pop-culture comic book style visuals with exaggerated close-ups and colorful compositions. I especially like the ominous cooling towers hovering over Dawn’s house. But the condesc-ending travelogue is amorphous and leaves Dawn as a wandering victim searching for Hercules. 

Final Grade: (C+)

BIGGER THAN LIFE (Nicholas Ray, 1956, USA)

A soft spoken schoolteacher faces the constricting reality of a fatal diagnosis, but his cure may kill him first. Director Nicolas Ray sets the fuse and detonates the nuclear family unit, imploding the middle-class mores of bourgeoisie suburbia.

Ed Avery is a timid workaholic, holding a full time teaching job and moonlighting as a dispatcher without his wife’s knowledge, unable to support his habitat on one salary. He begins suffering debilitating pains that tear through his body though he tries to bear this cross alone. Ed is diagnosed with a rare incurable disease, a death sentence unless an experimental drug can stave off the symptoms. Soon, he is addicted to Cortisone and the tiny pill that gets him so high also proves to be his downfall. Ed descends into a junkie lifestyle, his personality altered, lying and deceiving for his next fix, a man on a medicated mission whose future is only a prescription away.


James Mason imbues his character Ed Avery with an air of repressed anger and rigid class respectability, molded by a doublespeak society that holds illusion as reality. When his personality tectonically shifts, Mason seethes with unbridled rage and narcissism, a cipher that utters truth acknowledged but abandoned by his peers. His speech during a parent/teacher conference would be funny if it wasn’t so convincing. This transition is wonderfully realized by contrasting this transformation with the sublime honesty of a husband who can’t imagine that his wife believes he may be cheating on her. Ray depicts the average American household down to the minutest detail; from cluttered kitchen with a rusty hot-water heater to the mantle littered with deflated memories. He subverts this iconic imagery by filming from low-angle and lighting the characters in a nourish fashion, so shadows dominate their living counterparts. Ray allows the Cinemascope compositions to create a vacuum between people, an invisible barrier that separates both worlds.

Ed has stopped taking from the tiny bottle: it now takes from him. Madness has finally consumed him and it’s difficult to tell if the drug permanently damages his perceptions, or only awakens the sleeping giant of his super-ego. 

Final Grade: (B+)

THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL (Luis Buñuel, 1962, Mexico)

The Valkyrie’s virginal spirit rises above the tempest of anarchy: as a socialite dinner party comes to an end, the guests inexplicably find themselves trapped by their own desire to escape, the music room a dirge as class distinction and reason are devoured by the subconscious. Director Luis Buñuel guides us through the labyrinthine convolutions of our brains, its electric impulses driving pure instinct as the guests struggle to rise above the animal and not be sheep led to slaughter. 


Buñuel's surreal and absurdist masterpiece examines social order and breaks down the elitist conventions to reveal base desires, addictions, incestuous relationships, and self-destructive motivations that imbue each of us, regardless of wealth or standing. He is more forgiving of the servants as they leave the party before it begins, and the one who stays behind fulfills his role until the very end, trying to assuage the suffering of the imprisoned. But they are comically trapped in a room without bars, the transition to the Dinning Room an open archway where they throw their trash…but are psychologically unable to pass through. Time becomes insubstantial like a morphine dream, and as one older man suffers a stroke, a couple locks themselves away to sleep forever. Their spilled blood awakens the brooding killer whose nervous hand has been lurking beneath the polite veneer of cultural mores…and a sacrifice must be made to appease this witchery. 


Buñuel films in beautiful black and white, moving his camera about the crowded room and is able to focus upon individuals while never being intrusive: it is a marvelous technical feat. The performances are inspired as the suspense and madness gradually escalates into believability, as friends turn upon each other consumed by bloodlust and revenge. The aristocrats eventually escape by mimicking their behavior after the fateful sonata; but they become trapped once again under the watchful eyes of their deity. Here in this sacred temple walks the Exterminating Angel whose darkness and decay holds dominion over all. 


Final Grade: (A)