The Hunger Games: A View

            I watched this entire movie.  At the end I felt manipulated.  I'd been set up for the sequel.  It wasn't a cliff-hanger.  There was a conclusion, an emotional resolution.  I felt conned, anyway.

            If I see a Harry Potter, it's a given that there's going to be another Harry Potter.  I don't know snarf about this condescending hodge podge called The Hunger Games, except that I'm not going to rent the sequel. 

            Lo and Behold, as I scan the uber-film website Rotten Tomatoes, I see that

there are at least three more Hunger Games films already in the can and awaiting the release date in such fashion as to keep the market sharp.  No overstuffing, no bulimia in these Hunger Games.  The films are scheduled to release one a year, through 2015.

            The Hunger Games books form  a trilogy.  That's natural, that's the way the publishing business works these days.  Write a series: keep them buying the next book.  Keep spinning the story until the Young Adult protagonist gets herpes or joins a cult.  After eighteen years of age, the Young Adult hero/heroine has pubes and periods, and no longer qualifies for the teen discount.

            After watching the film for two minutes I knew that the story called for Revolution, that the Old Order must be destroyed.  Let's get rid of these mincing aristocrats who somehow never get fat in spite of hogging all the food in the world.  Wow, I think. In this future era liposuction has gotten AWESOME!

President Snow and Mr. Funnybeard

            So, in the final scene, the camera lingers on the face of Donald Sutherland, who plays the Benevolent Fuehrer, the grandfatherly President Snow.  He taps his 

lips with his forefinger.  He scowls.  His toady, Mister Funnybeard, had said, vis a vis unforeseen developments in the live-broadcast annual Hunger Game, "Everyone loves an underdog."  President Snow says that he (Mister Funnybeard) wouldn't like the REAL underdog very much if he got close enough to smell his B.O.             

          President Snow sees trouble coming.  The Underdogs are getting restless.  He forces Mister Funnybeard to eat poison berries.  The Beard wasn't tough enough.  Snow needs a bigger nastier villain.  I don't know anything about the books, the plot, the film sequels, NUTHIN'.  But I betcha Mister Funnybeard's replacement is a real gorilla.  My Predictable-Plot-Sensor has sniffed and distilled the corn sucrose and polyethylene glycol in Book One and says, "here she comes in Book Two! A real nasty character!"              

          This movie got critical raves and made tons of money and will continue to bask in its over-ratedness as long as the milk holds out.  Maybe that's because it's filled with such deep philosophical and political observations.  Maybe it has stimulated people to think deep thoughts!

            Here it is: In the not so distant future all the rich people, the one percenters,

have divided the country into twelve districts, with the richest district being, of course, District One, and so forth.  District Twelve is coal mining country, it looks like Appalachia in the 1920's. Freezing, miserable, hungry miners and their families have been so completely intimidated that they send their children to participate in the annual Hunger Games.  It's compulsory but every time a kid enters his or her name into the lottery there's a payoff.  They get a loaf of bread or a flank steak or something like that.  Hence, there are kids whose poverty and family-feeling has driven them to do the name-drop forty or fifty times, or a hundred.  They know that sooner or later their number will be up and they will be called to The Hunger Games.

            The Game is a live televised gladiatorial contest.  There is only one winner.  One survivor.  Two teenagers from each district are turned loose in a giant domed parkland and must hunt one another down.  There are hidden cameras everywhere.   The frog is a camera.  The butterfly is a camera.  The weaponry is strictly medieval. Swords, spears, axes, knives, bows and arrows.  The winner becomes a celebrity and gets all the perks of being a District One Percenter.

            Wow.  Would you let your sixteen year old sign up for this?  You don't have a choice.  Your kid might be irritating as hell right now but that's no way to shut up a teenager.

            The rich kids from Districts One and Two have years of training and are awesome killing machines.  Kids like Kaitness Everdeen, from District Twelve, have grown up in the woods and streams of coal country.  They've learned to trap and hunt to survive.  Kaitness is a wizard with bow and arrow.  She's Bear Grylles, Cody Lundin and Survivor Man Les Stroud dressed like a sixteen year old girl.  Well, she looks more like twenty six but what's one suspended disbelief among so many?

            There you have it, folks.  The Hunger Games.  It's the TV show Survivor with real edged weapons.  Alliances are formed and broken.  Since ultimately you may have to kill your boyfriend to win the game, emotional attachments are thrown all askew.  That's the real cruelty.  You have to stop trusting someone you love.

How heinous!  This crappy system has got to be toppled!  The Revolution will definitely be televised!

            I thought that was going to happen in this movie.  I hadn't reckoned on the sequel, the prequel, the dequel. or the hypnequal.  At the end I just felt ripped off.

            By the way, the movie is dead slow.  Two and a half hours of  Slowwwwww, leavened by five minutes of climactic battle with Cato The District One Killing Machine.

            If Kaitness was so smart, why didn't she recover her preciously limited arrows whenever she shot a squirrel or a pheasant? Stuff like that really bugs me.

            I give this movie one muskrat for the hair dressers and costume people.  They had a hell of a lot of fun.
          Aw, let's give it another half a muskrat for Woody Harrelson doing a great imitation of Woody Harrelson.  The guy's the Nick Nolte of our time.  He's made grunge into a career.

Captain America: A Review

Some time beginning in the late 70's a change began in the genre of Super Hero/Comic Book movies.  I think in particular about the first "Superman" released in 1978.  Then I follow a trajectory that brings us to 1997 and"Men In Black".  Within this time frame superheroes stopped declaiming their lines like politicians on steroids.  They abandoned the cornball sentiments that are still heard (unfortunately) in the world of politics.  Before this sea-change a film might end with the hero giving the obligatory pretty girl an obligatory super kiss.  When the kiss is done, he looks into the sky, eyes narrowed with noble determination, and says the ogligatory closing line:"Now the world is finally safe from Tyranny."

            By the time "Men In Black" came along, the hero's lines had changed, the entire tone of movies had changed, so that Will Smith could say something like, "I hate gettin' goo on my suit when I blast those mothas!"

            The deeper truth that lies behind this change is that pop culture has entered a new psychological era, the Age of Irony.  Insofar as mass entertainment is concerned, irony is now a more common dramatic currency than is heroism.  We, the audience, see ourselves more realistically.  We are saturated in irony because we know that we are doomed.  We are doomed individually: we are all going to die.  We are possibly doomed as a civilization, because of the way we have fucked things up.

            We know, or can imagine, many dooms that were hidden before the Discovery Channel founded its empire of info-tainment.  We imagine doom by comet impact.  We imagine the coming doom wrought by global warming.  We imagine doom by the explosion of the super volcano simmering under Yellowstone National Park.  We imagine doom by weapons of mass destruction, or malignant microbes.  We are a people of a thousand imagined dooms.  
           I have devised a personal motto:  March Cheerfully To Your Doom.  Is there any choice?  Or shall we simply proceed to the Age of Despair and forget about having any fun at all?

            I was curious to see how the producers of "Captain America" would adapt to our modern ironic sensibilities.  The themes of "Captain America" hearken back to that most heroic and patriotic era, World War Two.  How could they twist this red- white-and-blue superhero into an ironic commentary that would appeal to today's audiences?

            The producers used a simple device, and it worked.  They made the film's action a flashback.  Contemporary explorers in some remote shifting glacier discover a strange artifact sticking out of the ice.  As soldiers rappel down into this artifact, it becomes obvious that it is a highly advanced aircraft.  There is a pilot's seat looking out a giant windshield.  We don't see what, if anything, is in that pilot's seat. Scraping away a shallow layer of ice, one of the soldiers discovers a round device.  Is it a shield?  It looks like a shield.  And, by god, it is emblazoned with the white star surrounded by red and blue circles: the icon of the U.S. Armed Forces during World War Two.

            This flashback device enables us to look as through the wrong end of a telescope, witnessing the Age of Heroism through the sensibility of the Age of Irony.

Captain America, played without hyperbole by Chris Evans, goes about his business

without any bodice-busting fuss.  He's likeable, modest and utterly committed.

            A top secret agency, the Strategic Scientific Reserve, is working with a brilliant scientist, a fellow who escaped from the Nazis.  He has invented a biological technology that can turn ordinary men into Super Soldiers with super reflexes and super physiques.  The scientist's name is Dr. Erskine, but we may as well call him Dr. Epstein.  We all know he's a Jew, which releases him from the taint of Germanic Fascism.  Meanwhile, the Germans have an advanced Black Ops club, run by  a rogue genius named Johann Schmidt.  Herr Schmidt is at the helm of his own organization called Hydra.  This Hydra thing is to Nazism as a Great White Shark is to a goldfish. 

            Now we throw in a pretty girl.  She is an intelligence agent who liaises with the aforementioned Strategic Scientific Reserve.  She's everywhere.  She's part of the inner circle, though she doesn't seem to do anything besides be head cheerleader.  Heck, she's the only cheerleader. She believes in Dr. Epstein.  She accepts his choice of the first human  subject to undergo the transformation into Super Soldier.  This person is Steve Rogers, a weak, skinny but indomitably plucky 4F washout. The boy weighs maybe eighty pounds in a wet T-shirt and can't lift a moth without dislocating his shoulder.  He has tried to enlist forty times under forty different names in forty towns, but he's got asthma, heart murmur, flat feet, bed wetting, 20/80 vision.  He's under weight, under height, has Recalcitrant Plebny, Feline Leukemia, and every other disqualifier for military duty.

            But he is plucky!  Dr. Epstein recognizes this Pluck as the true ingredient of a Super Soldier.  Sure enough, when Steve gets put in the machine and pumped full of the esoteric hormones, he emerges as a plucky hunk of buff manhood like whooo hooo!  Now his head looks as if it actually belongs on his body, which was a disturbing artifact of his previous digitally de-buffed body.

            Agent Peggy Carter loved him before, but now she loves him just as much

and will love him even if the hormones turn him into a gay guy with a huge body and a tiny pin head.

            Here we go, folks!  The elements are in place.  We are now ready for many chases, explosions, gun fights, grappling and swinging from the bars of industrial catwalks, plus a few romantic interludes that are always interrupted before The Kiss can happen.  The Kiss finally happens as Steve Rogers pluckily volunteers to go on a suicide mission that leads to the surprise denouement of the film. 

            I liked the film, (meaning I watched all of it) but the ending left me saying "HUH?"

            I give the film three muskrats.  One of those muskrats is for the moment when villainous Herr Schmidt tears his own face off to reveal a red-orange skull with a Michael Jackson nose.