Tag: Jennifer Lawrence

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Now Playing in Memphis: Alien Invasions

Asteroid City

Wes Anderson’s highly anticipated new project Asteroid City lands this weekend. The film is a star-studded trip to Arizona desert in 1955, where the Junior Stargazers Convention is gathering for a wholesome weekend. But this cozy scene is shattered when an actual alien arrives in a for-real spaceship. Is the alien good or bad? Will the play based on the low-key alien invasion make it to opening night? Frequent Anderson collaborators Jason Schwartzman, Jeffrey Wright, Tilda Swinton, Edward Norton, Adrien Brody, Willem Dafoe, Bob Balaban, and Jeff Goldblum are joined by Tom Hanks, Bryan Cranston, Maya Hawke, and Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker. 

Jennifer Lawrence returns to the screen in No Hard Feelings as Maddie, an Uber driver whose luck has run out. To stave off bankruptcy, she takes a Craigslist job as a surrogate girlfriend for introverted rich kid Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman). This sex comedy for people who hate sex and also comedy co-stars Matthew Broderick and Natalie Morales. 

Speaking of alien invasions, the Time Warp Drive-In for June has three of them. First up on Saturday night June 24 throws Tom Cruise into a time loop. Edge of Tomorrow was a minor hit on release in 2014, and gained cult status since then—despite a late-game name change to Live, Die, Repeat. Emily Blunt and Bill Paxton co-star as soldiers fighting alien Mimics, whose time bomb is literal.

The kind of robotic mech suits the soldiers use in Edge of Tomorrow are straight out of Starship Troopers, the Robert A. Heinlein novel from 1959 which pretty much invented the idea. In 1997, director Paul Verhoeven omitted the armored spacesuits when he adapted the novel, focusing instead on subtly lampooning the book’s rah-rah militarism. Most people didn’t get the joke, but Starship Troopers is now regarded as a classic. Would you like to know more?

The Blob is an all-time classic of 1950s sci-fi. The 1988 remake, which provides the third film of the Time Warp, is well known among horror fans as one of the best remakes ever. Check out Kevin Dillon’s magnificent mullet in this trailer.

Pixar’s latest animated feature Elemental explores love in a world of air, fire, water, and earth. Ember (voiced by Leah Lewis) is a fire elemental who strikes up an unlikely romance with Wade (Mamoudou Athie), a water elemental. Can the two opposites reconcile, or will they vanish in a puff of steam? Longtime Pixar animator Peter Sohn based Elemental on his experiences as a Korean immigrant growing up in New York City.  

On Wednesday, June 28, Indie Memphis presents Lynch/Oz. Filmmaker Alexandre O. Philippe’s remarkable video essay explores the ways images and ideas from The Wizard of Oz shaped the radical cinema of David Lynch.

On Thursday, June 29, Paris Is Burning brings the vogue to Crosstown Theater. Director Jeanne Livingston spent seven years filming the Harlem Drag Ball culture, where competing houses competed for drag supremacy. Paris is Burning is a landmark in LBGTQ film, and one of the greatest documentaries of the last 50 years.

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Film Features Film/TV

Don’t Look Up

Jennifer Lawrence (left) and Leonardo DiCaprio

When Dr. Strangelove, Stanley Kubrick’s satire of the nuclear age, was released in January 1964, it began with a disclaimer: “It is the stated position of the U.S. Air Force that their safeguards would prevent the occurrence of such events as are depicted in this film.”

As journalist Eric Schlosser discovered while researching his book Command and Control, the disclaimer turned out to be wishful thinking. Dr. Strangelove’s central scenario, in which an American general goes murderously insane and orders his bombers to attack the Soviet Union with nuclear weapons, was completely plausible. Kubrick created what is arguably the greatest comedy ever by simply telling the truth.

The key to Dr. Strangelove’s success is Kubrick’s tonal tightrope walk between the hilarious and the terrifying. Now, with Don’t Look Up, it’s Adam McKay’s turn on the tightrope.

Michigan State University Ph.D. student Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) is studying supernovae when she accidentally discovers a new comet inbound from the Oort cloud. Her adviser Dr. Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio) figures out that Comet Dibiasky is headed directly for Earth. We’ve got six months to stave off utter destruction.

Meryl Streep

Kate and Randall call Dr. Teddy Oglethorpe (Rob Morgan), head of the Planetary Defense Coordination Office (which, the film notes, is a real thing), and they get a meeting with President Janie Orlean (Meryl Streep). To their dismay, the president and her Jared Kushner-esque son Jason (Jonah Hill) are more concerned with the upcoming midterm elections than with saving humanity. When they leak the news to the press, their appearance on a Good Morning America-type TV show hosted by Cate Blanchett and Tyler Perry is overshadowed by celebrity gossip generated by pop singer Riley’s (Ariana Grande) sex life. The end of civilization is just too big a bummer to get traction in today’s competitive media environment.

It’s obvious to anyone with two brain cells to rub together that Don’t Look Up’s comet is an allegory for global warming. McKay, like Kubrick, has been met with some bad reviews, and it’s true that Don’t Look Up lacks the perfection of Dr. Strangelove. The editing is choppy, and the story veers off into useless romantic subplots.

But what McKay gets right, he gets really right. The earnestness of the scientists trying to save the world becomes their biggest handicap. Legacy admission Ivy Leaguers in government dismiss the threatening discovery because it came from a state school. The elite news media descend on the subject — until the online engagement metrics fade. Most chilling of all is Mark Rylance as Peter Isherwell, a Steve Jobs-like tech billionaire who discovers precious metals on the comet and decides a couple of billion deaths is a small price to pay for propping up his company’s market capitalization.

Don’t Look Up was written before the pandemic, but if anything, the experience of the last two years has made McKay’s point for him; you could replace “comet” with “coronavirus” and the film would still work. When the comet becomes clearly visible in the night sky, Streep’s Trumpian president exhorts her red-hatted followers, “Don’t look up!” I thought about that scene on January 1st, when Memphis set a new high temperature record of 79 degrees. Crazy weather we’re having, huh?

Don’t Look Up is streaming on Netflix.

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Film Features Film/TV

Dark Phoenix

I’ll admit I got a little choked up at the beginning of Dark Phoenix when the 20th Century Fox fanfare sounded. Since 1935, it has signaled the beginning of so many great movies. Originally it was Charlie Chan mysteries that kept the lights on, then Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes was the studio’s big star. Henry Fonda starred in Young Mr. Lincoln and The Grapes of Wrath. John Ford got the studio’s first Best Picture with How Green Was My Valley. In the 1940s, Fox had both the courage to take on anti-Semitism with Best Picture winner Gentleman’s Agreement and the silliness to let Howard Hawks and Cary Grant make I Was a Male War Bride. In the ’50s, Fox churned out 30 pictures a year, including gems like All About Eve. The ’60s kicked off with Marylin Monroe in Let’s Make Love before the bloated historical epic Cleopatra almost sank the studio, despite being the highest-grossing movie of 1963. The decade ended with Planet of the Apes and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, then the 1970s began with M*A*S*H*. There was Young Frankenstein, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and, of course, Star Wars in 1977, a film which changed the entire calculous of Hollywood. The 1980s ranged from the serious Chariots of Fire to the unserious Cannonball Run. In 1984, Tom Hanks got his start thanks to Fox with Bachelor Party. A nine-month period in 1986-87 produced John Carpenter’s Big Trouble in Little China, David Cronenberg’s The Fly, James Cameron’s Aliens, and the Coen brothers’ Raising Arizona. The 1990s began with Point Break and Miller’s Crossing, made a star out of Keanu Reeves with Speed, then ended with Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace.

The X-Men franchise turns to ash with Dark Phoenix, starring Game of Thrones alum Sophie Turner.

The new century began with X-Men, the moment when the superhero trend kicked into high gear. Bryan Singer, a Sundance winner whose commercial career began with The Usual Suspects, was the director who was finally able to make a non-Batman comic book movie respectable. It would set the studio’s course for the new century — and ultimately lead to its demise.

After the Star Wars prequels concluded in 2005, X-Men became the franchise that kept the lights on at Twentieth. The series had its high points, like Singer’s first two films and 2014’s Days of Future Past. But as Marvel and Disney grew into a spandex juggernaut, Fox’s creative team seemed adrift, unable to even make a decent Fantastic Four movie. X-Men: Apocalypse was an unmitigated disaster, due mostly to Singer, who, it turns out, is a serial sex predator who just stopped coming to work one day in the middle of production. The moody, low-key Logan should have been the end of the series, but here we are.

Jessica Chastain (left) and Sophie Turner try to rise from the ashes in Dark Phoenix.

Last year, Disney was flush with Avengers and Star Wars cash, and the Murdoch family decided they wanted out of the film business so they could devote themselves to destroying the world full-time. Disney officially took control of Fox in March, ending an era in Hollywood, cancelling dozens of productions, and laying off 4,000 people.

Dark Phoenix was in production during the negotiations, and odds are it will be the last film to feature the Fox fanfare. It’s an adaptation of one of the greatest and most beloved stories in comic book history — and one that Fox already mined for the awful X-Men: The Last Stand. This was to be a do-over, and give Simon Kinberg, the guy who cleaned up Singer’s mess, a chance for greatness. Kinberg is an experienced producer and studio apparatchik, but this is his first official project in the director’s chair, and it shows.

It gets off to a promising enough start. It’s 1992, and the space shuttle Endeavor is disabled in orbit. Professor X (James McAvoy) sends the X-Men to rescue the astronauts, but when things go pear-shaped, Jean Grey (Sophie Turner) ends up irradiated by the strange cosmic force that waylaid the shuttle. Instead of killing her, it makes her stronger, until she becomes a danger to everyone around her.

Unfortunately, no one seems to care. Turner, fresh from the triumph of Game of Thrones, looks lost in what should be her big leading-woman moment. Jennifer Lawrence as Raven mostly just stares blankly into the camera. McAvoy at least looks like he’s trying as Professor X. The edit is flaccid at best, there’s some shoddy camerawork that is simply inexcusable in a $200 million production, and the score by Hans Zimmer sounds like a series of electric farts.

The Marvel theme is “with great power comes great responsibility,” and the Dark Phoenix saga is meant to show what happens when that maxim fails. Instead, it shows what happens when no one cares about their job anymore. It’s an ignominious end to a once-great franchise and a once-proud studio.

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Red Sparrow

Since around August 1991, there’s been something missing from American films: A good stock villain. That’s when the Russian Communist Party ceased to exist, the Soviet Union dissolved, and the Cold War, a nebulous conflict without a clear start date, officially came to an end. Millions around the globe who had lived their entire lives under the specter of nuclear annihilation breathed a sigh of relief. Freedom, democracy, and capitalism stood triumphant. But action and spy movies never recovered.

The Russians had been such good villains for us, the yang to our yin. The Soviets of movie lore were just as capable and well funded as their Western counterparts, but their fanatical adherence to an ideology we only half understood made them much more ruthless. Where would James Bond be without From Russia With Love? Rotting away in some flea-bitten colonial capital, keeping the locals subdued for the Queen, probably. The Russian threat, even dressed up as SPECTRE, gave him purpose and meaning. In the post-Cold War period, Bond would fight international criminal cartels and terrorists, but it just wasn’t the same. Nobody had that bad guy zing like the Russkies.

Well I’ve got good news for fans of international intrigue and the possibility of death by cleansing nuclear fire! The Russians are back! And this time they’re sexier than ever! We’re talking Jennifer Lawrence sexy here, people. Lawrence, fresh from dumping Darren Aronofsky because he Would. Not. Shut. Up. about their arthouse embarrassment mother!, plays Dominika Egrova, a made-up name for a Bolshoi ballerina if ever I heard one. Dominika is nearing the peak of a promising career on Moscow’s biggest stage when a gruesome injury throws her life into ruins. Her father is dead, her mother is an invalid, and, as anyone who has recently watched I, Tonya could tell you, there’s not much of a job market for hobbled ballerinas. That’s when her uncle, Ivan Dimitrevich Egorov (Matthias Schoenaerts) makes her an offer she can’t refuse.

Let me pause here to say I love the character of Ivan, and not just because he has the laziest possible made-up name for a Russian bad guy. Everything about Schoenaerts as Ivan is designed to push your Bond movie buttons. If this were 1963, he would be working for the KGB. As it is, he works for the SVR. Even his haircut and the impeccable tailoring of his suits resemble Red Grant, Bond’s nemesis in From Russia With Love.

If Schoenaerts is Red Grant, then Charlotte Rampling is Krebs, the matronly SPECTRE agent with the switchblade shoe. Rampling is even called “Matron” by the collection of would-be super spies in the notorious school where Dominika is sent to learn her trade craft, which consists mostly of picking locks and being very sexy. “The Cold War did not end!” she exclaims, before making Dominika and a tovarisch date raper with the completely authentic name Dimitri Ustinov (Kristof Konrad) strip and get it on for the class.

Dominika doesn’t spend long at spy school, as she quickly grows too ruthless and edgy even for the Cold War relics in charge. She’s sent into the field to root out a mole by seducing CIA agent Nate Nash (Joel Edgerton), whose name is totally not just made up to sound cool. Thus begins round after round of double, triple, and quadruple crosses with a salchow twist. Everybody betrays everyone else, and plots too complex to even follow if you’re taking notes (I was) pile up like leaves falling in Gorky Park.

Here’s the thing about Red Sparrow. It’s completely ridiculous, way too long, and yet also, somehow entertaining. A lot of that probably comes down to Lawrence, who pretty much just brazens her way through the proceedings with her movie star’s physical confidence. Lawrence earns her paycheck, which, given the nude scenes, must have been substantial. And really, isn’t elevating mediocre material by sheer charisma pretty much the job description of a movie star? Lawrence’s accent never stabilizes, but her lock jaw inscrutability takes inspiration from Best Actress winner Frances McDormand as her eyes whisper “Zees men are pigs. I vill control zem.”

I can’t help but think Red Sparrow works as well as it did for me because I watched it right after reading The New Yorker‘s extended exegesis of the Steele Dossier. It may make for an eye rolling film plot, but blinding powerful men with boobies and then blackmailing the hell out of them apparently works like a charm. Just look around.

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mother!

As we were trailing out of the matinee of mother! at Studio on the Square, a woman in front of me asked of no in particular “What was that?”

A Malco employee, waiting to clean up the theater, said, “It’s the Bible!”

Javier Bardem and Jennifer Lawrence do things in Darren Aronofsky’s mother!.

The weary few filmgoers in the theater groaned in unison. Mr. Malco was right, of course. That reading explained so much of the baffling imagery. What it didn’t explain was, why?

I’m a fan of everyone involved in mother! Darren Aronofsky’s Pi is one of the best indie films of the 1990s. I loved The Wrestler and particularly Black Swan, the psychedelic ballet body horror movie that got him five Academy Award nominations and Natalie Portman a Best Actress Oscar. Jennifer Lawrence is actually a great actress in addition to being one of the highest paid people Hollywood. Javier Bardem is a always a welcome presence, able to be either warm and human or terrifyingly cold. Michelle Pfeiffer is a legend. So is Ed Harris. Domhall Gleeson still has fun Lord Of The Rings vibes attached, and Kristin Wiig is frequently the best thing in all the films she’s in. So how could mother! have happened, and why?

After an arresting initial image of Lawrence in flames, she wakes up in a half-finished house in the middle of nowhere. The home burned down a while back, and she is rebuilding it while Bardem, a writer, tries to finish his new manuscript. Then Ed Harris, a chain smoking doctor with a hacking cough, shows up. He’s a big fan, and Bardem asks him to stay the night. Harris and Bardem get drunk and trash the place, while Lawrence tries to clean up. The next morning, Pfeiffer arrives. She’s Harris’ wife, and the two of them team up to be houseguests from hell. Lawrence wants to kick them out, but Harris is dying, and Bardem says he doesn’t have the heart. While they’re making a nuisance of themselves, their two squabbling sons show up, played by Domhall Gleeson and his actual brother Brian, and one quickly kills the other.

You can see in this scenario that Bardem is God (later in the film, he is asked his true identity, and he replies “I am I”, the literal translation of “Yahweh”), Harris is Adam, Pheiffer is Eve, and the Brothers Gleeson are Cain and Abel. But where does that leave Lawrence? Since she spends most of the film having anxiety attacks in extreme close up, she’s obviously meant to be the lead character, and yet she falls outside the symbolic system which seems to be the film’s reason for being—that is, unless you’re willing to go deep into the history of ancient Canaanite religions.

Back when Yahweh was the combination storm and military god of a tribe that didn’t yet call themselves Israel, he lived in a tent on a magic mountain and had a consort named Asherah, the goddess of motherhood and fertility. After the Babylonian diaspora, when the Yahweh cult made the Jews monotheistic, Asherah’s temples and altars were destroyed, and the goddess became a theological footnote. Considering all of the crap Lawrence puts up with in this picture, the neglected, semi-ex-wife of Yahweh seems like a good fit for her. But that doesn’t explain the soon-to-be-infamous sequence where Bardem and Lawrence have a baby, who is then torn apart and eaten by a crowd of Bardem’s fans. If the kid is obviously Jesus, doesn’t that make Lawrence Mary?

Aranofsky has said in interviews that Lawrence represents Mother Earth, and the Biblical structure is a hook on which to hang an allegory of man’s environmental destruction. I’m not big on authorial intent, which can be good to know but is usually beside the point, but somehow knowing that’s what the director was going for makes mother! even worse. It would be better if the artist had some kind of dense personal meaning he abstracted into symbols and I just didn’t get it. This, I got, and it’s bad. It’s bad because it’s both too obvious yet not obvious enough. It’s bad because it’s a 15-minute short film’s worth of ideas expanded into two hours. And it’s especially bad because the experience of watching mother! is so unpleasant. Aranofsky is really, really good at invoking anxiety, and this time around, he pulls out all stops. He’s basically revving up the audience’s endocrine system for 121 minutes for no reason. There’s no payoff, no catharsis, no changed understanding of the world. Just “It’s the Bible” and “Pollution is bad.”

There are occasional flashes of brilliance in mother! Lawrence has never looked as beautiful as she does under the lens of Aranofsky collaborator Matthew Libatique, and there’s a delicious shot where Wiig executes a bunch of counter-revolutionary refugees from Bardem’s book signing (don’t ask) before pivoting and glad handing Lawrence. But mother!’s sparse pleasures aren’t worth enduring its brain pounding absurdities. I’m a bigger than average fan of surrealism, but this is just a half-baked mess. As my wife asked after being confronted by Mr. Malco’s biblical hypothesis, “You’ve read the Bible, Is there a bloody floor vagina in it?”

No. No there is not.

mother!

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Passengers

Douglas Adams said it best. “Space is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is.”

Combine that really impressive bigness with Einstein’s hard speed limit, and that means f you want to get anywhere in space, it’s going to take a long time. Storytellers who want to write stories that take place on other plants have come up with all sorts of work arounds, like hyperspace and warp drive, to let people get from one star to another in a human lifetime, but there’s little evidence such things could work in real life. Therefore, the other option is to extend the human lifespan by putting passengers into extended hibernation, so you go to sleep on Earth and wake up on the exoplanet of your choosing a century from now.

Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence in Passengers.

That’s the departure point for Passengers. The starship Avalon’a 5,000 colonists and 200 crew are barreling towards the planet Homestead II with  at half the speed of light when the ship hits an unexpected swarm of space rocks. The impact causes a power surge that wakes one of the passengers, Jim Preston (Chris Pratt), from cold sleep. The problem is, the ship is only 30 years into its 120 year journey, meaning Jim is going to die of old age long before the ship makes it to Homestead. He is destined to spend the rest of his life alone.
The good news is, he’s alone in a kilometer-long luxury hotel staffed by robots. Soon, he befriends Arthur (Michael Sheen), the bartender droid whose establishment bears a striking resemblance to the bar of the Overlook Hotel where Jack Nicholson went insane in The Shining. This is probably not a coincidence.

Passengers is a story in the tradition of “The Cold Equations”, a pulp sci fi story adapted into a Twilight Zone script that highlighted ethical problems posed by the limitations of long distance spaceflight. It’s rare for being good sci fi that doesn’t involve zapping things with ray guns. It’s a story about how technology sometimes puts people in impossible situations that no human has ever been faced with before. (Before now, no generation has had to ever learn Instagram etiquette.) Jim is on his own in deep space, and it seems to be impossible for him to get back into hibernation without the help of a whole lot of specialized equipment and a team of doctors. Should he wake someone up to get help? Or maybe just for company? Faced with a totally unique moral dilemma, he does the only logical thing and starts drinking heavily.

Eventually, he makes the worst possible decision and wakes up a fellow passenger named Aurora (Jennifer Lawrence), not because she can help out with the situation, but because he thinks she’s cute. Pratt’s lonely agonizing over the decision to basically commit slow murder by waking Aurora up 89 years early is the best part of Passengers.

Writer John Spaihts wrings as much drama and pathos as he can out of the impossible situation, carefully throwing new wrinkles into our heroes paths at regular intervals. The script for Passengers floated around Hollywood for years, and was at one point going to be produced with Keanu Reeves for $30 million instead of the $100 million that Sony spent on this production. Frankly, that might have been a better move. The production design on Passengers is top notch, but it doesn’t really add much to the interesting part of the story, even after the ship starts to break down and Jim and Aurora have to try to fix it with the help of a reanimated crewman named Gus (Lawrence Fishbourne). In the third act, the film’s courage suddenly fails as it tries to fit its unconventional story into a happy (or at least, happy-ish) ending. But hey, at least they were trying! If the preview audience I saw the film with was any indication, it still works, and will very likely provoke some extended conversations on the way home.

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Film Features Film/TV

Joy

Film is the most collaborative of media. There’s a tendency to give all the credit or the blame to the director, and, as the person conducting the orchestra, direction can make or break a movie. But, as much as they’d sometimes like to, directors can not do everything themselves, so they must find collaborators they trust. The business of filmmaking being what it is, it is a rare thing when a director can gather a trusted band of collaborators for more than one film. In the case of those who can, like Martin Scorsese and Wes Anderson, their films become more like albums from a rock band. There are perfect albums, on which every song is a hit, and then there are the records with a few good songs and some filler.

Over the course of his last three films, David O. Russell has found a band who can play the music he writes. There’s longtime sideman and occasional writing partner Bradley Cooper, soul survivor Robert De Niro, and his lead singer and muse, Jennifer Lawrence. The band’s first film together, 2012’s Silver Linings Playbook, crackled with life and promise. Their second, American Hustle, shows a band who has worked out their chemistry and gained the confidence to explore new territory. Their third film, Joy, has a few good songs and a lot of filler.

Jennifer Lawrence in Joy

As it begins, Joy tells you it is “Inspired by the stories of daring women. One in particular.” Lawrence plays Joy Mangano, who, when we meet her, is a single mother juggling two children, a neurotic mother, Terry (Virginia Madsen), and an ex-husband, Tony (Édgar Ramírez), who is still living in her basement. Into this volatile mix drops her father Rudy (De Niro), who needs a place to stay because his current girlfriend is kicking him out.

The early scenes where we meet the family—which also include Joy’s grandmother, Mimi (Diane Ladd), who narrates the story from beyond the grave—are filled with swooping camera moves and juicy, emotional moments for the actors to chew on. The family has no problems expressing themselves, but there’s a big question as to whether their confidence translates into success or even competence. It’s invigorating at first, but as the screenplay piles on character after character and woe upon Joy, it starts to lose focus.

In a flashback inspired by tea with her best friend, Jackie (Dascha Polanco), we see how Joy’s life lost focus after she was high school valedictorian who had to turn down a college scholarship to care for her soap opera-obsessed mother. The parodic soap scenes Russell creates with the help of daytime television legend Susan Lucci and a truckload of hairspray start to seep into the dreams of the overwhelmed Joy. After enduring an embarrassing outing on a boat owned by her father’s new girlfriend, Trudy (Isabella Rossellini), Joy has a dream inspired by expired children’s cough syrup and comes up with the idea that will change her life: the Miracle Mop. Her invention of “the last mop you’ll ever need” leads her to the Pennsylvania headquarters of QVC, the pioneering home-shopping channel where Joan Rivers (played uncannily by her daughter Melissa Rivers) hawks cheap jewelry to housewives from gaudy rotating sets. QVC VP Neil (Cooper) takes her under his wing and discovers that no one can sell the Miracle Mop like its creator.

The scene where Joy makes her television debut is an epic slow burn that ranks amongst the best work Lawrence has ever done, but it’s a strong song on a weak album. The screenplay, which was also written by Russell, collapses into a jumbled mess under the weight of flashbacks and failed structural experiments. Lawrence earned a Golden Globe for her performance and is nominated for the Best Actress Oscar, and she’s fantastic. Even though most of the performances are solid, particularly De Niro and Rossellini, Russell is not able to conjure the same synergy he tapped in Silver Linings Playbook or American Hustle. Hopefully, the next album by Russell’s crack band will prove to be a comeback.

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The Hunger Games: Mockingjay-Part 2

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay-Part 2 is the latest in a growing series of films whose title contain both a colon and a hyphen, like The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn-Part 1. The paired punctuation has come to indicate a mangling by studio money-grubbing—one story has been split into two movies, and padding applied, to get you to shell out twice for closure.

Mockingjay completes The Hunger Games‘ unlikely transition from winking high school allegory to grimdark military science fiction. Our beloved heroine, Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) begins part two in a familiar setting: a hospital bed, recovering from wounds she received in battle. In this case, she was put in the hospital by her former fiancé and fellow survivor of the arena, Peeta (Josh Hutcherson), who was brainwashed into hating her by the forces of the Capitol, led by President Snow (Donald Sutherland). Sporting the thousand-yard PTSD stare she adopted in Part 1, Katniss meets with the leader of the rebels, President Alma Coin (Julianne Moore), and agrees to drop her former ethical reservations and do whatever it takes to defeat the Capitol. She is immediately thrust into battle in District 2 beside her second love interest, Gale (Liam Hemsworth), in an effort to destroy the last enemy stronghold blocking the way to an advance on the Capitol. When the post-battle evacuation of civilians threatens to turn into a riot, Katniss manages to partially defuse the situation before being shot by a loyalist refugee. After once again waking up in a hospital bed, she vows to personally kill Snow. Katniss defies the authority of Coin and her propaganda minister Plutarch Heavansbee (the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, whose absence the filmmakers work around with fragments of dialogue and CGI) to get into the battle at the Capitol, where the rebels must fight their way through a booby-trapped city to topple Snow’s teetering regime.

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay-Part 2

There’s a core of classic sci-fi running through all of Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games novels, which became best sellers in the vacuum left by the completion of the Harry Potter cycle. One of the interesting things about Harry Potter is its author, J.K. Rowling, offered a decidedly female take on the formerly male-dominated realm of epic fantasy, and the same dynamic is at work with Collins in the world of dystopian science fiction. Katniss is an action hero, but she’s also a reality TV star who has her own stylist. The story focuses very tightly on her character, and her two would-be boyfriends get about as much development as your typical Bond girl. The dystopia Collins paints is an artfully rendered funhouse mirror-version of contemporary America—surely, the Capitol is the most garish evil empire in film history.

Unfortunately, the film adaptations have not served Collins’ vision as well as the Harry Potter films did Rowling’s. The first film was barely competent, and the second was only an incremental improvement. The only great thing about the franchise has been Lawrence’s muscular, multifaceted portrayal of Katniss. And if Mockingjay had been just one movie, Lawrence might have finally gotten a film worthy of her talents. Katniss has grown from scared country girl to a hardened warrior who can take a nap as the dropship flies her to the war zone. At least director Francis Lawrence has the good sense to bring the series to a close by hiring a decent editor and giving Lawrence lots of close-ups.

But like The Hobbit films, there’s just no saving the movie from the financial imperative to split the story. There’s a solid two-hour movie buried somewhere in the 260-minute combined running time of the two Mockingjays, but, as it is, the beats just fall in all the wrong places. Part 2 builds some decent tension, particularly in a claustrophobic sequence where our heroes fight mutant attack zombies in the Capitol’s sewers, but the overall structure has been so fatally compromised that Katniss just seems to drift around in a haze of nonsensical plot complications. When our long-suffering hero gets her much-deserved rest, we share her relief that it’s finally over.

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The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1

Being the final chapter ain’t what it used to be. Nowadays, movie trilogies are likely to have four parts, thanks to the monetary aspirations of quarterly corporate profit-driven movie studios, robbing part three of its catharsis. It happened to Twilight, whose third literary chapter got uselessly split into two parts. The original plan to make The Hobbit into two movies got expanded into three, which meant that significant parts of the first two movies felt like the padding they were. And it happened to Harry Potter, whose closing chapter, The Deathly Hallows, was split in two a bit more successfully. Would Return of the Jedi have been better split into two parts with added Ewok action to fill in the gaps? Probably not. But it would seem that The Hunger Games film franchise has actually benefitted from splitting its final chapter in two, because Mockingjay – Part 1 is the best of the three films released so far.

The franchise got off to a rocky start in 2012 with the first film, where hero Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) volunteered to take the place of her sister Prim (Willow Shields) in the brutal gladiatorial-game-meets-reality-show that gives the series its name. Despite feeling rushed and incoherent, the first film made wheelbarrows full of money for Lionsgate and cemented Lawrence’s star status. For Catching Fire, the producers wisely ditched director Gary Ross in favor of Francis Lawrence, who could at least stage a coherent action sequence, and sent Katniss back into the arena for a tournament of champions designed to discredit and kill the increasingly popular Girl On Fire. But our heroine survived, thanks to her out-of-the-box thinking and the actions of game-designer-turned-revolutionary Plutarch Heavensbee (Philip Seymour Hoffman).

As this third film opens, Katniss is fighting her raging PTSD in the rebel base deep under District 13. One of her two beaus Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) didn’t make it out of the arena, but is still alive and being used as a propaganda shill by President Snow (a gleefully evil Donald Sutherland). Her other potential lover Gale (Liam Hemsworth) escaped the holocaust of District 12 and is now fighting for rebel President Alma Coin (Julianne Moore). Heavensbee and Coin want to use Katniss as a figurehead for the rebellion, but will the young woman known as The Mockingjay take up her mantle as a freedom fighter?

The weakness of splitting the final chapter of the story is that it makes Katniss’ internal struggle the film’s major conflict. Of course Katniss is going to take up her newly tricked-out bow against the evil Capitol, just like every hero since Odysseus has eventually responded after first refusing the call to adventure. But the strength of Mockingjay – Part 1 comes from the fact that the director and writers don’t have to cram so many plot incidents from the dense source material into a regulation-sized movie, and so they are able to stretch out and focus on their greatest strength: Lawrence.

Katniss is the hero our moment needs: She’s a working-class feminist fighting Das Kapital, represented by the patriarch Snow. She is tasteful and restrained in the face of the gaudy, late-stage capitalism of the ruling class — is there another epic adventure star who counts a stylist and a PR flack among their heroic band? She is a reality-TV star who sees through the artifice of the weaponized entertainment complex that is keeping her people subjugated. Like Humphrey Bogart’s Rick or Harrison Ford’s Indiana Jones, Lawrence fully inhabits Katniss as a character while also imbuing her with that mysterious movie star magic. Wearing the fierce thousand-yard stare of a seasoned warrior, she is the charismatic Che Guevara to President Coin’s calculating Castro. Then she furtively includes her sister’s cat among her list of demands to her new bosses, and you realize she’s still a teenage girl. Lawrence outshines everyone else on the screen, even to the point of undermining the romantic triangle with Peeta and Gale. It’s clear that neither one of these drips are worthy of Katniss, just as it’s clear that there are few projects 21st century Hollywood could come up with that are worthy of Lawrence, so she had to make The Hunger Games her own.

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

Sex, Lies, Videotapes, and Hackers

When I was in high school, I worked as a stockboy in a drugstore in my small Missouri hometown. My job was to replenish the shelves and do general grunt work. One of the store’s services was developing photos. The task fell to an older fellow (we’ll call him Joe), who spent hours in the store’s basement darkroom, turning rolls of film into family snapshots.

One day, as I was loading my two-wheeler with boxes to take upstairs, Joe called me over. “Look at this, kid,” he said, holding up a picture. I looked. And looked again. It was a photograph of female breasts. My 16-year-old eyes must have widened. Joe laughed and said, “Happens all the time. People take dirty pictures of themselves and hope I’ll develop them and not say anything.”

Then Joe opened a file drawer and pointed: “Look in there.” The drawer was filled with “dirty” pictures. “You wouldn’t believe some of the stuff I see,” he said.

The impulse to create nude or sexually titillating pictures has been with the human race forever — from cave drawings to ancient Hindu temples to Manet’s “Olympia” to Playboy. Small-town Missourians were not exempt from the urge.

Nor are celebrities. The news is filled this week with stories about the release of private nude and sexually explicit photos and videos of Jennifer Lawrence, Rihanna, Kim Kardashian, and others. The source of the photos obtained them by hacking into “the cloud.” Which is a lot like Joe’s file drawer, only bigger. Now, what the celebrities thought was private is public.

We may, in fact, be in the process of redefining the very term “private.” In a world of cellphone cameras, sexting, home-made sex videos, and internet servers that have access to it all, “private” only means you hope nobody ever opens the drawer where your stuff is. All your “secret” text and Facebook messages, all your “funny” racist emails, your “silly” naked phone pictures, your potentially libelous personal Tweets, your ice bucket challenge gone wrong — all are potentially available to the public, if someone wants to make it happen badly enough.

This too, is nothing new. Only the methodology has changed. The FBI and the CIA — and lately, the NSA — have been invading Americans’ privacy for decades. Even presidents have not been immune. John F. Kennedy’s sexual adventures were closely tracked by the FBI, for example. In those days, they used phone-taps, stealthy photographers, and informants. Now, it’s easier. We do the leg-work for them.

Being outed as gay or having smoked pot used to be enough to keep someone from public office. It was potential blackmail material. Now there are many openly gay public officials, and people shrug it off when they learn a politician once smoked pot. If the walls of privacy continue to crumble, revelations about a public figure’s sexy private pictures may soon engender the same response.