Tag: Donald Sutherland

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2

“Mockingjay – Part 2” is a fitting end to the Hunger Games franchise.

HungerGamesPosterHow do you have a Hunger Games movie without the Hunger Games? That was essentially the problem of “Mockingjay – Part 1,” the padded first half to the third and final entry in Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games book trilogy. “Part 2” finds a way to retain that Hunger Games feel without the repeat of the arena setting, and it finds Francis Lawrence’s film back on track for a satisfying conclusion to what has been an otherwise stellar franchise.

The rebel organization housed at District 13 has rescued Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) from the Capitol’s imprisonment and brainwashing, but at the end of “Part 1” he tried to murder Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence) and is still suffering from the after effects of the brainwashing. Katniss hopes to bring him back to the real world while organizing a plan of attack to bring down President Snow (an increasingly excellent, understated and chilly Donald Sutherland). The rebel leader President Coin (Julianne Moore) wants to use Katniss as a symbol for the rebellion, but Coin may be plotting a way to kill Katniss and get her out of the way in the event of Coin’s inevitable takeover and rise to power.

All this has traces of the politicking that bogged down “Part 1,” but “Part 2” is far better at reaching those intimate, character driven pow-wows and moments of conflict. Watching and waiting for the film to get to the action, Director Lawrence keeps the audience of two minds, torn between a craving for excitement and Katniss’s want for peace. For the first time in the franchise “Mockingjay” makes the dividing line between good and evil less clear. Katniss comes to realize the people trying to kill her are not her enemy, every drop of blood lost has less and less meaning, and the impact of each on the audience stings more.

“Part 2” gives back the “Hunger Games” feel by trotting Katniss, Peeta, Gale (Liam Hemsworth) and her outfit of teenage Marines into the barren warzone of the Capitol. The streets are littered with “pods” or cleverly designed booby traps. Their unmanned nature makes each feel gamelike, with someone from above pulling the strings and all the rules being decided on the fly. “Mockingjay” toys with everything from stormtroopers, flamethrowers, machine gun traps, spotlights capable of disintegrating and even slimy, faceless zombies that resemble the pale monster in “Pan’s Labyrinth.” One incredible set piece has the team running from a growing pool of oil; touch the surface and you’re immediately impaled by spears of the liquid suspended above the ground.

“The Hunger Games” have always stood out in the creative use of deadly traps and special effects, but it’s also one of the few that goes so far above and beyond the YA novel boilerplate romance and “be yourself” mantra. The symbolism here is all on point, with Katniss literally becoming the “girl on fire” after an explosion, with the floating packages previously used in the games as relief now used as harbingers of death, and with the televised murders of children not just used for action but to implicate us as an audience for enjoying it.

The very first “Hunger Games” showed this was not a trifling franchise just for kids. Katniss is a character in grief and anguish, the world is always in disarray, and love triumphs, but at a cost. “Mockingjay” ends this franchise fittingly; the odds were ever in its favor.

3 ½ stars

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire

“The Hunger Games: Catching Fire” finds new director Francis Lawrence raising the stakes on this already dark franchise.

“The Hunger Games” franchise has now done what it took the Harry Potter movies perhaps four or five films to get right. “Catching Fire” is a sequel that sees its stakes increase tenfold, its action becoming more crisp and polished, its themes growing deeper and its deep cast of talented individuals gelling completely.

It does beg the question, how does a story in which teenagers murder other teens for sport and sacrifice manage to get darker, more serious and more consequential? Gary Ross’s “Hunger Games” was a film about the internal struggle of an individual to find her strength and voice. It treated survival instincts like a virtue. Now in “Catching Fire,” that lone wolf mentality to just survive plays like another death sentence.

New director Francis Lawrence ties “Catching Fire’s” dystopian future concept and steamy love triangle to broader ideas about rebellion, fame, loyalty and psychology. Best of all, he’s packaged it in a slick, suspenseful package that hasn’t lost any of its twisted edge.

“Catching Fire” resumes shortly after Katniss and Peeta’s (Jennifer Lawrence and Josh Hutcherson) victory from the previous games. Now President Snow (Donald Sutherland) is using their celebrity as a symbol of false hope as he tours them around each district of Panem. Snow threatens to kill Katniss and her family unless she tows the evil Capitol’s line and makes her act in front of the cameras genuine.

Katniss however has become a reluctant symbol of a slowly growing rebel uprising. The film has done a wonderful job playing up the franchise’s iconography, with early shots framing Katniss as a figure of solemn power or people raising three fingers in defiance to the Capitol and making it feel significant. When they do celebrate her legend, people are beaten and killed by the Capitol’s “peacemakers,” faceless stormtroopers modeled off another similar franchise, “Star Wars.”

Because she’s creating problems, the new Master of the Games, Plutarch Heavensbee (Philip Seymour Hoffman), arranges a special event for the 75th Annual Hunger Games in which past survivors of the games are forced to compete again. Given how few there are still living, Katniss and Peeta are on the chopping block yet again. Continue reading “The Hunger Games: Catching Fire”

Don't Look Now (1973)

One of the longest and most simultaneously passionate and unsettling sex scenes in all of cinema is one between Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie in “Don’t Look Now.” It’s an emotionally charged scene of elegant love making, but spliced in between are shots of the two of them getting dressed separately. The images don’t belong together, but side by side, they show through creepy resonance how our lives exist in two moments. We have our memories and our often bleak visions of the future.

“Don’t Look Now” is an art-house horror classic. It’s a film that in its ether alone considers the unspoken sensations, feelings and emotions that surround death. Nicolas Roeg’s disjointed editing is strange on a narrative level, but it addresses these questions more fluidly and realistically than a standard melodrama ever could.

Sutherland and Christie play John and Laura Baxter, a married couple who has just lost their daughter by drowning in a pond behind their house. None of these images before her death are particularly pastoral. A red ball floats ominously in the scummy water, her brother runs over and shatters a piece of glass in the middle of a field, and a photo John is studying is stained blood red when he spills his drink on it.

We attain a sixth sense that something terrible will happen thanks to Roeg’s heightening of sound to something beyond diegetic. It’s as though the noises resound in our mind and not just on screen. These are sounds that will come back to haunt us.

In a jarring smash cut, we’re transported to Venice months after the incident. The Baxter son is at boarding school, and John and Laura are taking an extended work vacation to forget the past. Stray images of silverware or jewelry some how remind us of the tragedy, and we know that the Baxters must still be suffering. Continue reading “Don't Look Now (1973)”

The Hunger Games

I’m not a 12-year-old girl, but I would imagine they would not want to see children their age being gruesomely murdered with spears any more than I would.

“The Hunger Games” then is a puzzling blockbuster. The book trilogy by Suzanne Collins and this impending movie franchise are being marketed as the equivalent to “Twilight” and “Harry Potter.”

But the film is a shockingly bleak and brutal story of survival and mortality in the face of massive pressure and little hope. It is a deftly powerful piece of filmmaking that more closely resembles “Children of Men” than light entertainment. Continue reading “The Hunger Games”

Rapid Response: The Dirty Dozen

Only in a movie with Lee Marvin (and maybe Henry Fonda) could Charles Bronson look like less of a bad ass.

That’s kind of the appeal of “The Dirty Dozen,” a movie with a ridiculously famous cast of already massive and would-be massive stars (Jim Brown, Donald Sutherland, John Cassavetes) that was not only a shockingly violent war film but one that defined a generation of war films for years to come.

In many ways, “The Dirty Dozen’s” legacy is more interesting than the movie itself. Mark Harris’s book “Pictures at a Revolution” describes how Robert Aldrich’s film became the biggest box office hit of the year by celebrating a black man killing Germans, by appealing to a counter-culture, anti-establishment movement and by being the first war movie to outwardly call attention to the Vietnam War. Harris writes that the film reached an audience of war fans bored with the genre and craving to see some gritty, tough guy action and teens who disliked the war movies their parents did.

“It would have made a very good, very acceptable 1945 war picture. But I don’t think that a good 1945 war picture is a good 1967 war picture,” Aldrich was quoted in Harris’s book. And in that way, it was one of the many films that year that revolutionized filmmaking.

The problem is, the film remains a clumsy, long action movie that doesn’t really get interesting until the two big battles in the last hour. It spends a lot of time developing at least half of the dozen war criminals assigned to Major Reisman’s (Marvin) command, but the writing doesn’t have the sharp tenacity or wit to make it truly compelling.

Exploitation films and similar, even more polarizing fare like Sam Peckinpah’s “The Wild Bunch” merely two years later would surpass it in the violence department, and New Wave Hollywood directors were not far away from making less than oblique statements about the Vietnam War.

Still, it’s influence is obvious. Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds” is intentionally lifted from this film’s concept, not to mention the copycat Enzo Castellari version only years after “Dirty Dozen.”

But what bugged me was how almost hokey the film felt. I think the whole construction montage for instance is time that could easily be trimmed from the film, and the score really Mickey Mouse’s it in these moments as well. More time should’ve been spent highlighting the film’s theme of authority and power dynamics to make this an outwardly counter cultural film. That would’ve made it more timeless as well.

“Dirty Dozen” does aim to have fun, plain and simple, and that’s its appeal. But there are better ways to spend your time.