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Colin Carman

~ Jane Austen Scholar & Culture Vulture

Colin Carman

Tag Archives: stephen king

Review: “The Hunger Games”

24 Saturday Mar 2012

Posted by colincarman in Film Reviews

≈ 23 Comments

Tags

battle royale, catching fire, donald sutherland, dystopia, elizabeth banks, jennifer lawrence, josh hutcherson, science fiction, shirley jackson, simon beaufoy, stanley tucci, stephen king, suzanne collins, the hunger games, tim burton, wes bentley, woody harrelson

“Food Fight”

Grade: B- (RENT IT)

THE MUCH-ANTICIPATED screen version of “The Hunger Games” comes with baggage.  A lot of baggage, in fact: more than twenty million readers (and growing) and that perennially impossible pressure of bringing a beloved book to life on screen.  Let’s face it: you can’t appear as if you love the book if you love the movie as well.  But what’s to rave about here?  “The Hunger Games” begins and ends not with a bang but with a whimper, and that’s the surprising deficiency in Gary Ross’s screen retool of Suzanne Collins’ best-selling dystopic triology with this cheery premise: a futuristic Orwellian autocracy in which minors are marched into a televised fights-to-the-death.  Call it “Keeping up with the Kill-dash-ians.”  Ninety million dollars later, not to mention a costume department that resembles the offspring of Tim Burton and Marie Antoinette, and we have Part 1 of “The Hunger Games,” but it’s a snooze and you’re lying if you weren’t left a little hungry for just a little more gaming and a lot less exposition.

In terms of Collins’ savage plot, there’s really nothing new here.  Critics cite the Japanese film “Battle Royale,” but there are influences even more obvious: Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” and Stephen King’s sci-fi novel, “The Running Man” (later a film starring Schwarzeneggar), in which the clairvoyant King, who saw, back in 1982, where reality-TV was headed, put game-show contestants in a death match.  As Collins’ 16-year old heroine Katniss Everdeen, Jennifer Lawrence (Oscar-nominated for “Winter’s Bone”) has already been call bland and lifeless in the role.  Not so.  The leitmotif of The Hunger Games is containment – segregation, really, as in the district-ization of this future nightmare-socity – and Lawrence gives a restrained, rather contained performance, focused and somber.  Some of the first images of Lawrence are powerful: like a Diana in pigtails, she stands inside in a verdant forest, hunting bow in hand.  Of course, the huntress becomes the hunted as she joins twenty-three other so-called “tributes” to inhabit a vast televised landscape, replete with genetically engineered hornets and man-eating dogs the size of VW bugs, compliments of reality-show producer Seneca Crane (Wes Bentley) and blue-skinned Caesar Flickerman (Stanley Tucci) as the games’ slimy talk-show host.

Regardless, the supporting cast contains some delightful stand-outs: the always-entertaining Elizabeth Banks who cites Joel Grey in “Cabaret” as the inspiration behind her Effie Trinket and Josh Hutcherson (“The Kids Are Alright”) as the passive Peeta Mellark.  Two others are severely miscast: a wooden Lenny Kravitz as Cinna and a Woody (Harrelson) as Haymitch Abernathy.  Apparently, the party every night during shooting was in Kravitz’s trailer but he brings little of that fun to the screen.  And the fact that two of the audience members in my row were asleep two hours in – and it was a 12:15 screening! – speaks to the film’s snail’s-pace.  Simon “Slumdog Millionare” Beaufoy has adapted the second book “Catching Fire” for the screen – production begins this September – and let’s hope he can give the plot the Bollywood bop it deserves.

A sinister Donald Sutherland, whose white beard is combed into a ghostly mask, plays President Snow and in the film’s final scene, we see him assessing the winners of the Games and perhaps determining what’s to come.  “Contain it,” he tells Seneca earlier in the film.  Still, what are we to make of that last look at the games’ sole survivors?  It spells sequel, but how exactly?  What’s left uncontained?

With the next three films in the works and fans ravenous for more – that’s right, Hollywood will split the third book into two films to play the game some more – it’s safe to say the Kat Fight will continue.  Let’s hope it can overcome the low blood sugar that slows down this first installment.

Review: “Dream House”

09 Sunday Oct 2011

Posted by colincarman in Film Reviews

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

daniel craig, david louck, dream house, elias koteas, evil, freud, horror, james bond 007, jim sheridan, kubric, naomi watts, rachel weisz, stephen king, the shining, thriller, uncanny

“Burning Down the House”

Grade: F (SKIP IT)

For sale: three bedrooms, three full baths, garage, fully furnished, crown molding, stainless steel appliances, washer/dryer, storage.  House also includes poltergeists in the form of a murdered mother and her two dead daughters.  Any takers?

Only two: city-slickers Libby (played by Rachel Weisz) and Will, a publisher with pectorals played by Daniel Craig (a.k.a. 007 du jour), who move from town to country with bloody results.  The primary problem with “Dream House,” which is set in a New England town called New Ashford with Craig as an aspiring novelist, is that there’s not a shred of newness or novelty in this film (directed by the otherwise bright Irish film director, Jim Sheridan, of “In the Name of the Father” and “My Left Foot”).  As an anguished Libby tells Will, “There is something wrong with this house.”

Wrong, indeed. The less than dreamy house at the center of this turkey is already something of a suburban legend by the time Libby and Will start unpacking boxes.  Horror-queen Naomi Watts plays Anne, Will’s mysterious neighbor who keeps her distance, and won’t say what happened inside the Ward home five years ago.  After Will catches a gaggle of Goths holding a creepy séance in his cellar, and the ever-menacing Elias Koteas (of “Shutter Island,” a superior film built on the same concept of parallel plots) peering through his windows, he complains that he has an “infestation of teenagers in the basement.”  That’s the least of his problems.  Much to his disbelief, he comes to suspect that he is the house’s former occupant, a wife-killer named Peter Ward, and that Libby and his daughters are mere visions.  After paying a visit to Greenhaven Psychiatric Institute, Will comes to wonder: am I Ward?  Am I a widower or a wack-job?

Chances are you won’t stick around to find out and for good reason.  Screenwriter David Louck stuffs his script with laughable lines like “I’m not writing a book, I’m living in a fantasy!” and “Get me the chloroform now!” And when Will and Libby realize that the iniquity inside their walls cannot be suppressed, we get this: “You can’t paint over evil!”

Any smart spectator of this claptrap would be hard-pressed to find something intelligent to say about it, but if forced to lay a cerebral layer of paint over “Dream House,” Freud’s conceptualization of the “The Uncanny” (1919) comes to mind.  To prove that the uncanny relates to what he calls “themes of the double in all its grades and developments,” Freud describes being lost in an Italian piazza: “I suddenly found myself in the same street again [where] my swift departure resulted only in my ending up in the very same place, through a different detour, for the third time.  But then I was overcome by a feeling I can only describe as uncanny […] the unintended return of the same.”   The uncanny isn’t so much déjà vu but the compulsion to repeat and return over and over again.

“Dream House” not only repeats the central conceit of the King/Kubric classic, “The Shining,” in which murdered girls leave an infectious trace behind – come play with us, Danny! – but it goes in circles like the toilet bowl in which it belongs.  When a great conflagration eventually erupts in the final reel, you won’t feel the heat since, by that point, “Dream House” has already collapsed like a house of cards.

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