Starving for ideas: Catching Cold.

In THE HUNGER GAMES: CATCHING FIRE, the two models who survived the Hunger Games last year are forced by the Capitol to go on a Tour through the 12 Districts to rub it in everyone’s faces. And our faces too. Then they just repeat the last movie. And rub that in our faces too.

In this first sequel to THE HUNGER GAMES (book series by Suzanne Collins), Jennifer Lawrence returns as Katniss Everdeen, grumpy archer, and Josh Hutcherson reprises his role as Peeta, her ventriloquial dummy (the guy is like Pinocchio, in that his facial expression never changes). Liam Hemsworth completes this vapid non-sex triangle as Katniss’s boyfriend Gale, because in this insipid, unimaginative, pre-teen bankable-franchise environment, the more you resemble TWILIGHT, the more dolls you can sell.

Donald Sutherland is still President of Panem (which is just a future version of America, or a present-day version of Downtown Los Angeles), threatening to kill Katniss’s family if she doesn’t publicly quash the “hope” that she inspired by winning the Games. And there is a new Gamemaker to replace Wes Bentley’s Beard, the great Philip Seymour Hoffman with a name dreamed up by an elf: Plutarch Heavensbee.

The Holy Tour To Quash Hope, instead of quelling the Hope Riots, only exacerbates them. It’s like Ferguson, Missouri out there. So the Capitol schemes up a new twist to drag Katniss back into the Hunger Games to maybe get her killed – a Quarter Quell Hunger Games, where only winners from previous Games compete (kinda like JEOPARDY’s Tournament of Champions, only better, because none of them have to phrase their answer in the form of a question – stupid distracting rule!). Oh, plot device, thou predictable totalitarian mistress!

In honor of the same movie being replayed from the halfway point to the end, the same cast return: Woody Harrelson as The Homeless Guy, Elizabeth Banks as The Joker, Lenny Kravitz as The Hippie, and Stanley Tucci as The Village Idiot. Against the wishes of the pale boyfriend, Katniss now has to smooch that Boy Vagina in public again and smile big with those cheeks that I need to pinch pinch pinch!

New contestants/teen models, featuring alliances with my bride-to-be Jena Malone (SUCKER PUNCH) as Johanna the Axe-Wielding Slut, and Sam Claflin (PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: ON STRANGER TIDES) as Finnick’s Bare Chest. Also: the sedate introspectiveness of Jeffrey Wright (SOURCE CODE), and the drooling kookiness of Amanda Plummer (GIRLFRIEND 2011).

Oh yeah, the irrelevant “catching fire” reference is probably to describe the growing uprising – but maybe it’s simply Katniss’s dress that creates a fire special effect and sends Tucci into a tizzy. I’m guessing the author intended the former and the tweenfans think the latter.

They’ve rewritten the motivations of Katniss, just to create a love-triangle and set little girlies hearts aflutter with her indecision on whose teen meat to cherish. Remember when dull Peeta had a crush on her – and she responded by masturbating his wounds and tonguing him in the cave? And remember how Gale watched all this on widescreen with a lump in his throat instead of his pants? Well, in this movie, Katniss tells Gale that her affair with Peeta “was all an act.” Okaaaay… then halfway through their tour, Peeta whines about being Just Friends and she tells him she can’t live without him.

Don’t TWILIGHT me, bro!

Or how about the night Katniss wakes screaming from a nightmare, Peeta rushes into her room, and she asks him not to leave: “Will you sleep with me?” So Peeta, oh emasculated ladyboy Peeta, clambers in with all his clothes on– Must’ve been written by a woman! Even though they just snuggled, you do realize his erection never went down that night, right? It was a steel bar with its own zip code. Unless you’re an in-denial female, of course…

Katniss tells Finnick’s Bare Chest, “I’m an open book. Everybody seems to know my secrets before I know them myself.” Uh, yeah, Jen, about those nudes online…

Gale gets tied to the Whipping Post – any excuse to get his shirt off to impress Katniss.

If it weren’t for the striking performance of Jennifer Lawrence, CATCHING FIRE would hardly blip as a relevant movie.

There’s a grim indictment of our class-struggling society written into the fabric of THE HUNGER GAMES, but it’s framed within this tiresome faux-competition that doesn’t need to exist in a totalitarian government. You see, the Capitol (embodied by smarmy President Sutherland), is so powerful they needn’t fret about the best method of disposing of Katniss and dispelling her anarchic influence. Why is the President even bothering to re-write foolish rules into the Games to try to kill her? Hey, Bond Villain, Just – Kill – Her. If you really think she’ll become a martyr, then run some doctored footage of her killing a few kids or something. Have you seen THE RUNNING MAN? The Capitol is all-powerful, to the point where it can make an excellent actor-director like Stanley Tucci look like a gibbering idiot in a golden wig, and they can’t dispose of one low-class wench? I mean, you’re a totalitarian government – do something totalitarian!

Instead, President whines to Heavensbee like a bitch waiting for a call from her boo. Waah, how do I destroy her? Waah, she’s giving everyone hope because she defied me! Waah, I have innumerable armed guards willing to kill anyone who raises their hands and whistles but I can’t kill Katniss because – merchandising! Waaah!

Heavensbee has also been digesting too many Bond movies, as all his plots drag out Katniss’s demise by “letting her live” so that, uh, so that, uh… Well, we have two options: do we believe the President is falling for Heavensbee’s outrageously procrastinating plans because the President is stupid, or because the writers (Simon Beaufoy and Michael Arndt) think we are stupid enough to believe the President could be that stupid? (Of course, we discover Heavensbee has his own agenda, so maybe it could be construed that he charms the President into heeding him? …Nah, the writers think we’re stupid.)

Willow Shields as Katniss’s sister, Prim, gets her moment to shine in a beefed up role, playing staid nurse while her family crumbles around her. Still, Lawrence blazes brighter than anyone else in the conviction stakes, closely followed by the insouciant bum stylings of Harrelson. Seymour Hoffman is also without fault – like Gary Oldman, brings his A-game to even the schmaltziest turd-burgers. Everyone else is phoning it in, or probably just skyping it with those awesome gubmint cameras that can see every frickin thing from every frickin angle.

I still don’t get how the game controllers can see Everything from Whatever Angle They Bloody Well Want. We get no foreshadowing or knowledge of cameras in the forest, hidden or otherwise, no satellites, not even a simple bullshit explanation, like the complete Games dome being outfitted with cameras in every shingle. We can accept there are hidden cameras in a totalitarian government’s death trap – but how do these cameras focus on so many angles? Heavensbee asks for a closeup and not only do the controllers push in on the scene, they flip to four different angles, two of which can only be achieved by a Steadicam positioned directly underneath the lead actor’s ballsac! How much do you want me to suspend my disbelief, assholes?! Also, these controllers can never seem to keep their control room doors closed; more than once, Katniss walks by a door ajar and peeks in on something illicit before they look back and see her, then slam the door in her face. (You mean “physically looking back at the door” is their failsafe mechanism for ensuring no one is discovering their secrets? So they have cameras that can see through a person’s scrotum but no automatic door closers?) And where does she keep getting all those arrows? She empties her quiver on the baboons – the next scene, it’s full again! What the–? These lazy filmmaking methods friction my irritation so much that I can’t empathize with the film’s relevant messages.

Director Francis Lawrence chose the lazy route because – TWILIGHT. Even in this respect, he breaks from convention by making the woman the most powerful of the love triangle, rather than the annoying waif. The story also raises the very current issue of a boy-girl romance overshadowing – or at least, distracting from – life-death issues; broadcast a love story, no matter how corny, and people will forget they are being enslaved. It’s happening RIGHT NOW. (TMZ exists alongside Ferguson MO.) All great stuff. Then something stupid happens again – like meeting the “Career” Gamers – and all brave ideas are washed away. It’s not as if these “Careers” volunteer every year – they’ve been as unethically forced into their fates as Katniss and Puta; why are they called “Career Gamers” and why are they painted as baddies? And why don’t they have any body hair?

Pointless. That much smooth naked skin, I feel like I’m watching internet porn… Hmm, here’s a nice picture of Katniss…

END

Will Smith Saves The World – Again…

Everyone on Earth is dead – but they left the CGI running.

Will Smith is the “last man on Earth,” Robert Neville, tooling through abandoned, overgrown New York City streets, hunting antelope in a red sports car.

It is the near future and a plague/virus has taken down humanity – not again! – and Neville is the Last Military Virologist on Earth trying to find a cure for the remaining mutated humans who inhabit the scarred underbelly of the city, called Dark-Seekers (or Hemocytes). New York was “his sector” and his moral obligation to “fix things” is obsessive. Wife and child lost to an accident during evac of the city, now he blindly goes about his daily toil of hunting food, experimenting on rats, broadcasting his location to a world who may not be listening, “hiring” DVDs from the local store, and going slowly insane from the isolation.

While his cute German Shepherd, Samantha, frolics in the blighted cityscape, he smacks golf balls off aircraft carriers in the bay. It would be a good life, were it not for being no life at all.

Derelict future New York is all passively incredible CGI – a city bereft of human intrusion, yet breathing with the life of “reality” rather than simple rear-projection or matte painting; an exceptionally stunning, three-dimensional cityscape cyclorama, brimming with all the vibrancy that suffuses any real life tableau. It is some of the best CGI work you will ever witness. The visual effects companies who worked on this movie outdid themselves. (Among others, Sony Pictures Imageworks, CIS Hollywood, Lidar Services, New Deal Studios. The Visual Effects credits of this movie run longer than most movies’ full credits.)

Yes, the best CGI you will ever see… until the lion pounces. The passive tableaux look sensational, but animate objects are a little harder to create from dust or a twelfth rib or even computer pixels. After the film-makers raised dead New York from the primordial pixel stew, they got cocky and thought their version of LIFE would look just as convincing.

D’oh!

Thankfully, it’s not all about the CGI – though surrounded for most of the movie by green screen, Will Smith still pulls his A-game. Coupled with some well-constructed primal moments (Neville searching for his dog in a dark building, a knife breaking off in his leg), Smith’s sheer, unmitigated acting talent singlehandedly holds this movie aloft. In a scene where he sobs disconsolately to a storeroom mannequin, beseeching the dummy, “Please say hello back… please say hello back,” his emotional breakdown is so compelling that we imagine the dummy actually will come to life just to say it did a scene with Will Smith. And it doesn’t hurt the ladies’ visual experience that Neville’s daily exercise routine shows him ripped like the whip that scourged Jesus.

When Neville encounters the Dark-Seekers, we descend further into CGI audacity – these mutated humans (note: NOT zombies) are fully computer-generated, therefore kinda goony cartoony. As antagonists for Neville, they would have been more compelling had they been actual humans enhanced by CGI. Dash Mihok is the Alpha Male Dark-Seeker – or at least, playing the computer blip that does the most roaring at Will Smith.

I AM LEGEND is the third incarnation of Richard Matheson‘s 1954 sf novel of the same name. First iteration was THE LAST MAN ON EARTH (1964), starring cheesemeister Vincent Price; next iteration, THE OMEGA MAN (1971), starring Grand Poobah Cheesemeister, Charlton Heston. This 2007 version is directed by Francis Lawrence (CONSTANTINE, 2005) and re-scripted by Akiva Goldsman and Mark Protosevich.

In the third act, atheist Neville meets holy fool Anna (Alice Braga) and her son, refugees immune to the virus and on their way to an imagined sanctuary. Even though she saves his life after he tips into insane (due to the sad death of Samantha), he doesn’t know what’s worse – being victim to the Dark-Seekers or this Jesus freak.

Cultural touchstones appear throughout the film – the SUPERMAN AND BATMAN movie on posters, dialogue from SHREK, Bob Marley’s Legend album – with the final scenes setting up nicely how Robert Neville saves humankind, himself becoming a Legend for future generations to pray to meaninglessly as a savior…

D’oh!

END

Just another day in Hollywood…

Inconstantine.

Beautifully shot in ochre tinge, evoking a mythopoeic superstructure, creative camera bespeaking thoughtful setups and engaging angles, striking cinematography accentuating iconic imagery and mellifluous art direction, it’s a pity CONSTANTINE is such an insensate, half-headed dog of a film.

This movie was better when it was called THE MATRIX.

Traversing between two parallel dimensions, Neo – I mean, John Constantine (Keanu Reeves, kickin’ it arctic cool, by way of Eastwood’s Stranger, Mickey Rourke, and Ren & Stimpy) is some kind of secular exorcist, a border patrol for illegal demons trying to cross over into our dimension. Since there are already enough evil acolytes walking the earth – they’re called priests – Constantine routes these aliens with extreme prejudice, utilizing rules and laws that have no basis in any mythology, let alone as apocryphal arcana, that morph at the whim of the watery, unfathomable plot.

That’s the problem with movies of this ilk. No rules. (Or characters desperately mouthing expository “rules” just before a scene which would have been just as illogical with or without the exposition.) The definition of “inconstant” is “likely to change frequently without apparent or cogent reason.” Thus does this visually elegant photoplay shoot itself in the foot.

Constanpoff

But then, how can it be expected to adhere to rules when its source material is more contradictory and confused than a whore crying rape – the Bible? Simultaneously exhorting us to love our enemies, then enjoining Joshua “to destroy all that breathes as the Lord God of Israel commanded” (Joshua 10:40); a world-renowned book that teaches that the sun moves around the earth; that dead humans can be reanimated; that unscrewed virgins can give birth; to turn the other cheek, but to take an eye for an eye; that advocates human sacrifice as some kind of palliative to an imaginary burden of sin; a tome that, through its cold-blooded murders, incest, executions, lies and debauchery cannot but help engender a belief in evil.

Bring the kids.

The writers of the Hellblazer comic book (Jamie Delano and Garth Ennis), that this movie draws from, cannot be wholly blamed for CONSTANTINE’s befuddlement, as screenwriters Kevin Brodbin and Frank A. Cappello consolidated this tale from many Hellblazer episodes.

The first demon we encounter enables a young girl to walk up walls. In the next scene, she is tied to a bed, where Constantine exorcises the demon into a mirror and smashes it, thereby killing the demon. The inconsistencies pile up immediately: if the demon-girl can walk on walls, why not scurry down the outside wall of the building and lose herself in crowds before six men with ropes were called? And if you’re going to possess someone, why possess an underprivileged girl from a minority community? Why not a person whom the authorities would find financially impossible or ethically uncomfortable to restrain – like Donald Trump or Tom Hanks? (Some might say Trump is already in league with demons, what with his overwhelming greed and narcissism; some may say Hanks has also lost to evil, what with THE TERMINAL.) And maybe my mythology is rusty, but I believe the clause that covers disposal of demons via mirrors is right next to the one about “Let he who is without an expressionless movie hero cast the first stoner.”

In what could only be construed as bone-laziness on the demons’ part, why do these poltergeists, who have illimitable power over seemingly everything – the elements, animals, machinery – always allow characters to live just long enough to give out information that enables the hero to destroy them, rather than just killing the stoolie character immediately?

Not only does Beeman (Max Baker) get belatedly killed after giving out crucial info to Constantine (after this movie’s “power of Christ compels you!” scene), Constantine’s eager assistant, Chaz (Shia LeBeouf, whose ancestral family tree surely intersects with Josh Charles’s branches) also meets a belated end after chanting the Right Words and ruining a demon’s possession. Why not kill him BEFORE he starts chanting, Einstein-zebub? If Hanks was this inefficient, he’d be flipping burgers.

After THE MATRIX made him a superstar in this unique mold – the last counter-intuitive casting that worked so well being Michael Keaton as Batman – Reeves need tread no new ground to be accepted as Inter-Dimensional Tough Guy. His authoritative performance here might have wiped away the last stains of Theodore Logan Esq. had he not resorted to calling demons “assholes” and flipping them the bird. (Really, how offensive could an insult like this be to a para-dimensional entity that doesn’t have bowels?)

CONSTANTINE’s brouhaha revolves around the Spear of Destiny – a totally fictitious ornament (mentioned in passing only by John 19:34, and even then, not giving the lance or its holder a name – such details added millennia later) which has somehow gained credence in the catholic vernacular as the “spear that killed Christ.” And whomsoever “holds the Spear of Destiny holds the fate of the world in his hands.” Reportedly in Hitler’s possession at one time, I suppose that accounts for his domination of Western Europe. So what happened in May 1945? He woke up one day and misplaced it?

This Spear is instrumental in birthing the son of the devil – in some contrived plot also found nowhere in any Christian mythologies or apocrypha – where a transgendered angel Gabriel (Tilda Swinton, garbed like one of those insufferable female singer-songwriters who populated the 90s Los Angeles poetry slam scene) betrays god to help the devil’s son for a motivation unknown to anyone but the confused screenwriters.

And Yea, an angel of the Lord shall bring Good News about fashionable slacks.

Constantine uncovers this plot by sitting in a chair of special effects straight out of the bible. (Remember that psychic chair that Jesus sat in that one time?) This chair is apparently so dangerous that its owner, Midnite (Djimon Hounsou, dutifully cast as the African witch-doctor stereotype) constantly disallows its use by Constantine. When Constantine eventually uses it and his life is threatened, to escape, he need only call out to Midnite, who wrenches him bodily from the chair. Uh, guess it wasn’t that dangerous after all.

(How the chair works is anyone’s guess, as Constantine doesn’t punch in any instructions, nor does he “will” it to reveal anything to him. Why it doesn’t show him his last laundry day or an episode of those karaoke douchebags on AMERICAN IDOL is a testament to its lack of danger.)

Enter Rachel Weisz, as cop Angela Dodson. Her twin sister, Isabel, just committed suicide and is walking through hell in her nightie. As a cop – a person trained to only accept evidence – Angela approaches Constantine with unquestioning, juvenile belief in his “gift” of dimensional travel, beseeching him to find her sister and bring a wrap.

Constantine promptly breaches hell by putting his feet in water and staring at a cat. Whilst in hell – which looks like a cross between a Heironymous Bosch painting and Downtown Los Angeles at 2:30 a.m. – Isabel commits suicide by falling off a building (after she kills herself, where does she go then?) whilst Constantine and some half-headed monsters cluster together like N’Sync for a dynamic photo op.

Constantine brings back Isabel’s hospital tag as “evidence.” Rachel asks, “How could this be?” Well, there’s this thing called a POCKET which could very easily have hidden that tag until Constantine needed to whip it out and impress your small mind.

What would any dumb American film be without the British Bad Guy? Gavin Rossdale (from Bush – the band, not the criminal public official) plays Balthazar, a smarmy Bond Villain type who meanders about for no reason, who can’t be killed by heavy artillery, but cowers under the mighty incantations of Keanu’s stoner spells. He ends up as tiny pieces of face that can still talk – without the aid of lungs, lips, voicebox or tongue. He seems discomfited when an unseen entity scatters him even further – although if he can talk when he is made up of such tiny pieces (against any kind of natural laws), why can’t he still function as even tinier pieces?

A thousand transgressions of non-rules later, we arrive at the movie’s conclusion, laden with effects in lieu of excitement, logic and interest, where Constantine slashes his wrists to “die,” precipitating the appearance of Satan (Peter Stormare, clad in angelic white, chewing more scenery than Heston on Sinai), whereby Constantine can then narc on Gabriel in the next room who is using the Spear to bring forth Satan’s son. Exactly like in the Bible.

Let me get this straight: Satan, omniscient bringer of darkness, doesn’t know what is going on in the next room?

Directed by Music Video Director to the Sluts, Francis Lawrence (Britney, Janet, J-Lo), the roaring beauty of this movie is tempered by its dangerous stupidities. If audiences could appreciate it as simply an imaginative story (albeit contradictory and idiotic beyond belief), the human race might just survive. Unfortunately, ninety percent of audiences will take it as fact, to be added to their human-penned gospels and already insane mythologies of Christ and hobbits and Islam and space aliens. And as these gullible dupes become the decision-makers in society, billions more murders will be perpetrated for this “sacred truth” in a never-ending spiral of ignorance.

Bring the kids.

END