Film review: The Hunger Games

“Too much games; not enough hunger” is the snappy description of The Hunger Games given by a listener of Radio 5 Live’s “Wittertainment”. It’s an apt description, as this adaptation is a film of two halves.

The first 40 minutes, which introduce our heroine, display her impoverished lifestyle, see her volunteer to take part in the titular Games in place of her younger sister, and watch her become a supercelebrity in the build up to the Games’ commencement, are shocking, dark, lucid, touching and visceral. It’s a fascinating conceit, well realised, and Jennifer Lawrence plays her part with winning subtlety and nuance. There are moments that engage and frighten, and I found the knot in my stomach ever tightening as the Games approached.

Then the Games begin, and eat up the rest of the film. From here on, the film is episodic and dull, as the writers drop our heroine into deadly situation after deadly situation and contrive sillier and sillier means to extract her from them. Some of these contrivances (such as the nest of genetically modified wasps serendipitously hanging from a tree our heroine climbs to escape some attackers) are guilty only of being rather too convenient; others – such as the characters and creatures who suddenly and unexplicably become dramatically suicidal or life-savingly benevolent – are visible examples of the writers’ desperation to maintain the tense energy that was so powerful before the games began, or, worse, undisguised attempts to save the lead character from situations from which they clearly should have planned more plausible escapes. It feels rather like each scene was begun by one writer and completed by another, all against the clock, with no conversation between the two.

Lawrence keeps up her uniquely quiet character throughout (alongside a rather plain love interest – of sorts – who apparently learned to be the best makeup artist in the world by working in a village bakery), but sadly has to play against broadly characterless “good” kids and overpreening, blandly evil “bad” ones – with Big Evil Grins and Big Evil Snarls to make it clear that they’re Big Evil Characters (so it’s okay to kill them). I came out thinking a far more interesting film would have been one that introduced several of the contestants and explored each of their lives and personalities, and left us wondering who would survive, and how, and what it means for a sado-voyeuristic society to pit them against one another. Instead, it’s just so much substandard action trope with only one possible outcome. (Despite this, the big finale is a surprisingly underwhelming and colourless scene in which two teenagers threaten to eat some berries.)

The world outside the Games, a futuristic neon city of high society, is, if a little too startlingly wacky, visually quite interesting; but the characters inhabiting it are little more than Big Evil Viewers snarling and grinning in much the same way as the Big Evil Kids: poorly encoded nasty meritocrats operating in a repressive regime that is dull in its universality. Stanley Tucci puts in a good performance as a winningly manipulative television host, but the filmmakers broadly seem to be shouting at us: aren’t they bad bad people?

Yet I couldn’t help wondering how we, the audience, are any better than the one-dimensional coiffured voyeurs of the film, supposedly finding entertainment and pleasure in the banal and inevitable destruction of the poor. In truth, we’re most touched and engaged by the moving reality and humanity of the poverty in the first third than by the contrived attempts to excite and entertain in the latter sections. The filmmakers initially well represent the hunger and should have prioritised it over the games, just as they initially well represent the emotion and should have prioritised it over the action.

Film review: The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

Best Exotic Marigold Hotel? Worst Exotic Marigold Hotel, more like.

That’s about the standard of the jokes throughout this film (with perhaps ten surprisingly very funny exceptions). Imagine it delivered with the flatness of a sheet of paper, tempered between set-up and punchline by a languorous pause during which the editor might as well run into the cinema, attempting to tickle random members of the audience with camp condescension and leering, “waaaaaiiiiiit foooor iiiiiit!”

This just about sums it up.

But you are waiting for it. You saw it coming, it would seem, long before the writers themselves. Had you been in a position to do so, you would have raised your hand and said with quiet solemnity, “No. That’s not funny.” I implore you, if you’re invited to see this film, to do precisely that.

Please don’t mistake me for the kind of person who enters a film such as The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel expecting a great cinematic achievement; don’t think that I’m merely a dusty high-brow cineaste for whom only the severest of standards will suffice. I was prepared for a simple, heartwarming, predictable tale of loveable Brits learning life lessons in a colourful setting. This film manages to defy the very lowest of expectations (and be assured, in case you have somehow misjudged the tone of the review so far, it does not defy them felicitously). I’m generally loathe to make sweeping claims containing “most” or “worst” or “wittiest” ever, but The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel warrants it; it is unequivocally one of the most ill-judged comedies or dramas I have ever seen. It’s like watching a flailing first-time stand-up fluff all the punchlines to a series of old knock-knock jokes – but worse because you know that, had they really tried, they could have been a blazing success.

Because there is potential and talent here. It would have been wonderful to see a charming, well-written, well-paced film about elderly people. Three of the seven (yes, seven) central characters are played with respectable skill and patience, by Judi Dench, Bill Nighy and Tom Wilkinson. None of them are given much to work with – every character in the film is wafer thin – but these three manage to be, respectively, graceful, charming and touching. It’s a shame that one of the side-effects of their admirable performances is to draw more attention to the one-dimensinonality of the rest of the cast, from the four remaining retirees who just shout (Penelope Wilton), look startled (Maggie Smith) and gurn (Celia Imrie and Ronald Pickup, who, for no reason I can discern, play the same character), to the hotel owner and his acquaintances, who are determined to extract drama from the most mundane situations. “My feelings for you are too great for one word,” says Dev Patel’s character, simply so he can have a denouement when he finally dose profess his love. I don’t mind that everyone saw it coming, but I mind that it’s not remotely interesting.

Gosh, that paragraph went in too many directions at once, didn’t it? I struggled to refrain from dumping all the criticisms I wanted to make into one overlong, ugly sentence. But perhaps it was naïve of me to think that I could deal with seven-plus characters and their various plots and narrative arcs all at once. Yes, perhaps that was a poor writing decision on my part. I was in danger of undermining all my points by dedicating so little time and attention to any single one of them that, not only did they not have time to grow, but I felt inclined to resort to cheap clichés and lazy stereotypes just to muddle through to the end of it, and losing your interest along the way because you couldn’t possibly care about such hastily and poorly-written characters.

The preceding paragraph, by the way, represents the single, cloying, totally misplaced visual metaphor (a slow motion bird flying away to represent the release of death) that suddenly appears in the middle of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, accidentally highlighting how devoid of craftsmanship every element of every other moment of the film is.

For the sake of my blood pressure, which I feel rising at the mere prospect of writing more about how dismal this film is, I shall quickly summarise its flaws in bullet points and examples.

Lazy, clogged up writing:

• One of the seven supposedly central characters (Imrie’s gurner) isn’t even granted an ending to her story.
• Nighy makes a clunky segue from a perfectly good line to a completely irrelevant one in order to give Dench an opportunity to bed in some exposition.

Poorly-judged/-timed/-written jokes:

• Wilkinson bumps into Dench one night and asks quizically during an otherwise serious scene, “can I show you something”? A few audience members titter, unsure whether this is a bad, poorly-timed double entendre or a bad, poorly-timed unintentional double entendre.
• “I’ll give you your money back,” says Patel. “Right now?” asks Wilton. WaitForItBeat. “Right now. In three months.” says Patel. It’s hilarious.

Pointless subplots:

• Patel’s hotel manager has to save the hotel from closure, convince his mother to accept his girlfriend for who she is, and tell the same girlfriend he loves her. None of these have anything to do with the main characters. None of them are interesting.

Characters stating clearly and eloquently what they’ve just learned:

• Honestly, the actors might as well have just turned to the camera and told the audience the moral. Oh wait –

Infuriating cod-moralism:

• Dench is forced to narrate with endless monotonous proverbs that sound like someone entered the closing words of various episodes of Sex and the City into Google Translate and selected the language “dull”. These lessons, like the film (which is at least 30 minutes too long) never seem to end.

Endless clichés:

• Potential partners Nighy and Dench find themselves in an awkward tight embrace after a near-miss road accident.
• A young lover’s difficult mother finds her heart suddenly opened by a perplexing reminder of her own (never-before-mentioned) past.
• An old woman learns the Important Life Lesson™ that racism is wrong because, I don’t know exactly, an Indian woman gives her some Branston Pickle, or something.

“Words fail me,” croaks Smith during one of the film’s few clever exchanges, when asked to detail what she likes about the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. I can think of three – Dench, Nighy and Wilkinson – but their performances can do little to save this otherwise dreadful, dreadful clunker of a film. What do I like about The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel? Maggie, I’m with you.

Film review: The Iron Lady

In Team America: World Police, Trey Parker and Matt Stone neatly lampooned the film convention of the montage (“… show us a passage of time / we’re gonna need a montage … show a lot of things happening at once / remind everyone of what’s going on … to show it all would take too long / that’s called a montage …”). I wish someone had played this song to Phyllida Lloyd before she began editing The Iron Lady. I didn’t count the number of montages in the film but I’m confident there were at least 10 – perhaps closer to 15. That’s ten to fifteen lengthy sequences of cobbled-together news footage representing selected events that occurred during Margaret Thatcher’s political career, often without introduction, explanation, or follow up. “To show it all would take too long”, I suppose. To show something, though, would at least be courteous. Including one montage is (arguably lazy but) passable; sitting through ten in a row is less like watching a film than having a list of events read out to you.

Not just a list, though: a checklist. With each 80s newsreel, it feels like the filmmakers are ticking off significant historical moments to cover themselves when someone inevitably points out that a (seemingly biographical) film about the most divisive politician in Britain otherwise steers lightyears clear of any political action. Some viewers – and some of the filmmakers – would counter that this isn’t a biopic about Thatcher the politician, but a broadly fictional piece about a once-powerful woman coming to terms with the loss of her power. If that’s the case, the question rings loud and clear: why is it about (the decidedly non-fictional) Margaret Thatcher at all?

Most of the few non-montage sequences to which we’re treated are shot with bizarre – and entirely inappropriate – horror-film techniques: all canted angles, shaky handheld shots and extreme close-ups. In the middle of one such scene we cut to a shot so up close and out of focus that it’s little more than a blur of fleshy colour, before returning to the scene itself. Is this the editing equivalent of a typo? Or a failed attempt to create an effect? The whole film feels misjudged in this way: there are two catastrophic explosions, the consequences of which are dealt with in no more than 20 seconds; we’re constantly reminded of the huge significance of Margaret’s husband’s absence yet his decline and death is never shown and barely referred to; Thatcher’s declaration of war with the Falklands is shown but the consequences are barely felt by her or the audience in the few minutes dedicated to the subsequent events (and guess what film convention the filmmakers use to present those events…). There’s no plot, no narrative – nothing for the audience to hold on to besides Streep’s performance.

Which brings us to the film’s only saving grace. Those pervasive, infuriating montages are interspersed with scenes of Meryl Streep and Alexandra Roach playing Thatcher as, variously, an aspiring politican, an MP and (most of the time) a senile elderly lady. Streep and Roach both do excellent, compelling impersonations of “the iron lady”, Streep with the help of some profoundly detailed prosthetics (though once or twice you get the impression her face wants to move rather more than the make-up allows). There are also one or two touching moments – Thatcher’s blank dismissal to her daughter during an emotional exchange the most notable – but the film is otherwise completely undone by poor editing, lazy plotting and a naïve refusal to acknowledge that Margaret Thatcher’s legacy is neither her attachment to her husband, nor her senility, nor a series of anonymous newsreels. Thatcher’s legacy is her politics; an element that, along with a plot and a structure, is fatally absent from this film.

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Oh, and, for good measure:

Film review: Hugo

“We’re sitting here in 3D. We are in 3D. We see in 3D. So why not?”

This is how Martin Scorsese justified his decision to film Hugo using stereoscopic cameras. I find it a startling quote – an esteemed cinema connoisseur displaying a fundamental misunderstanding of film. Cinema doesn’t seek to perfectly emulate reality; we may be sitting here in 3D, but we don’t instantly change our physical perspectives like the sudden shift of a jump cut, and our most poignant moments aren’t (usually) accompanied by grand orchestral scores. Film is a medium with its own conventions and traditions, not replicable in the real world. To aim to dutifully represent life as we truly experience it would be to create not a film at all, but a piece of live performance art. This, I propose, is the conclusion Scorsese would have come to had he taken his own argument seriously.

Which is a lengthy way of saying, Scorsese’s remarks hadn’t convinced me that Hugo would be any more valid in 3D than the slew of films we’ve recently seen shot in, or retrofitted into, the format. So it was with high expectations for the film, but low expectations for the presentation, that I entered the cinema.

My expectations were, broadly, met. It’s finely played by all involved, particularly lead Asa Butterfield (who laughs and cries believably and doesn’t often ov-er-en-un-ci-ate like many young performers) and Ben Kingsley (who is a delight to watch making whole silent speeches with little more than his eyes and mustache), and it accurately strikes a difficult balance between slapstick and sentimentality – I often found myself touched (though never moved). It’s beautifully lit, all nostalgic blues and golds, and even the dust that drifts through so many shots is romantic.

And as a love letter to the imagination, to cinema, to the wonder of the movie, Hugo succeeds with aplomb. Here it’s at its best, brightly, lovingly and indeed educationally telling the tale of the moving picture with all the sound and colour at its disposal.

The film isn’t without fat; there are amusing but superfluous scenes involving minor characters (two cute romances and an odd friendship with a librarian) that I suspect a more objective writer or editor, with less attachment to the source material, would have left out; the explanation to the film’s final mystery drags and feels like a necessary but forced intrusion to an otherwise quite well-paced plot; and most of the shots noticeably taking advantage of the 3D format arguably are included for the sake of the 3D, not for the sake of the film.

Which rather neatly brings us to the use of 3D. I haven’t mentioned it till now, in an attempt to prevent it distracting from the rest of the film. Yet that is largely what it does, when it has any effect at all. More importantly, even if the effect wasn’t so distracting, it was almost entirely unnecessary. I counted seven shots during which the third dimension added to the film’s poignancy, power or entertainment. Most were delightfully subtle  – a flipbook sketch quietly coming free from the page; the sinister station controller’s face enlarging into the cinema itself as his anger peaked. But seven good shots and hundreds of distracting, dim, alienating ones is not a complimentary ratio.

I wanted to post this review now, rather than waiting for the DVD release, as I had so much to say about the use of 3D, and most home viewers will (I assume) watch the film in 2D. They can discard the previous paragraph as irrelevant and enjoy a film that, despite some simple flaws, is concise, fun, touching, and smart – and ever-so-slightly better than the one I saw in the cinema.