Movie Reviews: Hunger Games, Nightcrawler and St. Vincent

The first two Hunger Games movies were basically the same but with different stakes.  Both revolved around Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence) facing impossible odds in the gladiatorial arena, pitted against other children for the entertainment of the rich and powerful.  The second movie advanced the dramatic dilemmas from the first film, but it happened around the edges.  Considering the cliff hanger ending of Catching Fire, I was wondering how they were going to include the games again in Mockingjay, Part 1, the latest installment in the series.

Surprisingly, they don't.  In fact, this sequel has very little in common structurally with the first two films.  The first two films were action movies with political and romantic undertones, but the action is gone from this sequel.  We're left with a somber, political drama about a group of rebels on the precipice of war.  The political intrigue and romantic triangle are front and center, with the constant threat of anybody and everybody dying at any moment.  It's a slow, dark meditation on the realities of war, and what it means to be a figurehead for something so potentially liberating and yet necessarily destructive.

It's a good film, but you definitely will want to see the first two films ahead of time; and if you haven't developed any attachment to characters by then, you many find Mockingjay to be a bit trying.  I think it's fascinating, though, that the filmmakers would take a chance on doing a film this different.  I understand that it's based on a book, so they have to follow that story.  But in the last few years, the rules of blockbuster films have been rewritten.  Studios are now willing to trust that the audiences will follow the characters they love under changing circumstances, and that's a big deal.  I lament that smaller and standalone films may be endangered, but I'm excited to be living through this development of big budget, character driven blockbusters.  

Nightcrawler was released on Halloween, so I've taken my time getting around to seeing it-- but thank god I did!  This is an amazingly intense film noir about a down on his luck hustler (Jake Gyllenhaal) who gets involved in guerrilla journalism.  He follows the police around late at night, trying to get video footage of crimes, accidents, or any type of viscerally nasty images he can sell to the local TV news rooms.  I've always thought Gyllenhaal was a competent actor, but he acts the hell out of this role.  He's a thoroughly despicable guy with just enough charm to keep us watching.  One thing I like about this movie is that, even though it follows the very gritty underbelly of Los Angeles, it's not an ugly film.  The cinematography is pristine, and it makes the violence and corruption a bit more cozy.  And maybe that's what this film is about: how cozy we're getting with this kind of sensationalism.  I can't say this film is for everybody, but I loved it-- one of my top films of the year.

Last Friday, I was trying to decide what movie to see, so I asked a friend which comedy I should go see:  Horrible Bosses 2 or St. Vincent.  When I mentioned Bill Murray was in the latter film, she said to see that... as long it's actually funny; she said that when they cast comedic actors in dramas, the results tend to be dour.  I decided to see St. Vincent and the funniest thing about it was that she was right-- it was kind of a depressing drama starring comedians.  But that's not necessarily a bad thing.

I really like dramatic Bill Murray, particularly in films like Lost in Translation and Broken Flowers.  And he does an excellent job as a drinkin', gamblin', curmudgeonly guy taking care of the kid next door.  Melissa McCarthy, who's shown that she has comedy chops to rival Murray's, reveals that she can do a great job in a straight role as a mother struggling to take care of her son while making ends meet.  Naomi Watts was underused in the otherwise great Birdman, but here she has a chance to actually act, if only in a stock role as a Russian stripper-prostitute.

And that brings us to the problem with the film-- it's full of stock characters in stock situations.  The acting is really great, and they raise up the rest of the movie, but the movie needs to be raised a lot.  In a lot of ways this felt like one of those after school specials I used to avoid watching back in the 80s.  In that decade, you could've had the same film (minus the stripper-prostitute) starring Ed Asner and a young Ricky Schroder.  For some, this film might be worth seeing for the performances, but, personally, I was a bit bored with it.