2010-2019

Knock Knock Knock (2019)

André Crous

Although occasionally unbalanced, the heart-warming, Darjeeling-set Knock Knock Knock mostly sustains our interest thanks to its two leading men.

Knock Knock KnockIndia
3.5*

Director:
Sudhanshu Saria
Screenwriter:
Sudhanshu Saria
Director of Photography:
Achyutanand Dwivedi

Running time: 38 minutes

Lines intersect in director Sudhanshu Saria’s first medium-length film, entitled Knock Knock Knock. But the patterns they form and the nature of their content aren’t always apparent. On the heels of his successful début feature, Loev, Saria has crafted another story focused almost solely on the interactions between two men. This time around, however, the contours are much hazier, and the film may well frustrate viewers looking for clear answers.

Their first meeting happens, seemingly by chance, in the opening scene. Sitting alone at a table on the balcony of a café (Keventer’s, whose breathtaking view was made for the big screen) in Darjeeling, a quiet, focused, middle-aged man (Santilal Mukherjee) is designing a crossword puzzle. We see him misspell the word “camouflage”. Maybe it’s because he is distracted by prying eyes at the next table: They belong to a lively young man, whose clothing is conspicuously similar in colour to his own. His name, at least according to the credits, is Keta (Phuden Sherpa). When he realises he’s been noticed, he comes over to start chatting. He says that he designs tattoos, never wears shoes (according to him, they trap his energy) and is 22 years old.  The older man, whom he affectionately calls “Dada” (father), is not that dissimilar after all: For the last 22 years, he has been coming here from Kolkata on vacation to design crosswords.

The meeting, which also involves some bizarre talk about parabolas, ends the way it began, with Dada looking over his shoulder at Keta. The scene’s perfect bookend structure makes us wonder whether the encounter may have been imagined, and it won’t be the last time.

The next day, Dada is jogging when Keta sneaks up behind him to join his knight-like moves through the rolling hills. But we quickly view him with some suspicion because, despite his proclamation to the contrary the day before, he is now wearing shoes. And yet, he is bubbling with spirit and spontaneity and projects a childlike curiosity that is completely irresistible.

Things start to unravel a bit with an extended dream/nightmare sequence that swings between serenity and sudden scares and leads into the least clearly defined part of the story, which is, unfortunately, also the final act. Regrettably, the plot doesn’t turn explicitly into a ghost story, which could have been fun, nor does it work to emphasise a spiritual connection between the two characters until the very last moment. 

When an uptight introvert meets an ebullient extrovert in a film, it is supposed to generate conflict, which gives dramatic energy to the narrative, but Knock Knock Knock has no conflict and, therefore, no real drama to speak of. The opening scene has a wonderful two-minute single take that starts to delve into the two characters a little bit, but some important information is delivered in a rush, almost as an aside, and no other scene elaborates on the details we get here.

For close to 40 minutes, Mukherjee manages to sustain our interest in Dada. By the end, however, we still know too little about him to care about this character, so when the climax comes, it falls flat. Keta, who always appears out of nowhere, is even more of a blank slate: He exists only in relation to Dada, and this relationship never becomes anything more than superficial.

Knock Knock Knock is clearly a personal film for the director (it’s his hands drawing the crossword puzzle in the opening shot). But given the ambiguity and lack of urgency, it does not hold the same emotional sway as Loev and never achieves the balance that its characters refer to. “Nothing is random, right? There’s a pattern in everything”, says Keta, but the pattern here can be hard to decipher. Never awkward enough to thrill us and never intimate enough to really make us care, the clues to this film, itself a kind of crossword puzzle, are too vague and leave us with a few rows unfilled.

There are some interesting ideas here, from the resemblance between a crossword puzzle and a chessboard to a climactic shot showing only one of the characters where we expect to see both. The key to unlocking the central mystery may very well lie in Dada misspelling “camouflage”, which is precisely where the narrative proper starts, but the viewer has to let her imagination do the work to fill in the blanks.

Django Unchained (2012)

André Crous

In Quentin Tarantino’s best Western, Django Unchained, a slave set free by a German bounty hunter takes the South by storm.

Django UnchainedUSA
4*

Director:
Quentin Tarantino
Screenwriter:
Quentin Tarantino
Director of Photography:
Robert Richardson

Running time: 165 minutes

Django Unchained is an unconventional love letter to the Western. It’s not a popular genre today, although the Coen brothers with some modest success tried to revive it with their 2010 film, True Grit. But Quentin Tarantino, the golden boy of cinema for the past 20 years whose name has unduly become synonymous with the gratuitous depiction of violence, has the magic touch and proves his mastery of the art form once again.

The film is excessively violent, but, among the slow-motion explosions of blood as if from flesh volcanoes, there is an incredible story of one man’s quest to find the woman he loves and reclaim her from her owner. With the exception of the film’s climactic shootout, which puts the bloodletting of The Wild Bunch to shame and ends with a manor house whose walls are covered in blood from the floor to the ceiling, the pace is mostly steady and not a single moment is wasted.

What will stir viewers’ attention more than anything else, however, is the language of the film. It is unlikely that the word “nigger” has ever been used this often by white characters in a film. Occurring more than 100 times, it pervades their speech to such an extent that it is tough to remember whether skin colour is ever explicitly mentioned. Tarantino gets away with it because even though the word is used almost as frequently as an article, it never ceases to remind us of the time and place the central character, a freed black slave, is up against.

The former slave is the titular Django (Jamie Foxx), who is set free by the German dentist Dr King Schultz (Christoph Waltz), a bounty hunter who travels on horseback, followed by a wooden coffin with a plastic tooth on top bobbing up and down as he crosses the South in search of those wanted by the law.

Schultz is a peculiar creature who doesn’t seem to mind violence – besides, he is a perfect shot – as long as he gets the guy. He forms an instant bond with Django, mostly because he needs Django’s help in tracking down three brothers worth a lot of money dead or alive, and Schultz prefers them dead. But when Django tells Schultz about his wife, Broomhilda von Shaft (yes, of course, the surname is a reference to the big-name ’70s blaxploitation movie), sold to a big slaveowner, the German bounty hunter has a personal interest in ensuring his friend and colleague gets his wife back.

We thus find ourselves watching a quest, and it is every bit as exciting as Tarantino’s two Kill Bill films, in which the central character pierced and sliced her way with a samurai sword until she reached the object of her affection. However, Django Unchained has about 30 minutes of post-climactic appendage that go off on a tangent.

This final act is separated from the film’s first two hours by an extended shootout, bloody to the point of excess, that sees Tarantino struggle to keep things together. He satisfies us with small details in that final part, including his explosive presence as an Australian slaver and some beautiful shots right before the end credits start to roll, but, in retrospect, this last section seems a big digression that doesn’t have the same driving force as the rest of the film.

The duo of Foxx and Waltz sounds like an odd couple, but Dr. Schultz – a character that calls to mind Waltz’s role in Tarantino’s previous film, Inglourious Basterds – has a playful, almost childlike streak that is captivating, if one can overlook his penchant for shooting people through the head.

Foxx, playing a variety of roles that see him as both a slave and a slaver, a lover and an assassin, is by far the coolest cucumber in the story, though Tarantino uses those (Sergio Leone kind of) extreme close-ups on his eyes for poignant moments, and this tactic works like a charm. It is no coincidence that the music of Ennio Morricone, a composer associated with Leone’s films, also features in Django Unchained.

Aside from the many gunshots and the cussing, the film also has some slave-on-slave ultimate fighting to the death, called “Mandingo”, and as the film takes place shortly before the Civil War, there is an epic scene with Klansmen.

It is Samuel L. Jackson who steals the show, perhaps to the detriment of the film. As a slave who has lived with his master, Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), for so long that he now shares Candie’s disdain for blacks, he is truly odious, a traitor to all the oppressed people around him, to freedom and justice, too, as he revels in the authority his connection with the white Candie grants him. An Uncle Tom for the ages.

The film is certainly not intended to be a very serious discussion about slavery, but it is a very entertaining one, and it doesn’t ignore the importance of past iniquities. This might come as a surprise to some, but it shouldn’t, as Inglourious Basterds already proved Tarantino a skilled craftsman even when dealing with the suppression and extermination of Jews during the Second World War.

It is no easy feat for a film to keep our attention for nearly three hours, but the director succeeds effortlessly. His style of entertainment necessarily includes people being shot to a bloody pulp, but when they’re all really bad guys, one tends to have fewer ethical objections, especially when everything is so clearly “just a film”.

Mr Tarantino, to quote Calvin Candie, “You had my curiosity; now you have my attention.”

The Club (2015)

André Crous

The Club is an unapologetic indictment of the sick structures that allow paedophile priests to continue their lives without facing justice

El ClubChile
4*

Director:
Pablo Larraín
Screenwriters:
Guillermo Calderón
Pablo Larraín
Daniel Villalobos
Director of Photography:
Sergio Armstrong

Running time: 95 minutes

Original title: El club

If there was ever a film to put the final coffin in the Catholic Church’s case for credibility after decades of allegations about sexual abuse, paedophilia and cover-ups that involved the rotation of sex offenders from one parish to the next, it is Chilean director Pablo Larraín’s The Club (El club). With a plot set in a coastal town in the very recent past, it examines the activities of a group of four former priests who have been banished to an isolated house, along with a former nun, where they are expected to repent for their sins, which all relate to child abuse.

One of the opening scenes is a stunner and sets the stage for an hour and a half of tension that ultimately ends with an act so monstrous the fury quickly boils over from within the viewer because these supposed messengers of God reveal themselves to be nothing more than self-centred criminals who destroy innocent people and animals in order to keep their skeletons intact. In this particular scene, a victim of one of the former priests arrives at the home and proceeds to publicly castigate the priest at the top of his voice by going into detail about the sex acts the priest committed with him when he was an altar boy.

Paedophiles are mentally ill, and they should be treated, but if they commit sexual acts with a minor, such behaviour ought to be looked upon the same way one regards the acts of a murderer – with disgust and abhorrence – because the two acts are very closely aligned. It might seem like charitable (what some might label “Christian”) behaviour to love and support these people, but when they refuse to change and demand forgiveness, either because they don’t know what they are doing or because they are sinners and Jesus died for their sins, too, we need to stand up and refuse to grant them forgiveness, because they insist on destroying others in the quest for (temporary) self-gratification.

The majority of the five people comprising the titular “club” in Larraín’s film, his first since the beautiful true-to-life No, which depicted Chile’s landmark referendum in 1988, cannot even bring themselves to admit they are gay, much less that they sexually abused the minors in their parishes, and the same goes for the nun, who was sent to the house after her mother had accused her of beating her adopted daughter, an act of which she still proclaims her innocence.

When a prisoner is seeking parole, the board has to examine whether the individual in question shows any remorse. If there is no contrition, the person remains a menace to society and should be kept isolated. On a side note, this was the major problem with another film shown at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in the same year: the Czech documentary Daniel’s World (Danielův svět), whose main character never elicits any empathy from us because he revels in being sick and seeks acceptance and understanding from society instead of help.

Early in the film, Father García (Marcelo Alonso), a young adviser with a background in psychology, arrives on the scene with the goal of steering the priests onto the right path, but he is of little help, and the four men and one woman have a great deal of experience in manipulation, to which he eventually succumbs. This film is a tragic indictment of the human evils harboured, sometimes with pride, by the very priests who are meant to protect their flocks from the wolves, and when cold calculation is carried out with a smile, as is the case with Mother Monica (Antonia Zegers), we feel a collective chill running down our spine because we know how prevalent these people are across the world and how much damage they have caused to people everywhere.

The Club is unapologetic in its treatment of its characters, and that is as it should be, because any hesitation on the part of the filmmaker would have weakened the impact of the film. This is a serious topic that requires a blunt approach, and Larraín does not back down, even when it comes to showing the more graphic consequences of the former fathers’ decision to stay in the house rather than integrate back into society.

There are moments of hope for the characters, especially Father Vidal (Alfredo Castro), who calls himself the King of Repression and comes to closest to admitting his urges have persisted despite (or perhaps because of) the prohibition on receiving pleasure – masturbation is forbidden, of course, but so is taking long showers. Eventually, little matters because the evil these men (and woman) are capable of when push comes to shove will be shocking to even those who have followed the scandals of the Church through documentaries and fiction films over the past decade.

On the whole, this film suggests that the structures that kept in place these places of refuge for sex offenders should be burnt to the ground and take their culture of moral authority, divine entitlement and protection of one’s own with them on their way to Hell, which is without a doubt where these people belong.

Viewers who have problems with animal cruelty – especially inflicted on domesticated animals – would be well advised to steer clear of this film. The ghastly acts committed in the final act will hit you hard.

Viewed at the 2015 Karlovy Vary International Film Festival

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2 (2014)

André Crous

The last instalment of popular Hunger Games series ends on a high note but struggles to arrive at the finish line.

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2USA
3*

Director:
Francis Lawrence
Screenwriters:
Peter Craig
Danny Strong
Director of Photography:
Jo Willems

Running time: 135 minutes

This is one in a series of reviews including:
– The Hunger Games
– The Hunger Games: Catching Fire
– The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1

Katniss is tired, and so are we. The climax has been awaited far too long, mostly because Suzanne Collins’s three novels have been stretched across four films totalling more than nine hours. Jennifer Lawrence has cemented her status as the archer par excellence whose face, three-finger salute and flaming mockingjay pin became the symbols of a revolution against the smiling but devious President Snow (Donald Sutherland).

The first film’s Hunger Games, an annual reality-show event in which two dozen boys and girls from the dystopian country’s 12 districts participate and slowly get killed off until one survives, showed us the rise of Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence). She had taken part in order to save her younger sister, Prim, from being forced to compete. She befriended Peeta (Josh Hutcherson), a fellow competitor and boy from the same district as her, and the two of them undermined the rules, causing President Snow to lose face. This small act of defiance eventually sparked a wider rebellion, whose progress was marked by the subsequent three films in the series.

In terms of atmosphere, this final instalment is spot-on, but dramatically it feels like we have run a marathon only to arrive at the finish line inside the arena and looking around to see no one in the stands. The climactic siege occurs, would you believe it, during an ellipsis marked by a black screen. This is a deeply unsettling move on the part of the filmmakers but is sadly representative of the many missing sections in a film that otherwise has very little plot.

At its core, the narrative comprises only the penetration of the Capitol, the upper-class zone with its style-conscious inhabitants who look down upon the riff-raff, namely those who make up the districts. This is followed by a surprise public spectacle and the requisite “happy ever after” epilogue that is all too reminiscent of the never-ending final moments of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.

Katniss, Peeta and about a dozen fighters make their way by land and by underground sewer system to advance ever so steadily towards the palace. Inevitably, some of them die, including quite a few we never got to know at all and, thus, to whom we had absolutely no attachment. It goes without saying that all the major players survive until the very end, making the film (even for those who have not read the novels) a tad too predictable. They also confront some slimy monsters (“mutts”) the likes of which we could not have imagined in a world that, in many respects, is similar to ours. But the battle with these creatures is drawn-out and made silly by an overbearing score, causing the viewer to switch off, particularly because we know (ignoring any glimmer of realism) that almost everyone is likely to survive.

The film’s logic is not always on point, however. In one scene, the team escapes from one side of the building, cross a courtyard and enter another side of the building before the previous hideout is blasted into oblivion. On television, President Snow broadcasts the beginning and the end but somehow manages to miss their escape in broad daylight. It is also way too easy for the team to have access to a “Holo”, a machine that points out exactly where in the Capitol hundreds of booby traps, or “pods”, have been placed and allows them a way to circumvent these traps without mass casualties.

The story’s most exciting developments are saved for late in the film, once there is a false sense of calm. While it has been clear from the outset that the rebel leader, Alma Coin (Julianne Moore), is slowly becoming used to being in charge, this final film includes a handful of moments that increase our suspicions about her real intentions. To the screenwriters’ credit, her ambitions remain more or less ambiguous. At the same time, it becomes obvious that Snow was not the mastermind of a corrupt system as much as he was its logical extension.

The final moments, before the atrocious coda, are by far the most interesting, as they allow Katniss to reflect on her actions and the changes that have occurred since she first stepped forward to enter the ring in the first film. Katniss’s determination to make the right decision despite the ambiguity of the facts (“real or not real?” is a game she and Peeta plays throughout the film, and for good reason) signals her as an adult capable of critical reflection and aware of the consequences of her actions. At the end of a revolution, that is exactly what we want, even if the road to get there has been long and taxing.

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1 (2014)

André Crous

With The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1, director openly mocks the audience with a flat, unresolved storyline, because apparently buying two tickets is better than buying one.

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1USA
3*

Director:
Francis Lawrence
Screenwriters:
Danny Strong
Peter Craig
Director of Photography:
Jo Willems

Running time: 120 minutes

This is one in a series of reviews including:
– The Hunger Games
– The Hunger Games: Catching Fire
– The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2

Besides having a title that is a mouthful, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part I will also make very little sense to those unfamiliar with the world of Katniss Everdeen. We start in medias res and have to fill in much of the story for ourselves if we never read the books or saw the two previous instalments of the series.

This hurdle may have been easy to clear if the film itself wasn’t also stretched and contorted to tell a story whose central action only takes place in Part 2. The tactic of splitting the last book of a series into two final films, the first obviously ending on a cliffhanger, is one that was also deployed by Harry Potter and Twilight. If Peter Jackson had made his Lord of the Rings trilogy 10 years later, we likely would have been saddled with a four-parter, too.

A quick recap is in order: Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence), co-winner of the annual Hunger Games two films ago, and her mockingjay pin have become the symbols of a brewing revolution against the upper-class bubble, the Capitol, which controls territory as far as the eye can see in a post-apocalyptic world. This fight-to-the-death contest provides entertainment to the masses, and the victor gets lifetime compensation, although this often comes at some cost to their mental health. In the previous two films, Katniss became a warrior and beacon of hope for the downtrodden masses not only of her own district but also of the others. When she caused havoc inside the game world at the end of an evidently rigged game in Catching Fire (she shot a lightning-charged arrow into the arena’s force field), the wrath of the Capitol was brought down on her. She managed to escape, but her Hunger Games partner, Peeta Malark (Josh Hutcherson), was captured.

The forces of the revolution, comprising generations of marginalised individuals living from hand to mouth outside the Capitol, are slowly gathering on the outskirts of the “heart” of Panem, roughly the dystopian future version of the United States. All the while, however, despite her recent rebelliousness, Katniss remains a reluctant warrior and leader of the obviously imminent uprising. Were it not that Peeta, her fellow competitor and budding romantic interest, had been captured by the government at the end of Catching Fire and her home district razed to the ground, she probably would not have shown much interest in leading the charge against the odious President Snow.

This entire film is just buildup to the inevitable showdown of which we sadly don’t even catch a glimpse. All will be revealed in Part 2. For now, we have to be content with the very slow process of Katniss gathering her inner strength, getting Peeta back into her life and planning the attack on Snow and his power-hungry constituency.

But unlike the first two films, both of which centred on an iteration of the Hunger Games contest, this instalment has no focal event. The narrative is left with little oxygen and has to rely mostly on Jennifer Lawrence’s charisma, albeit undeniable. One particularly bad aspect of the film is the young “director” Cressida (Natalie Dormer), who is supposed to be an up-and-coming filmmaker from the Capitol who has joined the rebellion, but her approach to her craft is laughable and beyond irritating, as it seems she has never worked with actors before and grew up on a staple of propaganda films with transparent metaphors: When she notices Katniss standing in front of the ruins of her district’s Justice Building, she proudly turns to her cameraman and says, “There’s your first shot.” This group of terrible filmmakers who follow Katniss around like puppies often undermines our suspension of disbelief because we ask ourselves whether Katniss’s emotions and speeches are real or put on for show in front of the camera, which we never would have contemplated in the previous films.

Speaking of emotions, the biggest problem resulting from this instalment’s negligible sketching of past events is the character of Katniss’s friend, Gale (Liam Hemsworth), who was clearly pining for her while she was spending so much time with Peeta. Now that Peeta is in the hands of the enemy and Katniss only thinks of him, Gale is a strong but silent mess who only hints at being hurt but never stands up to fight for her. Hemsworth manages not to make Gale seem like too much of a victim, but instead of having the storyline plod along by having no one speak their mind, director Francis Lawrence could have revealed a bit more about this important character’s disposition.

Perhaps The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 1 will eventually be absolutely riveting when it forms a coherent unit with Part 2. However, because it lacks a major action scene or any kind of story arc that would show development and proper resolution during this particular film, it feels like more of a footnote than a proper page, never mind half a novel. We can usually forgive a film for a slow beginning if the last part takes our breath away, but if that first section suddenly vaults to prominence as its own thing, we have to call a spade a spade.

Lawrence, Hemsworth, Hutchinson and especially Woody Harrelson, who absolutely steals the show, all do excellent work in this film and keep the audience relatively interested, but the story just doesn’t get us worked up the way a film about injustice and revolution ought to.

There had to be a worst one in the Hunger Games tetralogy, and by the looks of it, that dubious title belongs to Mockingjay – Part 1.

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013)

André Crous

A change in the director’s chair ensures that the second instalment of popular Hunger Games franchise is just as entertaining as the first.

The Hunger Games: Catching FireUSA
4*

Director:
Francis Lawrence
Screenwriters:
Simon Beaufoy
Michael deBruyn
Director of Photography:
Jo Willems

Running time: 145 minutes

This is one in a series of reviews including:
– The Hunger Games
– The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1
– The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2

When The Hunger Games was released in 2012, everyone knew it was going to shatter a few records. Based on the novel series by Suzanne Collins, the film eventually went on to make more than $680 million at the box office. The only other films with greater earnings that year were The Dark Knight Rises and The Avengers, both of which had budgets nearly three times as big as that of The Hunger Games.

Hunger Games: Catching Fire is the second in a four-film series based on Collins’s trilogy – as was the case with the film adaptation of the Harry Potter series, the final Hunger Games novel, Mockingjay, would ultimately be split into two films, released over two years.

Drawing heavily on the influence of reality television on our lives, which pretends to epitomise the evolutionary race to the top with programmes named Survivor or The Apprentice, the first film centred on the titular life-and-death competition. The Hunger Games is a contest in which 24 individuals, “tributes”, from the world’s less-fortunate districts take part for the benefit of those living in the decadent Capitol. For them, this game in which people kill each other off until only one remains is the television event of the year.

In the first film, the teenage Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) from the impoverished District 12 volunteered to take the place of her younger sister whose name had been selected. She participated in the gory activities alongside Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson), who may just be the nicest guy you’ve ever met. Sooner or later, they realised they have to form an alliance and perhaps even a fake relationship to garner the support from the audience, which would give them a better shot at staying on the show because they provide entertainment.

At the end of the first film, the creators changed the rules of the game and decided that only one (instead of two) would be crowned victor. In rebellion, Katniss and Peeta, the two remaining contestants, made up their minds to swallow poisonous berries and thereby forfeit the game. The pressure on Gamemaker Seneca Crane resulted in them both crowned winners.

Catching Fire has a few very strong themes that may not fit together as well as in the first film, but it is a marvellous, informative piece of entertainment that does its best to do the duty of telling only the second act of the overarching tale.

First off, the tension between reality and illusion is foregrounded again, as we see Katniss agreeing under duress to play up her relationship with Peeta for the sake of entertainment and to convince the viewers (and more importantly, those in the districts) that this is pure love rather than a streak of rebellion that could destabilise the entire country of Panem. Because Katniss is not exactly an open book, it is not always easy to see where her acting ends and her true feelings for Peeta, whom we like very much, may begin, and this uncertainty is naturally a magnet for attention.

The other very evident theme is that of standing up against oppression. Small but powerful moments include the scenes in which the granddaughter of President Snow suggests an admiration for Katniss, as well as the many showings of a three-finger salute by the people of the districts, indicating their resistance to the rule of the Capitol.

The first half of Catching Fire shows the brewing unrest and Katniss’s and Peeta’s desire to quell the resistance even as they want things to change. The second half is the 75th Hunger Games, known as the third Quarter Quell, in which past winners of the games take part – like an All-Stars edition – to remind the districts of their past transgressions and the transience of life.

Although this happens every 25 years, and 75 is neatly divisible by 25, this comes as a great shock to everyone, and in this respect, the film makes little sense. But we have confidence in Katniss and Peeta because they are the most recent victors and are at a slight advantage over their opponents. It is too bad that the opponents, for the most part, are rather simplistically drawn as either good or bad (or what is supposed to be a grey middle ground of “provocative”, as in the case of Johanna) and don’t surprise us until, perhaps, the very end.

Another bit of plot that seems odd is the relationship between Katniss and Gale, her best friend and obviously a bit more than that. Despite the rest of the world thinking Katniss and Peeta are in love and would rather die together than have only one of them survive, that is obviously not the case in their home district, and everyone can see that. And yet, there is no uprising as a result.

The Hunger Games series changed hands with this instalment from Gary Ross to Francis Lawrence, whose approach to the material is much more obviously Hollywood than that of Ross, who memorably used a Steve Reich composition at a key moment in the first film. However, “more Hollywood” does have its pluses, as the special effects this time around are noticeably better, particularly during the scenes involving fire.

There are many problems with Catching Fire, but it remains an excellent piece of entertainment (Stanley Tucci’s turn as talk-show host Caesar Flickerman, tanned here to give him a John Boehner–like orange complexion, is as wildly amusing as in the past) that stacks up well enough against its predecessor and makes us impatient to see what happens next.

The Hunger Games (2012)

André Crous

With The Hunger Games, Gary Ross takes reality television shows to the extreme (within the family-friendly limitations of Hollywood entertainment).

The Hunger GamesUSA
4*

Director:
Gary Ross
Screenwriters:
Suzanne Collins
Gary Ross
Billy Ray
Director of Photography:
Tom Stern

Running time: 140 minutes

This is one in a series of reviews including:
– The Hunger Games: Catching Fire
– The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1
– The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2

The Hunger Games, a film based on the eponymous novel by Suzanne Collins, shares a premise with the notorious Japanese film Battle Royale: A group of teenagers, called “tributes”, are sent to an isolated area where they not only have to survive the elements but survive each other over the course of a severe couple of days. Whoever comes out of the ordeal alive wins the grand prize.

The story is set at some point in the future, and anyone who has not read the book might struggle to figure out exactly why these games take place at all. There are mentions of an uprising in the past that caused the world or the country to be divided into 12 districts, from each of which two children get chosen in an annual gathering called “the reaping”.

The 24 tributes, some with special skills, but most of them with nothing but their innate sense of survival, are shown on television for the duration of the games, and an easy parallel can be drawn to the ubiquitous reality shows we have become so used to. Indeed, the question of whether celebrity is worth the loss of privacy is addressed head-on.

Although only the barest details are given about the historical context of the ferocious spectacle, the viewer quickly enters this world with the help of Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence) and Peeta (Josh Hutcherson), two teenagers who are unwillingly thrust into the limelight and thrown into the lion’s den.

Even before their names are chosen, there is unease in the air. The people from Katniss’s and Peeta’s district live off the land and profit little from the glitz, glamour and riches of the Capitol – a city filled with wealthy people who have brightly coloured hair and wear gaudy outfits. The tension between the two groups of citizens is evident.

Insofar as its depiction of violence is concerned, The Hunger Games is far more Hollywood than Battle Royale. Going for a wide audience, instances of violence are kept to a minimum, and even the few action-packed moments that remain are composed mostly of blurred shots in which it seems the camera – rather than the characters – is under attack. The film’s use of rear projection, during some spectacular scenes in which the tributes are paraded on arrival in the city, is also very poorly executed.

But director Gary Ross, whose Pleasantville transported audiences to a time of nostalgia that was both playful and insightfully critical, here tackles some very timely questions about the nature of celebrity and reality TV. He also stealthily draws contemporary resistance movements (Occupy Wall Street, in particular) into the equation as a way of saying the majority does not have to be victimised by the ruling minority.

The director’s use of the handheld camera, to put us closer to the events, has mixed results, although our uncomfortable closeness to Katniss’ face when she is onstage during an interview with blue-haired talk-show host Caesar Flickerman renders some impressive results. As played by Stanley Tucci, Flickerman has exquisite timing, and his act, close to slapstick, is pushed to its limits. But Tucci never makes the character a joke by going overboard. And this observation is applicable to nearly all the actors in the cast, who are made to be much more human than one would expect.

Even Haymitch Abernathy, who is assigned to mentor Katniss and Peeta, and is a former winner of the Hunger Games, is portrayed as more than a drunk loser who used to be great. In his portrayal, Woody Harrelson credibly conveys the conflicting emotions of hope and hopelessness that can easily crush the spirit of all the contestants.

Another example of the film’s surprising departure from the average fare is the first scene inside this enclosed area in which the tributes will compete: When they all rush toward their gear before heading off into the woods, the music that accompanies this moment is not a glorious orchestral number but a minimalist composition by Steve Reich. Of everything that happens in the film, this combination of audio and visuals is perhaps the most telling of Ross’s desire to make a film that is different from the clusters of forgettable fantasy films we get every year.

The Hunger Games is a cautionary tale about reality television, and it effortlessly mixes in contemporary politics to produce a very intelligent film that never seems like it is trying too hard to be relevant. The focus on the characters inside the world of the game is tight, and the pacing is superb, and few other similar films of this length (142 minutes) go by so quickly.

The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies (2014)

André Crous

Thirteen years after Peter Jackson’s first Tolkien film, his sixth offers little proof he has matured as a filmmaker.

The Hobbit: Battle of the Five ArmiesUSA/New Zealand
3.5*

Director:
Peter Jackson
Screenwriters:
Fran Walsh
Philippa Boyens
Peter Jackson
Guillermo del Toro
Director of Photography:
Andrew Lesnie

Running time: 140 minutes

This is one in a series of reviews including:
– An Unexpected Journey
– The Desolation of Smaug

With the release of The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies, the sixth and hopefully the last film in Peter Jackson’s canon of J.R.R. Tolkien productions, the New Zealand director has proved decisively that he is not so much a storyteller as he is a choreographer, or more particularly an orchestrator of epic spectacle. He trains his focus on presenting and overwhelming the viewer with the larger-than-life world where the magnificent story is set, but the way in which the characters behave or appear is often riddled with clichés that speak of his immaturity as a teller of tales or a director of actors.

Such an assessment may sound harsh and unjustified, especially because Jackson’s name, in connection with the world of Middle-earth, rouses much admiration for his ability to use or create a vast canvas filled with battles and wizards that seem part of a familiar reality rather than a fantasy. This third instalment is the best of the Hobbit trilogy, but as a whole, these three films are surprisingly disappointing in comparison with his work on The Lord of the Rings, released 2001–03.

The reasons for this are legion and range from the quality and scale of the books themselves to the much-criticised approach of breaking the short novel (The Hobbit) into three separate films. But what is particularly irksome is the almost soap-opera acting in the director’s most recent works.

From characters looking off into the distance as they digest bad news (the elves, in particular, are prone to such conduct, and sometimes the camera tracks in on their faces for even greater emphasis) to histrionic displays of emotion (e.g. the face-pulling that Bain, the son of Lake-town’s Bard, engages in), there is plenty of theatrics to undermine our suspension of disbelief. And the less said about the corrupt councillor, Alfrid, who is an odious fellow that ultimately dresses up in women’s clothing and scampers off with gold coins in his voluptuous bosom, supposedly intended as a source of comedy, the better.

As the title indicates, a giant battle is central to this final part of The Hobbit. It takes place at the Lonely Mountain, where the Dwarves, along with the Elves and the humans, have little time to celebrate the departure of the dragon Smaug, as they soon face hordes of Orcs and Wargs that seek to capitalise on the mountain’s strategic position and the riches that remain inside it.

Smaug, which lent its name to the second instalment, is killed off very early on in the film, and this death firmly establishes Bard’s significance and determination. Played by Luke Evans, this character is a mixture of emotion and bravery, but the actor ensures there is never any doubt about the character’s commitment to justice, and unlike some of the others, we can always take him seriously.

One would expect a film with a sub-title like “Battle of the Five Armies” to be about bloodshed and courage, but while there are such moments involving the two main characters, Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) and Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage), it is in fact more about friendship, loyalty and understanding than anything else. More to the point, it is about the necessity of living together in harmony, avoiding the dark side and allowing others to love whomever they choose. The sentiment is sincere, but Jackson’s attempts to make these ideas visible in his story are overblown.

He handles the relationship between Kíli the Dwarf and Tauriel the Elf slightly better than was the case in The Desolation of Smaug, only because these two spend very little time together. However, the back story to Elvenking Thranduil’s objections to Tauriel’s love offers only superficial psychological insights into his character that culminate in embarrassing final heart-to-hearts between him and his son, Legolas, and him and Tauriel. (He acknowledges he was wrong about the purity of her love when he utters the cringeworthy statement, “It hurts because it was real.”)

And for the most part, Jackson is content to keep using the same cinematic language he used in The Lord of the Rings more than a decade ago to render spirits. He also still clearly enjoys employing slow motion as often as possible. His aerial shots are used somewhat more judiciously than in Smaug, but when it comes to the photography of vast vistas framed on either side by steep mountainsides, we get the feeling of déjà vu.

The world the director depicts can be the same without him having to revert to the same shots and same framing he used on previous outings. Jackson’s back projection in some of his scenes is just terrible, and the composition of the shots is generally the same: Gandalf on a horse, or Legolas hanging onto a cave bat, shot from up close and well lit, with the fuzzy and more sombre background in motion behind them. One would never guess this is the most expensive trilogy in motion picture history: This film alone reportedly cost $250 million, or around $1.7 million a minute.

The titular battle, which starts exactly at the halfway mark and lasts for most of the rest of the film, is not nearly as impressively staged as Jackson’s all-time great, the Battle of Helm’s Deep in The Two Towers, because he focuses too strenuously on Thorin’s development from being a power-hungry king to proving his friendship with Bilbo. And despite the 145-minute running time, there are major gaps in the narrative, especially regarding the movements of Bard during this battle.

As with Return of the King, the ending takes a while and could have been much shorter, because the screenplay keeps dropping intertextual references to Jackson’s earlier trilogy that seek to dovetail this story with the other one. Poor Bilbo returns from his adventure a whimpering, stuttering mess filled with emotion, a sight we certainly could have been spared.

While the best (and, thankfully, the shortest) of the trilogy, The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies underlines what should have been obvious by now: Peter Jackson has substantial imagination and obviously enough technical know-how to conjure a world of wonder, but he lacks the ability to tell his stories without reverting to the most banal narrative clichés. Moreover, his actors are more or less left to their own (all too often defective) devices. The film will make a generous profit despite its astronomical budget, and filmmakers like James Cameron will likely follow the same path of simplifying their stories while maximising the visuals of the world they offer for the viewer’s consumption.

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (2013)

André Crous

In The Desolation of Smaug, the second Hobbit instalment, Peter Jackson takes an unfortunate page from Spielberg’s book.

The Hobbit: The Desolation of SmaugUSA/New Zealand
3*

Director:
Peter Jackson
Screenwriters:
Fran Walsh
Philippa Boyens
Peter Jackson
Guillermo del Toro
Director of Photography:
Andrew Lesnie

Running time: 160 minutes

This is one in a series of reviews including:
– An Unexpected Journey
– The Battle of the Five Armies

When the first film in the Hobbit trilogy was released, everyone kept talking about the disproportionate length of the films (totalling around nine hours) compared with the size of the source text, J.R.R. Tolkien’s 300-page novel. If War and Peace could be made into a three-hour film, what prevented Jackson from producing a film length commensurate with the size of his story?

It doesn’t take an outsized intellect to recognise financial considerations playing an important role here, and one would expect that, if anyone could entertain us for such an extended period of time, Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson would be the man for the job. But just as The Hobbit precedes the story contained in The Lord of the Rings, so too does this current batch of films seem to be the work of a much less experienced director.

Because this second instalment of The Hobbit, titled The Desolation of Smaug, is the second film of a three-part series, we cannot have expected there to be much to get excited about, as it functions mostly as a bridge between the first and last parts of the story. But the same was true of the second Lord of the Rings film, The Two Towers, and yet Jackson used majestic battle scenes and spectacular locations to his advantage to keep our attention.

Very little happens in Smaug, at least until the very end, when Bilbo (Martin Freeman) and the dwarfs reach the Lonely Mountain (Erebor), where Smaug the dragon has lain in a chamber full of gold ever since he chased out the dwarfs, to whose kingdom he had laid waste. For the most part, we are on a journey with the dozen characters as they travel through Mirkwood Forest, arrive at Lake-town thanks to a complicated and conflicted widower and cross Long Lake to Erebor, where Bilbo is charged with stealing the Arkenstone gem from Smaug. On a parallel track, we see Gandalf the Grey’s realisation that he and his companions are up against something much more evil than they had anticipated.

But our unease with this film has as much to do with the thin storyline – once more spread over some two hours and 40 minutes – as it does with the embarrassingly amateurish presentation of romance onscreen.

We can all remember the weepy relationship between Frodo and Samwise in The Return of the King; in Smaug, the focus is on Kíli the Dwarf (Aidan Turner), the nephew of Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage), heir to the throne, and Tauriel (Evangeline Lilly), a female elf from Mirkwood who is the object of Elven Prince Legolas’ affections. In the film, at any rate, Kíli certainly stands out among his band of brothers as he is the only dwarf without a beard, and when he and his fellow dwarfs are taken prisoner by Elvenking Thranduil, Legolas’ father, he immediately hits it off with Tauriel.

This initial attraction, in no way hidden, will quickly lead to the two swooning over each other. Jackson, for all his filmmaking prowess, simply cannot resist the temptation to go melodramatic on us. When Kíli is struck by a poisoned arrow in the thigh, it is up to Tauriel to rub the healing herb into his flesh while intoning a spell, and when Kíli looks up at her, would you believe, she seems to shimmer with a blinding angelic light. It is difficult not to laugh, as we get unfortunate flashbacks to the worst film in the Jackson canon, his calamitous The Lovely Bones from 2009.

Jackson’s camera also flies all over the place, often making us nauseous when a wild helicopter shot is inserted between much calmer visuals. For the director, it would seem that “coverage” implies catapulting his machinery in every direction and using that footage whenever he needs to cut away from someone for a brief moment. Reckless track-ins, especially in one of the opening scenes, in the Prancing Pony inn in Bree, are also tiresome because their use speaks to Jackson’s apparent inability to come up with creative solutions to creating tension – in this case, to suggest the potential dangers around Thorin.

One truly adventurous scene, however, occurs during the dwarfs’ escape from Mirkwood: At one point, the camera seems to be floating on the wild river and pans from side to side as one of the dwarfs rolls around in a barrel, mowing down the Orcs on the riverbank as he careers full-speed across the river bends. It is a breathtakingly choreographed bit of action, all in a single take, thoroughly reminiscent of the epic single-take chase scene in the Jackson-produced, Steven Spielberg–directed The Adventures of Tintin.

Smaug may be Bilbo’s tale, but it belongs entirely to the titular dragon, voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch. Smaug is much more clever than he appears to be, and while he certainly poses a threat to the existence of all in Middle-earth – and the glint in his eye looks almost exactly like Sauron – we cannot help but respect his intelligence and even his wiliness, and Cumberbatch’s work here is mesmerizing.

While Smaug isn’t at the same level as Jackson’s three films from the beginning of the millennium, and despite the often amateurish representation of romance or infatuation, it is certainly an improvement on The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, and time goes by more quickly (that might be because the film is nearly 20 minutes shorter than its predecessor).

Unfortunately, Bilbo is not as active as we would like him to be, and he all but completely disappears from view in the Lake-town scenes. After we had lost Gandalf in The Two Towers, he reappeared towards the end with reinforcements at Helm’s Deep and provided one of the most memorable moments of that extraordinary film. But by the end of Smaug, Bilbo has done so little that we forget about him, and the film literally leaves him hanging – in a cage at Dol Guldur, where he discovers the Necromancer.

The Desolation of Smaug showcases little of the imagination we have come to associate with Jackson and his previous depictions of Middle-earth. At times Spielbergian with his sentimentality, here he rarely awes us with the breadth of his vision. The scenes with Bilbo or Smaug – and especially with the two of them – are marvellous, and so is an early scene with giant spiders, but overall it would seem Jackson has lost his Midas touch.

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012)

André Crous

Peter Jackson’s adaptation of The Hobbit is faithful to the novel, but the epic length of this three-part production is unjustified.

The Hobbit: An Unexpected JourneyUSA/New Zealand
2.5*

Director:
Peter Jackson
Screenwriters:
Fran Walsh
Philippa Boyens
Peter Jackson
Guillermo del Toro
Director of Photography:
Andrew Lesnie

Running time: 165 minutes

This is one in a series of reviews including:
– The Desolation of Smaug
– The Battle of the Five Armies

During the 10 years that elapsed between the making of the epic trilogy The Lord of the Rings and the three films that compose the The Hobbit trilogy, it was unthinkable that anyone other than Peter Jackson could do justice to the original novel by J.R.R. Tolkien. Jackson had created a landmark piece of cinema that melded a vast array of special effects, motion-capture technology and epic storytelling to produce films that were held together by a very strong story and dazzled us with some remarkable set pieces in the genres of adventure, drama, fantasy and war.

Perhaps it is true that Jackson was the only person who could have made The Hobbit at the same level as the Lord of the Rings films, but it is a pity he wasn’t aiming higher. In his previous trilogy, he pulled together a disparate group of individuals – four hobbits, a dwarf, an Elf, a wizard and two humans – with a dynamic sense of tension, action and friendship.

The Hobbit doesn’t reach the same level of excitement or provoke the same interest. At the beginning of the film, we see the dwarf kingdom prosper before being attacked and evicted from their own treasure-filled mountain, Erebor, by the dragon Smaug. Shortly afterwards, Gandalf the Gray (Ian McKellen) knocks on the door of Bilbo Baggins’s (Martin Freeman) door in Hobbiton and manages to convince him, with some reverse psychology courtesy of a horde of dwarves – who raid his pantry – led by heir apparent Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage), to join in the journey back to Erebor, somehow slay the dragon and win them their kingdom back.

In this sense, the story resembles, in broad strokes, the quest of the fellowship in The Lord of the Rings; however, the group is by no means as interesting as in the other films. This weak spot greatly impedes our engagement in the social fabric, despite magisterial efforts by Freeman.

But there is at least one marked difference between the narrative structures of the two series. Whereas The Lord of the Rings was told entirely in the present tense, except for that exquisite prologue narrated by Cate Blanchett in The Fellowship of the Ring, The Hobbit is framed as a story written by the old Bilbo to his nephew Frodo. The cuts back to him, 60 years after the events, which for those who haven’t seen the other films or read the books spoils the story by revealing he survived the ordeal, border on the tedious, and Frodo’s appearance here also seems more like a cameo than a necessity.

There is little variety in terms of the storyline and its different groupings of characters, but the film reaches a high point when Bilbo is separated from the group of dwarves, finds the One Ring and plays a game of riddles with Gollum. Gollum, even more than Gandalf or any of the elves, is the one character from The Lord of the Rings whom we are really glad to see again, and every minute spent in his company is electric with tension and expectation.

There is one aspect of the film, however, that is groundbreaking, and this deserves to be mentioned in every review. Films are usually recorded and projected at a rate of 24 frames per second. That is the minimum amount of frames necessary to render a moving image that doesn’t suffer from the stuttering movements of early cinema. With The Hobbit, Jackson collected double the data and had many of the prints projected at 48 frames per second, a process that is called High Frame Rate, or HFR, coupled with 3-D effects.

The result is distracting as we are confronted with twice the amount of data as usual, and while things move at a more “natural” speed, it nonetheless seems to be too fast. It is effectively high-definition images, and with the three dimensions, rendered here more strikingly than in any other film this reviewer has ever seen, all pretense of fiction seems to disappear.

But, ironically, that is a problem. While the quest for so-called realism in the cinema is important for the viewer to feel somehow part of the action, there is a difference between feeling like you’re there and feeling like it’s reality.

Middle-earth is a realm of fantasy, and any illusion that the creatures are almost “real” will be easily rejected by the viewer, creating a barrier to our investment in the events, or feeling of being present.

Maybe it is merely a question of getting used to the HFR – it will almost certainly be used in the future – but this new technology would seem to benefit a documentary film much more than one set in a fictional fantasy land.

The two-dimensional version is much more palatable, and the same will be true of the 3-D version screened at the conventional 24 frames per second. In terms of tone and story, this first film, whose running time of 165 minutes is pure self-indulgence (the entire series is based on a book that is one-third as long as the Lord of the Rings supertome), is far from the success one had expected from Jackson.