BYOB 32312

DP/30: Detachment, director Tony Kaye

This is one of my favorite DP/30s ever. Tony is… Tony. Dive in and at least get to the part on John Carter. I think you’ll be hooked.

DP/30: The Deep Blue Sea, director/screenwriter Terence Davies

Review: The Hunger Games

“What do you think the Devil is going to look like if he’s around? Nobody is going to be taken in if he has a long, red, pointy tail. No. I’m semi-serious here. He will look attractive and he will be nice and helpful and he will get a job where he influences a great God-fearing nation and he will never do an evil thing… he will just bit by little bit lower standards where they are important.”

This quote, from Broadcast News, is always reliable. Written by Jim Brooks, spoken by Albert Brooks (no relation), it is one of the movie world’s clearest statements about lowering the bar gently, even enjoyably, until we all live in Hell.

And so goes The Hunger Games. The film is loaded with actors who are undeniably likeable and gifted. The concept is very compelling. The adapted/director has glossy skills behind the camera and a gift of dialogue.

So why is the movie like eating the white of a hard boiled egg with no salt, pepper, or any other flavor except “white?”

Simply, it does not have the courage of its conceit. Not for a minute.

The movie is about a nation that went through a rebellion 80 years before this story and a fascistic government which after putting down the rebellion, keeps down the 12 rebellious districts as best they can. One tool is The Hunger Games, an annual contest that selects 2 children from each rebel district to battle in a only-one-survivor show. 24 kids. 23 will die.

Katniss, played by budding superstar Jennifer Lawrence, has a little sister who has just come of Hunger Game age and a broken mother who has been unreliable since her father’s death. Katniss volunteers after her little sister is picked. There is also an insanely pretty guy she is attracted to who stays home after he is not selected for the games. (Saving him for Movie 2, I bet!)

Katniss is of the earth. She is tough. She is smart. And she is honorable.

That’s one character you know.

Josh Hutcherson plays Peeta, whose name is pronounced “Peter” through most of the movie until Katniss screams it correctly, making her sound like she’s in a community theater production of Fried Green Tomatoes: The Stage Show. He’s a bit of a cypher because we are not supposed to know if he is playing Katniss or digging Katniss.

That’s two characters you almost know.

And that is about all you will ever get. There is a crazy evil blond boy, who gets one line of character dialogue in the third act. And as is needed in any “meaningful” movie with 3 blacks in its entire cast, there is The Magic Negro, in this case embodied by an absolutely beautiful 13-year-old who looks to be about 8 years old. The character is named Rue. She appears from nowhere to innocently help our hero, breath purity into the proceedings and (don’t feel like spoiler warning the obvious). There is one other kid from the same District 11 as Rue… the only other black kid in the games. (Enter extreme segregation eyeroll here.)

What does it tell you when the movie’s website lists FIVE of the kids forced to play in the games listed in its “Full Cast List” section? There’s Katniss, The Boy, The Evil Kid, The Angelic Little Black Girl, and the Crazy Knife-Wielding Brunette Girl *(who is essentially the smart-ass version of the guy with the big knife in Raiders). That’s five of twenty-four, almost all of whom will be murdered by other under-18s. I found 8 more with character names on imdb and another 6 with non-descript character names “District Girl/Boy #.” So I am still missing five murdered characters.

The thing is… if your premise is forcing 24 teens and pre-teens to murder one another in a few days, shouldn’t your movie be emotionally invested in that idea? Isn’t that an idea that not only demands focus, but must be shown respect, lest you turn mass murder into something even less weighty than deaths in a first-person shooter videogame?

Do I think that Hunger Games is going to set some kid or kids off on a rampage or keep them from crying when someone they love dies? No. But will a slaughter in a foreign nation mean anything more to them after seeing this movie? No. Probably less.

Ironically, the Japanese film Battle Royale was all but banned in the United States when it was released a dozen years ago. It never got a theatrical. And it had only cult DVD distribution in this country until this month.

Watching it today, after having seen The Hunger Games and hearing from people who claim the books are not a rip-off of BR, I am not only reminded how much of a clear rip-off this film is (I can’t speak for the future books or movies), but I am saddened by how powerful the emotion – not just the violence – is in BR compared to Hunger Games.

I actually have no problem with a PG-13 version of this material. I get it. Business is business. But BR is almost a textbook of things that could have been done in Hunger Games that would have raised the stakes.

So much of it is nearly identical. There is an evil gamemaster (whose fate in similar in both films… though, of course, unseen in Hunger Games). There is a kitschy cheerleader type laying out the rules. There is a central love story, confused by another relationship. The largest kid is the most skilled, violent, and crazed. Etc.

The numbers in Battle Royale are different… 42 kids, not 24. All the kids are one high school class, not strangers from 12 districts. So it is a bit easier and there are more opportunities to get into ideas connected to specific characters before they die. For instance, there are multiple groups refusing to play the game as it is presented. One pair commits suicide rather than play. Another pair of tries to broker cooperation between all the kids. Another group, all girlfriends, decides to ride it out in a safe space and to try not to kill or be killed… at least until the time is running out. I value all three of these ideas, but I am not saying that Hunger Games had to directly reflect BR. Honorable suicide is cultural touchstone in Japan and not so much here. But these are real ideas… as active in concept as Hunger Games is purely reactive.

Also worth noting, in a film with a running time under 2 hours, BR manages to introduced every single kid and to note their demise at least twice.

As for simple guts, as an action tale, you need look no further than the start of the game. Katniss is warned, “If you jump off the starting pedestal a second early, they’ll blow you to high heaven.” (paraphrased) And then, the film proceeds NOT to have anyone jump early. That’s the kind of movie this is. There is a lot of talk about how deadly everything and everyone is… but they seem intent on keeping a movie about a mass murder event safe for a 12-year-old to see three times. So no one gets “blown to high heaven” for jumping early, thus mitigating the danger from the game itself.

Conversely, before the game even starts in BR, the guy in charge of the game kills a girl with a knife thrown into her forehead for whispering to others after she was told not to and there is a neck-splosion from the control necklaces each kid wears. These kids are terrified and they immediately know that the stakes are death and that death is real.

Another Hunger Games cheat – maybe from the book – is that instead of letting the kids fight a fair fight, the “gamemaster” adds all kinds of weird, badly CGed elements… like flame balls to push characters out of an area or CG monster dogs that are not only badly done, but, as so many things in this film do, distracts from the core idea of the story… kids forced to kill kids.

This is not a Paul Verhoeven movie or something that is aggressively satiric, like Series 7: The Contenders, made for adults, somewhat cartoonish, and poking us in our collective face with our lack of sensitivity. This is a movie made primarily for kids. Between 7 and 12 million kids under 18 will likely see this movie this weekend. What are we telling them when only two or three of the twentysomething kills has any attempt to make an emotional connection?

Is the movie entertaining, aside from my social concerns? Modestly.

The greatest failure within the narrow context of the film itself is the misuse of Woody Harrelson, Toby Jones, Elizabeth Banks, and Stanley Tucci, who gets most of his character work done by slapping in some giant teeth and smiling in a genuinely creepy, funny, and showbiz -familiar way. They hired some of the great scene stealers of the era… and get a couple laughs out of each. it’s almost as though they just didn’t want to go there… even though they trussed up the audience like the crowd that dances The Time Warp in The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Second is the failure to force or allow Katniss to ever have to seriously confront her own morality. She doesn’t kill for quite a long time and then, only when reacting to an attack. Our hero, basically, ends up behaving like every action movie sidekick that ends up taking care of business at the last second when the hero gets in trouble and the coward has no choice but to act. Twice.

Third is the abandonment of any strategic thinking that involves more than one step. This movie is checkers, not chess. Act, react, reset for the next scene. Oy.

Fourth is the irritating cutting that has never been seen in a Gary Ross film before. Someone needs some Ritalin. This is cutting that doesn’t push story forward… it’s just style. Bad style.

I’m sure there are more – wasting Donald Sutherland is almost as much of a sin as Wes Bentley’s stupid facial hair – but I don’t feel like picking the movie apart.

My guess is that most people will “be okay” with Hunger Games. I get that. It moves along and Jennifer is lovely to look at and you’ll never actually be surprised or be forced to care very much. Every emotion is simple and obvious. It’s a much better film, technically, than Twilight. But this film makes me appreciate the high camp of that series. It’s about a bunch of kids so horny that they can’t contain their inner animals. I’d love to see Neil Jordan’s version… it might actually be good. But at least it is what it is, not a faded copy as though the printer was just about out of ink.

No horns. No fire-breathing. No deep offense. Just empty calories.

Yes. The International Trailer For Prometheus Is Superior.

DP/30 Emmywatch: The Walking Dead, actor Scott Wilson

Ledes: The Hunger Games

I have so many ideas for a lede for a Hunger Games review… just can’t decide…

“If you made vanilla pudding that had just the right color to look like good vanilla pudding… and then you removed the vanilla… you would have The Hunger Games.”

“Makes the first Twilight movie look like a masterwork. Twilight is still a terrible movie, but at least it’s high camp ravioli filled with hard PG-13 lust. The Hunger Games is tofu with nothing around it to add flavor.”

“Anyone who claims that The Hunger Games is not a PG – not even a PG-13 – ripoff of Battle Royale has to go to an island and watch The Hunger Games over and over until they commit suicide. No one leaves.”

“It’s not easy to make a movie about over 20 children being murdered by state decree and still not offer anything remotely moving. And to take Stanley Tucci in a blue wig and oversized teeth, Elizabeth Banks in a pink everything, and Woody Harrelson in Jeff Daniels’ Dumb & Dumber wig and an audience full of people dressed as the “lovely party” sideshow that dances the Time Warp in Rocky Horror and only get 4 or 5 random laughs may be a crime against movies.”

“Not a wet eye in the house.”

“And Donald Sutherland as Colonel Klink!”

“Isn’t it a little offensive in this day and age for a movie to present governmental fascism, racial segregation, and the ritualized murder of children to keep a segment of society that rebelled decades earlier in line, and to have none of it carry any meaning… or any true horror for children? Is this film any less desensitizing than Grand Theft Auto? (The CG certainly isn’t any better)”

BYO Torture

The electricity in half of my home has been off for 3 days now… the computer/video production half.  Hopefully, it will be fixed tomorrow.

It is easy to blame one’s tools – or the unavailability of them – for a lack of productivity.  But I see it kind of like the weather.  50 degrees in New York in March is a nice day.  In LA, it’s freezing.  Is it an added layer of clothing or just all in our heads?

Trailers: Prometheus & Dark Shadows

Weekend Estimates by Klady High

SLUMP!!!!!!

Sorry. Couldn’t help myself. Box office for “Weekend 11” is down about 5% from last year. And it doesn’t need any magical explanation. Last year, there were three openers in “this” weekend (Limitless, The Lincoln Lawyer, and Paul), which grossed $45m combined. This weekend, 3 new openers combined for $38m. My sources tell me that $7m divided by $115m is about 6%, which more than explains the mystery of this “down weekend.”

21 Jump Street is a solid hit, outgrossing expectations, and as noted yesterday, right in line with Blades of Glory, ending the opening weekend, by estimate, $1.7m ahead of the old Will Ferrell hit (that totalled out at $119m domestic. Jump could end up being more than increased ticket prices ahead of Blades when international numbers come in.

Speaking of Will Ferrell, Casa de mi Padre is not the worst opening for a Will Ferrell film in his career. It’s #2!

It’s good to know that Summit, now that it’s eating Lionsgate, can have its consultants get some box office writers to claim an opening is Shinola when it’s clearly shit. But there really is no excuse for this opening. This quirky idea was never going to open to big numbers, but triple what they got was completely doable if the marketing ever reached out to Ferrell fans who will take the ride to weirdness with him almost anywhere. But Lionsgate, distributing through a shell, didn’t bother to do that, even though Ferrell is a very effective pitch man. And before anyone says, “But the movie sucked,” I’d point out that, A. It doesn’t matter. And the fact that Jump St is good won’t matter until next weekend either, and B. Thanks for your opinion, but if more non-junketeers had opinions, there might be a real discussion about what the film is trying to achieve… no offense to your personal opinion.

They blew the pooch on this one.

And we have already discussed Jeff, Who Lives At Home, which got a hard push from Paramount, but just couldn’t find the audience it deserves. I wonder whether the over-50s might have saved it. As is, it’s no commercial disaster, but it’s no hero either. All that will be left to shown for it is – taa-dah! – a good movie.

Speaking of good movies… The Artist is about done here, with an outside shot at $45m, but that’s about it. The Descendants is also playing out, stopping around $83m domestic. And Hugo will squeeze out about $73m. Looking forward to Clooney in the English-language remake of The Artist… The Artiste.

In limited/exclusive, the Israeli Oscar contender, Footnote, is doing nice business for Sony Classics and IFC has a hit with The Brothers Dardennes’ The Kid with a Bike.

Friday Estimates by Early Fox Klady

This 21 Jump St opening takes me back 5 years to a DreamAmount comedy called Blades of Glory, which people didn’t see coming… but was funnier than expected and much more successful than expected. Will Ferrell has a long history of these kinds of surprises… Jonah Hill doesn’t. But sometimes the pieces just fall together. Channing Tatum as girl-bait (as well as being funny here), Oscar-nominee Jonah, being the third high-profile teen movie in the last couple months (which will open the best of the 3), and the writer-directing team that has, once again, delivered beyond expectations. The number is slightly more muscular than Blades… befitting the rise in ticket price (a factoid which in this specific, narrow conversation is interesting and used more broadly is not).

Clearly, the negativity on John Carter cost it even more since last weekend’s opening. Brutal. And Project X is taking a hit from the new teen flick in the marketplace… and being brainless, boring calories.

Will the Summiteers point at Casa de mi Padre as an excuse for dumping Lionsgate marketing staff? Probably. But it will be silly. Hard to say whether, say, Paramount could have found a $9m opening there. It’s an odd niche product, but so was Nacho Libre.

On the other hand, Paramount couldn’t figure out Jeff, Who Lives At Home, which they (rightly) loved. The Duplass Bros film, which has been screening at fests for 7 months, somehow missed the part where all of its fans who write for a living became a singular voice, making this a must-see for intelligent adults. (Obviously, not 100% of people love it… but it’s had a wider embrace than any other Duplass or Duplassian work, so…) The studio kind of had the same problem with Young Adult, a film I am still mourning. (Perhaps coincidentally, Reitman and Mr Mudd are on this film as producers as well.)

I don’t see this as a problem of execution at Par so much as some kind of strategic issue. It feels, from the outside, as though when they have a good film with a potentially strong core, but a tough road to widening beyond that base, they do great strengthening that core and “forget” the support they might get from the rest of the media.

Don’t get me wrong. Paramount is clearly as strong as any movie marketing dept in the industry, if it’s not the strongest. But with so much big product, some of these smaller films are not opening the way they should… even when real loving care has been part of the dynamic.

BYOB 31612

DP/30: 21 Jump Street, directors Phil Lord & Chris MIller

DP/30 – The Raid: Redemption, writer/director Gareth Evans

Delivelution: DVD R.I.P. 1996 – 2015

It started with the DVD of Twister, which was released in Japan in 1996 and in the US in Spring 1997.

It ends with a wi-fi breeze, as, sensible or not, the studios are now officially getting out of the DVD business. By 2015, only pirates will be producing and distributing discs.

And yet, the technology to get off of discs and onto streaming and digital download as the primary delivery systems is, ahem, still unsettled. Not to put too fine a point on it, Ultraviolet is still buggy as the E.G. Marshall episode of Creepshow. It doesn’t work right on Apple computers, though you need to use your computer to plug the code from your DVDs into the system. It offers download as an option… but that doesn’t work on Macs or iPads or the like.

Ultraviolet promises a link to televisions – on some level redundant if you own the DVD/Blu-ray – but isn’t linked to Sony’s PS3 (as Nextflix, Hulu, CinemaNow, Video Unlimited, and Vudu are) or, as far as I can tell, anything else that will play on a HDTV.

A couple of days ago, WalMart announced the kind of deal that could have saved some record stores for another year or two longer than they lasted. (I’m pretty sure I wrote about this notion for music about 8 years ago.) It’s quite simple. For $2 or $5, depending on whether you own a Blu-ray or a DVD, you can purchase a digital copy of said film in a cloud.

They are calling it “conversion,” but in fact, there is no conversion. Like the digital copy option now on many DVDs sold at retail, all they are really doing is selling you a new product – a new delivery option – and adding you to the access list. Your hard disc is proof that you have already paid a larger amount to get this access at this price.

It’s very much like the iTunes cloud option, which will “convert” your music library into a cloud for $25 a year, so you don’t need to overwhelm your iPhone or iPad (max space, 64 gigs) with music and still have access to your entire music library at any time at any place. If your music isn’t available in the already existing iTunes library, they will load it to the cloud… but most record-company music is now in the iTunes library, so all they need to do is to give you access to their already existing massive cloud.

And now, Apple is doing a movie cloud as well.

Fore everyone who thinks of the industry as simply being greedy and stupid, this is a reminder of how stupid they are not. Basically, they are squeezing a bit of revenue out of a moment of change. By 2015, anyone who would care enough to lug a bunch of DVDs down to WalMart for “cloud conversion” is likely going to be paying for cloud access to much larger libraries that include the individual titles they’ll pay for in the interim. The price isn’t onerous. The service has value. And the next generation is already coming.

Meanwhile, this process doesn’t put a greater burden on the already buggy Ultraviolet, as these films will be available through Vudu, WalMart’s streaming service, which unlike Ultraviolet is already hooked up to more than “300 Internet-connected devices,” many of which stream to your HD television.

This is the quietly undersold part of this deal with WalMart. The Vudu. The Ultraviolet group is trading, in part, technology that isn’t quite working right yet for Vudu – WalMart’s company, bought in 2010 – which works well.

Things are now moving incredibly fast, as the industry’s faith in hard discs as a business has already bottomed out… and this is the part where the industry starts to look a bit greedy and dumb. They are rushing into a technology that has, essentially, the classic million dollar body and 5 cent brain. People keep quoting the percentage of web space Netflix is eating. Now imagine that traffic multiplied by 100… and you get some sense of the industry’s target. And then wonder… how is this all going to fit? And then add on… with AT&T and others throttling data use, how is The 99% going to pay for all this great “service?”

The easy answer – and you’ll hear it – is that the discs still exist, so it doesn’t matter… only so many people will convert to cloud service, etc. But once Hollywood starts turning the boat, the boat turns and not incrementally. It’s not always fast. That’s why I am giving it 3 years to make the change. But you can already see the signs of diminished interest on the retailing side.

Even in the WalMart deal, there is a big red sign… when you take discs to WalMart for “conversion,” you will go to the Photo area, NOT the Home Entertainment area. This is not being used as an opportunity for WalMart to make their Home Ent business stronger, but just to generate high-end foot traffic and also build the base of Vudu users, who they and the industry hopes will soon skip buying discs altogether and just buy digitally.

But to paraphrase Carl Gottlieb/Roy Scheider… we need a bigger internet. This seems to be the part where the studios are just like us. The internet is an extremely cheap delivery service, essentially. It’s cool. There will be circumstances in which over 100,000 people or even over 1 million people seek to upload one thing at the same time. But mostly, if you have Blazing Saddles on “your cloud” – which is really Fox’s cloud or Vudu’s cloud or Apple’s cloud – along with 50 million other people, heavy usage in any given 2 hours would probably be 1000 calls for that upload. Point is, it doesn’t cost them much to have every film sit on their server and be there when the call comes… because for most films over 2 years old, it will be more like 10 viewings per 10 million subscribers at a time, max.

But can the infrastructure of the web handle this exponential growth in use? Who is paying for that? And as the home wi-fi providers throttle that service in lieu of higher prices, who is going to pay for all this access?

No doubt, it will all work out eventually. There is too much money in play for it not to work out. I have long projected post-theatrical studio subscriptions to be a future $15 billion a year business for each major studio/subscription group.

But remember when word processing was buggy and unreliable and you lost a lot of work when programs crashed and you hadn’t saved aggressively? Remember how good typewriters seemed as the computers and word processing software slowly improved so this was not a constant threat?

Cloud life if coming. It makes too much sense. Anytime. Anywhere. But I don’t expect it to really work until near 2020. For 3 or 4 years, after DVD is dead and buried, it will be like torture… buggy and expensive. (see: cell phone bills, circa 1999.)

But here we go… ready or not…