The Hunger Games

The difficulty in approaching any film, especially one based on a popular book, is that of knowing and understanding history and where it might fit in.  It’s almost impossible to watch John Carter and not think of all the similar elements it shares with a host of popular movies from the 20^th century, and yet it was published far before those works and is clearly an influence on a number of them.  It is probably best to disregard the notion of ‘authenticity’ as being crucial to enjoyment when possible – though that gets tricky when you think of the number of films and TV shows that function almost entirely on the audience’s preconceived notions of a particular genre (think of everything Joss Whedon has done).  In a perfect world, pure originality shouldn’t matter.  After all, it’s the specific approach to an idea that pays dividends, or else you’re left with nothing but an idea.  In that spirit of generous critiquing, I can’t blame Suzanne Collins for writing a hugely popular book and then having it adapted into a successful film even though Battle Royale has existed for over a decade now.  That’s not to say it doesn’t matter, though.

The Myth of the American Sleepover

Late one night, in the waning days of summer, a boy and a girl sit on a floating dock just offshore from a high school party.  The girl, about to enter her freshman year, explains that she skipped a friend’s slumber party to be there.  The boy, about to be a junior, extols the virtues of slumber parties, and mourns the loss of childhood that comes with moving onto the more teenage pursuits of high school parties and social status.  “I don’t want you to buy into all this youthful adventure bullshit,” he explains.  The air of wistful mourning for innocence lost colours every frame of writer/director David Roger Mitchell’s The Myth of the American Sleepover.  Not necessarily mourning by the characters, but always by the director and, by extension, the film itself.  

Kids with Guns: Kick-Ass

I’m sure I’ve talked about the importance of tone in films before, and before I go back to that old standby when talking about Matthew Vaughn’s comic book fantasy Kick-Ass, I think it worth stressing how crucial it is (for the thousandth time). In most films, suspension of disbelief is paramount for engaging with the characters and story. This is not to say that everything need be believable or even logical, but if you want to be swept up in whatever experience the film can offer, the wrong moment can jar you right out of the picture. A consistent tone does well to maintain the suspension of disbelief in genre films such as Kick-Ass because, after all, nobody wants to find themselves aware of the real world when they’re meant to be escaping from it. As a digression, a good director making a certain film knows when to use a moment totally at odds with everything else around it to emphasize a point and, hopefully, get an emotional reaction (Richie’s attempted suicide in The Royal Tenenabaum, for instance). I’m not saying Matthew Vaughn is forever incapable of accomplishing this, but Kick-Ass is most certainly not that film.