TV/Movies Megathread

[Eddie Teach]

Season 2 wasn't that great, but momentum kept me going. Main problem was that, as all the bits with Barksdale's crew remind you, the focus of the season was on a sideplot and very loosely connected with the focus of the series.

However, the main problem I have right now is the writing's slipping. The cops all seem a lot more stereotypical than they did first season. The only interesting characters left* are Stringer and Omar(who hardly ever shows up). I especially don't like how they've dumbed down McNulty.

*Though Littlefinger shows potential.

[The Brain]

Season 2 is a chore (Polacks zzz). Season 3 is OK. Season 4 is really good IMHO, the kid shit works. Season 5 sharks are increasingly getting jumped and journalists are inherently uninteresting.

PS Omar is gay.

[garbon]

PS Omar is gay.

Well yes, you learn that in Season 1.

[Josephus]

Decent blog on Star Trek Voyager...for those interested:

http://www.avclub.com/articles/star-trek-voyager-accidentally-presided-over-the-f,98207/

[CountDeMoney]

Went to go see Star Trek: Into Darkness today.  I shall write about it after I feast.  I am torn about it, however.

[11B4V]

Decent blog on Star Trek Voyager...for those interested:

http://www.avclub.com/articles/star-trek-voyager-accidentally-presided-over-the-f,98207/

I could never get into that or Enterprise.

[11B4V]

Watch Oldmans Tinker, Tailor, etc. Not bad, Oldman and Cumberbatch did a good job. Just seemed glossed over. C+.

I did order the Alec Guinness version. I have feeling it will be better.

[Ideologue]

If you agree with the pack you can write content free reviews like Ide and nobobody (except languish) will question you.

Fuck you, that's your content.

This is definitely shaping up to be the year that professional reviewers lost the mandate of heaven, though--well, such as they had it in the first place (a 40-odd score for Tron: Legacy suggests it was given up a long time ago ).  The big movies they have (by majority) panned, at least the ones I've seen, have been great (Oblivion, Pain & Gain, Gatsby) and every big movie they have so far (again, by majority) acclaimed has been quasi-crap (Iron Man 3, Into Darkness).  They managed to be right about Oz, I guess, although even that is technically fresh.

P.S. I don't know what you're talking about with regards to Fantastic Four.  The fluctuations you see are statistically insignificant: that movie is not entertaining.  The second one is okay--and I mean middlingly okay--but my recollection is that the first one is a real fart.

[katmai]

This is definitely shaping up to be the year that professional reviewers lost the mandate of heaven, though--well, such as they had it in the first place (a 40-odd score for Tron: Legacy suggests it was given up a long time ago ).  The big movies they have (by majority) panned, at least the ones I've seen, have been great (Oblivion, Pain & Gain, Gatsby) and every big movie they have so far (again, by majority) acclaimed has been quasi-crap (Iron Man 3, Into Darkness).  They managed to be right about Oz, I guess, although even that is technically fresh.

[Sheilbh]

Season 2 of the Wire's my favourite. It's got a beautifully elegiac tone to it.

[Neil]

Season 2 of the Wire was really good.  It was nice to see that Baltimore was about more than the Barksdale crew slinging drugs and the cops trying to catch them, but at the same time we don't lose touch with our friends.  Chris Bauer was super-good.

Oblivion was a good movie.  I think I enjoyed it at least as much as I did Iron Man 3.

[katmai]

Oblivion was a good movie.  I think I enjoyed it at least as much as I did Iron Man 3.

My comment was more directed to other two film quoted

[Neil]

Oblivion was a good movie.  I think I enjoyed it at least as much as I did Iron Man 3.

My comment was more directed to other two film quoted

I haven't seen either.  The Rock is generally pretty funny in roles where he can be a little out there, but that doesn't make a movie.  Be Cool might have been the worst non-Random Hearts movie ever, for example.  I'm not sure that Gatsby is my speed.

[Ideologue]

Yeah, while I am a booster, I will freely admit that Gatsby can not and will not be everybody's cup of tea.

***

The Hunger Games (2012).  There are times I regret not getting out to the theater more often before about a year ago.  Watching Tron: Legacy for the first time the other night, I was overwhelmed with joy but my happiness was tinged with sadness that I'll never get to see it on the big screen.  And then there are times I watch The Hunger Games, and I reckon, heck, it all evens out.

In case you haven't seen it, the concept is more-or-less Battle Royale except taken seriously, and therefore worse in every category you could think of, and many more you likely wouldn't.

The Hunger Games began as a bold experiment in shareholder value, when in 2011 Lionsgate decided to make a science fiction blockbuster without a tripod, crane, steadicam, a single inch of track, nor one sober adult with two functioning hands.  (There may have been a dolly, missing a wheel; and I understand aerial shots were done by throwing the camera in the air and having the actors try to catch it when it fell.)  The experiment worked: seven hundred million dollars, worldwide, on a budget of less than eighty.  Finally, the visually impaired had a movie made just for them.

There are stretches of The Hunger Games that feel like days, though even without exaggeration they must go on for over a quarter of an hour, and perhaps surpass the thirty minute mark, where the camera literally never stops moving, and this movement is not graceful.  You could have replaced cinematographer Tom Stern with a dog and tied a camera to its head, and you would have made a superior choice.  The only well-framed sequence in the entire movie are the ending credits.

The unique palette for The Hunger Games was achieved by an exclusive agreement between Stern and the abstract concept of paleness.  It takes a special kind of sub-genius to decide that the proper look for a movie that takes place 90% out of doors is a nearly-uniformly cool, unexciting, quese-inducing color scheme.  And, as for the parts that do take place indoors, it takes a true visionary to believe that a movie whose principal and indeed sole strength is its costume and set design should be lit less flatteringly than my cube farm's bathroom. According to IMDB, Tom Stern once saw Minority Report and said, "That's too bright, too warm, too inviting to actually look at."  The same source reports that Tom Stern saw Flash Gordon and his testicles immediately retreated into his body.

The really funny part about the sickly look of The Hunger Games is when you find out that the scenes on the game grid (or whatever) were filmed in the same area of North Carolina where Michael Mann did The Last of the Mohicans.  I know that these are beautiful woods, but you would never believe it from seeing them photographed like this.  And, I admit, I felt a sense of guilt upon learning this; perhaps I could have stopped all this somehow.

It's not all Stern's fault, though.  Besides the trivial fact that director Gary Ross, as well as a number of producers and other decisionmakers, must have signed off on his thoroughly despicable visual aesthetic, or even instructed him that this was what was desired of him, let's also not forget that there were two editors involved in making Stern's garbage photography flow.  I am not at all convinced, however, that Stephen Mirrione and Juliette Welfling actually worked together, spoke to one another, or even knew another editor was actually operating upon the film.

Why am I naming all these ancillary people?  Because they're on the proscription list.  Anything henceforth done by anyone associated with this movie should be viewed in the dimmest (palest, grayest) light possible, and treated with the utmost caution.  Personally, I'd have them exiled, but unfortunately it's not up to me.

And yet here's a silver lining to all this cinematic placenta: it means that actual behind-the-camera talent was not wasted on a story of zero value whatsoever.

"Battle Royale but taken seriously" only scratches the surface of what a creative black hole The Hunger Games is.  The central premise is not only wholly derivative of that much better film but, indeed, also slightly more stupid than just sending a class of Japanese schoolchildren to fight to death on an island as an object lesson to other students.  Imagine a future that can roughly be described as The Truman Show meets Spartacus meets Gone With The Wind, where adolescent "tributes" are randomly taken from "districts" to compete in a Netflix original series in gladiatorial-style to-the-death last-human-standing free-for-all combat (despite their [theoretically] hilarious variations in physical size, cognitive development, and training).  The hunger games are apparently of great interest to viewers, despite the fact that it is stated, several times, that most challengers die from exposure or dehydration, which is no doubt ABSOLUTELY SPELLBINDING to watch in real time.

The rationale behind the games is perpetual punishment for a rebellion which occurred nearly a century prior.  This permanent Super-Reconstruction is believed, somehow, to be conducive to social stability; indeed, it apparently is.  A riot occurs after the death of one district's tribute (according to my girlfriend, this riot was started by the dead girl's father, but the only visual indicator of their blood relationship is that they're both black, so you can charge this movie with casual racism too if you so wished).  A riot as a result of the state kidnapping, enslaving, and murdering children?  How unpredictable.  I'm sure that's the first time that's happened in these 74 years.

There is also the competition for sponsors, who can give the contenders in the game stuff via balloon, but this is almost interesting, so I'll skip it, like the movie does except when it requires some false danger to be dealt with by dei ex machina.  I'll note here briefly that nothing clever is done by way of connecting the concept to Internet culture or the erosion of privacy or the quest for fifteen minutes of fame even at the cost of blah blah blah.  A hundred years hence, we'll have advanced in our methods of televised presentation no further than what Kristoff was doing in The Truman Show, though our beard technology will have grown far more sophisticated.

Battle Royale is, I should say, not a significantly more intelligent movie, but its minor edge in brains is decisive: Battle Royale was smart enough to know that it wasn't smart, and more importantly smart enough to recognize that the only compelling reason to buy this kind of malarkey is because it comes with the entertainment of watching teenagers murder each other in creative ways.

Too bad The Hunger Games is a two hour and twenty minute exercise in forcing your eyes to stay on the screen, though not because of its weak and impotent PG-13 attempts to depict graphic violence.

But we can be fair, and judge this movie on its own terms.  It doesn't want to be fun, it wants to be harrowing.  It's a shame then that it can't even succeed at its own poorly chosen goal, since our protagonist (Jennifer Lawrence), a young woman with a silly future-person name, keeps having her hard choices made for her, throughout the film, right up to and including the climax.

For example: Lawrence gets a little girl helper about halfway through the movie.  Will Lawrence be forced to choose between executing a twelve year old girl, and her own survival?  Will they even play up that tension?  Of course not, the little girl is javelined to death by a practically nameless and faceless older kid about ten minutes later.  Will Lawrence hunt the killer down and avenge her small friends' death with a deliberate homicide?  Will she wrestle with the idea of consciously taking a human life?  Is this how they will develop tension?  Nope.  She instinctively shoots him with an arrow.  Or maybe it was a woman, as javelin-person was onscreen in only about five shots, i.e. roughly 7.5 seconds.

Basically every turn of the plot is like this--the protagonist makes few moral decisions, and perhaps only one right at the end, when her and the last survivor enter a suicide pact to maintain their dignity in the face of slavery and deprive the viewers of a victor (so what? never mind, this apparently is bad).  A suicide pact, you ask?  Hunger Games did tell you it was hard core.

Ha ha, just kidding.  They change the rules (for the third time, by my count) so that there can be two victors after all.  It's all gonna be okay, kids!

Yeah, Spartacus and Antoninus this is not.

No, a spectacle of ineptitude and cowardice like this comes along rarely.  I like to think this movie was made along similar lines to the hunger games themselves: everyone involved was selected by lot from arbitrary jurisdictions, given random equipment, and told to make a movie, or die.  You see that camera shaking?  It's because the man holding it is afraid.

F

P.S. Can you believe that the guy who directed this also directed Pleasantville?  That's a big WTF.  Another fun fact--he's apparently directing the remake of The Creature From the Black Lagoon.  Hell's bells, what a rotten piece of news.

[Admiral Yi]

wut?