The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2

Author Suzanne Collins originally conceived The Hunger Games trilogy as an anti-war story. Famously, the germ of the books began to grow one night when Collins happened to flip back and forth between a reality tv show and news coverage of the Iraq war. That combination of violence, voyeurism, and entertainment struck a chord with the writer, and she turned it into a Young Adult publishing phenomenon. The books were adapted into the very successful film series of the same name and now, the final installment, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2 has arrived in theaters.

Much like the films in the Harry Potter series, the Hunger Games movies have become progressively darker and more sophisticated in their themes and visuals. Despite its ostensibly teenage target audience, Mockingjay Part 2 is surprisingly bleak.  As our protagonist Katniss Everdeen leads a band of rebels into the heart of the oppressive, totalitarian capitol, certainly there are victories and successes, brief moments of romance and exciting action set pieces, but none of it feels particularly celebratory or worthy of a fist bump. Throughout the film, Katniss and the other characters wrestle with questions about who we consider an enemy or a friend, what lengths people are willing to go to in order to win a battle, and how reliable the information we get from the media and our leaders really is. Though it is a tent-pole blockbuster film, given our moment in history, Mockingjay Part 2 is an uncomfortable and sad film at times.

In one scene, a train full of refugees fleeing the devastation following a bombing rolls up to a station full of the heavily armed people who just dropped those bombs. Katniss tells everyone to lower their weapons, imploring for peace, but even as she’s trying to protect the refugees, one of them, sick with his own losses, puts a gun to her head assuming she’s the one responsible for all the destruction. Mockingjay part 2 deals with more ambiguity than you would expect and wrings a lot of tension out of characters trying to do what they feel is “the right thing” and having it turn out to be misguided, destructive, or naïve.  With everything happening in Europe and the Middle East recently, it’s hard to get any escapist pleasure from moments like this in the film.

But then like I said, escapism was never the point of the Hunger Games books or films. On the contrary, the futuristic setting and gleaming, good-looking American sweetheart lead actors just seem like a way of getting audiences to consider how we really feel about killing other people in the name of an ideology or a government, what we think about the voyeuristic nature of the 24 hour news  cycle and infotainment. The film doesn’t offer any easy solutions. It treats oppression, rebellion, violence, and war as inevitabilities, and suggests that there are no actual victors in war except for the people who get to write the history books.

Strictly as a film, Mockingjay Part 2 is pretty good with a few flaws. As usual, Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss manages to convey a wealth of feeling with a minimal performance, and her emotional presence carries the film. Katniss’s younger sister Prim plays a major role in the movie’s plot but gets almost zero actual screen time and no character development at all. The normally excellent Julianne Moore is also given very little to do in her role as President Coin and almost seems bored throughout the film.

In the end, Mockingjay Part 2 finally gives both its characters and its audience get a moment of peace after four movies worth of suffering. It’s hard-won and sad but peace nevertheless.

R.I.P. Melissa Mathison

Screenwriter Melissa Mathison died in Los Angeles earlier this month of neuroendocrine cancer. As a writer, she wasn’t particularly prolific. She only has seven big screen scripts, one English language translation, and one tv movie to her credit. Admittedly, that’s more produced scripts than most of us ever write, but compared to someone like Nora Ephron or David Koepp who have scripts well into the double digits, her output is pretty modest. In fact, her claim to fame might have been that she was married to Harrison Ford for almost 22 years and was the mother of his two children. However, that is not what Mathison was best known for. Her greatest notoriety came from this:

With input from director Steven Spielberg, Mathison wrote the script for 1982’s E. T. The Extra Terrestrial. The film, of course, was a cultural phenomenon, and has been referenced, imitated, and ripped off ad nauseum since it came out. When you adjust for inflation, it is also the 6^th highest grossing film of all time. Of course, much of that credit goes to Steven Spielberg for his deft direction and to the cast and special effects crew for making a stubby little puppet made out of rubber and foam seem convincing and compelling. But it is impossible to make a great film or even a good one without a solid script. It is the screenwriter who establishes setting, time, character, and action. It is the screenwriter who puts the words into the characters’ mouths that make us love them, hate them, fear them, and quote them. Mathison’s script not only gave us lines that are still part of our cultural vernacular but also provided us with unforgettable moments, like the sequence in which E.T. home alone in Elliot’s house discovers the joys of beer and proceeds to get drunk. But since he and Elliot have some kind of empathetic psychic link, the boy gets drunk too – at school. In the middle of science class when he’s supposed to be dissecting a frog. He frees the frogs, kisses the girl, and chaos ensues.

Mathison did that. Her words, her ideas. 

Of course, nothing else she wrote ever came close to the same level of success or fame. She averaged a couple of scripts per decade, including a biopic of the Dalai Lama called Kundun that was directed by Martin Scorcese. At the time of her death, she was working with Spielberg again on a script for his version of Roald Dahl’s The BFG. I look forward to that film to see if, once again, Mathison’s words and Spielberg’s direction can make some movie magic. 

In the meantime, while we all wait for what, unfortunately, has turned out to be Melissa Mathison’s swan song, remember some wise words she wrote a couple of decades ago:

The Peanuts Movie

When Charles Schultz retired from producing the Peanuts comic strip in 1999, he had been at it for 49 years and had drawn nearly eighteen thousand strips. He had embraced the marketing of his characters with enthusiasm, and thanks to a lot of Charlie Brown tv specials, Snoopy t-shirts, and Woodstock lunchboxes, Schutz made an estimated 1.1 billion dollars over the course of his career. Good ol’ Charlie Brown may never have been terrible at baseball, football, and kite flying, but he was an immensely profitable cash cow.

After his death in 2000, Schultz’s will specified that there were never to be any new Peanuts strips. His syndicate respected that wish and instead has printed reruns in the papers for the last fifteen years. However, the will did not forbid new material for tv or film. Consequently, we have The Peanuts Movie now in theaters. It’s a lushly produced computer generated cartoon that features the whole gang – Charlie, Linus, Lucy, Sally, Peppermint Patty, Marci, and all the rest.    

 

Though the technology and production are 21^st century, the story is strictly old school. The entire film is basically just a string of familiar jokes and scenarios culled from the strip and other animated projects. The main gist is that Charlie Brown is madly in love with the new kid in class, the Little Red Haired Girl, and spends the movie trying find ways to impress her. Throughout the film, all the familiar set ups are reliably present – Charlie fails at flying a kite, Snoopy has elaborate daydreams about being a World War I flying ace and battling the Red Baron, Lucy runs her psychiatric stand and still only charges five cents, Lucy’s still crazy about Schroeder, and Sally still calls the blanket-carrying philosopher Linus her “sweet baboo.” On the one hand, all of this feels almost too familiar and well-worn. A parent might wonder why he shelled out eight bucks for his daughter to see material she already has at home on DVD, but on the other hand, I admire that the film is actually true to Schultz’s spirit and aesthetic and doesn’t particularly try to tart things up for the sake of attracting teens and tweens. This is in sharp contrast to the candy-colored trainwrecks made out of Dr. Seuss’s material over the last few years. The Peanuts Movie is both as innocent and as slight as the original tv specials from the 50s and 60s. 

 

Visually, the film is an interesting combination of tactile, 3D digital rendering and what appear to be hand-drawn eyes and mouths for all the characters. For the first time ever, Snoopy actually appears to have fur, Charlie Brown’s trademark yellow and black zig-zag shirt has texture, and Linus has hair instead of just black lines poking out of his head. But their eyes and mouths maintain the same rough, hand-drawn feel they had in the strips and tv specials. Visually, Snoopy’s flying ace day dreams are the most lovingly rendered and compelling to watch.

For older viewers, The Peanuts Movie is a nostalgia trip of the first order. I sat next to two adult women in their 40s at the theater and every time Vince Guaraldi’s familiar music began to play or when Charlie cried out, “RATS!” they cooed and laughed and loudly asked each other if they remembered that from the Christmas special, the Halloween special, etc. But if you’re not particularly nostalgic about Charlie Brown, there’s a good chance that as an adult, you’ll be bored out of your gourd in The Peanuts Movie. It doesn’t have much going for other than its appeal to your childhood.

It’s meant for younger viewers for the most part. My six year old was perfectly happy through the whole movie, and I imagine she’s the exact target the filmmakers were aiming for. 

  

The Peanuts Movie doesn’t do anything to update this half-century old set of characters, but it will probably reenergize the Charlie Brown marketing machine for a new generation. Wherever he is, I’m sure Charles Schultz is happy that there will be Peanuts lunchboxes and Snoopy t-shirts for another fifty years.

Edward Scissorhands 25th Anniversary

When Tim Burton’s film Edward Scissorhands came out twenty five years ago, it was a modest critical and commercial success. Critics praised its gentle, fable-like quality and the chemistry between its leads – the it girl of the day Winona Ryder and an up-and-coming TV actor making the leap to mainstream film named Johnny Depp. It was only Burton’s fourth film, and certainly a departure from Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, Beetlejuice, and Batman. With 25 years worth of perspective now, it’s easy to see that Edward Scissorhands was filled with all sorts of important firsts and lasts. 

 

Most notably, it was the first collaboration between Burton and his go-to male lead of choice, Johnny Depp. Prior to working together on this film, the only thing Burton knew about Depp was that he has been a teenage heartthrob on the late eighties tv show, 21 Jump Street. Since 1990, the two have worked together on seven more films that have included everything from animation and a Broadway adaptation to a behind the scenes Hollywood bio pic and a couple of remakes of earlier films and tv shows. They are like a gothic Scorcese and DeNiro or Woody Allen and Diane Keaton with black lipstick. They seem to continue to inspire each other, even if the results of their collaborations aren’t always successful. Edward Scissorhands and Ed Wood are both great films. Dark Shadows and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow? Not so much. 

 

Besides bring the beginning of his collaboration with Burton, Edward Scissorhands was also Depp’s first starring role in a mainstream Hollywood movie. He had a bit role in Nightmare on Elm Street and a lead role in John Waters’ little seen Cry Baby, but this was the first big screen role people would actually see. It began a period of Depp wanting to resist the lure of studio Hollywood while still wanting to be in movies. Depp wanted to be a serious actor and regularly turned down roles in action movies and straightforward love stories because they were too conventional. It wasn’t until Pirates of the Carribean that he truly embraced big budget Hollywood and with a fifth installment of that franchise in the works, it would appear Depp is ready to ride that particular horse into the ground. But before he was Captain Jack, he first was Edward.

 

Another significant element of the film is that it was the final big screen appearance of Hollywood great, Vincent Price. Price has a cameo as the mad scientist who brings Edward to life but then dies before he’s able to finish him, leaving him, obviously, with scissors for hands. Price made his big screen debut in 1938 and worked consistently on tv and in films until the early 90s. His final appearance as a brilliant but misunderstood creator was a fitting final role for someone who been a leading man, a character actor, a voiceover artist, a chef, an art collector, and a dozen other things. Often Price is associated with just the low-rent Roger Corman horror films he did in the 60s, but there was much more to him than that. Edward Scissorhands is important for being the home to his final role if nothing else.

Tim Burton’s films are very hit and miss. Many of them just seem like exercises in style with herky jerky storytelling and thin characters. But when he gets it right like he did with Ed Wood, Big Fish, and Edward Scissorhands, he achieves a dreamy, quirky fairy tale quality that’s both memorable and lovely. Edward Scissorhands is probably his best film and still holds up after all these years. Check out the new 25^th anniversary version available on Blu Ray now.