#it was merely a little off handed thing for pathos or whatever the fuck

[fluffypotatey]

y’all ever been given the greatest epiphany on why your self worth is so fragile and it is all because of an off handed comment by your parent that they will never remember or connect the dots to how they treat you?

[oddygaul]

The Hunger Games Cinematic Universe

To preface, it does feel a little weird to critique these movies as if they sprung from nowhere. They’re all pretty faithful adaptations, which is relevant because many of my problems with this series are structural / worldbuilding issues, and so aren’t necessarily the fault of the adaptation as much as the source material itself. On the other hand, it’s pretty easy to rattle off some adaptations that took risks and made something fairly transformative - Jackson’s Lord of the Rings, or anything Masaaki Yuasa has adapted come to mind  - so fuck em, they’re fair game.

(I’d seen the first two movies a decade ago, and read the trilogy after that. Ballad and the Mockingjay films were new to me.)

The Hunger Games

Okay, so the original holds up as far as I’m concerned. What sets it apart from much of the post-apocalyptic or action YA that I’ve seen is ultimately how grounded it manages to keep its portrayal of all the kids. I think a lot of fiction with a similar premise tend to falls prey to Anime Syndrome: yes, all the characters are 16 or 17 or whatever, and the authors will make them do some classic teen angst things like get into stupid arguments and be deeply hormonal, but they fail to have the kids react to the horrifying situations they find themselves in convincingly. This is the plight of any battle shounen: the characters are literally fighting to the death against some manner of horrible supernatural monster, or even other human beings, yet will be written like a little devil-may-care badass, or even be stoked about getting to tEsT tHEiR LiMitS! If you’re going for a fun action show, that’s fine, but if you’re trying to sell it as a drama, you’ve already lost your biggest chip.

The Hunger Games (the first one, mind) never forgets that all its characters are young as hell. The absolute shaking terror of the cornucopia, the wide eyed panic as Katniss and Foxface come face-to-face and realize that neither of them wants to do harm, even Cato’s eleventh hour realization that his entire life and persona are ultimately meaningless*, all fill the story with a pathos that makes the movie work, despite some inherent YA cheese.

*Probably my favorite addition to the movie.

I really love the stupid-ass beard they gave this guy

Catching Fire

Yeah, this is where it starts to fall apart for me. The first act prior to the Games is pretty compelling; our look into Katniss’ PTSD, her and Peeta’s inability to reintegrate into society as if nothing happened, and the acute, sudden horror they’re slammed with upon realizing they’re being forced back into the games are all handled incredibly well. The first half hour of this movie feels like slowly waking up from a bad dream, only to realize you’re still asleep.

After that, though… eh.

I think what bothers me about the Games themselves in this one is that everyone taking part is an adult now. Part of what makes the concept of the Hunger Games so brutal is the age of the contestants - and not merely in a pearl-clutching, oh-jeez-it’s-so-horrible-to-see-this-violence-done-upon-the-youth sort of way. There’s just a special abhorrence tied to watching a bunch of children, who ought to have their whole lives ahead of them, slowly have the dawning realization that their whole world is now this mere microcosm, in which their only options are murder or death. Watching this emotional turmoil play out differently for each character is what makes the setup compelling; horrible, wrenching, but compelling.

So, having the idea for this one be that these grown-ass adults, each of whom has (by definition of being a victor) gone through this incredible trauma before, is willing to go back again and fight like it was the first time? I dunno, it feels goofy to me. And I’m not saying they have a choice to participate - I know it’s mandated - I mean that once they’re in the arena, half of them seem to go “oh well, here I go killin’ again!” like they’re clocking in for a job. It’s not like they’re sliding back into their old psychology by force once they’re in the arena, either - even in the training center, the careers are doing their usual sneering badass routine. You could make the argument that successful careers are the most likely to have child actor syndrome - that they stopped emotionally maturing after the Games and are stoked to be back in their element, Football Player That Peaked in High School style - but that feels so reductive.

I guess the fact that half of the tributes get in on the Secret Rebellion Plan kind of addresses this - they are working toward a goal in the background - but it still feels off. I wish the movie spent more time exploring the mindset of all the contestants before the games started to flesh out their motivations. As is, the Games here no longer feel like blood sport exploring the psychological response to trauma - they’re just blood sport.

Also, the violence feels very sanitized. Say what you will about the shakycam used in the first movie (it is undoubtedly excessive at times), but the confusion it provides combined with the blood makes the 74th Games feel absolutely terrifying. It gives the sense that no one is prepared for how primal things are becoming as the situation descends into a barbaric haze of violence. In Catching Fire, meanwhile, the bloodbath feels like it’s by-the-numbers for everybody - Katniss and friends group up and just start killin’ Bad Guys** right off the bat like it’s nothing, barely even watching their backs as they talk to each other. I read that the director of #2 and on made an intentional decision not to show blood, because he doesn’t like ‘glorifying violence’... I truly don’t understand how showing a bunch of characters cleanly and effortlessly killing other people like they’re in a Marvel movie is any better.

**This is just a symptom of my larger issues with the worldbuilding, but I really think the careers and their motivation get such short shrift in these movies. They explore it a bit in the first movie, but in Catching Fire they’re fully content to have the careers be easy Evil Bad Guys that the viewer isn’t supposed to feel bad for when they die. It’s another touch that betrays its YA roots, and reminds me of Harry Potter - “Welcome to Hogwarts! We’ve sorted you into the evil house for evil, no-good children, which exists because we need to have antagonists.”

This is also where the rebellion bits start popping up, but I’ll talk about those in a moment because…

Mockingjay I & II

…that’s what these entire movies are about and it’s so, so dicey.

Honestly, to me it feels like Collins had a great idea for a standalone book, but then, by dint of it being YA, was obligated to have the characters eventually band together to take down the big bad Capitol, and just didn’t have a great grasp on how the wider world worked or what a strong revolution story looks like. I think this story worked the best when it was only a small snapshot of the world, with all the periphery implied; the more it’s forced to get into the real nitty gritty of how the setting works, the more ramshackle and unbelievable everything feels, and Mockingjay is where it hits a breaking point. It’s not that there are plot holes, exactly, it’s that we see so little of the wider world that everything feels grossly oversimplified.

I think this is where these films’ dogged adherence to the source material really screws them over. While the books are also lacking in worldbuilding and context from the perspective of other characters, it makes sense there because the books are all first-person POV. Of course we don’t get cutaways to citizens in the Capitol ruminating on their role in all this, or seeing the inner workings of the Peacekeepers to give them any characterization whatsoever outside of being blank plastic suits, because Katniss doesn’t see that. Since the movies have fully done away with this conceit, though, the omission of these supporting scenes feels glaring - especially when the movies are trying so hard to push this theme that everyone has their own fight, and both sides have a reason for their actions.

So, on that note, thematically it’s a fucking mess. It dips its toes into a dozen different themes without really firmly exploring any of them, leaving it feeling indecisive and tonally inconsistent. For example, Mockingjay I spends its intro showing the effect Katniss’ PTSD is having on her, and challenging the idea that just because someone has gone through trauma, they’re a hero and ought to be set up as the mouthpiece of the revolution - how can you ethically put the responsibility of leadership on someone who gets the shakes every time they hear a bang? …but then, not to worry, show her a cool superhero outfit and she’s out there shooting down gunships with fuckin Hawkeye arrows by dinnertime.

And the wider revolution story has many similar issues. What’s your message? Dictators are bad? Wow, what a take. Both sides committed atrocities, so they’re both bad? Politics are hard and messy, and you just gotta keep your head down and hope you can retire to the country? Yeah, way to really take a hard stance on that one.

If I put all that aside, it generally works as a character piece - Katniss and Peeta’s development over the course of the story, in particular, is well done through and through, and it feels rare to see a broad appeal series like have the nerve to take its leads to such dark places. There’s also a lot of surprisingly great character acting throughout; my personal standouts are Hutcherson, Stanley Tucci, and (surprisingly) Woody Harrelson, but there’s honestly not a bad actor in the bunch, which is impressive. Still, with the subject material being so heavy, it’s hard for me just to take it at face value like that, and I wish they shored up the weaker elements a bit.

I’m just saying, if you spend that much of your screentime showing crowds of children being murdered by IEDs, I think you ought to be building towards a strong statement. 

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes

Yeah, this one felt like a waste of a movie in a really weird way. The execution was incredibly well done - lots of solid acting, production design, etc, which is a huge waste because the basic premise of the movie is fucking worthless.

So, the whole point, I would say, of doing a prequel is to flesh out interesting parts of your universe that you didn’t have time for in the original work. Unanswered questions, a character’s past that you want to learn more about, a deeper dive into parts of the world or lore that weren’t touched on but caught people’s imagination. The Hunger Games series has plenty of gaps that need to be filled: I said above how incredibly small the world seems due to barely exploring any of the capitol, other districts, etc., so it was ripe for a prequel or spinoff! Let us spend some time in other districts, see how other people live and feel about the whole thing. Even if we’re not going post-war, and are going back to the era of the Games (which of course we would), there’s 75 years worth of questions to explore.

Instead of focusing on any of that, the premise of this movie (/book) is “Hey, you know the villain from the original story that seemed like a huge, irredeemable piece of shit? Let’s spend a two and a half hour runtime telling you his backstory, which will show you that actually… he’s always been a piece of shit”. Wow. Spellbinding.

Now, there’s nothing inherently wrong with a main character being a bad person. Particularly, if your character is charismatic, they don’t necessarily have to be right or good to be interesting to watch; there’s a certain magnetism to watching that for a lot of people. It’s never been my cup of tea, to be honest; whether pegged as comedy (Always Sunny) or drama (Breaking Bad), I get fed up really quickly when I hate everyone in a piece of fiction. But done correctly, it can still be interesting - showing how a character ended up where they are, showing you a rare good side of them you’d never seen, or showing that they used to be moral, but just happened to be tested one too many times and fell off the deep end.

Snow is none of these. He’s a piece of shit from the first time we see him, he consistently acts like a piece of shit to everyone around him, and then he ends up, in fact, being a piece of shit***. What’s interesting about that?

***I think the most generous interpretation I could give of his character is a piece of shit who briefly dabbles in transactional friendship after Lucy Gray saves him from the rubble, then shortly thereafter returns to being a piece of shit. Which I still do not find especially compelling.

Even outside of that, it’s one of those prequels that does nothing but make the world feel smaller - rather than expanding on any of the dozens of untouched ideas in the series, we spend a bunch more time in District 12, and show that, actually, it turns out Snow and his hangups are the only reason anything happened in this universe for nearly 100 years. From Katniss’ name to the Hanging Tree song she sings, turns out half the things we learned in The Hunger Games resulted from this one particular guy’s life story. In a series that already felt like the world was too small and was in desperate need of expansion, further narrowing the scope feels like such a misstep.

Why yes, I did need to know exactly what the Kessel Run was!

Odds & Ends

I mostly blocked out my memories of Mockingjay the book from the single time I read it back in the day, because I thought it was booty, but the one thing I remembered liking that they changed up was Finnick’s death. In the book, he’s just there one moment and gone the next, without any fanfare or time to grieve, which serves to make his death feel especially cruel. I suppose it was inevitable, but counter-intuitively, the Big Hollywood Death Scene they gave him here felt a lot less impactful.

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A point about the series in general: boy did the costume design bother me. It’s interesting, because all I remembered about it from when this series blew up was the gaudy Capitol style and how crazy the internet was about it. Watching these movies again, I feel like that success was a total fluke, because everything else is goofy as hell. The way that every district has their own bespoke fucking Civil War re-enactment outfits is wild - look, the ‘District 11 is just one big Southern plantation’ thing was always really obvious, but seeing each district dressed up like they're from competing historical re-enactment groups was wild.

The prequel turns this up to 11. I feel like someone on the team though they were real clever - this one’s set 60 years earlier, so let’s make all the outfits and design retro! What? People in flapper clothes, the lake scene with their 1940s swimsuits, even the logo and graphic design in the Hunger Games broadcasting room looking like it’s from the 50s - it doesn’t make any fucking sense. Yeah, they’re set decades before the original books - in the year, like, 2300. What, everyone just forgot how to do graphic design again after the war? Fashion is cyclical, but not like this…

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Also, movies 1 and 2 in particular definitely have some uncomfortable racial dynamics going on. I was already weirded out that a lot of the districts seem to be separated by ethnicity, but as you go on, it’s hard to ignore how nearly every Black person seems to exist solely to help Katniss along in her quest before dying horribly and usually on-camera. Rue, Thresh, Cinna, even that old man that flashes the salute in District 11… it’s remarkably consistent.

[davidcameron]

David Cameron is walking down a hall in his big house. This hall - painted slate grey with a plum accent wall - leads from his bedroom to the guest bedroom and, because of ruddy corona, what a true shiter that has been, I mean, Christ almighty, a man can’t even go into a branch of Budgens and pick up a four pack of Red Stripes, a mint aero, some of those jalapeño pretzels, a Dr Pepper, one of those 500ml bottles, maybe some chewits, what else?, can’t even do that without having to put a bloody mask on, because of this effing corona, because of that the guest bedroom has been basically out of action for, gosh, getting on for a year now with this business, and David Cameron has quietly claimed the space for himself, creating a type of rec room, a type of, dare he say it, rumpus room, dad shack, den - and don’t say “of iniquity”, don’t say, “uhh, yeah, of iniquity”, in that sardonic tone, you don’t need to fill in jokes or telegraph jokes like you’re John fucking Virgo on Big Break, remember that?, “commentator’s eye” they would say when he correctly telegraphed a ball’s trajectory, there’s no need to provide your own jokes - man cave, dude ranch, for himself, even though he’s already got his games room, his office upstairs, his shed-cum-home-office out the back, and the second drawing room is basically his, and he has begun to move a few of his things - a couple of beanie babies (Schweetheart, Bananas, Kicks the bear), a life-size gorilla plush named Dazzle, a few Boofle bears and a couple of Boofle dogs, some Garfields and a big Snoopy he got in America - and has arranged them in such a way that the space utterly screams “David Cameron”.

But David Cameron won’t reach that rumpus-cum-man-cave in this story because check this out: about three quarters of the way down the hall (it’s a long hall), David Cameron encounters the ghost of his father. The ghost is dressed in fishing waders and both David Cameron and the ghost are wearing identical camel coloured bucket hats. “Daddy,” David Cameron says, in a high, wheedling voice (alright, look, “a high wheedling voice” you’re like, “errr…”, you’re like, “uhhhhhh… isn’t his voice already… I mean, come on… doesn’t his voice already sound… I mean… y’know… come on…. isn’t his voice already pretty…” that’s what you’re doing, but look, for this scene to have a moment of high pathos - like Balzac - it’s imperative that one is able to imagine, while reading it, that David Camerons’ voice is even higher and more wheedling than usual, that he is speaking as he spoke when he was a child, if you can take your Saturday Nigh Live-addled mind out of brothel of Twitter quips - “ooh, eleven hundred people have made the feral hog joke, so here’s my go at a feral hog joke”; not everything is a fucking joke, okay? Not everything has to be a fucking bit, you know? It’s impossible in this dog of a year, this crapper of a year, this toilet of a year, to write about David Cameron speaking in a high, wheedling voice without some quote unquote left Twitter Medium centrist dad Gawker Clickhole Deadspin quote unquote comedian seeing it, going haha, tapping their phone back to the Twitter app and posting something like, “what about if the feral hog said im baby” - then maybe you’ll be able to see this as a genuine emotional moment of David Cameron confronting the one true demon that we all have: the past) “Susie was mean to me again today, she said… she said I smelled of wee, Daddy,” just as he had said some decades ago, stood in the kitchen of his family abode in front of his father. Back then, his father, who was still alive at the time, had basically just told David Cameron not to worry about it and, anyway, little Susie’s mum was a complete bitch, doesn’t even say hello when you see her in the M&S queue, which you’d think she would after we had her whole hideous family at the garden party last year. Now though, in the present, the ghost of David Cameron’s father, whose face, in fact, though now wanly, yellowly ectoplasmic, translucent, resembles very strongly a particular Boofle dog, crouches down into, let’s say, warrior pose from yoga, the one where you bend your knee at the front and… just Google image search it if you can’t picture it, places his hand, his forehand… the hand that he has at the front… he places a hand on David Cameron’s shoulder, and it has a forlorn, yellowish coldness to it, a depthless cold, a fractal cold, spinning off out of itself like the fronds of a Romanescu cauliflower. “Son,” he intoned (said), “I have a sorry tale to tell you. Son,” he went on, sadly, a depthless sadness, a fractal sadness, like thinking about which came first: the chicken or the egg (it’s the egg, because that hatched into the chicken. But hang on, who laid that egg? Alright it was a chicken then. But where did that chicken come from? It came from an egg, so it must be the egg that’s first. Ah but…) “Many years ago your ancestor and mine, old Bobby “Fat Bob” Cameron was the first man in the world to operate a flushing toilet. In those days, almost as ignorant as our own, nothing was known of the so-called ‘toilet plume’, the efflorescence of urine that is thrust into the world by the toilet in the same manner that your wife’s Chanel Number Five is forced from its crystal vial, hangs in the air and drapes all over her… Anyway, son, as I was saying, little was known of the toilet plume in those days, and, being the very first - as we Camerons often are - old Bobby Cameron was enveloped in a rich fug of his own feculence, a real - as they said in those days - pea souper. Pee souper. Haha. Ahaha. Sorry son, whenever I tell this story I have to pause to laugh at that moment, even though what I am about to tell you is truly no laughing matter. At that moment the Cameron family, in everything they are and everything they do, was forevermore - because of the hubris of man in creating a device which effortlessly concealed his privations and unmentionables - cursed to faintly hum of piss, irregardless of whatever bathing or other self care routines they may take part in. I can’t believe I was laughing just now because as you can see, son, it’s a really bad curse. I must leave you now, son, you’re on you’re own. See you. Bye.” David Cameron, his eyes wet, looks upon the visage (face) of his ghostly father, its yellow hue now browning, as the leaves do in October or as piss does if you’re dehydrated, and, as it browned (like a pork chop does in the pan), it began to fade, eventually disappearing, gone, leaving the astonished David Cameron alone.

And was there - almost imperceptibly - the faintest tang of urea in the hallway? Was this ghost truly his father? Was this curse, this awful curse, real? Could what David Cameron just witnessed be merely the result, the excrescence, even, of the late night feast of three quarters of a jar of black olives, two pepperami wideboys and a Bombay badboy pot noodle that still roiled inside him? Was his own father fated to appear only as a vaporous yellow cloud, a fine mist of the type that you would give a treasured fern, but piss? Was he, David Cameron, and everything he had ever done and everything he would ever do, fated to stink of piss? Were those moments when, after a hefty one at the ballot box during PMQs he would sit down next to George, and George would give him a particular look, was that not just resting bitch face - which, by the way, he totally does have, whatever he and his Evening Standard cronies might protest - but his querulous nostrils registering that unwanted tang and recoiling, however much Comme des Garcons Wonderwood David Cameron had spritzed all over himself? David Cameron stands in his empty hallway (slate grey with a plum accent wall), and ruminates about the past and the future, thinks about piss, toilets, stinks, stands there for eleven or twelve minutes until his wife comes bounding up the stairs. “Ah, darling, she says, I’ve been looking for you, I just wondered if…” she stops right in front of David Cameron and also stops what she was saying and her eyes dart around, her nose twitches, and a look of revulsion and concern crumples her otherwise Hellenic (David Cameron has always thought) visage, “Oh no,” she says, “Oh dear, has the dog gotten up here again?”