Look deep into the screen, my children. Any screen, all screens --this is your new reality: screens in the classroom -- a big one instead of a blackboard, linked to the laptop on your desk; the phone on which you secretly watch movies with a well-concealed earbud instead of watching the screen your teacher is pointing at; screens on the way home on the bus (your phone again) or car (DVD player above the dash + phone); screens at home (which you watch with one eye on the phone screen), the big flatscreen in the living room, the small one in your room, your laptop and phone still flickering as well... wake, and repeat. How many more minutes of life can the screen co-opt? There aren't any left. There's not even room for any more overlaps. You'll need ADD just to keep up with the future generations able to watch four movies at the same time without losing focus on a single one (while watching just one will drive them insane with restless leg syndrome and cell phone finger twitching).
With their action figure and video game readiness, teenager-based dystopia sci-fi is all the rage -- and three recently-released big budget Blu-rays (I watched them all in the same weekend --consecutively) speak to this proliferation of screens, proving themselves to be great examples of what Guy Debord called recuperation. These big budget, mass-marketed teen demo-skewed tales of 'being an individual' use the trappings of rebel youth subversion in service of the institutions they're allegedly subverting (i.e. the Che Guevara emblem used on a Bud Lite bottle: "Viva l'revolution... responsibly."), tapping deep into the product placement pulse of teen fantasy nerd America, and bringing forth all the synergy and branding money that it implies--! Piggyback on, Jackie! Wonder Twin Towers Activate! Form of Coors Lite... Ice!
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KICK-ASS 2 (2013) nearly drowns here and there in coming-of-age platitudes about being yourself and collecting 'wherever outlaws rule the west' merit badges come sailing down the Donkey Kong ladders of your life along the way. If that justifies dressing up in goofy costumes and sticking your pretty face harm's way, all in the name of a safe America, then Yog Soggoth blessings on you, but you're loco. On the other hand, if, like me, you loathe the hypocrisy behind the bloodless PG endless ammo expenditure and zero body count of the old A-TEAM show (or T2's "Casualties Zero" Arnold eye screen scrawl), then its use of plenty of blood and realistic damage done to property, life, teeth, and limb makes KICK-ASS 2 a priceless precious thing, as gleeful in its sociopathy as Wendy Kroy, Alex and his Droogies, or Mr. Blonde.
That's the real lesson here: just because you promise something to an adult doesn't mean you have to deliver on it. And don't hide anything in your room. Searching your kid's drawers for drugs seems to be the 'in' thing these days. Kids acting weird? Search their drawers. The moral? Kids, hide your drugs outside your window, on a string, like Don Birnim's bottle in THE LOST WEEKEND!
Complain all you want, and some have --even co-star Jim Carey (I think he took his kids to the premiere, and was shocked at all the beheading)--but to me the film's absurdist brutality-- its gleefully 'real' cartoon violence-- is a long sigh of relief after an eternity of teen-friendly action movie bullshit. That said, the romantic / sexual elements are sexist and cliche'd. Night Bitch (Lindy Booth) has a great midriff but she's subjected to a strange rape gag which I did not care for. I also don't like that Carey's character would be so stupid as to crate his attack dog upon realizing he's under attack. Someone breaks in your house you don't lock up your attack dog! Schwontz, indeed! It makes no sense, like an NRA member hearing burglars downstairs so quick locking up his bedside gun.
But the rest of it is sublimely subversive, whether in a deliberate STARSHIP TROOPERS crypto-fascist qua-intentional way, or just unconsciously ultra-violent, it doesn't matter. With Hit Girl + her awesome vampire in LET ME IN and as Jack's nemesis Callie Hooper in the much-missed 30 ROCK, Chloe Grace Moretz is the promise of Angelina Jolie's Lisa in GIRL INTERRUPTED fulfilled. Unlike Jolie, whe's not squeamish about ripping someone's throat out with her teeth. Viva la revolution... irresponsibly, as Thanatos intends!
Speaking of revolution, HUNGER GAMES: CATCHING FIRE (2013) isn't fun or romantic or at all pleasant, but after a grueling angry week of work (or school) it's certainly cathartic. Snide observers might dismiss Katniss' (Jennifer Lawrence) as just another morose girl who likes hunky boys to fight over her, and who prefers the company of a guy shorter than her ("so he can look up to me, so I can be his ideal") but really loves a hunky taller dude. This time we barely explore that by-now dulled triangle (except as an oblique analogy to Hollywood's lavender marriages) instead Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) is depicted more like the uncooked egg schoolgirls carry around during reproductive health awareness week. While her rightful man (some Hemsworth or other) is off fighting the real war; Katniss coddles and protects Peeta with the zeal of a neurotic mother hen. He's near-grown, Katniss. Let lil' Peeda stand up by himself.
What works best is how well the film nails down the nerve-shredding implication that 24/7 media coverage not only destroys stars like Britney, Amy, and Lindsay, but our civilization as a whole, leading to a globally catastrophic intensity wherein celebrity hinges on survival and failure to smile with casual joie de vivre when cameras are present--or to be convincingly smitten by some designated short guy before a live studio audience--ensures your family is killed and your village fire-bombed.
The concept is ingenious, because HUNGER GAMES is a cottage industry at its own throat, equating its depicted future dystopia with an endless flow of diegetic paparazzi, make-up chairs, TV promo circuits, award shows, tedious applause, and all the red carpet press sound byte droppings that are a parallel to the grueling regimen of its meta/non-diegetic modern starlets.
Perhaps to metatextualize these implications, Jennifer Lawrence spends most of the movie caked in enough bronzer to weigh down three Cleopatras on a death march backwards through the uncanny valley. Her glum face beneath this load would be too much to bear without some of her old spark, and it ain't there, honey, so thank god Jena Malone shows up, a champion from one of the other districts, to pick up the badass bitch slack. Malone looks great in her black and silver uniform, or naked in an elevator, or spattered in blood, stealing ever scene she can while JL's Katniss mistakes glum moping for world weariness.
All the old cast is back as well, including Donald Sutherland as the evil emperor, a decadent fop whose refusal to grasp even the most basic tenets of social psychology makes his tenure as leader the most unrealistic thing about the film. Here's a man who genuinely believes he can quell a revolution by publicly executing and flogging anyone who makes a Girl Scout sign. For a man whose reign hinges on TV propaganda, you'd think he would know enough about mass media by now that all he'd have to do to quell rebellion is give out mockingjay symbols as keychains, T-shirts and bumper stickers, and have his Stanley Tucci greet the TV audience with it (in short, komrade, to employ recuperation), the way MTV has done to every underground music movement since its inception. Draconian brutality never works in quelling revolutionary symbolism, Donald! It all but ensures it. It's like dropping napalm on a peace symbol bumper sticker to end the hippie movement. You end the hippie movement by getting Nixon to say "sock it to me" on Laugh-In.
The reason why Sutherland doesn't do that of course is inherent in the marketing for the film itself; as he lurches about on his pre-set dictatorial track, it's as if the Donald is trying to throw us off the scent of Lionsgate's own ingenious use of recuperation by showing his own obliviousness towards such a practice. As those 'mockingjay' pendants are on sale just a few stores down from the multiplex at Forever 21 or Mandees or wherever, it would be conflict of interest for the evil emperor to endorse them. They mustn't get wise, these kids. A happy consumer is an unconscious consumer, even if what's being consumed is the notion of waking the fuck up.
Other HUNGER signifiers are probably not going to be sold at the multiplex, regardless, such as the garish fashions worn by the hoi poloi. With their frills and pouffiness drawing groaningly obvious parallels to both the Reagan 80s and the French Revolution, the series offers enough hammering on the dividing wall between the champagne and canapés of the sophistos and the hunger of the peasants to make even D.W. Griffith's ORPHANS OF THE STORM seem Rohmer-esqely subtle. That said, there are moments when Elizabeth Banks as the agent-PR maven looks mad hot in her gold trim, and this go-round she gets a few scenes to act instead of just playing the shrill press agent mouthpiece for plot exposition. I still don't like those terrible fake color eyebrows...Then there's a rare treat, lacking in the other films discussed here: a genuine drunk hip older dude, one of the few 'understandable' adult characters in this or any of the series currently marketing themselves to teens: Woody Harrelson. Advising Katniss how to blend in, make friends, and learn to think outside her box, and to have a damned drink once in awhile. He also eats when food is offered and gamely drinks this wretched dystopia out of focus, freeing himself for better things other than validating Katniss' useless sulking and refusing all offered goodies, as if eating a single hors d'oeuvre would make her 'part of the problem.'
The most original element is the central bizarro twist of having to imagine spending all your time with the dude you don't like, yet must pretend to love, and he's shorter than you, while your true tall love galavants into the firestorm. And the short guy's so sweet and staid, and supportive, he only makes it worse. That tweens are swooning for him out in the real world, only shows there's still hope for short, staid guys.... and hope is a dangerous thing.
(check out this great paranoid rant about the Girl Scout / Katniss salute on the Dismantle the Beam Project!)
ENDER'S GAME (2013) is far removed from all that tweenage love nonsense, but there's a lot of care and time spent getting the glistening eyes of the space bugs exactly right. Luckily Asa Butterfield's Ender is allowed to be kind of fourteen year-old Hannibal Lecter instead of just a 'normal' kid like the kind only a Morris Chestnut would think really exists. Recruited by Harrison Ford via the old LAST STARFIGHTER tactics and put in charge of a drone armada to fight a bunch of STARSHIP TROOPER-esque space locusts, Asa's 'Ender; is legitimately scary and sociopathically over-calm. And its awesome.
I hated LAST STARFIGHTER and its bland 'every lad' gets recruited to save the world because he plays video games well. I didn't mind the hunky ciphers in STARSHIP TROOPERS because we were supposed to think of them as caricatures, not as 'normal suburban teens' as imagined by guys who haven't seen ever seen on. But Ender is different. He's a weedy ectomorph but can defend himself with devastating Lecter-like economy. Underneath his nervous morphology and liberal guilt lurks the heart of a carnivorous killer. His nebulous doubts about the rightness of his mission are played up but we never really get the full HEARTS AND MINDS story before the reverse of the climactic battle of BREAKING DAWN smashes through our screens and from there they start setting up the hoped-for sequels. The film's structure ingeniously keeps the space war stuff on the screens within the screens (knowing we've seen it all before) and secondary to the Starship Enterprise-ish minutiae of commanding a row of similarly young and gifted kids sitting at drone computer screens. And hey, it's what the military is doing right now with drone programs! THE LAST STARFIGHTER really is coming true!
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| Real life drone pilots at their consoles |
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| The last thing any kid wants is to see an 'average' kid like themselves in a sci-fi movie. We go to sci-fi to get AWAY from that shit, dumbass. |
As in CATCHING FIRE, ENDER wants you to want the sequels, to get the DVD, see it again on the IMAX, in 3-D, commit to it, for it only earned, so far, a paltry sixty million, little more than half its budget. I wish my interest in seeing sequels to under-performers like JOHN CARTER and THE GOLDEN COMPASS could bring them forth through sheer will, but then again I don't have either on DVD. I know I should buy them, like an indirect post-production Kickstarter, but it's a lot of emotional baggage to deal with, a lot of responsibility befriending the nerd no one else likes. You can never shake them off once you do. Besides, how much difference will my ten bucks make against that vast deficit? I'd rather invest in a film that will feel my paltry offering, even if only as a ripple in the wind.
Not to ramble off topic, but I feel like I should defend JOHN CARTER in particular because I read all the original Warlord of Mars Edgar Rice Burroughs novels as a kid, as well as Burroughs' Tarzan and Carson of Venus books. Also Robert E. Howard's Conan, Moorcock's Elrik; and Fritz Lieber's Fafhr and the Gray Mouser.
The best part about all of them? No fucking kids! No 'average teen' hero for us to 'identify' with. No 'Boy' in the Tarzans ('Boy' ruined the later movies), no boys at all. In those books we were still allowed to identify with the badass adults, the ones who could kill without PC moral hand-wringing. We need those adult heroes back! Imagine STAR WARS if Han Solo never showed up, replaced instead by a 12 year-old boy with really normal hair and a nagging mom?! Horrible... yet there it is...
Not to ramble off topic, but I feel like I should defend JOHN CARTER in particular because I read all the original Warlord of Mars Edgar Rice Burroughs novels as a kid, as well as Burroughs' Tarzan and Carson of Venus books. Also Robert E. Howard's Conan, Moorcock's Elrik; and Fritz Lieber's Fafhr and the Gray Mouser.
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| from 1946! I got it for cover price at the Lansdale PA Book Swap, around 1981! |
And so it is that we must fight Morris Chestnut's call to safety and fight with all our strengths against unimaginative dogmatic Hollywood's glorification of 'being a kid.' Already they have gone back and digitally removed all the cigarettes, replaced the FBI's guns with flashlights, removed the nudity and much of the cursing from our cinema heritage. Stop them! Stop them before they install their safety-first overhead florescent lights even into the darkest recesses of our most secret-sacred imaginations. I say roast Morris's chestnuts on the open fire of aimless youth rebellion! Richie in OVER THE EDGE, thou shalt not have died in vain, in vain!
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