Hungry for More of The Hunger Games

The Hunger Games...but not as you know it.

Okay, so The Hunger Games was very, very good indeed.

For those who don’t know, The Hunger Games is based on the first of a trilogy of highly successful young adult novels by Suzanne Collins and is set in a distant future where after a terrible war in North America a new nation called Panem now exists. Panem’s rich and decadent Capitol rules over 12 impoverished districts who every year are made to send one male and one female child to compete in an epic televised fight to the death: the titular Hunger Games. In the grim and grey District 12 sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen volunteers to take the place of her terrified little sister, joining Baker’s son Peeta as the District’s two contestants in the year's upcoming games. We then follow gifted hunter Katniss as she negotiates the bewildering (to her) decadence of the Capitol while also training for the games, appearing on live TV chat shows, trying to entice sponsors, before finally getting dropped in to the midst of the brutal and barbaric games themselves.

The Hunger Games has been talked about as the next Twilight/Harry Potter - the next huge YA book-to-movie series. But to my mind this is as far removed from Harry Potter and what little I've seen of the shallow and shoddy Twilight as you can get. For a start, it is sci fi and not magical/fantasy/supernatural shenanigans. Plus it's unashamedly old fashioned in the way it has been made, being non flashy, steadily paced and made with an indie/1970's feel that emphasis strong storytelling, strong relatable characters, inventive editing and plenty of smarts and depth. It has ideas, themes, questions to ask, points to make. It wants its audience to think. In short, The Hunger Games is actually about something.

But The Hunger Games’ greatest weapon is its star.

As Katniss, the movie and book’s young heroine, Jennifer Lawrence is fantastic. Jennifer was fab in X-Men: First Class as young Raven and was stunning in Winter's Bone (for which she was deservedly Oscar nominated). In fact, a lot of her work in THG is very similar to that of Winter's Bone. The entire first act of THG could almost be Winter's Bone 2 – a rural, poverty stricken and grim setting; a tough but sensitive teenage girl saddled with a useless parent and who has to effectively bring up her younger sibling and provide for her family under miserably harsh conditions. Even the score is similar being all low key and folksy. But when Katniss and her co-competitor, Peeta, get to the Capitol, this all changes. Things become rather flashy, gaudy and overblown in order to contrast the under-the-heel poverty of the outlying Districts with the decadence and shallowness of the Capitol, a place so ghastly that for entertainment it makes twenty four kids fight to the death each and every year.

At 2hrs 20mins The Hunger Games is a lengthy film. The pacing is slow and steady. But what it is showing us, what it is doing is always utterly engrossing, taking its time to build the world, the characters and the relationships. It never drags. Plus Woody Harrelson is in it and is pretty darn great, as is Elisabeth Banks as the wonderfully shallow Effie Trinket. But this movie belongs wholly to Jennifer Lawrence. As Katniss she manages to be caring, brave and cleverly resourceful while always staying angry, vulnerable and just plain terrified by the situation she finds herself in. I wouldn't be surprised if she gets a second Oscar nod for her work here. In my humble opinion Lawrence is possibly the finest talent of her generation currently working in movies. She’s an actor where you can see so much going on behind her eyes, on her face, in her body language. She sells the character and the situation utterly. This makes her a compelling presence to watch. She has grit and a palpable inner strength, which was so very obvious in Winter’s Bone. I predict a long and illustrious career for this young lady. I just hope she keeps picking varied and interesting projects.

And now to the actual games themselves.

Set in a huge forest arena with cameras hidden in trees, genetically modified wasps and killer dogs, the games are about as shocking and brutal as you can get in a 12A film. I have to say I winced a few times. I mean, they have little kids - not just teens - who kill and get killed! The initial melee when all of the kids are first released in to the game area is stunning. Shot with virtually no sound it’s lots and lots of panicky shaky camera work and quick edits of kids killing other kids with rocks, knives, swords, bare hands. There was one brief shot of what is a little blond girl - maybe 10/11 – lying on her back on the ground with a bigger teen boy standing over her about to start bludgeoning her to death. Luckily the camera cuts away before the first blow hits, but it still made me cringe. It’s shocking, affecting but thankfully not gratuitous. And it carries on like that for the rest of the film with the kids slowly being whittled down until the last two remain.

There’s lots going on here, lots of comment about reality television, about how the media glamorises violence, about how we send teenagers to war to get maimed and killed often for no good reason. And about how kids regularly killing other kids – be it in gangs or in school massacres - has become a horribly regular real life phenomena. Of course there’s nothing original in any of this. Battle Royale did the adults making kids kill each other thing ten years ago (though in BR it is all older teens and is so bloody and over the top to be kinda silly). And Robocop and The Running Man amongst others have done reality TV going too far. But the concept and its related themes and the questions raised are always worth repeating if done well. And they are done very well here. As I’ve said before, to my mind the very best genre books/films/TV are really all about people, about who we are and how we relate to each other. And about the world we are currently living in as well as the future world we are busy making for ourselves. The Hunger Games fits squarely in to that camp.

Major kudos then to director Gary (Pleasantville, Seabiscuit) Ross and to screenwriters Suzanne Collins and Billy Ray for making a grown up, intelligent, provocative movie.

Go see it.

And may the odds be ever in your favour.

Winter’s Bone: Redneck Noir is a Chilly Affair

Winter’s Bone, an adaptation of Daniel Woodrell's 2006 novel of the same name and directed by Debra Granik, tells the story of 17 year-old Ree Dolly who lives in a rural dirt poor area of the Ozark Mountains, Missouri. With her father having absconded while on bail and her mother virtually comatose with depression, it’s left to Ree to keep her and her little brother and sister together and to keep them all fed and warm with little or no money, relying instead upon squirrel hunting, wood gathering and the charity of neighbours. However things take an even bleaker turn when Ree learns her father put up their house as collateral for his bail and that unless he shows up for his trial in a week's time they will lose their home. So doing the only thing she can think to do, Ree decides to head out on her own to find her father and bring him back in time for his court appearance. Knowing that he was part of the local drug trade, she goes looking for him in the most unsavoury of places only to be told in no uncertain terms by those she meets to keep her nose out and to stay clear. But being the tenacious girl she is, Ree refuses to listen, and carries on searching and asking questions, putting her own life at risk in the desperate attempt to keep her family together.

Winter’s Bone is a bleak, harsh, slow-burn story of courage and fortitude in the face of seemingly overwhelming odds and obstacles. It is about the varying strength of family ties and community. It is about the hard cruelty of life in the poorest areas of heartland America. And it is about the destruction and misery of drugs, especially on the poorest in society. But most of all it is a story about strength of character and how one so young can and does step up to the mark to be the kind of person we all hope we could be.

As Ree, Jennifer Lawrence is fantastic. She is the centre of this story, the foundation upon which the entire film is built. Ree is a smart, tough, caring, industrious and ultimately tenacious and thick-skinned girl who, despite having the weight of the world on her young shoulders, soldiers on to do what she must for the good of her family, no matter the many set backs and abuses received along the way. Twenty year old Jennifer Lawrence is for sure a very pretty girl. But as Ree she carries with her a heavy world worn look that blunts her natural prettiness and which along with a rock solid determination and intelligence makes her seem old beyond her years. It is without doubt a great performance and if I’d seen Winter’s Bone in 2010 then she would have given Natalie Portman a close run for best female performance of the year. On a side note - it’s great to see that Lawrence is playing Mystique/Raven Darkholme in Matthew Vaughan’s upcoming X-Men: First Class, a great casting choice for a film which has the potential to be the very best of the year.

Anyway, back to Winter’s Bone. Debra Granik’s direction is focussed and naturalistic. There are no visual or creative ticks. The camera, often handheld, simply follows the characters around while catching occasional glimpses of the depressing, worn-out human landscape of rotting houses, rotting vehicles and discarded trash that pollute what is an otherwise beautiful part of the world. The pace is slow and steady and patience is required from the viewer. Also, be warned, the film is no laugh fest. Humour is almost entirely absent. It is an unrelentingly grim, grey, chilly tale featuring unpleasant characters that do unpleasant things and will definitely not be to a lot of people’s tastes. However if you stick with it, you’ll find that it’s also oddly life affirming too, being as it is about family, community, sacrifice and determination in the face of adversity.

I recently heard the term ‘red neck noir’ used by someone to describe this film. And it’s quite a good one as Ree is in effect a young Philip Marlowe type who is out to solve a mystery no matter the consequences and the physical traumas she must endure along the way. But unlike the also excellent Brick, Winter’s Bone doesn’t employ the many conventions of the genre and transplant them to a new setting. Instead, it tells a fairly simple story with no great twists or surprises from a realistic and purely character based angle. And it does so very well indeed. 4 (out of 5)