The Girl Who Played With Fire

The Hunger Games

*** out of ****

Directed by: Gary Ross

Starring: Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson, Woody Harrelson, Liam Hemsworth and Stanley Tucci

Running time: 142 minutes

The Hunger Games is more than a Battle Royale with cheese. Based off a hugely popular trilogy of books by Suzanne Collins that draws inspiration from other works, the film mixes up these source elements and adds its own ingredients – captivating characters and ingenious plotting, among them.

Does the film adaptation grasp the novel’s impalpable intensity and excitement? Mostly.

For the uninitiated, The Hunger Games takes place in the nation of Panem, which consists of a bourgeois Capitol and twelve surrounding districts. Around 75 years ago, the districts rose up to usurp the Capitol’s power and lost.

To remind Panem’s citizens of just how powerless they are, the Capitol hosts a competition each year called The Hunger Games. One girl and one boy aged 12 to 18 from each district compete in a fight to the death until one sole survivor remains.

At the start of the film, Katniss Everdeen, (Jennifer Lawrence), hunts game with her close confidante, Gale (Liam Hemsworth) in the forests outside their district, the twelfth. She is the provider for her mother and younger sister, Prim (Willow Shields), since food rations are limited. (Think of Katniss as an extension of Ree Dolly, the heroine that Lawrence portrayed in the Oscar-nominated thriller Winter's Bone.)

Katniss becomes the hunted, however, when she volunteers to be her district’s representative in the Games. Joining Katniss in the arena is Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson), the son of the district’s baker.

But before the Games commence, Katniss and Peeta have training to do. Staying in the plush Capitol, they are given ample time to train with weapons, get advice from their district’s mentor – an agitated, sarcastic drunkard named Haymitch (Woody Harrelson) – and smile for the garishly dressed crowds of onlookers that are feasting for the much-hyped competition.

Peeta plays it cool and soaks in the limelight, while Katniss is decidedly more reserved, although her bow and arrow skills impress game-maker Seneca Crane (Wes Bentley). Rounding out the colourful supporting cast is Elizabeth Banks as haughty chaperone Effie Trinket, Lenny Kravitz as debonair stylist Cinna, and Stanley Tucci as the flamboyant TV host Caesar Flickerman.

The name Katniss comes from a plant that is rooted in muddy water. Katniss is a strong-willed, independent warrior that stands for resistance from a muddy, decrepit life – like the way that flower stands in muddy water.

Since Katniss is the fierce soul of the novels, Jennifer Lawrence’s portrayal proves to be the film adaptation’s sharpest weapon. Virile and commanding even as she nurses her own trembling vulnerabilities, Lawrence is the anchor of this well-paced, gripping thriller that could have been more effective if a director without such a muddled vision had been behind the camera.

In earlier sections, director and co-writer Gary Ross (Seabiscuit) uses a handheld approach to lend a documentary-like realism to District 12’s ashy, battered atmosphere. This gritty aesthetic should have been abandoned as soon as the players take their place in the Games course. Here, the shaky camera becomes distracting. Jittering in close-ups as youths are hacked to bits, the camera disorients the onscreen action, bringing chaos when clarity is needed.

Regardless, the tone of the film remains somber throughout, thanks to a wonderful ensemble that grasp the harsh reality of Collins’ chilling dystopian universe. Still, Ross should have treaded into darker territory more often. The idea of kids (well, young adults) annihilating kids is horrifying, and the attitudes that propel this violence are ripe for commentary and discussion.

Ross - whose debut film, Pleasantville, was a sharp satire about political repression - should have gone for the jugular with the subject matter. While these Hunger Games are gripping, they are also safe.

Don't Go Chasing Waterfalls

Jeff, Who Lives at Home

** out of ****

Directed by: Jay and Mark Duplass

Starring: Jason Segal, Ed Helms, Susan Sarandon, Judy Greer and Rae Dawn Chong

Running time: 84 minutes

Jeff, Who Lives at Home is a slight indie with modest charm that, like its drifting stoner protagonist, aims to be average. It succeeds on that level.

The title character is a happy shlump played with gawky sweetness by Jason Segal. Beyond locking himself in his mother’s basement to smoke weed, watch infomercials and avoid any form of work, Jeff is deeply interested in destiny and happenstance.

Jeff believes that series of random occurrences will eventually surmise into a moment of perfection. He would rather leave his own life’s path to faith than his own actions.

One afternoon, dressed in a dark grey sweatshirt and baggy shorts, destiny calls Jeff out of hibernation. Aimlessly drifting through Baton Rouge, he bumps into his brother, Pat (Ed Helms).

Although Pat is married and employed, he has not noticed that his wife, Linda (played by Judy Greer, charting similar territory to her recent turn in The Descendants), is unsatisfied with him. Pat has kept a closer eye on his bank account and recently bought a Porsche Boxster without Linda’s approval. He hears the brunt of her disgust regarding the two-seater over cereal.

Pat and Jeff do not get along, rarely see each other and have different outlooks on life – Pat is a pragmatist and Jeff an idealist. However, the brothers both shut out females who are close to them: Pat with Linda, and Jeff with his mother, a bored, cubicled near-retiree played by Susan Sarandon, whose subplot regarding a secret admirer is thin but amusing.

This exercise in ponderous ordinariness comes from the Duplass Brothers, whose films, like the ignored 2010 gem Cyrus, are stripped down yet awkwardly endearing comedy-dramas.

The Duplasses do not shoot their scenes as much as place the camera down and play around with the zoom button. Sometimes their reliance on this technique helps to get a sardonic reaction shot. In other times, it is jittery and irritating.

The Duplasses are wry observers of human behaviour, but their script for Jeff, Who Lives at Home is standard. The casting is both a strong point and a weakness for the film. Since the actors are playing characters similar to others in their oeuvres – Segal in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Helms on The Office – their performances feel more rehashed than revitalizing.

The film’s tone is also off-putting. We start by laughing at the meek imperfections of the brothers, but as their heads collide and the film drifts into serious territory, the film keeps its light tone.

A tranquil jingle of a musical score plays in the background of nearly every scene, regardless of the mood, making later scenes disruptively tone-deaf. This makes way for a convenient, hackneyed, falsely uplifting ending.

The conclusion aims for catharsis, but doesn't flow of the rest of the film. It is a botched, lazy attempt to redeem the characters’ misdeeds that, unfortunately, does not feel earned.

Century-Old Story Not Recharged (on Mars)

John Carter

** out of ****

Directed by: Andrew Stanton

Starring: Taylor Kitsch, Lynn Collins, Willem Dafoe, Samantha Morton and Dominic West

Running time: 132 minutes

Big-budget tentpoles do not get much stranger than the elliptically titled John Carter.

It is based on a century-old 11 volume series of adventure books by Edgar Rice Burroughs that James Cameron and George Lucas have paid homage to in their sci-fi repertoires. The story jumps around between a futuristic Mars – or as it is known in the books, Barsoom – and Reconstruction-era America.

The protagonist is a scruffy Confederate cavalryman (without much of an accent) named John Carter. He is played by Taylor Kitsch, a relative unknown unless you caught his smoldering charisma as Texas fullback Tim Riggins on Friday Night Lights.

Early in the film, Carter is prospecting in the Arizona Territory circa-1868 when he comes across a group of Apache Indians. Fleeing from the tribe, Carter finds a cave full of gold. However, before he can take the treasure, a strange creature wearing a medallion attacks him.

For some reason, the medallion transports Carter to the red planet of Barsoom. There, he adopts Tarzan’s physique and Tigger’s long-jump bounce.

Here comes the exposition: Barsoom is scarcely populated and the numbers keep diminishing. Two cities, Helium and Zodanga, are at war. The leader of Zodanga’s army, Sab Than (Dominic West), has the upper hand and the military might to rule the planet. Instead, he chooses to stop the war as long as he can marry the princess of Helium, Dejah Thoris (Lynn Collins).

But Dejah vanishes from her kingdom and soon tags along with our blandly named American hero and a group of Tharks, which means “skeletal, four-armed Martians with attitude” in Barsoom-ian.

Like the protagonist, the film jumps around plot-wise and tone-wise. The jumbled narrative does little to make its concepts and character strands coherent for audiences that are unfamiliar with the source work.

Kitsch has the gravitas to pull off this dimension-bending hero, although the lackluster script does not offer him the range to prove he is leading actor material. Collins, West and the rest of the ensemble are solid, bringing as much weight as they can muster to the pulpy dialogue. Their stronger individual moments are there, but are scant.

Carter is directed by Andrew Stanton. Stanton is part of Pixar’s team and an Oscar winner for directing Finding Nemo and Wall-E.

Wall-E is an animated space-set epic that also takes place on a large, arid planet many years in the future. That adventure worked because of captivating characters and imaginative plotting. Those aspects are missing from his latest endeavour.

John Carter is one weird sci-fi extravaganza, mostly because it hardly feels like it was worth the effort or the coin, a whopping $250 million. The action is lifeless, the characters flatly defined and the plotting haphazard. It is a fascinating failure that does not work as a whole, even if the cast lifts individual sections to more than they are worth.

Friday Night Might

Undefeated

*** out of ****

Directed by: Daniel Lindsay and T.J. Martin

Running time: 110 minutes

A run-down, close-knit suburb in the Southern U.S. pins its hopes on a football team. If that synopsis reminds you of Friday Night Lights in all of its forms, from book to television series, you may be delighted to find that Undefeated, the recent Oscar winner for best documentary, covers similar yardage.

The film takes place at Manassas, a nearly all black high school in the outskirts of Memphis. Although the school is shiny and refurbished, the surrounding neighbourhood is full of crumbling homes, deserted after the area’s Firestone factory shut down.

The players on the Manassas Tigers football team have been a sorry bunch. Seasons have gone by without a win, and they have never scored a playoff victory either. In 2009, however, a team that used to go seasons without a win finally started to hit a streak.

Among the seniors the film follows include O.C. Brown, a humongous offensive tackle that became a college prospect after YouTube clips showing his rough beatdown tackles gained traction online. He gets handfuls of mail a day by schools offering him scholarships. Those mean nothing if he cannot raise his marks, though.

Meanwhile, Chavis Daniels is an impressive player on the field but a firecracker of insensitive slurring and searing anger off it. He spent time in a penitentiary but his harsh attitude returns as soon as practice starts.

Then there is Bill Courtney, the coach that balances sympathy with strict authority. When Courtney, a burly ex-car salesman, joined as volunteer coach six years prior, the school could not afford a decent athletics program. To make money, the school traveled to the state’s most elite schools to face their teams. Their opponents pummeled them, but the fees given to Manassas sent them packing with enough to run their program.

A stickler for character and discipline among his players, Courtney brings a passionate delivery and ruthless attitude to his post at the school. His revealingly candid halftime speeches expose a gut-wrenching testament to his team. Courtney sadly laments how he has forged stronger bonds and spent more time in recent years with the players than his own children.

Directors Daniel Lindsay and T.J. Martin fortuitously captured the team cruising to their best-ever season. (Don’t worry: the title is about as much of a spoiler alert as it was for a 2011 documentary about Sarah Palin.) With crisp handheld cameras, the duo captures revealing, candid moments between the players and their coach.

They film the most gut-wrenching subject matter without edits, grasping the most gripping footage as it unfolds. Meanwhile, for such a low-budget doc, the football games are filmed with surprising versatility. The images are clear, the movement is flexible and the tension sometimes becomes impalpable.

Unlike the Friday Night Lights series, which ran for 76 episodes, the film has less than two hours to invest its audience inside the plight of a determined, disciplined group of fighters. What Undefeated lacks in depth, it makes up for with sheer poignancy and inspiration.

Chaos in Cape Town

Safe House

**1/2 out of ****

Directed by: Daniel Espinosa

Starring: Denzel Washington, Ryan Reynolds, Vera Farmiga, Brendan Gleeson and Sam Shepard

Running time: 114 minutes

Studio executives marketed Safe House, a flashy, fast-paced and somewhat flawed thriller, as a Denzel Washington vehicle where the actor takes on the duties of portraying a masterly, manipulative villain.

However, despite the focus on his striking, smirking badness in the promotional material, his Tobin Frost is a tame character, without the class of his Frank Lucas from American Gangster or the cocky charisma of Training Day detective Alonzo Harris. Instead, Safe House works because of the other leading man, puppy-eyed Canadian Ryan Reynolds.

Reynolds is Matt Weston, a low-level CIA agent keeping idle watch over a safe house in Cape Town, South Africa. He is looking for a chance to prove himself so that his mentor (Brendan Gleeson) can promote him to full-time operative.

His one shot comes in the form of enigmatic renegade Tobin Frost (Washington), a cunning criminal with credentials that hint that he cannot be cracked by tough interrogators.

As Frost is tortured at the safe house, a group of mercenaries attack. Weston escapes with his houseguest and receives quick instruction from Langley: keep Frost off the grid and take him to a secure location without attracting attention.

Washington is a striking screen presence, but his Frost isn’t vindictive enough as a villain. The characterization in David Guggenheim's script is too minuscule for such a powerful screen presence. When one character calls Frost "the black Dorian Gray," it doesn't ring true. Frost isn't complex enough as a character to merit that analogy. Washington has a mirthless grin, though, that wouldn't seem out of place in a Hallward portrait.

Meanwhile, certain story elements hinge on implausibilities. Many of these eye-rollers involve the sloppy, underequipped CIA staff. Headed by Harlan Whitford (a gristled Sam Shepard) and Catherine Linklater (a bossy but underused Vera Farmiga), the analysts pace around a control room with giant screens and wait for results. They do not use any, well, intelligence in the room to help combat the situation in South Africa. What a waste.

Nevertheless, Safe House turns out to be a crackling thriller at points. Espinosa directs his action sequences, including a terrifically suspenseful showdown in a steel-shackled shantytown, with bluster and a bit of disorienting camera juggling.

Moreover, Reynolds holds his own against Washington. The Canadian actor shows surprising range – it seems that his intense one-man-show, Buried, wasn’t a fluke – and manages to outshine his onscreen competitor in the film’s second half.

As the stakes rise, Reynolds capably envelops the pain of a gritted, writhing action hero. A prolonged mano a mano fight scene with a deceptive housekeeper played by The Killing’s Joel Kinnaman is blistering and bloody.

While the story’s contrivances dillute the suspense and Washington's presence proves to be underwhelming, Safe House is still a solid piece of frenetic action fun.

In a Class of its Own

Monsieur Lazhar

***1/2 out of ****

Directed by: Philippe Falardeau

Starring: Mohamed Fellag, Danielle Proulx, Sophie Nélisse, Émilien Néron, and Brigitte Popart

Running time: 94 minutes

In the motion picture academy’s 84-year history, Canada has submitted a film for the foreign language category 37 times. The country has been nominated six times, four of them coming in the last decade – including one win, for Denys Arcand’s The Barbarian Invasions. The most recent inductee into the category is Monsieur Lazhar, a deeply moving drama from director Philippe Falardeau.

Lazhar examines the relationship between a teacher and his students, although in more sensitive and introspective ways than well-meaning Hollywood hokum such as Dead Poets Society and Dangerous Minds. Here, the lessons taught aren’t inspirational or academic, but revolve around issues of death and loss.

The teacher is one Bachir Lazhar (Mohamed Fellag), an Algerian immigrant with an undetermined status who takes a job at a Montreal primary school.

His job, however, belonged to a young teacher that hanged herself from the pipes of her classroom on a dreary winter morning. The students are fraught with despair as the shadows of her death loom over the classroom. Renovations of fresh paint and a school-employed psychologist’s advice can only dillute some of the grief.

Lazhar hopes that he can be a bearer of good news. His rapturous voice and cordial attitude gets high marks, especially from a sweet student named Alice (Sophie Nélisse). However, his pupils groan when he assigns a dictation from Balzac, perhaps a tad advanced for a Gr. 6 class.

The children are curious about their new teacher’s past, although Lazhar does not disclose it to them. His wife and children were killed in a supposed arson attack in Algeria. He moved to Canada to escape this danger, and like the students, Lazhar is going through a period of loss. In this classroom, the lessons learned are mutual.

With poorer actors and with a weaker directorial grip, Monsieur Lazhar could have been a shaky mix of light, candid classroom moments and somber meditations on death. However, French-Canadian director Philippe Falardeau understands that the key to connecting moments of comedy and drama is through sensitive storytelling and finely nuanced performances.

Fellag, with a tall stance and cheery face, is tremendous as the title character. He has a momentous presence that works wonders when his protagonist leads the children in deep discussion. Fellag also applies sweet, subtle character touches to grab the kids’ (and also the audience’s) sympathy.

He riffs lovingly with his superb class of young actors, especially the angelic Nélisse and Émilien Néron. The latter child actor plays Simon, a rambunctious, off-kilter student whose conflicted relationship with his late teacher stirs great regret inside him after she dies.

The film touches on issues of immigration and classroom politics, but is most compelling when it focuses on the bonds forged between the teacher and his pupils. Warm and generously humanistic, Monsieur Lazhar is an insightful look into the development of teacher-student relationships, and a film that’s bound to teach other writer/directors how to compose sensitive subject matter with poise and poignancy.

The Deep End of Parenthood

We Need to Talk About Kevin

***1/2 out of ****

Directed by: Lynne Ramsay

Starring: Tilda Swinton, John C. Reilly, Rock Duer, Jasper Newell and Ezra Miller

Running time: 112 minutes

In We Need to Talk About Kevin, a gripping adaptation of Lionel Shriver’s harrowing 2003 novel, Tilda Swinton plays Eva Khatchadourian. At the film’s start, Eva hides behind thick sunglasses as she waits anxiously at a travel agency.

Although she once worked as a travel agent and even had dreams to venture off into voyages around the world, she now sits impatiently and waits for a job. She could really use a vacation.

Living in a cramped bungalow, Eva spends meager sums on food but sinks the rest of her stomach with Chardonnay. She doesn’t engage in the flighty fun she used to know. Meanwhile, her neighbours dowse her house and car with red paint in the middle of the night.

Eva has done no crime, or has she? Months ago, her son Kevin (played as a teenager by Ezra Miller) perpetrated a vicious high school massacre, killing a handful of his classmates. When she visits him in prison, the two sit in stony silence, even though there’s plenty to talk about.

The big question is, did Eva’s conflicted relationship with her son have an impact on his decision to commit murder?

Stories of family abuse generally focus on the unyielding power a parent figure has on their child. We Need to Talk About Kevin, Lynne Ramsay’s vivid, expressionistic take on Shriver’s award-winning novel, reverses this approach. Instead of the domineering mother or father, the seed is the seed of hatred and dread in the family tree.

Kevin, from infancy (when he is played by Rock Duer) to bitter prankster youth (Jasper Newell from ages six to nine), is a living nightmare. He torments Eva with mind games and misbehaviour, mocking her attempts to be motherly and sensitive, while manipulating her to get his way.

Kevin’s persistence at wrecking his mother’s life is offset by his seemingly sweet relationship with his father, Franklin, a giddy child at heart played by John C. Reilly (an inspired casting choice). Franklin doesn’t notice how his wife becomes drained by her son’s annoyances – “That’s what boys do,” he tells her, referring to Kevin’s wild behaviour.

Lynne Ramsay’s adaptation improves on the source material by treading even deeper into Eva’s psyche than the novel did. Shriver’s tale is written in the form of correspondences between Eva and Franklin. However, Ramsay does with feelings, colours and sounds what Shriver’s novel couldn’t with words.

Ramsay uses alarming sounds – a ticking clock pounds on the soundtrack, trickling up constant feelings of dread – and bold, bloody red images to enter her tormented subconscious.

Despite combating the aches of mothering a horrible child, Eva keeps fighting the strain that is her unfortunate parenthood. Swinton’s portrayal is gaunt but gripping due to how closely she treads between resisting Kevin and exploding with menace at her calculating child. It’s a riveting performance in a deeply unsettling triumph of a film.