Photo: Movie poster, from its Wikipedia page. Remember who the enemy is, indeed. Good catchphrase.
Saw Catching Fire last night, so a few quick things:
--Best thing to say about this very good movie: It didn't seem anywhere near as long as it was. That says a lot, because this one ran about 2 1/2 hours.
--Few actresses hold up better under so many intense close-ups as Jennifer Lawrence. The camera was directly in her grill for the whole movie.
--Then again, few retain such unrealistically perfect make-up application, especially for an action flick. Not that she isn't pretty anyway, I'm just sayin'.
--Woody Harrelson, along with Matthew McConaughey, has had a career resurgence the last few years. Woody Harrelson has certainly come a long way since Cheers.
--Donald Sutherland has been playing this type of bad guy for a very long time now, with the same menacingly slow speech, rich voice and grey mane. Good to see that some things never go out of style.
--Speaking of which, where were his granddaughter's parents the whole movie?
--I've never read the books, but I was pretty confident that they wouldn't do the exact same thing for two consecutive movies. Something else had to be afoot here.
--Kind of obvious, too, because most of the former winners seemed really pissed off to have to do it twice.
--And how can you not expect a rebellion when you promise those who've cheated death--cheated it from a situation that you initially threw them into--that they won't ever have to do it again, and then make them go through it again?
--And then throw all of them together in one group, and they're all enraged. At you.
--And leave alive the former winners who didn't have to be in these Games, and not expect them to also be enraged? And leave them out there with the general public? Who're all beyond enraged? At you.
--Now that I think of it, this is one half-assed despotic leader of a dystopian future. In that vast library he's always sitting in, he doesn't have one Orwell in all that? And with all of those great ray televisions, he hasn't watched any of those types of movies? These dictators have to be better prepared.
--How did the other rebels know that she'd finish coiling the wire around the arrowhead shaft and then throw it up into the dome the second the lightning hit? It was a realistic guess, considering her psychological profile (the movie should've shown they had such things), but the whole rebellion was predicated on the electronic surveillance being blown so she could be rescued. And that was only going to happen if she threw the arrow like she did, exactly as unrealistically perfect as she did, exactly when she did.
--That must've been a 500-foot throw, straight up, by the way. There's no Olympics in this future?
--As Jeffrey Wright's character said, "There's a flaw in every system." That includes screenplays and movie-making. I gotta stop thinking these films through like this after I see them.
--Incidentally, you can currently see Wright on HBO's Boardwalk Empire. Good show, though this past season hasn't been as good.
--The directing and pace of this movie was better than the first. The first was also a good movie, though it was just what it was, if you know what I mean. Essentially, it was "The Most Dangerous Game" for teenage girls, with a female protagonist. With a little of Orwellian Dystopia and Stephen King's The Running Man thrown in. Not that that's a bad thing.
--If I were starting a rebellion, I also wouldn't tell the symbolic figurehead of that rebellion until I had to.
--But I would want to be the rebel and the symbolic figurehead of that rebellion, cause that's how I roll.
--I was hoping more would be done with that little girl's character from the first one. She was, indeed, too young. Though I'm old enough to feel that they all were, but whatever.
--A friend of mine says the next one should be called Please Put Me Out, but she's just jealous and bitter.
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