The film depicts a totalitarian future in which the all-powerful government of Panem (in what was once the United States) demands an annual “tribute” of two youths from each of its 12 districts to fight to the death in a televised event known as the Hunger Games. Sixteen-year old Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) of the dirt-poor District 12 volunteers to take her younger sister Primrose’s place in the Games. But when she reaches the Capitol of Panem, she realizes that in order to succeed, her physical abilities are not enough. She must also create a convincing (if false) public narrative that she and fellow tribute Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson) are “star-crossed lovers” in order to win the allegiance of the audience and outwit the “gamemakers.” This crafting of her own media narrative eventually turns Katniss into a popular heroine with the power to change the future of Panem itself.
Author Suzanne Collins has said that her inspirations for The Hunger Games came from a variety of sources, including the ancient Greek myth of Theseus, Roman gladiatorial games, contemporary TV, her father’s experiences in the Vietnam War, and news footage of the Iraq War. However, the movie adaptation of The Hunger Games contains a number of other cultural and historical references as well. Here’s a mini-guide to the cinematic, literary, and historical allusions in The Hunger Games.
The Goddess Diana
The Goddess Diana.
An early scene in The Hunger Games depicts Katniss sneaking into the forest to hunt for food. She retrieves her bow and arrows from a tree, and spotting a deer, attempts to shoot it—before her friend Gale interrupts her. The imagery of Katniss with her bow and arrow—central to The Hunger Games—evokes the imagery of Diana, the Roman Goddess of the Hunt, who was frequently associated with deer hunting. In one famous story from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, when the hunter Actaeon accidentally sees Diana bathing nude in a forest pool, she turns him into a stag and sets his own hounds to chase him down and tear him apart. One can see allusions to these hounds in The Hunger Games when the gamemakers send monstrous dogs into the forest to hunt down Katniss and Peeta. In addition, Diana was a chaste goddess, and Katniss’s reluctance to engage in a romance with Peeta reflects this warrior-woman ethos of independence from men. Early in the film, Katniss even tells Gale that she will never have children. Peeta himself, in his somewhat subservient position to Katniss, resembles male acolytes of the Goddess Diana, from Hyppolytus to the Priest-Kings of Nemi—who themselves participated in a famous ritual of fighting to the death, as described in Frazer’s The Golden Bough.
[For the rest of the article and the accompanying slideshow, please visit The Atlantic.]
Review: HBO’s Game Change is like Days of our Lives for Republicans
By Jason Apuzzo. It used to be that a politician had to be a Kennedy to get a juicy, tell-all movie made about them.
On the odd chance that you can’t get enough of this year’s colorful Republican primaries – if lurid accusations of Newt Gingrich’s ‘open marriage’ or saucy rumors of Herman Cain’s romantic conquests haven’t been enough for you – or if you think all the pizazz went out of the campaign once Michelle Bachman left the race (can anyone else say “Obama is a socialist” with such a winning smile?), then HBO’s frothy Game Change, which debuts this Saturday March 10th, may be the remedy for you.
Game Change is pure political soap opera, and in fleeting moments it even makes for compelling drama – though to be fair, Game Change is probably not an accurate view into the behind-the-scenes dynamics of the 2008 McCain campaign, or into the personality of its megawatt star, Sarah Palin.
Julianne Moore as Sarah Palin.
What the movie is, however, is a gossipy and occasionally colorful look at how much changed – at least in the world of Republican politics – when John McCain made the decision to select Sarah Palin as his running mate for the 2008 election.
And as the roiling 2012 campaign continues to make clear: a lot changed from that point forward.
There was an era, seemingly a lifetime ago, when the Republican Party appeared to be the quieter, more straight-laced of the two parties. Most people over 30 remember what that was like, back before Republican officeholders were expected to be celebrities.
Traditional Republican candidates were war veterans and businessmen, successful lawyers, sober Congressmen with dark suits and smiling families, genial chairmen of the local chamber of commerce. Think Mitch Daniels crossed with Phil Mickelson.
They were the type of person you’d want to buy real estate or aftershave from, or to lead your nephew into combat – but not necessarily build a Broadway show or rock opera around.
That, of course, was before the Palins came to town.
Game Change is HBO’s adaptation of the book of the same name about the 2008 Presidential election, penned by journalists John Heilemann and Mark Halperin. Crucially, that book depicted both sides of the 2008 campaign – dwelling mostly on the epic Democratic Party primary battle between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, something left out completely from HBO’s movie. Continue reading LFM’s Jason Apuzzo Reviews HBO’s Controversial Game Change at The Huffington Post and AOL-Moviefone
[Editor’s Note: The article below appears in its entirety today at The Atlantic.]
Putin’s Kiss, Khodorkovsky, and Target question tyranny, capitalism, and their country’s future.
By Govindini Murty & Jason Apuzzo. As Russians head toward their presidential elections on March 4th, a trio of new films sheds light on a contemporary Russia veering between hope and cynicism, democracy and authoritarianism. The documentary Putin’s Kiss depicts a young Russian woman who becomes disillusioned with her role as a leader in Vladimir Putin’s nationalistic youth group Nashi in the wake of a brutal beating of a journalist. The chilling documentary Khodorkovsky examines the fate of the jailed Russian billionaire turned democracy activist Mikhail Khodorkovsky. And the science-fiction epic Target depicts the moral collapse of a wealthy elite in an authoritarian, near-future Russia.
On the brink of what may be another six years under Putin’s rule, these three films reveal a deep anxiety about Russia’s future—and a faint glimmer of hope for more genuine democratic freedom.
Masha Drokova is the young heroine of Danish director Lise Birk Pedersen’s documentary Putin’s Kiss (2012), a selection of the 2012 Sundance and Berlin Film Festivals and currently playing in limited release. Born in 1989, Masha is part of the first generation to grow up in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union. At the age of 16, Masha joins Putin’s nationalistic youth group Nashi; by age 19, she is already a spokesperson and leading commissar of the youth group, and Putin himself awards her a medal of honor. By age 21, the bright, ambitious Masha has everything thanks to Nashi: a prestigious spot in a top Moscow university, a new car, an apartment, her own TV talk show, and access to the highest echelons of Russia’s power elite.
As briefly mentioned in the film, Nashi itself was founded in 2005 by Putin supporters to counter the rise of pro-democracy youth groups in the wake of the Ukrainian Orange revolution. Although purportedly “democratic and anti-fascist,” Nashi bears a striking resemblance to the Soviet youth group Komsomol. Like Komsomol, the well-funded Nashi provides a route for many young people into official advancement.
In Putin’s Kiss, Nashi founder Vasily Yakemenko is shown exercising a Svengali-like control over his young charges, exhorting them to discipline and promising them a new life if they will dedicate themselves to Putin and the Russian motherland. As Yakemenko says to the Nashi faithful: “I want everybody to understand: There is no authority for the movement except for the policy of Putin and Medvedev … Being part of the movement means going out into the streets. It means to tell a villain he’s a villain.” As depicted in the film, a major part of Nashi’s efforts are directed toward vilifying Putin’s opponents as “enemies of Russia.” By way of example, the film shows some particularly crude attacks directed at opposition figures Boris Nemtsov, Ilya Yashin, and Garry Kasparov.
Masha is initially drawn to Nashi out of patriotism and ambition. She sees Nashi as a way for young people to get involved in helping advance Russia, and she considers Putin a force for strength and stability. Masha is such a fan of Putin that she becomes known as “the girl who kissed Putin” for impetuously pecking him on the cheek when he presented her with a medal.
Yet Masha’s curiosity about the larger world leads her to make friends with a group of opposition journalists. Masha’s chief friend in the group is the gregarious Oleg Kashin, a liberal journalist who writes for the Kommersant newspaper.
Things take a dark turn one night in 2010 when assailants brutally beat Oleg Kashin …
[For the remainder of this article, please visit The Atlantic.]
Libertas’ Jason Apuzzo, Govindini Murty & Joe Bendel participated in this year’s Indiewire critic survey for the Oscars & Indie Spirit Awards. The survey asks critics who will win the Oscars and the Indie Spirit Awards, and also who should win the Oscars and Indie Spirit Awards, based on the actual nominations.
To see the main Indiewire article covering the critics’ Oscar/Indie Spirit picks, see here.
Joe’s list should be up by later today. And if you want to see a list of Joe’s many reviews of Oscar/Indie Spirit-nominated films, visits Indiewire’s Criticwire page and click on ‘Joe Bendel,’ then scroll down his page.
Our thanks to Indiewire for inviting us to participate. The Indie Spirit Awards took place last night, and you can see a list of the winners here.
By Jason Apuzzo. Celebrities will invade Los Angeles this weekend for the 84th Academy Awards ceremony. Searchlights will blaze and flashbulbs will pop as Hollywood stars will descend from the heavens — or maybe just the Malibu hills — to touch the ground that regular Angelenos walk on each day.
They’ll smile and snarl our traffic. They’ll toss their hair and forget to thank their husbands. They’ll praise each other for their bravery, while collecting $75,000 gift bags.
L.A. is accustomed to such strange invasions, of course. If you’re a movie fan, you already know that L.A. has been invaded over the years by everything from giant atomic ants (Them), to buff cyborgs (The Terminator), to rampaging 3D zombies (Resident Evil: Afterlife). So Angelenos take invasions from movie stars in stride.
But this weekend marks an anniversary of an invasion you might not know about: L.A.’s first alien invasion.
A surviving image from The Battle of Los Angeles.
This February 24th-25th is the 70th anniversary of The Battle of Los Angeles, also known as The Great Los Angeles Air Raid, one of the most mysterious incidents of World War II — and also one of the key, oddball events in U.F.O. lore that’s still inspiring movies and TV shows to this day.
Between the late evening of February 24th, 1942 and the early morning hours of February 25th, the City of Angels flew into a panic as what were initially believed to be Japanese enemy aircraft were spotted over the city. This suspected Japanese raid — coming soon after the Pearl Harbor bombing, and just one day after a confirmed Japanese submarine attack off the Santa Barbara coast — touched off a massive barrage of anti-aircraft fire, with some 1400 shells shot into the skies over Los Angeles during the frantic evening.
Oddly, however, the anti-aircraft shells hit nothing. Despite the intense barrage, no aircraft wreckage was ever recovered.
Indeed, once the smoke had cleared and Angelenos calmed down (the public hysteria over the raid was mercilessly satirized by Steven Spielberg in 1941), no one really knew what had been seen in the sky or on radar. Were they weather balloons? German Zeppelins? Trick kites designed by Orson Welles?
Many people believed the aircraft they’d seen were extraterrestrial – one eyewitness even described an object he’d seen as looking like an enormous flying ‘lozenge’ – and some accused the government of a cover-up. Conflicting accounts of the incident from the Navy and War Departments didn’t help clarify matters.
As if to confirm public fears of extraterrestrial attack, one famous photograph emerged (see above) from the incident showing an ominous, saucer-like object hovering over the city. This much-debated photograph, which even appeared in some trailers for Battle: Los Angeles last year, inspired America’s first major U.F.O. controversy — a full five years before Roswell.
To this day, no one knows for sure what flew over Los Angeles that night and evaded the city’s air defenses. (The raid itself is recreated each year at Fort MacArthur in San Pedro.) But since it’s more fun to assume that it was aliens than weather balloons, we’ve decided to honor The Battle of Los Angeles by ranking the Top 10 movies in which aliens attack L.A. (See below.)
To make this list, a film must feature aliens on the warpath — no cuddly E.T.’s here — and their attacks must take place in L.A. proper, rather than out in the suburbs or desert (eliminating films like Invasion of the Body Snatchers).
As the list demonstrates, no city — other than perhaps Tokyo — has suffered more on-screen calamity at the hands of extraterrestrials than Los Angeles. At the same time, there’s no apparently no other city that’s easier for aliens to hide in.
From George Pal's "War of the Worlds."
1) The War of the Worlds (1953)
Producer George Pal’s adaptation of the H.G. Wells’ novel is the granddaddy of ’em all, and still the best L.A.-based film about alien attack. Gene Barry plays Dr. Clayton Forrester, a natty scientist at ‘Pacific Tech,’ who along with his girlfriend Sylvia van Buren (a perky USC coed, played by Ann Robinson) struggles to prevent Martian invaders from destroying human civilization. Highlights of the film include a boffo attack on downtown L.A. (which Pal initially wanted to film in 3D) by the graceful, swan-like Martian ships, and an Air Force flying wing dropping a nuclear bomb on the Martians. Filmed in vivid Technicolor, The War of the Worlds was a huge hit, broke new ground in visual effects technology, and helped kick off the 1950s sci-fi craze.
Best exchange of the film: “What do we say to them [the aliens]?” “Welcome to California.”
2) Independence Day (1996)
Director Roland Emmerich’s funny, exhilarating and patriotic summer hit from 1996 borrows key elements from The War of the Worlds, but adds a few of its own: 15-mile-wide flying saucers, a president who flies fighter jets … and Will Smith. In the role that made him a megastar, Smith plays a trash-talking Marine fighter pilot paired with an MIT-trained computer wiz (played by Jeff Goldblum, channeling Gene Barry) who fights an alien saucer armada out to demolish humanity. ID4 is easily the best of Emmerich’s apocalyptic films, largely due to its tongue-in-cheek humor. Watch as ditzy Angelenos atop the Library Tower cheerfully greet an alien saucer, only to be zapped into oblivion a moment later. Only in L.A.
Best line of the film: “Welcome to Earth.”
3) Transformers (2007)
There’s mayhem, and then there’s Bayhem. Michael Bay’s Transformers redefined sci-fi action cinema in 2007, featuring a spectacular climax in downtown Los Angeles — a riot of colossal urban warfare and aerial strikes as the U.S. military and Autobot robots unite to fight Decepticon robots out to enslave Earth. A key sequence showcased Autobots and Decepticons ‘transforming’ at 80 mph on a busy L.A. freeway, swatting aside cars and buses while fighting each other — living out the fantasy of every aggressive L.A. driver. Unlike the stately saucers of ID4, or the graceful war machines of War of the Worlds, Bay’s Decepticon robots are fast-moving, anthropomorphic and nasty. Like certain Hollywood celebrities, they trash talk, strut and propagandize as they smash through buildings and otherwise inflict as much collateral damage as possible. The film that made stars out of Shia LaBeouf and Megan Fox, Transformers delivers heaping doses of humor, curvy women and robot carnage; it’s Bayhem at its best.
Best line: “You didn’t think that the United States military might need to know that you’re keeping a hostile alien robot frozen in the basement?!”
From the NBC miniseries "V" (1983).
4) V (1983)
These alien ‘Visitors’ look just like us, and they come in peace … except that underneath their false skins they’re actually lizards and want to eat us. That’s the premise of Kenneth Johnson’s apocalyptic NBC miniseries from 1983, a show that leans heavily on references to Nazism, communism and other pernicious forms of group-behavior. V is also the show that first gave us gigantic motherships hovering over major cities, years before ID4. The best part of V, however, is the scene-chewing performance by Jane Badler as the alien leader Diana; somebody should put that woman in charge of GM. Otherwise, in V the human resistance movement against the aliens centers around Los Angeles — possibly because it’s hard to cop a tan while saucers are blocking the sun.
[Editor’s Note: The article below and its accompanying slideshow appears in its entirety today at The Atlantic.]
Decoding the many references to film history in Martin Scorsese’s Oscar-nominated movie
By Govindini Murty. Martin Scorsese’s delightful children’s film Hugo is currently nominated for eleven Oscars, the most of any film of 2011. And in a year of movies like The Artist and Midnight in Paris that pay homage to early 20th century film and cultural history, Hugo might be the most complex cinematic homage of them all.
Based on the children’s book The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick, Hugo tells the story of an orphaned boy who lives in the walls of a train station in 1931 Paris. Young Hugo (Asa Butterfield) maintains the station’s clocks and tries to repair a mysterious automaton left to him by his late father, a clock maker. While doing so, Hugo encounters an old man who sells toys in the station, Papa Georges (Ben Kingsley), and his precocious step-daughter Isabelle (Chloë Grace Moretz). Hugo and Isabelle team up to find the secret of the automaton, discovering along the way that Papa Georges is none other than Georges Méliès, the legendary turn of the century filmmaker known for such fantasy films as A Trip to the Moon (1902).
Scorsese uses the stunning 3D cinematography of Hugo much like a palimpsest, layering multiple levels of historical, cinematic, and intellectual history in each scene. Hugo references everyone from Jules Verne, Django Reinhardt, and the robot C-3PO to classic silent movies like Douglas Fairbanks’s The Thief of Bagdad, Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and Harold Lloyd’s Safety Last. Scorsese has even said that he considers the 3D in Hugo as a cinematic form of Cubism.
This cultural guide will help to decode the wealth of allusions in Hugo, making for a crash course in film, art, and literary history:
Maria from "Metropolis," C-3PO from "Star Wars."
Mysterious Automata
Hugo’s central mystery revolves around the automaton left to Hugo by his late father. The eerie metallic figure recalls such classic automata as the Machine-Man in Fritz Lang’s 1927 sci-fi epic Metropolis and C-3PO in Star Wars. According to Hugo author Brian Selznick, the inspiration for Hugo’s automaton came from an 1805 writing automaton created by Swiss clockmaker Henri Maillerdet, currently in the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, as well from the 18th century Jaquet-Droz writing automata in Neuchâtel, Switzerland. Animated figures go back to the Renaissance, when mechanical humans and animals would appear out of clock faces to mark the time. Automata were also popular in Hellenistic Alexandria, where automated figures were used in mechanical puppet theaters and in temples to provide oracles.
In Hugo, the automaton possesses a dual quality—both ominous and marvelous. This reflects the ambiguous feelings that people have toward humanoid automata—seeing them either as frightening doppelgangers (as in Metropolis) or as magical helpers (as in Star Wars). The scene where Hugo dreams that he turns into the automaton reinforces this ambiguity and dramatizes a common fear of dehumanization in the machine age.
[For the rest of the article and the accompanying slideshow, please visit The Atlantic.]
