The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part One

Cold Open:

EXT. DYSTOPIAN GOVERNMENT SQUARE

A non-descript future Dystopian society. Citizens are gathered around the square. A chief bad guy, The DYSTOPIAN LACKEY, steps forward. He's surrounded by his fellow lackeys.

DYSTOPIAN LACKEY

By order of the Hollywood money machine, all final films of all future film series are to be split into two parts. The Hunger Games: Mockingjay: Part One shall be one of many of these two-part trilogies. Future servants include the final films of the Divergent and The Avengers film series. Any attempt to subvert our decree shall result in the offender getting laughed out of Hollywood.

Jethro promptly punts the Dystopian Lackey into orbit with a kick. The other lackeys follow.

JETHRO

Not if critics like me have anything to say about it!

The Review At Hand:

Yeah, what that guy said.

In the previous film, Catching Fire, Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) cancelled the dreaded Hunger Games by destroying the studio. Evil President Sore Loser Snow (Donald Sutherland) responds by carpet-bombing Katniss's home District 12. Katniss finds herself in the underground District 13, which was long thought carpet-bombed too.

Katniss finds herself the Mockingjay, the symbol of the upcoming rebellion against the evil Capitol. The pressure from both sides threatens to crush her. It's especially so once she finds out what happened to her beloved Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson).

Yes, that's it in a nutshell. Why did it need to be two movies? I'd say profit.

It's easily the shortest of the films so far at 123 minutes. And the plot is rather slow. A few plot points and action scenes happen here and there, but that's about it. That's a contrast to the previous films which were quicked pace and at least twenty minutes longer.

It gets good when stuff happens. Katniss's stiff-acting in a series of District 13 propaganda videos is amusing. The action scenes that happen are suitably tense. The acting was pretty good, especially from the leads. The final plot twist was especially suspenseful (even if it wasn't the twist I predicted in the Catching Fire review).

The set, costume and makeup designs are much more subdued than the other films. But I appreciated the artistry behind them. If only there wasn't a year-long gap between this and the next part. There's so much stuff from the story I'm waiting to see done.

Birdman

Follow a bunch of creative egos and see what you think of it. That's one lesson you can learn from the new film, Birdman (or The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance).

Riggan Thomson (Michael Keaton) was once the big-screen superhero Birdman. Years later, Riggan is flat broke and washed up. He aims to remedy his fortunes by bringing Raymond Carver's short story What We Talk About When We Talk About Love to Broadway. A comment from Carver to young Riggan inspired him to go to acting.

The preview phase is a disaster. Riggan decides to bring on celebrated Broadway star Mike Shiner (Edward Norton) to the production. Mike forcefully takes up the spotlight. A critic wants to tear the production to shreds on the basis of it even existing. Riggan's desire for perfection irritates everybody around him. And even worse, Riggan's grasp of reality is fading away. As his cinematic alter-ego taunts him in his mind, Riggan starts to believe himself greater than great.

What you'll notice the most is its camera style. Shot by cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, the camera follows its actors along. When pieced together by editors Douglas Crise and Stephen Mirrione, the end result appears as one long take.

The story, by director Alejandro González Iñárritu and co-writers Nicolás Giacobone. Alexander Dinelaris, Jr. and Armando Bo, is darkly funny. The show's production is one long comedy of errors. The audience can laugh fine at the set falling apart in one scene. But when the play finally premieres, Riggan's grand finale is shocking.

As Riggan, Keaton convincingly plays an artist on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Reality blurs so much that we often believe, as he does, that Birdman and psychic powers are for real. More often than not, we're made aware that he is hallucinating. It all leads to a last scene open to interpretation.

Birdman's tone isn't for all tastes. There are some great laughs out of it, but it turns dark once we understand its main character. As for me, I found it a good balance of humor and pathos. It's one of the funniest satires I've seen.

Big Hero 6

Ever since Disney bought Marvel a few years back, an animated film based on one of Marvel's properties was within the realm of possibility. The possible is now actual as Big Hero 6, Marvel's Animesque Super Team, has their own Disney animated feature.

The hero of Big Hero 6 is Hiro Hamada, a teen genius in the futuristic hodgepodge metropolis of San Fransokyo. His brother Tadashi attends the elite San Fransokyo Tech and encourages Hiro to enroll there. Hiro does so by demonstrating his new Microbots at the University science fair. A few hours later, Tadashi and famed instructor Professor Callaghan are killed in a fire at the school.

Hiro is miserable until he finds Tadashi's last invention, the medical balloon-bot Baymax. He also finds a masked villain using his Microbots. Hiro suspects the baddie of starting the fire and vows to catch him. Hiro upgrades Baymax into a fighting robot and enlists Tadashi's friends - tomboy GoGo, peppy Honey Lemon, uptight Wasabi and laidback Fred - to fill up the Big Hero 6.

The city of San Fransokyo may be fictional, but it's great. It's a bright, colorful animated environment which convincingly looks like both of its two inspirations. It especially appealed to me as I was in San Francisco twice this year (and expect to be there again next month). It felt like I was there again.

The Big Heroes of the movie have their charms. Baymax's cuddly design and soft voice should make him an instant hit with kids. Hiro is a likable, relatable protagonist whose youthful misbehaving never annoy the audience. Wasabi and Fred are good comic relief. Honey Lemon's enthusiasm endears herself to all. And GoGo's just cool (her catch-all catchphrase is "Woman Up!"). Overall, this was a great bunch of super heroes. Their final defeat of the masked villain involves some unique uses of their skills.

This super adventure differs a lot from its source material. But that's not bad. The story they devised was funny, meaningful, fun and quick-paced. Whether in 3D or Flatscreen, Big Hero 6 is a Marvelous adventure for all.

An animated short, Feast, opened the film. A story of a Boston Terrier and his love of human food, it was both cute and cringe-worthy at the same time. Stay tuned after the credits for a cameo from Marvel's legendary Stan Lee.

Interstellar

As I said in my Transcendence review:

One film I waited for this year was Interstellar, Christopher Nolan's thought-provoking sci-fi about a wormhole to another universe. What's on the other side?

We now know what's on the other side of the wormhole. It's a big, loud visual extravaganza that sure talks a lot about science.

In the not so distant future, Earth has no future. NASA has gone underground while society has gone agrarian. Crops are going extinct one by one. A new Dust Bowl has gone global. And it's just going to get worst before the end.

Former NASA pilot Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) tries to keep his family safe from catastrophe. One day, he finds a "ghost" in his daughter Murphy's (Mackenzie Foy) room communicating in binary. The binary codes lead them to NASA's last base. The staff discovered a wormhole near Saturn; on the other side are a few potentially hospitable planets. Cooper, the only man left with space experience, is tasked with leading the mission.

Interstellar's visual expectations absolutely live up to the hype. The journey through the wormhole alone ought to warrant the film an Academy Award. Other visual highlights are a frozen planet (even the clouds are frozen!) and a journey through a black hole and eventually time and space. The film's comic relief characters, a pair of robots named TARS and CASE, are great animatronic creations.

The film's mammoth 169 minute runtime can definitely test a few attention spans. It explains all the quantum physics and stuff of its space travel but barely in layman's terms. At least one plot twist was introduced far too early to make it shocking. And the film's final plot twist had me going "huh?" A lot of simple plot details got lost in the shuffle.

Interstellar is a marvel of technical design. It deserves to be seen on the big screen. Its splendor alone is enough to make up for the overly-complex story.