Chaplin!

I have a new post up for the Close-Up series on the MUBI Notebook!  This one is on Charlie Chaplin's The Kid, which you can watch on MUBI here, and I'd highly recommend it.  It's an essential classic and a great gateway not only to Chaplin, but to silent film in general.

Chaplin must be in the air over here this month, since there's also a two-part rumination on Chaplin's The Gold Rush by Daniel Riccuito, part personal and part historical, that you should check out as well.  Part one, and part two.

REVIEW: The Hunger Games (2012)

I'm, er, game, but even ignoring some awkward writing/staging, a lot here works at cross-purposes: the super-handheld camera captures gritty imagery of a rural post-apocalypse, while one half of the cast looks like they wandered in from a low-budget Fellini film and the other from the CW.  It's nothing if not a festival of recognizable actors with campy haircuts: Stanley Tucci with a combination pompadour-ponytail, Elizabeth Banks looking like a kabuki Queen Elizabeth, a soused Woody Harrelson sporting Kurt Cobain bangs, and Wes "American Beauty" Bentley with a beard that could best be described as Expressionist.  So the kids (and the cinematographer and composer) appear to be taking this all very seriously—the adult actors, not so much.  There's not much to say, except that this is the sort of film where the disturbing premise of being forced to kill another human being is buried under the way in which the Darwinian games can be a metaphor for high school cliquishness.  But I suppose I can't hold it against the filmmakers for not successfully combining dystopia and camp—it's a hard trick.  Plus, I'm happy to see an action film that isn't in a hurry, and when the action does come, it ain't bad.

2 out of 5 stars.

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The Hunger Games is now out on DVD.  It made a boatload of money.