The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013)

catchingfireFrancis Lawrence (Constantine) didn’t have to work too hard to clear the bar Gary Ross set in 2012 with the dull adaptation of The Hunger Games. I wish he had anyway, because Catching Fire does just that only about halfway in, and then never roaring.

Assuming audiences have digested the previous film and its Battle Royale of a plot, Catching Fire catches Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence, American Hustle) and Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson, 2012’s Red Dawn remake) ditching their potato-sack wardrobe to embark on a victory tour of the nation’s 12 districts and sell the illusion of a romance to the huddled masses. Instead, they deviate from the government script and Katniss becomes a “beacon of hope for the rebellion. She needs to be eliminated,” orders nefarious President Snow (Donald Sutherland, Space Cowboys).

catchingfire1To do that, Snow forces the pair into another round of Hunger Games, this time an all-stars edition planned by Plutarch Heavensbee (Philip Seymour Hoffman, The Master). As Head Gamemaker for the Capitol, he creates a deadly beach scenario full of such frights as angry monkeys, blister smoke and Amanda Plummer.

Once Lawrence — the director, that is — gets his young stars into combat, the movie becomes mild fun to watch. Before that, it’s almost as bland and plodding as Ross’ work, which mistook its dystopian setting as a mandate that it also couldn’t have a soul. Dozens of characters with names that sound like failed foreign breakfast cereals return, but Mr. Lawrence is able to inject the proceedings with more juice. Too bad his leads remain ever languid.

The one thing that the original The Hunger Games had that Catching Fire does not is an actual ending. What viewers get here is not just a cheat, but a bout of expository diarrhea. It is possible to give a story closure while leaving some threads dangling for the next chapter; this one is all damned dangle. —Rod Lott

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Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (1970)

investigationcitizen“How are you going to kill me this time?” she asks teasingly, as she takes her lover into her arms.

“I’m going to slash your throat,” he answers his mistress, welcoming the embrace.

As they undress and slide under the silk sheets, he makes good on his playful threat. That the man actually kills her is one shock. That he is also the chief of the police’s homicide division is another.

Never named, the inspector (Gian Maria Volonté, A Fistful of Dollars) is worshipped by the officers below him, whereas they view the deceased Miss Terzi (Floridan Bolkan, A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin) as “a libertine” for owning no undergarments. Then again, Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion takes place in an era when Italy kept secret files on homosexuals and communists alike, which the inspector lords over as potential blackmail material, so the authorities are all about snap judgments.

37.tifPreaching precision and repression, he embarks on the investigation of Terzi’s murder despite being the crime’s perpetrator. He even leaves a slew of clues at the scene that point directly to him. Why? He feels he is so above the law, he never could be taken seriously as a suspect. He even informs his superior of his affair with the woman.

Investigation is not your ordinary Italian thriller, and not just because it won the Academy Award that year for Best Foreign Language Film. It is built with a heavy streak of political satire, some of which may be lost on American viewers, but hardly to a point of indifference; the mystery of the inspector’s mental state is too great a pull, and director Elio Petri (The 10th Victim) parcels out explanatory bits during many flashbacks.

Technically, the movie is imperfect — the camera shakes in the pivotal moments right after the crime, and later, the crew clearly is reflected in our antihero’s sunglasses — but all that can be overlooked with ease because its plot is so unique, even several decades after the fact. Sporting the bounce of a plucked rubber band, Ennio Morricone’s equally first-rate theme strongly hints at Petri’s playful intent, dark though it may be, dark it should be. —Rod Lott

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Golden Needles (1974)

goldenneedlesTo grant Golden Needles the alternate title of Mitchell Goes to the Orient — as a friend of mine did — is not out of line, even if Mitchell was a year away from its messy birth. This half-baked adventure presents star Joe Don Baker (Walking Tall) in the same vein: overweight, unkempt, presumably sweaty, kinda dumb and yet somehow wholly desirable to women out of his league. Imagine the guy who runs your grocery store’s produce department strutting around like he were George Clooney, and that’s Baker as Mitchell Dan.

The Golden Needles of the title refer not to what viewers will want to stab into their eyes upon the requisite sex scene, but the magic acupuncture statue that damn near everyone wishes to acquire. An American woman named Felicity (Elizabeth Ashley, Coma) attempts to buy the stolen statue in Hong Kong, but her offer is turned down. Her solution is to hire Dan, whom she just met at a brothel, to steal it for her. “That must be a bell-ringer of a statue,” he says.

goldenneedles1Damn straight it is! If its needles are placed in the proper order, it grants “sexual vigor” to the poked! Although supposedly retired, Dan agrees if Felicity will hug him and say “I love you” to him right then and there. Dan has mommy issues, so Lord knows why the refined Felicity decides to sleep with him. He kisses as if her face were a roast beef platter; fittingly, their postcoital activity is stuffing themselves with seafood. You’ll swear off seafood.

Golden Needles is an action movie, although one might forget that fact while watching. It has two fun chases — one through a health spa; the other, a shipyard — and the brief moments that Jim Kelly (Black Belt Jones) is onscreen busting out kung-fu moves are blessed ones. While watching the Hulk-esque act of Baker throwing Asians through plate glass never gets old, the movie does. That Robert Clouse went from the martial-arts classic Enter the Dragon to this obscurity in less than a year says more about the talent of Bruce Lee. —Rod Lott

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Real Time: Siege at Lucas Street Market (2001)

realtimeAdapted from one of his own short stories — this particular one featuring his comic-book creation of Ms. Tree, who does not appear in the film — Real Time: Siege at Lucas Street Market finds prolific author Max Allan Collins (Road to Perdition) transferring his criminal mind to feature films for the third time, moving from killer-Mommy thrillers to the corner store. Viewers will end up with more than a pack of cigs and a Dr Pepper Icee.

The same year that Fox’s 24 series made split-screen vogue again, writer/director Collins took the concept further by filling his frame with as many as four screens at once, each displaying a different angle of the same scene. Presented as an unbroken story, Real Time depicts a January robbery of an Iowa convenience store by two drug-hungry lowlifes, and Collins tells his tale almost entirely through the shop’s security-camera footage, with snippets of amateur video as supplemental material. Such a structure allows the story to thrive on the lowest of budgets; so does a running time as tight the knots of a veteran yachtsman. This is a case of turning a project’s challenges into attributes.

realtime1With pop radio piped through the store’s P.A. system providing stark contrast to the deadly situation, our felonious duo takes everyone inside hostage. This includes a cop plagued by Montezuma’s revenge, a jailbait shoplifter, a mother and her ballerina child, a douche of a businessman and a very pregnant woman; the latter is played by ’80s scream queen Brinke Stevens (Slave Girls from Beyond Infinity), and it’s nice to see her in a down-to-earth role where she isn’t present strictly to disrobe.

At the time of this Siege, sales of DVD players had yet to hit their peak, and Collins makes creative use of the technology by allowing viewers to go nuts with the multiangle feature. Jumping around is hardly required to enjoy the movie, however; as I did, you may as well forget about the remote and just let the hostage drama unfold as the filmmakers intended. At once realistic and yet just pulpy enough to let you know Real is fiction, the movie boasts a uniqueness that makes up for deficiencies in the overbaked performances of the robbers (Tom Keane and Chad Hoch), who seem seconds away from screaming, “Attica! Attica! Attica!” —Rod Lott

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Hammer Films’ Psychological Thrillers, 1950-1972

hammerthrillersWith Hammer Films’ Psychological Thrillers, 1950-1972, you know David Huckvale has done his job when I fill up my Amazon Wish List with titles I don’t yet own and move those that I do and haven’t seen — several found on The Icons of Suspense Collection — to the top of my DVD viewing pile.

When people think of Hammer, they think “horror”; some misinformed fans don’t even realize the legendary UK studio made anything but fright films. Thrillers, it did even better — at least that’s my purely subjective view, but Huckvale would seem to agree, calling them “more than catchpenny essays in suspense.”

His book examines all 17 of them — the psych-focused ones, anyway, and then only those falling between the golden years of 1950 and 1972. (Sorry, Hilary Swank and The Resident!) But first, he lays the groundwork by discussing the classics that informed Hammer’s approach to the genre: Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Diabolique and four from Alfred Hitchcock. That said, when it comes to one of the former’s famous twists, Huckvale contends that “Hammer got there first,” with 1950’s The Man in Black.

Barely a chapter goes by — one, literally — without mentioning cribs from Hitchcock, whether birds and baths, mirrors or mothers. Huckvale reserves perhaps his highest praise for what arguably looks the most overtly Hitchcockian of them all: 1963’s Maniac.

From start to finish, the author delivers smart, insightful readings, comparing the films to one another, analyzing them in relation from Shakespeare to Sigmund Freud, yet remains standing on the opposite side of dullsville. There is more merit and credibility on any given page than in the whole of Randy Rasmussen’s Psycho, the Birds and Halloween: The Intimacy of Terror in Three Classic Films, a fellow new release from McFarland & Company.

Huckvale may veer often, but he always has a point, and he is as comfortable teasing the prospect of Cary Grant playing the Phantom of the Opera as he is at referencing Kierkegaard. —Rod Lott

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