Terms of Interment

I'm not sure if it's brave or stupid to have an action hero who doesn't actually accomplish anything throughout the film, but considering my bad attitude when I left the theater after seeing Lockout, it's probably the later.

Guy Pearce is barely recognizable as Snow, a vague ex-government agent in a vague future who takes the fall in some kind of vague sting operation that went vaguely wrong. The vague officials holding him decide he's the perfect guy to to save the President's daughter (Maggie Grace), trapped on an orbital prison where vague experiments are being conducted on cryogenically frozen prisoners. The prisoners got loose and are now making vague demands, and now it's up to Snow to wander around, being told what to do from another orbital station like he's a remote controlled car and complaining about how the President's daughter just won't shut up even though she barely says anything annoying or irrelevant to the situation. It's the same annoying character relationship between Jake Gyllenhaal and Gemma Arterton in Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, only without any actual justification for it on the screen.

If I was being favorable, I could almost call Guy Pearce's Snow character a parodically typical action hero stereotype. Gone are Pearce's sunken cheeks and leaner frame that made him seem so unique in L.A. Confidential and Memento. Pearce has never been an action star, and what Hollywood seems to telling us is that with enough trips to the gym, anyone can fill in for roles that used to exclusive to types like Arnold Schwarzenegger or Sylvester Stallone. Yes, just slap some biceps on Paul Giamatti or Kevin Kline and stand him in front of some CGI speedlines, that's the ticket.

For some reason, all the plot elements seem to be in different rooms from each other. There's the ongoing subplot of Snow trying to discover the location of the vague compromising information Snow was catering around in the sting operation, and he seems far more interested in that than the actual saving daughters plot. The actual prison break, which we are told involves hundreds of the worlds most evil prisoners, is represented by a tiny fraction of about eight, only two of which have any character to them at all. There is no apparent in-fighting for control, no splitting into several conflicting parties. While this one group of prisoners do all the hostage negotiations and executions, the rest of them are apparently standing around with their thumbs up their asses. Then there's the political squabbles going on on the second orbital base. The President is stripped of power at one point, doesn't really mean anything. There's a Star Wars trench run style scene that I honestly can't remember too much of. And I think Snow only kills one guy. Maybe two, but I think the second one was an accident.

Nobody seems to know what they want Lockout to be, nothing gels together. Die Hard had a similar setup of hostages, robberies, reluctant heroes and mystery, but all of these things were interlocked with each other, removing one element would cause the rest of fall apart. Lockout keeps these elements at arms length from each other and seems too afraid to make any of it matter.

White Collar Michael Myers

Virtually all horror movies have an element of voyeurism present, why do you think they've cornered the POV shot market? In many ways, the act of spying on people in their most intimate and private moments, from undressing to sexual intercourse to the use of illegal substances, is a substitute for rape in a film, since rape is rarely commercial in for mainstream Hollywood productions. At the very least, you would need some kind of buffer to balance it out, like the bumbling redneck cops in Wes Craven's Last House on the Left. Roger Ebert gave that film three and a half stars, while giving I Spit on Your Grave, which is pretty much the same movie only without the tonal whiplash, zero stars. Oh, Roger, you're such a wacky guy.

Voyeurism often replaces rape in the one-two punch for most movie horrors, to have your life invaded by an intruder just to finally be snuffed out. It's not enough to JUST spy on someone or JUST kill them. Everyone's spied on someone in their lives, be it as something as minor as instinctively looking down a woman's blouse as she bends over. There is a key scene in Cabin in the Woods in which Holden (Jesse Williams) discovers a one-way mirror in his room that allows him to look into Dana's (Kristen Connolly) room and catches himself watching her undress before his better judgements kick in. He ends up switching the room with Dana to make her feel comfortable, and she too falls pray to the same instincts as she watches Holden take his shirt off.

The point of the scene within to the film is to contrast with the main antagonists, two white collar schlubs who peer into and manipulate these kids' final hours. While the film is rightfully thought of as a tongue-in-cheek inversion of trashy slasher movie tropes, it is also the natural extension of them, placing a Jason Voorhess mask and Freddy Krueger sweater onto Nineteen Eighty-Four totalitarianism. Big Brother is the ultimate voyeur, so by right he would be the ultimate slasher killer. Hell, it's the world we live in, from the intimate surveillance to the apathetic administrators, only instead of the state throwing zombies and Pinhead at you, they thrown middle-easterners and Vietnamese. Throw in a little Illuminati symbolism and you might as well call Cabin in the Woods the most American horror film ever made.

Cabin in the Woods has killed the horror genre. Hollywood will keep producing and reproducing films for it, but there is simply nowhere to go after this. The conclusion of the film is a violent slobberknocker where every horror icon ever reigns havoc within the hallways of the Big Brother corporation building, the final death throes of modern horror within the intestines of the ultimate horror villain, the snake eating its own tail. Any horror movie after will be an empty zombified husk of what once came before.

And may the odds be ever in your favor!

As a human being, I am prone to detecting patterns in everything, from bathroom tiles to burns on toast to the marketing campaign and the film it's advertising. This can be self-sabotaging at times, my attempts at being too clever can remove me from just having a good time with a movie, but it's not like I could help it with The Hunger Games. The film was doing its best to push me away, from the dull performances, to its action beat pacing that refused to stop and take in a scene, to the shakeycam/Bourne Identity/Black Hawk Down cinematography that would pop up at the most inappropriate times, trying to get the audience seasick. So as the film ran through all the key moments of Suzanne Collins' fairly decent book, my mind ended up wandering to tall tales of producers and directors and marketeers.

There once was a major studio exec named Snow. He had been there in the late 1970s, when the baby boomers finally gave up on peace and San Francisco and became the sellout nuclear families that they sprung from. The rebellion had failed, Nixon and Vietnam had put everyone into a meat grinder. The people were broken and boring and needed to be entertained, out of fear of a second uprising. So Snow and other big producers created the Blockbusters, big over-advertised event movies. Every year, the studios would select a handful of interesting adventure films and put them in an arena and see which ones would come out on top. Early winners included Jaws and Star Wars. And it worked. Hippies haven't been seen since.

Snow was still one of Hollywood's head honchos when the 2012 Blockbusters rolled around. Many films had been chosen as tribute. The Avengers and The Dark Knight Rises from District 1, the superhero district. Two Snow White movies somehow got selected this year, weird. Finally, there was District 12, the pop literature district. At the reaping, Max Brooks' World War Z was selected, but The Hunger Games offered herself as a volunteer tribute. And so The Hunger Games was shipped into a magic train to be taken to Hollywood.

And if The Hunger Games is Katniss, then surely Twilight is Haymitch, the drunken bloated franchise that won the Blockbuster years ago. He teaches the District 12 tribute how to look pretty, how to punch up that love triangle, how to throw around shitty CGI dogs like sprinkles. And advertise, and advertise, and advertise, and advertise. Get those sponsors, make Hollywood love you before you even step out into theaters.

While the percentage of good/middling/bad films that come out every year hasn't really changed since the 1920s, the use of advertising campaigns and hype machines have built up to a radical level, artificially creating event movies out of what might otherwise have been simple films, which is what The Hunger Games is at its core. It takes no risks, it offers no surprises, and is ultimately hampered by poor decisions in camera work and pacing. Despite its popularity NOW, despite its box office NOW, I cannot see The Hunger Games lasting in the long run. Its bad enough that the story is a critique of current popular trends in reality television, which will surely date the film in ten years time, but it can't stand up on its own, even if it turns out to be the biggest film of the year.

Of course, this year's game isn't over, and there's the chance that The Hunger Games doesn't pull it off in the end, taking a spear in the chest from one of the equally-hyped summer films or maybe a fluke Oscar bait film this winter, but lord knows it's going to give a good run at it. The film that was on fire.