Monday, March 11 writing reviews

Notice from Mr. Tirre that I received this morning:
TALKBACK4Teens is inviting SOTA students to join their next forum filming this coming Monday March 18 in Rochester.
How much teen talent does Rochester have?? TALKBACK4Teens airs on Public Television and the web. Filmed in the television studio in
downtown Rochester, this is an opportunity to discuss talent in Rochester and your own talents in particular.  All interested students
please contact us at Participate@TalkBack4Teens.com and put S-O-T-A in the subject line, and go to the website TalkBack4Teens.com

These next couple weeks we are working writing how to write reviews. Everyone will write one for a film and another of the their choice: music, theatre, restaurant or art exhibit.
 These are due by midnight tonight. As with other assignments, please respond on a word document and send along. This is the last grade of this marking period.
MAKE SURE YOU HAVE HEAD OR EAR PHONES TOMORROW.

Please read the following the film review from The New Yorker on The Hunger Games and answer the following questions.  Due by midnight tonight.
1. How has the author Denby prepared himself with background material to write the review?
2. What literary elements do you note in the article? Identify textual examples of characterization, plot, setting, tone and dialogue.

3. What historical allusions does Denby make? Again be specific.
4. To what does Denby proclaim the success of the film?
5.What do we know of the actor Jennifer Lawrence's background?
6. Who is the cinematographer and what type of camera work is used in the film?
7. According to Denby, why is this film incapable of being a classic?
8  Discuss who the audience is for this review and how you know it.

The Current Cinema

Kids at Risk

“The Hunger Games” and “Bully.”

by David Denby

Suzanne Collins’s “The Hunger Games” (the first book in a best-selling young-adult trilogy) is a sensational piece of pop primitivism—a Hobbesian war of all against all. In a dystopian society in the future, a group of wealthy, epicene overlords—authoritarians with violet hair and the vicious manners of French courtiers—threaten and control an impoverished population. Years ago, the virtuous commoners rose up, unsuccessfully, against their decadent rulers, and they’ve been both cosseted and terrorized ever since by a yearly lottery in which two teens from each of twelve districts are selected, trained, and turned into media stars. They are then set loose in a controlled wilderness, where they must survive hunger and one another, until only one of them is left alive. The survivor will bring home to his district both glory and food, and everyone, rich and poor, watches the events on television. Collins’s idea seems to be derived from the bloodier Greek myths and Roman gladiatorial contests (the big shots have names like Seneca and Claudius); from William Golding’s “Lord of the Flies”; and from TV spectacles like the myriad “Survivor” shows and sado-Trumpian elimination contests. Collins’s strategy of putting girls and boys (some as young as twelve) at the center of a deadly struggle adds tense, nasty excitement to the old tales and tawdry TV rituals she draws on.

Trying to explain the trilogy’s extraordinary popularity, critics and commentators have reached for metaphors. Perhaps it’s that the books offer a hyper-charged version of high school, an everyday place with incessant anxieties: constant judgment by adults; hazing, bullying, and cliques; and, finally, college-entry traumas. If you stretch the metaphor a bit, the books could be seen as a menacing fable of capitalism, in which an ethos of competition increasingly yields winner-take-all victors. Collins might seem to be one of those victors herself: there are twenty-four million copies of the trilogy in print in the United States alone. But maybe the reason for its success is simple: it makes teens feel both victimized and important.

Collins understands her audience well, and she can write. Her first-person narrator, Katniss Everdeen, who hails from a shabby coal-mining area, is a tough, resourceful girl, a huntress who protects her family. Collins, staying inside Katniss’s head, produces short, tactile sentences that are precise about apprehension and physical experience. However fanciful the basic premise, the books are rugged girls’ adventure literature of the kind that used to be written for boys. Making an exciting movie out of “The Hunger Games” should not have been that hard.

I certainly have no quarrel with the casting. Jennifer Lawrence demonstrated a convincing strength as Ree, the Ozarks girl with a husky voice and pale-blue eyes in “Winter’s Bone.” In “The Hunger Games,” as Katniss—a more dynamic version of Ree—she has a lightly burnished copper complexion, and when she’s still, there’s something luminous, slightly otherworldly about her. Her gravity and her steady gaze make her a fine heroine. And I enjoyed nineteen-year-old Josh Hutcherson as Peeta, the other competitor from Katniss’s district, who adores her; he has a lost look, an engaging not-quite-handsomeness. In true young-adult-fiction style, Katniss has a second admirer—stalwart, gentle Gale, played by Liam Hemsworth, who looks, in this movie, like a larger Taylor Lautner. Among the adults, Stanley Tucci and Elizabeth Banks, wearing enormous wigs, camp it up as the rulers. Though the satiric point of making some of the plutocrats monsters out of an eighteenth-century farce eludes me,

But the rest of “The Hunger Games” is pretty much a disaster—disjointed, muffled, and even, at times, boring. Collins herself labored on the script, along with Gary Ross and Billy Ray, and Ross (“Pleasantville,” “Seabiscuit”) directed. Working with the cinematographer Tom Stern, Ross shoots in a style that I have come to despise. A handheld camera whips nervously from one angle to another; the fragments are then jammed together without any regard for space. You feel like you’ve been tossed into a washing machine (don’t sit in the front rows without Dramamine). Even when two people are just talking calmly, Ross jerks the camera around. Why? As the sense of danger increases, he has nothing to build toward. Visually, he’s already gone over the top. And the action itself is a thrashing, incoherent blur—kids tumbling on the ground or wrestling with each other. Katniss stalks various kids with her bow and arrow, but she kills only one intentionally—a domineering sadist—and you don’t see the arrow hit him; you don’t even see him fall. Ross consistently drains away all the tensions built into the grisly story—the growing wariness and suspicion that each teen-ager must feel as the number of those still alive begins to diminish, or the horror (or glee) that some of them experience as they commit murder. The camera rushes through the wilderness, but, in the end, the movie looks less like a fight to the death than like a scavenger hunt. Katniss is always finding something useful in a tree or lying on the ground.

“The Hunger Games” is a prime example of commercial hypocrisy. The filmmakers bait kids with a cruel idea, but they can’t risk being too intense or too graphic (the books are more explicit). After a while, we get the point: because children are the principal audience, the picture needs a PG-13 rating. The result is an evasive, baffling, unexciting production—anything but a classic