The Hunger Games (Movie Review)

2 hrs and 22 min, color, 2012

The young reading public has swarmed all over Suzanne Collins’s direful, portentous fable and sent it soaring on the best seller charts, almost off those charts.  Over 800,000 copies sold in the four years since its publication, translated into 26 languages!   How can we aging literati fail to take notice, even those of us who have not read the book but have put ourselves through the feverish paces of watching and absorbing the movie adaptation, which according to reliable sources is quite faithful to that novel?  I have viewed better dystopian depictions of tyranny on screen, but I have sat through much worse, and I am impressed by the earnest professionalism with which the drama unfolds under the direct management of Collins herself.  She took command of the screenplay, assisted by Director Gary Ross and another writer Bill Ray.  I feared it would be gory and exploitative, but it is neither.  It is stark, but not especially distasteful, and Katniss, the main character, is competently and sensitively portrayed by Jennifer Lawrence.

In an undisclosed year far beyond our own, the North American continent has been transformed into one sizable nation called Panem, divided into twelve districts, District Twelve being the former Appalachia region, the lowest in reputation.  Every year a male and a female youth are selected by lottery from each district and shipped by rail to the capital, where they must compete in the ultimate blood sport dubbed The Hunger Games.  The twenty-four contestants (called “tributes”), after being feted in spectacular ceremonies, are turned loose into a huge forest region (somewhat booby trapped) where they must kill each other or be killed, only one survivor to emerge from the melee.  The entire event, lasting many hours, is observed on television by the entire country, each district rooting for its own tributes.  You could say that it is Reality TV carried to monstrous and gruesome proportions.  The teenaged Katniss, an expert with bow and arrow and knives, her expertise honed on many a hunting expedition in her mountain woods, finds herself competing with a young man from her district named Peeta (Josh Hutcherson), whom she hardly knows.

We have all heard, or seen depicted, stories about individuals fattened up in high style before being served up to a gross malevolence ordeal for the amusement of a crowd.  The ancient ritual recited by the Gladiators, trained to fight to the death in the arena, echoes in the mind – “We who are about to die, salute you!”  The initial lottery itself in each district is even called The Reaping, as if the chosen are so many sheaves of wheat for consumption.  Give ear to Panem’s shadowy President Snow (played by Donald Sutherland): “Hope is the only thing stronger than fear,” but it is also “dangerous” and has to be “contained.”  To paraphrase: Give the subjects a big prize to hope for (like something on the order of an Olympic medal and the esteem that goes with it), but incite enough fear to keep them under control.  This has often been the unwritten credo of a family member or somebody in a relationship who alternately gives/withholds affection or rewards/punishes.  It is the most deadly of all control mechanisms, and Collins has envisioned how this would work if a government used it instead of abject cruelty and oppression as the device to enslave.    

There is another by-product of such a system of control.  Those who are thusly manipulated can eventually become just as deadly to each other.  If you choose to screen the film, note how easy so many of the twenty-four young tributes find subverting and killing to be, once they are turned loose in that forest.  Is it unheard of for children in a household dominated by this give/withhold ploy to begin manipulating each other in like manner instead of taking loving refuge together against their common domestic antagonist?  I am sure most of us have seen this kind of dynamic at work, the mistreated mistreating others mistreated.  Collins tries to imagine what such a thing would look like when an entire society functions that way.  To a great extent she succeeds.  But what is missing from the narrative is a full payload of suspense, at least from where I sit, or have I been seeing too many movies for too long.  The outcome of this fight to the death was quite apparent to me well over an hour before the movie ended.  See how you find it, unless you have read the book and already know!  Fortunately the movie’s ending, foreseeable though it may be, is not the ending of the story.  “The Hunger Games” is the first of a published trilogy, all three novels already in print, the second and third movie adaptations now in various stages of preparation.  I guess I will be checking them out when they arrive.

My comments cannot justly be concluded without due consideration to Jennifer Lawrence.  Mostly because of the admirable work she does this is more than just an action/adventure vehicle.  She gets very deftly into the character of Katniss; she knows exactly how to light each scene and each close-up from within herself.  She gives a three dimensional portrayal among a teeming multitude of one or two dimensional ones.  She has great promise as a serious actress.  In the novel Katniss narrates; in the movie she does not.  A wise decision!  Too much would have been known too early about what is driving her.  She is given more leeway to make Katniss mysterious. The film benefits considerably from that bit of mystery.

I do not recommend “The Hunger Games” for the general public.  In fact, I have no particular audience in mind.  Each will have to decide how relevant the material is to her/his life.  How much savage confrontation can you handle?  Just be advised that there is more than one kind of warfare going on in it.

To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com.  

I welcome feedback.  Direct it to bobracine@verizon.net

The Missiles of October (Movie Review)

                                  The Missiles of October

                              (2 hrs & 35 min, color, 1974)

Wars of wits between hostile nations are nothing new on the face of the earth.  They have been in play since Day One of recorded history.  Most of them barely attract the attention of the general populace of those nations.  We the citizenry are not told much of what goes on in the Intelligence field; cloak and dagger maneuverings take place behind closed doors or in the streets of remote cities or in the board rooms of the Pentagon and the CIA.  Trade-offs of one kind or another are employed to resolve tensions and keep the world safe from imbalances of power.  Only in rare instances do these shadow games trigger open and armed combat.  Relatively few people know how close the civilized world ever comes to such a tipping point. 

But in October of 1962 just about everybody on the planet knew that a zero hour on a grand scale was imminent and that the stakes were astronomically high – too high for the ordinary swap deals of diplomacy.  The United States and the Soviet Union engaged in more than a backyard tussle; they came eyeball to eyeball over nuclear arms on the world stage. 

This month marks the fiftieth anniversary of what has come to be called the Cuban Missile Crisis, the nearest the world has ever approached an all-out nuclear war.  My children had not even been born, but all of us who were alive at the time can surely remember at least some of what we were doing when for thirteen frightening days the world held its breath as President John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev traded deathly ultimatums.  Never was there a fortnight in which an American president worked harder to earn his salary.      

If any of you under fifty years of age want to get the lowdown on this chapter in your nation’s history, I could not recommend anything more informative and dramatically absorbing than “The Missiles of October,” a TV movie that aired twelve years after the events it portrays.  And those of you over fifty who do remember it would also do well to watch the film, not only to get refreshed on the blow-by-blow details behind the scenes but to absorb into your consciousness the courage and the wisdom that finally averted the unthinkable, not only on the part of Kennedy and his Cabinet but Khrushchev and his Presidium as well.  (There are no good guys and bad guys portrayed in this scenario.)  And it might increase the value of the stock you take in your mortal existence many times over. 

A quick review of the circumstances:  Aerial photographs by U.S. planes detected the presence of Soviet missile bases being built on Cuban soil despite continued assurances from the Russians that they had no intention of doing any such thing.  Kennedy had to call an emergency meeting of his entire cabinet to determine what to do about this development.  Dean Acheson, Maxwell Taylor, Robert McNamara , Dean Rusk, MacGeorge Bundy, C. Douglas Dillon, George Ball and Bobby Kennedy  the President’s brother, then Attorney General, are names that most of us old timers should quickly recognize.  Some favor immediate bombing of the missile bases, others want to blockade the island, a few prefer diplomacy.  Tempers flare; nerves are rubbed raw again and again.  The deliberations get quite hot.  All kinds of bends and twists occur before a consensus is reached.  The clandestine Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba by American mercenaries two years before, one that failed, made the Russians very uneasy.  Khrushchev felt impelled by this fiasco to protect the Cuban people from alleged U.S. aggression and sought to do so by the establishing of these bases. 

Many other political figures eventually become involved in the crisis before it is resolved.  That it was resolved is something everyone knows.  How close the two major powers came to disaster might surprise many who were living in 1962.  Until I saw the film for the first time shortly after its premier, I myself had no real grasp of how NEAR-   TO-   ALL-OUT WAR-    WE-    WERE-    TAKEN.  I still tremble every time I think of it.

Many of the players in this huge all-male cast, all of them monumentally at the top of their form, too numerous to list completely, are dead now, but seeing them in this celluloid time capsule gives me fond memories of much of their other work.  Kennedy is portrayed by William Devane, and his command of the New Englander’s drawling manner of speech is astoundingly accurate, as well as his body language.  It might be hard to believe that he was not a member of the Kennedy family himself.  What extensive coaching and voice training he must have had to go through preparing for this most difficult role!  And Martin Sheen is a lively, appropriately intense and fast talking Bobby.  Howard Da Silva, well known stage and screen personality in many memorable character parts including the psychiatrist in “David and Lisa” and Ben Franklin in “1776,” does not have the voice of Khrushchev but he commands every moment in which the Soviet Premier is seen.  Ralph Bellamy turns in a worthy portrayal of Adlai Stevenson, ambassador to the U.N. and former Presidential nominee.  Nehemiah Persoff fits very nicely into the shoes of Andrei Gromyko, the Soviet Foreign Minister who pays Kennedy a visit right during those thirteen days and pretends that nothing is going on in Cuba that the U.S. should be worried about.  Everybody shines; there is not a wooden portrayal anywhere.     

The color processing of the images seems a tad anemic by today’s digital standards and some of the panning of the camera from face to face feels a bit awkward to me.  And we have to put up with periodic pauses for the station identifications and commercials which we mercifully do not have to sit through, just the bothersome hiatus complete with a repeated and needless fanfare.  But the script is not allowed in any way to suffer on account of these factors.  The movie was produced by Herbert Brodkin and Robert Berger and directed by Anthony Page.  It can be rented from Netflix and is available in many public libraries.

What pleases me is the non-partisan treatment the material is given by screenwriter Stanley R. Greenberg.  I picked up no political party sympathy from any of the dialogue.  The president under siege just happened to be a Democrat.  But the drama transcends party politics and all other lines of social or bureaucratic division, and no digressions into anyone’s private life or places of residence or reputation or ideology ever take place.  All the scenes occur in official surroundings, punctuated a half dozen or so times by newsreel footage of atom bomb testings and military deployments.  Jackie Kennedy never puts in an appearance, her name only once mentioned.  Lots of close-ups are used – men staring into each other’s faces behind closed doors, reading each other’s expressions, picking up each other’s dynamics.  The tightly constructed screenplay gets down to the business of the missiles right from the start and stays that way until the last pulse pounding moment.  I promise, whatever your political orientation, you will not be bored or disinterested.  Some of you might want to watch it with your grown children and afterward give them a hug and thank God they were permitted to enter this world.     

To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com

I welcome feedback.  Direct it to bobracine@verizon.net

Witness (Movie Review)

                                             Witness

                               (1 hr & 52 min, color, 1985)

Who could imagine how the world of Amish country peace, piety and simplicity might become entangled with the virulent urban jungle that this devout, exclusive Christian sect would shun like an apocalyptic plague?  Screenwriters William Kelley and Pamela and Earl Wallace could, and did so with a very special skill and ingenuity, not to mention imagination, for this most singular achievement in suspense and heartfelt excitement.  Almost thirty years it has been around the Video/DVD circuit, and it has not dated in the slightest since its first theatrical screening.  The world it depicts could just as well be that of the twenty-first century, in which the endangerment of the innocent and vulnerable is almost daily reflected in the newspapers and on television news broadcasts. 

A seven-year-old Amish child, played by Lukas Haas, witnesses the murder of a police officer by two other officers and lands along with his mother Kelley McGillis, recently widowed, in the clutches of Homicide investigator Harrison Ford.  When Ford learns who the culprits are, he too is marked for assassination by the same parties along with the boy and his mother.  The killers’ attempt on Ford’s life leaves him wounded, and together with mother and child he slips out of town and takes hidden refuge within their Amish household.  There he is nursed through the crisis and upon recovery tries to provide protection for the whole Amish community, all of which is now in danger. 

    

The basic cultural disparity is as formidable a factor in the construction of this tale as are the evil doers.  Ford is magnificent as a man in travail amidst unfamiliar surroundings.  The film did much to establish him as a serious actor, something other than the handsome adventurer of the original “Star Wars” and the Indiana Jones series.  He portrays a man tarnished, deeply conflicted and vulnerable, not a smoothie macho protagonist.  McGillis is equally as cogent and evocative of internal as well as external fortitude               in the face of personal combat but also possessed of a lot of heart and soul.  This cop’s willingness to transform himself into a member of the village, however temporarily, is the basis for the film’s comedy.  It also calls forth McGillis’ lighter side and serves as the catalyst for their mutual passion and desire.  My only criticism is the length to which the writers take this mutual attraction.  I cannot quite buy it, not in these forbidding circumstances.  But I can appreciate the attraction and its complicating impact.  They are quite beautiful people.   

Any movie lovers now under the age of thirty would be doing themselves a huge favor to screen it.  It wields an emotional clout that is irresistible and has an ennobling effect upon all the heroic characters it portrays and by inference upon all of us who champion social justice, sanity and personal integrity.  And it is quite entertaining to boot.  Comedy and drama make good compatible partners all through the footage, from start to finish.  That this is achieved with a deadly threat hanging over the heads of all the principle personae, from early on until the explosive climax, is no small wonder.  And what an explosive denouement it is!  Explosive and downright frightening!  But after the last tense moment has passed, the material should go down quite pleasantly, thanks in part to a beautiful score by Maurice Jarre, especially the theme he wrote for the barn raising scene. 

Peter Weir is the director, a gifted Australian who has been doing top notch work on the screen for almost four decades.  (Check out “The Truman Show,” “Dead Poets Society” and “The Year of Living Dangerously.”)  Edward S. Feldman produced.  And not surprisingly it can be rented from Netflix.     

                                                                                                                                                          

I close with a quotation from the dialogue.  Whether or not the screenplay authors made it up or got it from another source I have no way of knowing short of meeting up with them in person and asking them.  I will not reveal which character says it or to whom or why, because it could have been uttered by anybody anywhere at any time in a moment of deep insight: “What you take into your hands you take into your heart.”  Something to ponder, eh!

To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com

I welcome feedback.  Direct it to bobracine@verizon.net

The Other Polarization (Essay)

The Other Polarization

Malcolm Boyd, an Episcopal priest, once stood before a large audience fully clothed in his clerical garb, collar and all, and announced, “I’m not the religious type.”  From time to time I hear people I know from my own church setting make similar assertions.  I myself am one of those I have heard speak thusly.  Not that I never was “religious.”  But during the evolution of my inner life over the seventy-nine years of my sojourn on this planet and my pilgrimage of soul, most of which I have probably completed, I find I have shed much if not all of the parochial garments with which I was vested in my youth.  I have not yet determined to what extent that shedding will make or has already made a significant difference in my contribution to God and society.  But I see more clearly than ever the subtle and sometimes troublesome contrast between religiosity and spirituality.  I strive to be spiritual more than ever; I no longer consider myself “the religious type.”

Not that a spiritual individual is unable to derive both tangible and intangible benefits from affiliation with an institution of religion and participation in its rituals and practices.  Many do.  What makes the distinction imperative for me is the need to understand the degree to which the form (religion) is mistaken for the content (spirituality).  Religion is human-made, an edifice sculpted out of theological and moral and ethical concepts and swaddled into the folds of tradition.  Spirituality on the contrary is not a product of human devising at all.  Spirituality is a sensitivity to life and the world, a cultivated capacity for profound emotion and imagination and embracing.  It derives not from the practice of prescribed behavior but from the opening of the mind and heart. 

Jesus converses with Nicodemus in the third chapter of John’s Gospel, a most devout and orthodox Pharisee, which is to say as religious an individual as anyone could possibly be.  In that classic exchange Jesus tries to communicate to him something about spirituality.  He says, “You hear the wind, but you do not know whence it comes or where it is going.  So is everyone who is born of the Spirit” – everyone who has had a spiritual birth, who has transcended those layers of tradition and become a seeker of universal divine truth.  I will venture to paraphrase even further: Spiritually alive people cannot be tied down any more than that wind.  We are unpredictable; we do not work from roadmaps or creeds or systematic theology.  We are caught in the wind of movement, growth, discovery and change.  We live comfortably with mystery and open-endedness.   

Why as a blogger for a divergent readership do I make a point of drawing this distinction?  It is because I am hearing a lot of religious voices making headlines today and rousing up large swaths of the populace over hot button issues, but I am not hearing as much spiritual talk as I would like.  It is not just our politicians and economists who are polarized but our professors of faith as well.  To quote Boyd further, “Real answers need to be found in dialogue and interaction and, yes, our shared human condition.  This means being open to one another instead of simply figuring how to maintain a prescribed position.”  There is a lot of defensive ideological positioning going on among the devout in our time but so few are speaking with fervor about openness and kinship of spirit.       

  

Religious people often think of themselves as preservers – of tradition, of established practice, of, yes, the forms to which they have wedded their lives.  Many years ago I took over the pastorate of a church that had just lost its building by fire.  Before it could rebuild, it became necessary to open up the cornerstone of the old structure that lay in ashes and ruin, one that dated from the turn of the twentieth century.  What came out of that cornerstone was most revealing to me.  A paper accounting the life of that congregation at that erstwhile period concerned itself almost totally with that building.  Dates were listed as to when pews were erected, stain glass windows installed, classrooms painted, an organ purchased, etc.  It spoke of “the church” as if that “church” were nothing but a vessel of wood and stone.  There was no mention of the quality of life among the people, the size of the enrollment in Sunday School, how much money was being devoted to causes, who was teaching and preaching, or even the size of the congregation.  The person or persons who composed that document to be left in that cornerstone were religious people to be sure – good people, respectable people, worshiping people, the faithful.  And thank God for them!  Where would Christianity be without the faithful in each flock!  But I wonder how spiritual they or the parishioners they represented were.  No reflection at all on matters of heart and soul could be read in the contents of that manuscript.  They apparently saw themselves essentially as preservers of a life style and an institution.  Preservers have their place, but they tend sometimes to go too far and fence in the Biblical teachings, as did the Pharisees.  Whereas spiritual people who transcend religiosity try to give the teachings room to breathe. 

The difference as I see it:

Religious people regard themselves as defenders of and advocates for a proscribed system of belief and practice.  Spiritual people have no theological ax to grind, but tolerate and welcome diversity. 

Religious people think of the Given Word as a restraint on human behavior and choice.  Spiritual people cherish the freedom of the human mind which the Given Word (however it is understood) impels them to question and explore. 

Religious people conceive of God in terms of a profile of itemized attributes.  Spiritual people consider God a mysterious but challenging presence within us and about us.

Religious people turn worshipful eyes outward and upward.  Spiritual people turn their examining eyes inward, taking seriously the Socratic maxim, “Know thyself,” searching for the truth about the universe within our common humanity.  

Religious people seek happiness and meaning from external venerated structures.  Spiritual people seek it from within, taking from the structures only that which aids them in self-understanding and understanding of and compassion for their fellow creatures. 

Religious people are ardent observers of formal worship.  Spiritual people are meditative seekers after elusive truth. 

Religious people welcome a certain degree of stricture and judgmental assessment.  Spiritual people try to forego judgment for the sake of gaining understanding and relationship.

Religious people are excited by the lyrics of hymns and anthems.

Spiritual people become ecstatic not just over these but over a vast assortment of inspirational music, recognizing no real distinction between so-called sacred and secular.  I personally find just as much spiritual nurture in Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto, Dvorak’s Ninth Symphony, Copland’s “Appalachian Spring,” and Bill Whelan’s “Riverdance” as I do in “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.” 

Religious people treat Scriptural text and so-called sacred writings as supreme and God given.  Spiritual people find edification and divine revelation in many great works of literature from many cultures, ancient and modern.  The novel “To Kill a Mockingbird” and its motion picture adaptation (recently reviewed on this blog) are treasures every bit as holy to me as the Four Gospels, the same to be said for Herman Hesse’s “Siddhartha” and Kahlil Gibran’s “The Prophet.”

There are those still among us who would turn the Bible, a most indispensible and vital teaching resource, into a form of tyranny over the human mind and stifle progressive enlightenment.  I pray earnestly for more voices from the ranks of the religiously faithful in our time to be heard advocating for the obliteration of barriers, for tolerance, for making the world safe for diversity.  Less religiosity based upon literalistic interpretations of Scripture!  More spiritual sensitivity, which at the very least requires less rigidity!   

Spirituality has no form, any more so than does that wind to which Jesus likens those who truly seek to be Godly. 

To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com

I welcome feedback.  Direct it to bobracine@verizon.net