The Hunger Games (2012)

Long after some vague civil war has toppled the USA, the West has been re-united as the nation of Panem, and the grand and glorious tradition is that every year, two dozen adolescents battle to the death on world-wide TV.

It’s the military draft plus a reality show plus Shirley Jackson’s ‘The Lottery’, and it’s completely plausible — America is collapsing now, and humanity’s future will be savage, and probably live-streamed.

The Hunger Games made for an enjoyable dystopian best-seller fifteen years ago, and I read it, as did millions of Americans. As a book it was surprisingly good, but not good enough to make me want to read the sequels.

As a movie, it’s an engrossing and exciting adventure, near-perfect Hollywood action and drama. If you scratched it to the bone, you couldn’t find any message or meaning beyond, you know, the bold political statement that we shouldn’t send adolescents to battle to the death.

Like the book, it’s not good enough to make me want to see the sequels, but it’s a definitely good enough to munch popcorn and enjoy.

Jennifer Lawrence, Elizabeth Banks, Woody Harrelson, Liam Hemsworth, Josh Hutcherson, Lenny Kravitz, Donald Sutherland, Stanley Tucci, and Toby Jones from Doctor Who are featured.

Verdict: YES.

♦ ♦ ♦

The Hunt (2012)

Unless it’s a classic or blockbuster, I usually know only a movie’s title when I watch it. Will it be comedy, drama, horror, kung fu? Ain’t no knowing. That strategy usually works out well, and it sure saved this movie for me. If I’d known what The Hunt was about, I might not have hit ‘play’.

Mads Mikkelsen plays Lucas, a kindergarten teacher, and one of the kids in class says Lucas has done something sexually inappropriate. Soon as the child says it, the school administrator reacts like she’s supposed to, and a counselor does what counselors are supposed to do, and here come the cops, doing that they’re supposed to do.

All the evidence on screen suggests that the teacher is just a teacher, not a perv, but everyone in town decides he’s guilty. He’s fired, shunned, even blacklisted from shopping at the grocery store. Humans do love being inhuman.

California’s famous ‘Satanic panic‘ was unraveling as I lived in San Francisco in the 1990s, and it’s my only point of reference for such awfulness. Everything here matches those atrocities. All the adults believe the child when she says something awful happened, but nobody believes her when she says, “I just said something stupid. He hasn’t done anything.”

This is heady drama, with two huge laughs in the middle, huge because everything else in the film is so serious.

Overall The Hunt is an outstanding flick, but the resolution is rushed and feels simple, as if 15-20 minutes of the script got chopped away.

Verdict: YES. It would’ve been a BIG YES, if the ending hadn’t been hurried.

♦ ♦ ♦

Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016)

This one’s difficult for me. Saw it with my wife when it first came out, and we both liked it a lot. She was a movie buff like me, and we enjoyed revisiting movies we liked, so I’m certain we would’ve seen it again, but she died, damn it. Mostly I’ve avoided re-watching our favorites, but here we are in the H’s so, gulp, let’s give Hunt for the Wilderpeople a go.

It’s a family-oriented light comedy and adventure, about a chubby orphan who imagines himself a modern gangster, talking street lingo and naming his dog Tupac. He’s remanded to foster care with a rural couple — a lovable lady who wants to smother the boy with maternalism, and her husband, who just wants to be left alone.

Soon the kid and the cranky old man are lost in the woods, and everything’s funny and endearing and almost plausible. Writer/director Taika Waititi shows a lot of empathy for outsiders and sarcasm for the authorities, and the kid’s terrific.

My favorite bit, not really pertinent to the plot, is when they come across a hermit who welcomes them into his home, and says,

This is a well-made piece of feel-good cinema, very Hollywood (in a good way) despite being from New Zealand. The only thing missing was my wife’s wisecracks and insights.

Verdict: BIG YES.

♦ ♦ ♦

Hunter Prey (2009)

The opens in a desert somewhere, amid some kind of unexplained futuristic military action. The soldiers are wearing full body armor, their faces hidden under helmets, and without being able to see their faces, you can’t tell who’s talking. It’s hard giving a damn when everyone’s always under a helmet.

After about 15 minutes of this, the soldiers remove their helmets to very dramatic music, revealing that they’re space aliens, with faces white as white greasepaint and wearing standard-issue cheap sci-fi prosthetic noses. But they’re space aliens painted white with prosthetic noses, so there’s still no telling them apart.

Eventually, another guy wearing a different kind of helmet shows up, and takes his helmet off in the desert sun, revealing himself to be a caucasian human. Cue the thunderously overdramatic music, please.

Turns out the human’s a prisoner who’s escaped from the greasepaint space aliens’ ship, after the ship crash landed. But it’s taken a long time to eek out these minimal details.

The movie gets better, and by the end it’s a decent low-budget retelling of Enemy Mine, which was probably a retelling of some earlier movie or novel I haven’t seen or read. Everything’s a ripoff of something, amIright?

Hunter Prey is an adequate ripoff, but not good enough to forgive the first half hour of nothing but talking helmets.

Verdict: MAYBE.

♦ ♦ ♦

… and out of alphabetical order …

Affliction (1998)

Is there anybody else like Paul Schrader, who’s allowed to keep making movies that are actual art instead of mere entertainment? He wrote or ‘co-wrote’ The Last Temptation of Christ, Obsession, Raging Bull, and Taxi Driver, and wrote and directed Blue Collar, The Card Counter, First Reformed, Hardcore, Rolling Thunder, and this, based on a novel by Russell Banks (Continental Drift, The Sweet Hereafter).

Nick Nolte plays Wade Whitehouse, a working class small town cop with a toothache and a head full of problems. Most of his problems come from the titular affliction of having been raised by an abusive, alcoholic, mean-as-fuck father (James Coburn).

When some old dude gets killed in what sure looks like a hunting accident, Wade thinks it wasn’t an accident, and he’s going to crack the case like a chain-smoking Columbo. Meanwhile, his mother’s died, which unavoidably brings Wade back in touch with his dad, and Dad’s a guy who makes any problems worse.

Nolte has never been better. He’s awkward, uncomfortable, askew in almost every scene, a schmuck who’s a little bit less-than-ordinary trying to make life on earth worth the time, and falling short like most of us. He’s bubbling with rage and insecurity, which he keeps in check but just barely.

Coburn is terrific at being horrendous, and won an Oscar for it. You’ve also got your Sissy Spacek, Willem Dafoe, and Mary Beth Hurt.

This is fiction, but the kind of fiction that’s cut directly from real people. Swear to cripes, there’s nobody in this movie I don’t ‘know’. Set in New Hampshire and filmed in Canada, the snow is real and you can feel the goose bumps.

And it all comes to a surprisingly ‘happy ending’, too.

Verdict: BIG YES.

2/12/2025

Logo illustration by Jeff Meyer.

No talking once the lights dim, and only real butter on the popcorn, not that fake yellow stuff. 

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