The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2

Here are three reasonably good-looking young people and a bird that is on fire for some reason.

O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention,
A kingdom for a stage, princes to act
And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!
Then should the warlike Harry, like himself,
Assume the port of Mars; and at his heels,
Leash'd in like hounds, should famine, sword and fire
Crouch for employment. But pardon, gentles all,
The flat unraised spirits that have dared
On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth
So great an object: can this cockpit hold
The vasty fields of France? or may we cram
Within this wooden O the very casques
That did affright the air at Agincourt?

In these opening lines from the Prologue to Act I of Henry V, Shakespeare establishes what academics would later describe as a "topos of inexpressibility." The high and kingly matters of war and politics are so consequential, so deeply and intensely real, that it is beyond the ability of a playwright and a handful of actors to reproduce them; the players can only point to grander things than themselves and hope the audience will forgive them.

A moment ago, as I sat in front of my computer preparing to review the fourth and final film of the Hunger Games tetralogy, I was reminded of Shakespeare and his topos of inexpressibility because reader, I cannot fucking express to you how bad this movie was.

I feel so empty inside.

That was such a bad movie.

I mean, it was SUCH a bad movie.

Near the end, while yet one more excruciating, plodding scene offered us more flabby expository dialogue regarding the fates of characters we last cared about no later than 2013, I turned to John and whispered, "oh god, how much more of this must we endure?" and he was nice enough to say "ssshh," because the man who had been snoring behind us for the last 45 minutes* seemed to have woken up, and it was possible that he was once again attempting, against all reason, to enjoy the steaming shit-heap of a movie that was The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2.

Crimson Peak

Funerals rarely look as funereal as they look in Crimson Peak. These are outfits that practically scream: we are going to take a dead person and bury them right in the fucking GROUND.

I would like Guillermo del Toro to design my mausoleum, please.

Man, Crimson Peak is a great looking movie. It's lean on plot, and full of characters you've seen before doing things you've seen before, many many times before, but you can't throw a rock in that movie without hitting some lovely melodramatic Gothic architectural doodad or other, and the characters constantly walk around swathed in yards and yards of dramatically swishing diaphanous translucent fabric that swishes around them, being super dramatic and translucent and diaphanous.

There is a funeral near the beginning of the movie with a black coffin processing toward a huge, elaborately carved stone monument, with men in top hats and women all in black with black netting over their faces, and del Toro loves showing us that funeral so much that not too long afterwards he needs to show us ANOTHER funeral, only this time it has to be raining so everybody can be holding black umbrellas that go with their black top hats and dresses and face-netting.

To demonstrate how simple the plot is, here is a fairly complete summary of it in only seventy-six words: a girl falls in love with a mysterious man from far away. They marry and she returns with him to his home, only to find that the home is full of secrets. For a long time, she wonders what the secrets are, and then she finds out what they are, and they are kind of fucked up. After that, some perilous things happen, but she will probably make it through the peril and be fine afterwards.

But for heaven's sake, most of the movie is set in a mansion where there's a hole in the roof that constantly has leaves or snow falling langorously through it and landing in an elegant, melancholy pile on the floor, and where blood-red glop oozes up between the floorboards and leaks down the walls and although the movie makes some bullshit excuse about how the house is built on top of a clay mine and the clay is very red, Guillermo del Toro just wants to make the house look like it's bleeding. And you might well ask, given that the house is in a barren clay field with hardly any trees, and of the few trees there are, none come even close to being as tall as the house, well then those leaves that are falling so evenly and majestically through the roof of that red-glop-bleeding house, where the hell are they coming from? FROM THE FEVERED, BAROQUE IMAGINATION OF GUILLERMO DEL TORO, THAT'S WHERE.

American Ultra

Jesse Eisenberg spends much of American Ultra absolutely looking like shit on toast, and he really makes it work.

Movies with stoner protagonists risk devolving into a series of cliches. You know. Smoking marijuana makes you hungry, it makes you laugh at things that aren't really funny, and it interferes with your short-term memory in ways that make you comically bad at performing simple tasks. Amirite?

American Ultra is none of that. It's original, ecomomical, and visually and formally beautiful. It isn't really a stoner movie for stoners. It's surprisingly dark and smart, and it doesn't suggest that being a stoner is a lot of fun. From the beginning of the movie, Jesse Eisenberg* appears to be trying to self-medicate, and it doesn't seem to be working very well.

And then, as you will know if you saw any of the previews, Jesse Eisenberg turns out to be a trained and conditioned secret agent so secret that he didn't realize he was one, and then a lot of people try to kill him and his girlfriend Kristen Stewart a lot, I mean, seriously, a LOT, and I won't tell you exactly how it ends, but it becomes clear enough early on that this is not the kind of movie where the good guys die, or even lose, at the end.

Mad Max: Fury Road

Tom Hardy takes over the title role in 2015's Mad Max: Fury Road. Unlike his predecessor in the part, Hardy has probably never addressed a female police officer as "sugar tits."

Perhaps you didn't realize that you needed to see Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron spend 120 minutes driving a giant war-semi covered in pointy things across a blasted and poisonous hellscape with literally one tree in it while they're being hotly pursued by a sort of mobile homicidal Burning Man Cirque du Soleil show on wheels, but trust me, holy crap you need to see that immediately and when you do you will not be able to believe your eyes.

A lesser movie would have just shown us a gearshift knob made out of the head of a human femur. Mad Max: Fury Road gives us a gearshift knob made out of the head of a human femur that pulls out of the gearshift and reveals itself to be the handle of a stiletto.* I really respect that kind of attention to detail.

If most action movies are advertising, then this one is poetry. Oh, Reader, this one is savage, glorious, blood-spattered poetry, full of explosions and piercing war cries and unlikely objects flying through the air in every direction. That's right, Reader. Shit in this movie gets so real that I can only convey the intensity of my excitement by addressing you directly. As soon as we got home, my boyfriend John plopped down on the couch in front of his Xbox, and, with glazed eyes and a dreamy tone in his voice, simply said: "I need to shoot things."