life with more cowbell

With all the live music and theatre I’ve been seeing lately, I recently realized I’d gotten woefully behind in movie-going. Here are two I saw during my staycation recently:

The Hunger Games. Really good adaptation (first book of a trilogy by Suzanne Collins, who also worked on the screenplay) of a gripping, intense story of a young underdog being thrown into a battle for survival in an annual government-mandated reality t.v. show. I know! Perfect casting of Jennifer Lawrence in the lead role of Katniss Everdeen – and loved watching Elizabeth Banks (District 12 PR gal Effie Trinket), Woody Harrelson (former champion & District 12 mentor Haymitch Abernathy), Stanley Tucci (Hunger Games host Caesar Flickerman) and Donald Sutherland (President Snow). Liam Hemsworth (Katniss’s friend Gale) and Josh Hutcherson (fellow contestant Peeta Mellark) are Lawrence’s swoon-worthy co-stars, forming the other two points of the story’s emerging love triangle. Also, loved him in the book and really loved the casting of Lenny Kravitz as the District 12 tributes’ stylist Cinna.

Katniss is a strong, smart and resourceful young woman – protective of her family and friends, and takes no pleasure in even the thought of having to kill another person for survival. She takes no crap but she has a very big heart. And the audience is on the edge of its seat rooting for her. Great social commentary, set in a dystopian world in which a post-civil war government becomes a menacing dictatorship, and the class divide is staggering. Also a darkly comic poke at reality t.v. and the excesses of western society.

Yet another instance of an adaptation from novel to screen being greatly assisted by the novelist (also see Silence of the Lambs, Thomas Harris; The Hours, Michael Cunningham and the Harry Potter series, J.K. Rowlings). If you haven’t read the book – and reading it before or after seeing the movie is entirely a personal choice – please do! I received the book as a Xmas present, so read it first – now I need to get my hands on the next one.

The Iron Lady. Received huge buzz, positive and negative, over both the subject matter and casting – and Oscar, AACTA and BAFTA awards for its lead actress. Whatever your politics, this was a good movie and Meryl Streep was brilliant – totally disappearing into character as Margaret Thatcher. So much so, it was spooky, actually. I liked how the film was structured in a non-linear way – how moments in Thatcher’s fragile elderly present serve as a springboard into memory. We see her as a bright, passionate, engaged young woman (played by Alexandra Roach), inspired by her politician father to go into politics herself. We see her struggle with the old boys club that is British Parliament and her years as Prime Minister. We also see her in love,  meeting the equally bright and also playful Denis Thatcher (played as a young man by Harry Lloyd) and as a widow, mourning him – and in her reluctance to let him go, holding conversation with him (Jim Broadbent). Lovely performances from the core cast.

As we all too often see with politicians (and more recently than we’d like where I come from), even those with the best of intentions, wanting to make change can give reign to an inability to compromise – and even bully – for change. Heavy-handed policy of her administration aside, this portrayal rounds out the Prime Minister and gives us a glimpse of the woman.