2013: The Year the Movies Weren’t Cool

The movies are no longer the pinnacle of pop culture. How do we make them matter again?

When “The Hunger Games: Catching Fire” came out in November, it accomplished something no other movie in 2013 has: it made an impact.

Prior to its release, I saw genuine excitement in my friends and in my social media feeds. Jennifer Lawrence began appearing on just about every late night talk show and proceeded to be generally awesome and meme worthy.

When it finally did come out, lo and behold, it was really good – better than the original by far and fully matching the hype. It even made more money than the original and set records for the November box office. Critics discussed it like it was important, and people talked about and saw it multiple times like it mattered. And it does matter.

Each year a few moments in popular culture seem to define the entire year. They set the world on fire for moments at a time and anyone who’s anyone knows about it and is talking about it.

Pinning down just how they define the year is a bit more intangible, and it’s up to the media to write year-end lists, columns and mashups that weave our culture together when box office receipts and viewership numbers don’t paint the whole picture.

2013 has been an exciting year, as are most years when we look back each December. This year gave us the finale to “Breaking Bad,” one that garnered as many parodies as it did live viewers. It gave us the hilarious and even groundbreaking antics of Kanye West and Miley Cyrus. “Homeland,” “The Walking Dead” and “Dexter” made waves with polarizing new seasons. Arcade Fire and Daft Punk turned heads with critically acclaimed smash hits and tour and marketing choices that were talked about as much as the music. “Grand Theft Auto V” and “Call of Duty: Ghosts” were blockbuster video games that made “Thor” look like an independent film. Jimmy Kimmel pranked the Internet. We learned what the Fox says.

And a few movies came out too.

In terms of quality alone, 2013 turned out to be a pretty great year for movies. You can read my Top 15 list here. Many were moving, original and game changers, and some felt like they could be all time classics.

And for the most part, these movies made money, they got good reviews, and they’ll be here to stay through Oscar season and beyond. People continue to see them, buy them, stream them, steal them, whatever.

But increasingly, they matter less.

No longer is film the pinnacle of pop culture. TV offers more opportunities for experimentation and narrative complexity, music continues to pose discussions about race, femininity and more beyond the music itself, video games demonstrate the greatest chance for growth as a blossoming art form, and all three continue to be infinitely accessible and open to critical discourse.

Film on the other hand can seem to be more selective, more homogenized and harder to access. Filmmakers like Steven Soderbergh and others are jumping ship to TV, the mass marketed movies are losing their zest, the important and groundbreaking films are not available nationwide or in the Netflix canon, and film’s innovations to the medium, namely digital and 3D cinematography, look gimmicky and defensive at worst.

No one is dismissing the work of great artists because there is other entertainment to be found elsewhere, but when everything is to some degree competing for attention, the ability to discuss films and share them widely is waning.

Movies aren’t worse; they just aren’t cool. Continue reading “2013: The Year the Movies Weren’t Cool”

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire

“The Hunger Games: Catching Fire” finds new director Francis Lawrence raising the stakes on this already dark franchise.

“The Hunger Games” franchise has now done what it took the Harry Potter movies perhaps four or five films to get right. “Catching Fire” is a sequel that sees its stakes increase tenfold, its action becoming more crisp and polished, its themes growing deeper and its deep cast of talented individuals gelling completely.

It does beg the question, how does a story in which teenagers murder other teens for sport and sacrifice manage to get darker, more serious and more consequential? Gary Ross’s “Hunger Games” was a film about the internal struggle of an individual to find her strength and voice. It treated survival instincts like a virtue. Now in “Catching Fire,” that lone wolf mentality to just survive plays like another death sentence.

New director Francis Lawrence ties “Catching Fire’s” dystopian future concept and steamy love triangle to broader ideas about rebellion, fame, loyalty and psychology. Best of all, he’s packaged it in a slick, suspenseful package that hasn’t lost any of its twisted edge.

“Catching Fire” resumes shortly after Katniss and Peeta’s (Jennifer Lawrence and Josh Hutcherson) victory from the previous games. Now President Snow (Donald Sutherland) is using their celebrity as a symbol of false hope as he tours them around each district of Panem. Snow threatens to kill Katniss and her family unless she tows the evil Capitol’s line and makes her act in front of the cameras genuine.

Katniss however has become a reluctant symbol of a slowly growing rebel uprising. The film has done a wonderful job playing up the franchise’s iconography, with early shots framing Katniss as a figure of solemn power or people raising three fingers in defiance to the Capitol and making it feel significant. When they do celebrate her legend, people are beaten and killed by the Capitol’s “peacemakers,” faceless stormtroopers modeled off another similar franchise, “Star Wars.”

Because she’s creating problems, the new Master of the Games, Plutarch Heavensbee (Philip Seymour Hoffman), arranges a special event for the 75th Annual Hunger Games in which past survivors of the games are forced to compete again. Given how few there are still living, Katniss and Peeta are on the chopping block yet again. Continue reading “The Hunger Games: Catching Fire”