What’s the movie (opening on 4.13) going to add? Length, dialogue, plot, exposition, FX, Hamlet-like philosophical inquiry, etc. I think the trailer suffices. Highly proficient. The over-amplified foley work is just right. Favorite bit: Curly doing the circular run-around thing while lying on his side.

Director Ulu Grosbard, who died last weekend at age 83, did three excellent things within a six year period. He directed the original Broadway production of David Mamet‘s American Buffalo, which I was lucky enough to see in ’77. He directed the absolutely dead perfect Straight Time, the Dustin Hoffman crime drama which came out the following year. And he directed True Confessions, the 1983 period drama about an Irish LA detective (Robert Duvall) and his corrupt, wheeler-dealer priest brother (Robert DeNiro).

During the q & a following 6.23.07 screening of Straight Time at L.A. Film Festival — (l. to. r.) Theresa Russell, Ulu Grosbard, Dustin Hoffman, Harry Dean Stanton and producer Tim Zinneman.

Grosbard’s first film-directing landmark was his adaptation of Frank Gilroy‘s The Subject Was Roses (’68). He also directed the slightly less heralded but actually pretty good Falling in Love (’84), a Westchester County remake of Brief Encounter with Robert DeNiro and Meryl Streep.

Grosbard was given a “thanks’ credit on Reservoir Dogs, whatever that alluded to.

But over the last 34 years my instant association has been, “Aaah, the guy who got Straight Time right…yes, eternal admiration and respect.”

I attended a special screening of Straight Time on 6.23.07 at the Billy Wilder theatre during the L.A. Film Festival. Grosbard took the stage after the show along with Hoffman, costars Theresa Russell and Harry Dean Stanton and producer Tim Zinneman. Here‘s an mp3 of a portion of what was said. You’ll hear Grosbard first, and then Stanton and Russell (or the other way around) and then Hoffman comes in with a longish riff about his research, including an interesting observation about how criminals and actors aren’t all that dissimilar.

I’ll never forget a moment during that performance of American Buffalo when Robert Duvall “went up” — i.e., forgot his next line. Costar Kenneth McMillan instantly saw his dilemma and gave him a cue…wham, Duvall was back on it.

Grosbard was born in Belgium in 1929. His family escaped during World War II and landed in Havana, of all places. Grosbard worked as a diamond cutter there. He made his way into the arts through the stage, and he broke into films as an assistant director on Robert Rossen‘s The Hustler (1961), Elia Kazan‘s Splendor in the Grass (1961) and Arthur Penn‘s The Miracle Worker (1962).

Here’s Grosbard’s N.Y. Times obit, written by Bruce Weber.

“Jennifer Lawrence seems too big for Josh Hutcherson. It almost looks like she has to bend over a bit to give him a hug. Lawrence is a fairly tall, big-boned lady who’s maybe 5′ 8″, and Hutch seems to be 5’7″. Male romantic figures have to be at least be as tall as their female partners, and girls like guys to be at least a little bit taller, so Lawrence and Hutcherson don’t seem like a good fit. ” — from yesterday’s Hunger Games review.

HE commenters actually disagreed about this. One said they were both listed as 5’7″ on the IMDB. Another said that Hutcherson’s character, Peeta Mellark, is supposed to be gentle and vulnerable so it’s okay for him to be dwarf-sized. Those who posted anything along these lines are hereby required, in lieu of this and other Just Jared Hunger Game NYC premiere photos, to drop to their knees and humbly admit error.

Yes, Lawrence is wearing heels but even barefoot she’d obviously tower over the guy…c’mon. Update: And nobody’s standing on a platform either. Chris Hemsworth, Lawrence and Hutcherson are all standing on the same floor space. The liars and delusionals on this site…God!

First of all, you can’t slash a woman’s throat with a fencing sword. Other than that this is mildly engrossing in a nihilistic fuck-all American Psycho sense. Hats off to director Daniel Wolfe and star Jake Gyllenhaal. Would I listen to The Shoes if I was driving across Ohio on an interstate? Honestly? No.

Jonathan Liebesman‘s Wrath of the Titans (Warner Bros., 3.30) is having its all-media L.A. screening on 3.27. In IMAX 3D. Sam Worthington, Ralph Fiennes, Liam Neeson, Danny Huston, Edgar Ramirez, Bill Nighy, Toby Kebbell and Rosamund Pike. I noticed a problem as I stared at the poster the other night. No large predator has ever had long idiotic teeth like this. Ever. Some designer just went crazy.

Somebody tip the person who wrote the headline for this 3.20 Hollywood Reporter story about a new home video version of Yellow Submarine — it’s the Bluray, not the DVD, that matters. These days announcing a new DVD of an older title is like saying a new VHS is being made. Todd Gilchrist‘s article says the 1969 animated film has undergone a frame-by-frame cleanup. Gilchrist doesn’t say who’s releasing it on 5.28.

Russell Crowe as Noah, counting off giraffes and zebras and monkeys and snakes and worms in Darren Aronofsky‘s Biblical epic? That’s the scoop from Deadline‘s Nikki Finke and Michael Fleming. Their third sentence says that “the once hoped-for spring start is now July, sources say.” Except Noah dp Matty Libatique told me about the July start date at Sundance two months ago.

This morning I told Sasha Stone and Phil Contrino all about The Hunger Games, and then they proceeded to ignore most of what I said. They think I’m too off on my own beam to relate to a film like this. It’s all contained in Oscar Poker #72. Here’s a stand-alone mp3 link.

I’m going to take my time with this puppy. I don’t have Robert Harris’s discerning eye, but so far it looks pretty good. Mostly. But it’s not breathtaking. The darker scenes are a bit grainy and fuzzy; sunshine scenes are nice and vivid. I’m seeing textural details (wood, leather, fabric, hair and beard follicles) that I’ve never seen. And sometimes it just looks like an okay DVD. So it’s fine but not great. Paramount Home Video should spend the money to do it really right.

A gifted Manhattan-based web designer named Jean-Paul Tremblay is roughing out a Hollywood Elsewhere re-design as we speak. Nothing too radical, but you can’t stay in the same place year after year. HE as presently constituted looks like a 2004 website, and I need it to look like 2012. Nothing’s set in granite but I’m hoping to have HE 2.0 up and rolling by 5.1.12 if not before.

Battle Royale “is a 2000 Japanese thriller film directed by Kinji Fukasaku, based on the novel of the same name. It was written by Kenta Fukasaku and stars Takeshi Kitano. The film tells the story of a class of teenagers that are forced by the government to compete in a deadly game, where the students must kill each other in order to win. The film aroused international controversy and is banned in many countries.”

I was so profoundly turned off during last night’s screening of The Hunger Games (Lionsgate, 3.23) that I had to leave for a couple of minutes. I had to get some air and kick out the pent-up energy. Now there’s no hiding. I have to write about it. Can I just load up the shotgun and spray indiscriminate buckshot, or must I methodically explain how relentlessly draggy this film is?

Last night’s crowd (partly media, partly hoi polloi) was paying very close attention, but at no time did I sense anything resembling emotional engagement, let alone tears or fears or sadness or real excitement. The after-mood was one of flatline yawns and chuckles and shrugs. “That was it?” “Ah, well…okay.” “Yeah, you know…gonna be huge.”

After seeing Catherine Hardwicke‘s Twilight on 11.18.08, I posted as follows: “Within its own emotional teenage-girl, imagining-and-longing-for-the-ideal-boyfriend realm, Twilight works.” Not my cup, but a film that worked fairly well within its own perimeters, and which had captured the essence of Stephenie Meyer‘s books.

But Gary Ross‘s The Hunger Games, also based on an enormously popular book series, is at best a mediocre effort — an obviously second-tier thing, tedious, lacking in poetry or grace or kapow. It feels sketchy, under-developed, emotionally simplistic and hambone.

And it looks cheap and cheesy. One act’s worth of CG-looking CG in the big capitol super-city (for the most part), and then two acts of running around the woods in North Carolina with Steven Soderbergh handing some second-unit lensing. And then a wrap-up and a non-finale and cut to black.

My strongest reaction was to Tom Stern‘s awful cinematography. I found it visually infuriating. Stern’s shooting, especially in the last two thirds, is almost all jaggedy, boppity-bop, bob-and-weave close-ups. Way too close. It reminded me of how ’70s TV movies used to look. Stern has dp’ed on several Clint Eastwood films (Gran Torino, Hereafter, Invictus, The Changeling) and CU’s were not his signature before, I can tell you. God, how I was longing for Hoyte van Hoytema!

At no time does The Hunger Games just spell you into submission by how cool and majesterial it looks. The fast and close visual scheme seems to be primarily about covering up the fact that there isn’t much to show. The cutting, clearly, was all about getting a PG-13 rating, and this is R-rated material all the way.

The Hunger Games is about a futuristic North American nation, ecologically ruined and controlled by repugnant urban elites who symbolically punish a once-rebellious citizenry by ordering certain specially selected youths to compete in an annual televised gladiatorial event — an elimination game like Survivor only played for real blood with medieval weapons — in a forested area. The nation watches this contest via hundreds of TV cameras mounted on trees, blah blah.

Jennifer Lawrence in The Hunger Games.

Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) is the heart of it, the heroine, the hunter supreme from a down-at-the-heels, coal-mining, Butcher Holler-like district, the 12th of twelve. The arc of Suzanne Collins‘ three-volume story is about her basic humanity — her entirely sane revulsion at the terms of this horrendous environment and system — and a relationship that blooms between Katniss and Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson), a combatant from her district and the son of a baker, blah blah.

Katniss also has a current with Gale Hawthorne (Liam Hemsworth), who figures slightly in this installment but more prominently in the next, Catching Fire, and in the finale, Mockingjay (which may be a two-parter). Fire, I’m told, is mainly about Katniss deciding which guy she’s really in love with, Gale or Peeta, and Mockingjay is primarily about overthrowing the upper-class sickies.

Lawrence seems too big for Hutcherson. She’s a fairly tall, big-boned lady (I’ve been in a hotel room with her) who’s maybe 5′ 8″, and he seems to be something like 5’7″. Male romantic figures have to be at least be as tall as their female partners, and we all know most girls like guys to be at least a little bit taller, so Lawrence and Hutcherson don’t seem like a good fit. It almost looks like she has to bend over a bit to give him a hug. (Hemsworth, a six-footer or thereabouts, has no problem on this score.)

The Terry Gilliam-esque, 18th Century French aristocratic fop makeup and over-the-top, self-satirizing manner of the upper-class venals (portrayed by Elizabeth Banks, Wes Bentley, Stanley Tucci, Toby Jones, Donald Sutherland) is an immediate failure of concept. Overdone, overbaked.

Woody Harrelson and Lenny Kravitz play the only two marginally likeable elites.

The Hunger Games tells us that each and every person among the upper classes is amused, unconcerned and untouched by the plight of young people forced to fight to the death. That there isn’t a single drop of compassion among all these thousands…not a thought, not a look, not a moment’s hesitancy. That would be inconsistent with human nature, I think. Even during the Colliseum days in ancient Rome a certain portion of the citizenry was appalled by the carnage.

The upper classes are metaphors, I gather, for the boomers who are sending GenY and GenX into a future laden with economic doom and despair. The district tributes are going to have to kill each other in the marketplace in order to survive, and the older GenXers and Boomers find it amusing, touching, affecting…it’s entertainment. The Hunger Games is basically a big “fuck you” to the Boomers.

In Act One Katniss is shown hunting game in an off-limits area of a forest in order to feed her family. What prevents district residents from growing vegetables? Has the soil been polluted by nuclear fallout or something?

There’s a moment in Spartacus when Kirk Douglas and Woody Strode are about to fight in the gladiator-school arena, and they’re sitting alone in the shadowed waiting area while Strode eyeballs Douglas with a bitter expression. “Are you a bit sickened by this diseased little moment?,” his eyes seem to say, “or are you amused? I’m somewhere in between.” There’s nothing in The Hunger Games that even flirts with this kind of vibe.

There’s a brief but very angry Spartacus-like rebellion at the end of Act Two when the regular Joes in District 12 fight back against the white-suited drone soldiers, storming the barricades, etc. Their rebellion is crushed but is paid so little attention to that I was wondering why they showed it at all.

Katniss is shown climbing up big limbs of trees without any branches or knobs or suckers to hold onto. She climbs right up leaders of the trees like a squirrel or a monkey. But she’s not SpiderMan and it doesn’t make sense. I used to work as a tree surgeon, and you can’t just scale up bark like you’re a chipmunk. You need handholds and footholds. This part angered me almost as much as Stern’s cinematography..

Some CG dogs, created by the elites, come after Lawrence and Hutcherson at the finale.

I was saying to myself, “Boy, it sure is a good thing that the space-shippy art sculpture in the middle of the field has those slick aluminum sides because this prevents the CG dog monsters from climbing up!”

Here, again, is what I said after seeing Twilight: “Due apologies to those middle-aged male journalists making smart-ass cracks outside the theatre after it ended, but they’re wrong. They’re living in their own world — blinded, blocking, reactionary. Because within its own emotional teenage-girl, imagining-and-longing-for-the-ideal-boyfriend realm, Twilight… should I say this? I don’t want to anger Vivian Mayer. But what publicist would be upset if a guy like myself, an unregenerate adult-movie, classic-movie, indie-movie, Pasolini-admiring, Kubrick-worshipping fan who hates sitting next to giggling groups of women in cocktail bars — what if a guy like me said that this sucker works?

“Because it does. On its own attitudinal terms and given what it’s addressing and saying. And you can take that to the bank and put it in your IRA account. I’ve been in this racket for nearly 30 years and I know when a film is working so don’t tell me.”

The Hunger Games is going to earn close to $90 or $100 million dollars this weekend, but it doesn’t work.