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.

I put these on the back bumper every Presidential election year. I get them done at Kinko’s on Westwood Blvd. $32 bills and change for six. An old tradition.

I’ll be sitting down with The Hunger Games about 90 minutes hence, but right now I’m having a WTF reaction to the current Rotten Tomatoes reviews. It’s running 100% as we speak, although a critic friend who’s seen it says this doesn’t calculate. “[The film] doesn’t want to make you poke your eyes with scissors or anything,” he says, “but come on.” So what happened to “toned down for young female demo” and “good enough, somewhat chickenshit“?

“A thrilling, intelligent, deeply-felt movie that does not play by the typical rules of franchise building in modern Hollywood.” — Drew McWeeny, Hitfix. “As thrilling and smart as it is terrifying. There have been a number of big-gun literary series brought to screen over the past decade. This slays them all.” — Olly Richards, Empire. “As action, as allegory, as cinema, The Hunger Games is the best American science-fiction film since The Matrix.” — James Rocchi, Boxoffice. “The Hunger Games is that rarest of beasts: a Hollywood action blockbuster that is smart, taut and knotty.” — Xan Brooks, Guardian.

My critic pally says it’s “one of those unimaginative, let’s-recreate-exactly-what-was-on-the-page-while-watching-the-PG13-rating-and-count-our-money adaptations. I’m surprised Chris Columbus didn’t direct it. Lifeless, turgid, rote, irritating…whatever one may say of, say, James Cameron or Oliver Stone, they have never made a movie as crass and calculating as this one.”

This cover shot caught my attention last night as I was buying groceries at Gelson’s. I was mainly thinking, “This again?” 21 years ago that naked Demi Moore pic on the cover of Vanity Fair was a bombshell event. Before that point the words “naked”, “pregnant” and “sexy” weren’t exactly conjoined in the public mind. No longer. 2012 pregnancies are about pride, delight, celebration, serenity and…fill in the blank. But the “whoa” factor has left the room.

This is a ’80s Roger Corman film without the refinement. (Cannon was always afraid of t & a — they never went there.) And what a supporting cast! Christopher Lloyd, Ving Rhames, David Hasselhoff, Paul Scheer and Cu Gulager. Dimension will release Piranha 3DD on June 1st.

Woody Allen‘s latest, an anthology piece set in Rome, once had a great title — The Bop Decameron. But under-educated people the world over said they didn’t understand what it meant, and so Allen went with Nero Fiddles — a mildly dreadful title. But the under-educated didn’t understand that one either. So now the film is called To Rome With Love — surely the drippiest that Allen has ever gone with in his 40-plus years of filmmaking.

“The film’s former title, Nero Fiddled, while an appropriate and humorous phrase in the U.S., is not a familiar expression overseas and many international territories preferred a more globally understood name,” explains a Sony Classics press release.

I’m sorry but what does that mean? They don’t have schools overseas? What sales reps from what inernational territories were pleading with Woody to dumb it down?

A movie title can’t be too arcane or obscure, of course, but artists should never descend to the water-table level of common comprehension. Let the unwashed masses come up to your level, dude. You’re the artist. You prepare the food, and the rabble sits down to eat it. To hell with ’em if they can’t figure decipher the meaning.

How clueless do you have to be to not know the expression “Nero fiddled while Rome burned”? If you don’t know that one then you’ve probably never heard the one about Julius Caesar crossing the Rubicon or George Washington chopping down the cherry tree or Abe Lincoln splitting rails or the expression “it’s Greek to me” (a line from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar) or whatever.

To paraphrase a line from the late Hunter S. Thompson, “Has the international community descended to the level of dumb beasts?”

Or is Woody letting his sister, Letty Aronson (who produces his films and deals with funding and distribution), push him around in his old age? Can anyone imagine the Woody Allen of the ’70s, ’80s or ’90s saying, “Oh, the uneducated masses don’t understand what my title means? I’ll dumb it down then…no problem”?

Snow White (Kristen Stewart) as a pint-sized Bruce Wayne with a touch of Frodo Baggins, learning the art of war from a studly handsome assassin who takes pity (Chris Hemsworth), and then waging a military rebellion against the evil, sometimes naked queen (Charlize Theron)…swords, shields, “Hyaahh!!,” sweat, magic, CG, moisture, fireballs…a full serving of the usual Hollywood fanboy/fangirl stuff. A stylistic twist or two, no apparent surprises, same old fast food. Or so the trailer indicates.

“Who are we kidding? We’re kids. We get to go play. We’re not curing cancer…we’re just [here] to entertain you guys” — Theron at Wondercon.

Universal is opening Snow White and the Huntsman on Friday, June 1st.

Enough with the onslaught of Prometheus teasers and trailers already. This one apparently dropped after (or at the same time as) yesterday’s domestic trailer debut.

I’ve been handed a couple of tickets to see the big swanky restoration of Abel Gance‘s Napoleon at Oakland’s Paramount theatre on Saturday, 3.31. The film will run 5 and 1/2 hours and the show will run longer, beginning in the late afternoon with two or three intermissions plus a dinner break. I saw a shorter version 31 years ago at the Radio City Music Hall with a live orchestral score, composed and conducted by Carmine Coppola. It was truly fabulous all around — ecstatic, unforgettable.

The San Francisco Silent Film Festival is presenting the show. The Napoleon restoration is by historian, documentarian and archivist Kevin Brownlow, and restoration guru Robert Harris is a co-presenter. We’re talking four special screenings at the Paramount (3.24, 3.25, 3.31, 4.1).

For whatever reason there are no plans to take the Napoleon show to any other cities. I can’t figure why. You’d think film buffs coast-to-cast and worldwide would gladly pay top dollar to see this, especially with the live orchestra and all. Talk about a once-in-a lifetime thing.

The problem for me is that I’ll have to shell out $500 to make the Oakland show. The roundtrip Southwest air fare (Burbank to Oakland) will run about $300 minmum and then there’s renting a car for $40 a day with a one-night $100 hotel cost (and maybe a bit more) plus meals and Diet Cokes and whatnot.

I’ll never see Napoleon on a big Polyvision screen again and I remember what a jolt it was in NYC in ’81, but I’m still having trouble with plunking down five Ben Franklins and perhaps a tad more. You have to show a little discipline in life. I’ve never splurged like this for a single viewing of a film. Even if a Bay Area friend lets me crash on their couch it’s still a $400-plus tab so I don’t know. I’m mulling it over.

I could always rent a car in LA and drive up, but I’d have to leave on Friday if I want to be rested for the Saturday afternoon show. Friday to Monday rental at $40 a day would be $120 plus insurance plus gas — figure $220 or so. But I’d have to stay Friday and Saturday night at a motel/hotel and that would be a couple of hundred plus meals so I’d be right back to $500 or so.

I’m going to a friend’s wedding in the Palm Springs area next weekend, and that’s a big deal that I don’t want to miss. The tab for that will be $500 plus a wedding gift so I don’t know about Oakland. I really want to go but it feels excessive. Why don’t they just bring the show to LA?