'Hunger Games' finale only half way there

A franchise inches toward its conclusion.

The decision to split the finale of The Hunger Games series into two parts leaves fans with little choice but to queue up for the penultimate offering, even if it's a bit of a placeholder.

In general, I've found the series to be reasonably good, an entertaining addition to the world of big-screen YA fiction that spills over to a broader audience.

Two previous movies have reinforced the notion that the story's main character -- Katniss Everdeen -- is indefatigable, rebellious and self-sacrificing.

Fair to say, too, that the gifted Jennifer Lawrence has made Katniss her own. At times, she even looks younger than her 24 years.

Lawrence, of course, returns for The Hunger Games: Mockingjay -- Part 1, a movie that takes a step toward concluding the whole business, though not a giant one. The movie feels like an obligatory -- and somewhat listless -- march toward the real finale, due next year.

Director Francis Lawrence (I Am Legend) takes two hours to deliver a slightly unbalanced result: His film manages to be darker and more complex than its predecessors -- a look at issues involving propaganda and war -- but it's also less exciting.

Part 1deposits us in a post-games world in which the ruling Capitol is being threatened by rebels and in which many of the districts of the great empire have been reduced to rubble. The high-stakes drama that the games themselves imposed on previous movies has gone missing.

Although severely traumatized from the last episode, Katniss is asked to emerge again as Mockingjay, a much-admired warrior. She's supposed to provide inspiration for weary revolutionaries who are prone to intimidation by the imperious and markedly evil President Snow, played by Donald Sutherland with all the soft-spoken, sinister intent he can muster.

Burdened by doubt, Katniss is distraught that her friend and love interest (Josh Hutcherson's Peeta) is being held prisoner in The Capitol.

Worse yet, Peeta allows himself to be used. He's making TV spots encouraging the rebels to seek peace; i.e., to submit to the Capitol's exploitative authority.

The supporting cast is minimized in this episode. Philip Seymour Hoffman's Plutarch Heavensbee devises an ad campaign to boost rebel morale, and Julianne Moore's President Alma Coin makes stern speeches to the populace of District 13, an underground redoubt where even the Capitol's bombs are ineffective. As Haymitch Abernathy, a briefly seen Woody Harrelson seems to shown up between other jobs.

Even Elizabeth Banks' lively and pretentious Effie Trinket seems subdued in this most despairing of all the Hunger Games movies. Liam Hemsworth's Gale is around to advance the plot.

Although Part 1 ends in anguish, it spends too much time allowing Katniss to wander across the dystopian wreckage in this final chapter of author Suzanne Collins' much-read trilogy. Katniss isn't even a prime mover in the movie's last bit of action.

I wouldn't say that Part 1 has done irrevocable damage to the franchise, but it doesn't really satisfy. Like exhausted baseball fans, we're left to console ourselves with a familiar refrain: Wait until next year.

We wait. We hope.

Another helping of John le Carre

In A Most Wanted Man, author John le Carre shifts his espionage focus to Hamburg and Berlin. With the Cold War receding into memory, le Carre continues to find other milieus in which he can examine the chilly world of men and women who earn their living plying history's back channels.

Director Anton Corbijn tries to respect the tone and intricacies of le Carre's informed imagination, immersing us in a complex story built around German spy Gunther Bachmann (Philip Seymour Hoffman).

As head of a special unit, Bachmann spends his time keeping tabs on Hamburg's radical Muslims. He hopes that he can uncover terrorist plots as he moves through a shadowy world that he doesn't always understand. Who could?

We're in a post 9/11 environment: The movie begins several years after Hamburg played home to Mohamed Atta, one of the leaders of the World Trade Center attack.

Not without reason, Bachmann considers himself a savvy guy. He's seen plenty, and he's not likely to be bested by anyone. He's a bit disheveled, but he's knowing and efficient, and has a deep mistrust of bureaucracy -- anyone's.

The movie starts when Issa Karpov (Grigoriy Dobrygin), a Chechen/Russian arrives in Hamburg. A devout Muslim, Issa may be dangerous or maybe he's merely a pawn in someone's plan to lure and catch a bigger fish.

A German immigration lawyer (Rachel McAdams) tries to help Issa gain permanent residency in Germany. They approach a German banker (Willem Dafoe) to gain access to a substantial bank account left by Issa's father, a bad actor in the Russian criminal world.

The movie's cast of characters also includes Dr. Faisal Abdullah (Homayoun Ershadi), a high-profile spokesman for the German Muslim community, and a cagey CIA agent (Robin Wright), who tries to work her way into Bachmann's plans.

Corbijn (Control and The American) doesn't totally conquer le Carre's complicated plot, the movie's pacing can become turgid, and the story might have been better served with a German actress in the role played by McAdams.

Still, the payoff perfectly reflects le Carre's cynical intelligence, a rueful defeatism that emanates from too keen a knowledge of the many ways in which people betray one another.

I wish it weren't so, but, for me at least, the fact that Hoffman's no longer with us imbued A Man Most Wanted with unintended eeriness, a sense that perhaps, in the end, life trumped any performance the gifted actor could give.

Put another way, it's difficult not to mourn the fact that A Man Most Wanted should have been one more Hoffman movie among many more to come.

More (and better) Hunger Games

The series continues with a strong second helping.

At the conclusion of The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, I felt as if I'd been watching an old-fashioned serial -- only one that had been playing for two hours and 26 minutes. Even at this excessive length, the second big-screen adaptation of novelist Suzanne Collins's popular series, left me wanting more.

Much of the credit for this goes to Jennifer Lawrence , the fine actress who gives Catching Fire its conscience and its heart.

Moreover, the movie's visual environment -- skillfully created by director Francis Lawrence and a capable effects team -- enhances what amounts to an upgraded second helping of a franchise that's gaining both momentum and seriousness as it moves toward its finale.

Lawrence (the director) has a distinct advantage over his predecessor, director Gary Ross. Because he doesn't need to establish the world in which the action takes place, Lawrence is free to advance the story, and he wastes no time belaboring the obvious: The Hunger Games that define the movie have a disturbing contemporary relevance, reality TV carried to perverse extremes.

This edition finds Jennifer Lawrence's Katniss Everdeen as haunted as she is determined: In the last installment Katniss killed to survive: She now suffers the burdens of post traumatic stress disorder and lingering guilt.

The twist in the story finds Katniss and Josh Hutcherson's Peeta thrown back into competition as part of a ploy by the evil Capitol to extinguish any flames of rebellion that might be sparking in the various districts into which the country of Panem has been divided.

This particular competition -- staged to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the Capitol's victory over an earlier rebellion -- pits previous Hunger Games winners against one another in what promises to be an even more brutal fight to the death. There's only one winner in a Hunger Games competition; i.e., one survivor.

There's a hitch in the plan, though. This time, combatants are much more likely to ally with one another because they all feel betrayed. Victories in earlier editions of the Hunger Games were supposed to guarantee the winners and their families lives of peaceful ease. The Capitol has reneged on its promise.

It doesn't take much familiarity with the Collins's novel to know that currents of rebellion flicker beneath the fascistic, authoritarian order that the Capitol ruthlessly enforces. Public floggings and arbitrary punishments makes us root for revolution.

The returning cast includes Donald Sutherland as President Snow, a man whose cunning is as thorough as his crisp enunciation. Liam Hemsworth returns as Gale, Katniss's old flame. Katniss's heart may belong to Gale, but she's forced into a phony romance with Peeta -- mostly to amuse the ever-observant powers-that-be in the Capitol. Will the sham become real?

Woody Harrelson reprises his role as Haymitch, an older former Hunger Games winner. Elizabeth Banks returns as Effie Trinket, the big-haired fashionista who presides over the public image of Katniss and Peeta. Lenny Kravitz is back as Cinna, Katniss's super-creative costumer; and Stanley Tucci again turns up as Caesar Flickerman, the host of the Hunger Games broadcast whose smile is as big as a billboard. A little of Tucci's over-the-top, parodic take on game show hosts goes a long way, even when used judiciously, as it is here.

The movie benefits from the addition of a few new characters: Plutarch Heavensbee (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a game designer and master schemer, becomes the brains behind President Snow's malignant schemes. Plutarch has been charged with designing this edition's electronically controlled Hunger Game: It's called The Quarter Quell and includes poisonous fog, vicious baboons, swooping birds and a storm surge.

Also joining the fray are Jeffrey Wright, as a technically savvy warrior, and Sam Claffin, as an arrogant combatant, who turns out to be less selfish than we initially anticipate. Jena Malone has a nice turn as a Hunger Games participant who makes no attempt to hide her fury at having been drawn back into combat.

From the outset, the movie's effects team has ample opportunity to impress -- in the sleek imperial Capitol, on speeding trains and in decaying District 12, home to Katniss and Peeta, and, of course, in the action-packed games. (Oddly, the games might be the movie's least interesting achievement.)

The movie builds to a climax that neatly sets the stage for the final chapter, Mockingjay, which is scheduled to be released in two installments next year.

Unlike some franchises, Catching Fire isn't afraid to put some breathing space between its action set pieces. And this time, the movie seems more serious about immersing us in a class-divided society in which the misfortunes of the impoverished many support the decadence of the privileged few.

Precise music, sloppy lives

A great cast does its best to elevate A Late Quartet.

Sometimes I wonder if even Christopher Walken knows where his line readings are headed? Walken, of course, has acquired the reputation of being an actor who specializes in characters who challenge expectation and defy most ideas of normality. But not always. A Late Quartet, a movie about a string quartet that faces a major crisis, provides welcome proof that Walken is not only a highly capable actor, but an extremely sympathetic one. The movie takes the burden of weirdness off Walken's shoulders, something that should come as a relief to both the actor and his audience..

Walken plays Peter Mitchell, the group's cellist and elder statesman. When Peter tells the other members of the unimaginatively named quartet -- The Fugue -- that he has been diagnosed with Parkinson's, troubles begin to threaten the group's 25-year history.

Conflicts quickly arise among the musicians: two of whom (Philip Seymour Hoffman -- as the second violinist -- and Catherine Keener -- as the violist) enter a shaky period in their marriage. To add further complication, professional jealousy starts to poison the atmosphere: The second violinist thinks it's time for him to change places with the first violinist (Mark Ivanar.)

You can tell from a quick perusal of the bold-faced names in the preceding paragraph that A Late Quartet boasts a terrific cast, all of whom are in expectedly fine form.

It's hardly surprising that Hoffman, most recently seen in The Master, gives a strong performance as Robert Gelbart, a husband who believes that his wife, Juliette, is not supporting his quest to play first violin. He's also in conflict with Ivanar's character over the quartet's approach to music, which very much has been determined by the first violinist's highly controlled personality and his preference for technical mastery over free-flowing passion.

The story needed no further wrinkles, but the screenplay has Ivanar's character giving violin lessons to Alexandra (Imogen Poots), daughter of Robert and Juliette. Alexandra harbors a good deal of resentment toward her parents, another dynamic in what turns out to be a script that tries to hit a few too many melodramatic notes.

Director Yaron Zilberman builds the movie around all of these personal tensions, as well as around the group's efforts to master Beethoven's challenging Opus 131.

I know a musician who remained unconvinced (perhaps even bothered) by the fake playing that this talented quartet of actors must attempt. But there's no faulting the cast for the way it inhabits each character.

Hoffman captures Robert's restlessness, volatility and disappointment; Keener excels as a woman who too often has been called upon to become a stabilizing influence on the group; Walken brings a sad sense of resolve to the role of a recently widowed man who's about to lose the skill that has carried him through life. Less well-known than the others, Ivanar more than holds his own.

Zilberman's approach to the material is fairly straightforward, but the screenplay he co-wrote with Seth Grossman, isn't always sure-handed. The story comes dangerously close to farce as the result of an affair that Poots's Alexandra initiates with Ivanar's character.

If you're looking for deep insight into chamber music, you may be a bit disappointed, but the notion that disciplined classical musicians can lead particularly sloppy lives is not without interest, and a screenplay would have to have been awfully bad to defeat a quartet of actors this good.

The real master is behind the camera

Paul Thomas Anderson's latest is strange, compelling and uncommonly bold..

While watching Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master, one thought kept running through my mind: "I don't think I've ever seen anything quite like this." Visually stunning and filled with disquietude, The Master can be as staggering as it is demanding.

When I say that The Master brims with unease, I mean it as high praise. The composition of its images, its almost frightening insularity and the strangeness of its central performances are nothing short of mesmerizing.

The movie centers of two characters, a sailor cast adrift in society after World War II (Joaquin Phoenix) and the founder (Philip Seymour Hoffman) of a cult called The Cause, which claims to take adherents back through past lives as a means of helping them attain perfection.

Untamed, libidinous and violent, Phoenix's Freddie Quell becomes a kind of project for Hoffman's Lancaster Dodd, a test case for Dodd's therapeutic methods. Theirs is a complex relationship built on contradictory helpings of acceptance and scorn.

With his mouth twisted into a perpetual snarl and his shoulders hunched forward, Phoenix creates a character who suggests both menace and vulnerability. Hoffman's Dodd has an air of assumed grandeur. Dodd seems totally convinced of his own importance and singularly focused on his theories, which (as his son reveals in a moment of rebellious candor) the great man may be inventing on the fly.

Prone to violent, alcohol-fueled outbursts, Freddie may not be entirely likable, but Dodd isn't entirely dislikable, either. That's part of the way in which Anderson keeps us off guard.

War scarred and psychologically troubled, Freddie clearly needs help with destructive behavior that includes making potent alcoholic drinks out of any available substance, including paint thinner. For his part, Dodd can't seem to bring himself to kick poor Freddie to the curb.

Anderson slowly lets us know that Dodd is gathering followers, many of them wealthy people who eagerly submit to what he calls "processing." He drubs such followers with provocative questions, repeating each inquiry with willful insistence. Such "processing" is supposed to help people recall and recover from troubling life episodes, roadblocks on the path to perfection.

Anderson insists on keeping the thematic waters muddy, even when his images -- with help from cinematographer Mihai Malaimare Jr. -- are astonishingly vivid, many of them set to the startling rhythms of Jonny Greenwood's invigorating score.

The Master may bother some viewers because it poses unanswered question. Why is Freddie so troubled, for example? He ran away from love he found in his hometown of Lynn, Mass. He probably saw too much war. He claims to have had an incestuous relationship with an aunt. But we're never entirely certain about the forces that keep pushing Freddie into the darkest corners of his mind.

Dodd has been compared to Scientology Founder L. Ron Hubbard, but a movie about the roots of Scientology will have to wait. Anderson has created a haunting vision of the post-war 1950s. Meticulously appointed and yet never entirely realistic, The Master lives in a world fraught with unborn meanings and still-to-be-realized consequences.

Whatever you think of Dodd, you'll have to agree that he has no greater supporter than his wife, played with astringent force by a terrific Amy Adams. As Mrs. Dodd -- one in a succession of Mrs. Dodds -- Adams exhibits frightening levels of loyalty and determination. She's like the ideal corporate wife, well-mannered, attractive, maternal and totally committed to her husband's advancement, a true believer when it comes to The Cause.

Taken together, Phoenix, Hoffman and Adams give three of the year's most commanding performances.

After Anderson's last movie -- There Will Be Blood -- I had an e-mail exchange with a screenwriter who found the movie lacking because it had no third act. The same can be said of The Master. But Anderson is too skilled for us to assume that he doesn't know how to create a third act.

Absent a thunderous payoff, we're left to turn the movie over in our minds, tilling its rich soil as we search for seeds of meaning, wondering whether every image we've seen is meant to be taken literally. Some may be a product of Freddie's lurid imagination, for example.

Movies, of course, are meant to be experienced as much as pondered. And the experience of The Master can be unsettling and uncontainable, as overpowering of some of Anderson's extreme close-ups. If you're with The Master, it may make you feel as if you're standing on the edge of a cliff, fearful of the fall but unable to turn away. The Master can trouble as much as it intrigues, but it also stands as an uncommonly bold piece of cinema.

Never boring, but not brilliant either

George Clooney's Ides of March wallows in fashionable cynicism.

Here's some shocking news: Politics can be a dirty business -- full of betrayals, double dealing and unholy bargains. If that comes as a surprise to you, you've probably never read an American newspaper, but this widely held and fashionably jaundiced view permeates George Clooney's The Ides of March, a story about a governor who's trying to win an Ohio presidential primary.

Clooney directed, co-wrote the screenplay and plays Governor Mike Morris, an idealistic liberal who's not afraid to admit that he's not a religious man. Clooney donned many hats to make the movie, but he's not its star. Instead, he cedes the spotlight to Ryan Gosling, who portrays Stephen Myers, an ambitious but idealistic campaign worker and political hotshot who works for Morris' more-seasoned campaign manager (Philip Seymour Hoffman).

Based on Beau Willmon's play, Farragut North, The Ides of March resembles Clooney's previous directorial efforts -- particularly Good Night and Good Luck and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind -- in its snappy intelligence.

Never boring and full of intriguing moments, Ides of March gets its best work from a terrific supporting cast: - Paul Giamatti (as the campaign manager for the opposition); Hoffman (as Morris' veteran campaign manager); and Evan Rachel Wood (as a flirtatious young intern working on the Morris campaign). Gosling is at his best before the script turns the tables on his character, forcing him to decide whether he's going to wallow in the dirt along with the rest of the pols or keep his self-respect.

Clooney's Mike Morris isn't much of a character; he's a kind of walking position paper, and the script --- predictably, I think -- contrives to find ways to challenge Morris' status as a liberal icon. The central plot twist is best discovered in a theater not in a review, but I found Morris' inevitable act of hypocrisy to be less than shocking, an obvious attempt to evoke an incident with which we're all depressingly familiar.

And by the end, it seemed to me that Ryan had adopted a kind of single-minded approach to his character that might have benefited from some shading.

But what surprised me most about The Ides of March is its hermetic quality. The movie lacks the infectious bustle and noise of a campaign; it's fine when the exchanges between characters tend toward intimacy, but it misses the rambunctious excitement of politics. The movie resembles a tune that's all melody and no harmony.

That's not to say that Ides of March is a bore; it's not. The best thing about Ides of March is watching its various characters jockey to prove who's most in the know. Still, it felt to me as Clooney & company never allowed the story's cynicism to bubble urgently from its core. I enjoyed Ides of March, but couldn't entirely shake the feeling that Clooney was playing a game that had been rigged from the start.

Brad Pitt connects in 'Moneyball'

Moneyball gives Brad Pitt a chance to follow Tree of Life with another strong performance.

By now, you've probably read that Moneyball, the new movie starring Brad Pitt, is well worth seeing. Thankfully, the critical consensus -- a 94 percent rating at Rotten Tomatoes -- pretty much has it right. I learned this when I caught up with Moneyball after returning from 17 days out of the country (see previous post), and finding myself engaged by a baseball movie that smartly turns its cameras away from the field. Moneyball may not strike a direct hit, but it deserves credit for taking aim at romanticized views of the national pastime.

Pitt gives a winning performance as Billy Beane, the Oakland Athletics' general manager who -- with help from a numbers cruncher played by Jonah Hill -- used statistical analysis in an attempt to match small-market achievement and big-market results.

There's daring here, too. Pitt, who at 47 still has lots of boyish charm, has no love interest in the movie, although Beane is shown to have a tender relationship with his daughter from a failed marriage. Beane's a loner who wants to win, to prove that baseball's imperial forces (notably the Yankees and Red Sox) can be defeated by guys with brain power and the courage to follow a system. Even Oakland's scouts -- grizzled veterans of many baseball wars -- think Beane has strayed too far outside the lines.

Moneyball marks Pitt's second strong performance of the year, following on the heels of an impressive turn as a tough-minded father in Terrence Malick's Tree of Life. This time, Bennett Miller (Capote) directs Pitt in a performance that highlights Beane's competitive desire, his pragmatism and his willingness to kick aside conventional thinking.

Beane's also haunted by his own past as a player whose potential seriously was misjudged by the scouts who recruited him for the Majors. Even by his own standards, Beane's stat-heavy approach doesn't quite work, but Beane's inability to win the big prize -- a World Series -- gives the movie added poignancy.

The sideline action -- views of the A's less-than-commodious clubhouse, for example -- adds color, although the script by Steve Zallian and Aaron Sorkin (from the best-selling book by Michael Lewis) tends to overstay its welcome, and Miller does not pitch the perfect big-screen game.

Tensions between Beane and A's manager Art Howe (Philip Seymour Hoffman in a smallish role) could have received more attention, and Hill's character -- based on former Beane assistant Paul DePodesta -- makes for a pleasing, if obvious, odd-fellow pairing with Pitt. Hill's Brand is the kind of nerd who's not supposed to get a second look from guys with jock mentalities.

Still, in drawing the contrast between the romance of baseball and the hard-minded approach of the statistician, Moneyball proves an enjoyable and mostly unconventional look at the world of big-time sport.

Perhaps more than any other sport, baseball lends itself to consideration of thought-provoking analysis: What if there are no intangibles when it comes to judging talent? What if only numbers matter? What if the work of two decent players can contribute as much to winning as one great player?

Moneyball won't topple the mythic, romanticized view of baseball that has dominated so much of American storytelling, but it asks us to confront our own romanticism about the sport, which (for those of us in the aging part of the population) is tantamount to confronting any residual romanticism about our long-faded youth.