The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is a horrendous title. It’s about three times as long as it should be, painful to say and somehow even more embarrassing than a placeholder like “Untitled Hunger Games Prequel”might be. By stretching to incorporate so much of the series’ symbolism, it’s not just inviting you up its own ass, it’s forcefully dragging you there merely for thinking about it.
Also, it’s so close to several perfect titles for what’s really going on here, like Hunger Games: The Snake eats its own Tail or The Ballad of the Dying Business Model.
Images courtesy Walt Disney Motion Picture Studios.
⭐⭐
Rating: 1.5 out of 5.
For the past several years as Disney pivoted toward a streaming-first business model, the company line has been that instead of movies about individual heroes leading into a bigger crossover movie, they’ll have solo TV shows, and every movie will be those crossover-scale cultural events. The Marvels is the first execution on that concept, following up on characters and settings introduced in “WandaVision,” “Ms. Marvel” and “Secret Invasion,” and I’m not watching all that shit.
This is actually kind of a painful thing, because I want to be the movie guy. I want to be the person you come to with backstory questions, but it’s 16 hours of “content” that’s cheap even by MCU standards, and I’m not doing it. I can’t do it, I have a job and a social life, but more importantly, I won’t do it. I have a shelf full of movies to watch that aren’t “content.” Disney’s explicit aim here is not to make more art, but to waste more of my time, and I’m not going to participate.
Framing this positively, The Marvels is a new experience for me! This is the first MCU movie for which I won’t have seen all the background content. How each installment stands or fails to stand on its own has always been a major issue for the MCU, and that issue is transforming. This superseries is 15 years old now. There are devoted fans who weren’t born when Iron Man came out.
“Paris awakens unlike any other city: slowly.” Images courtesy Netflix.
9/10 Director David Fincher, backed by Netflix, has been angling for awards lately, first with flagship series “House of Cards,” then a black-and-white stab at the great American biopic with Mank, and now The Killer, another American arthouse cliché of the lonely man of mystery. It’s effectively two separate genres, the deep urban neo-noirs like Taxi Driver or globe-trotting fantasies about secret spies with their secret ways like The Killer, but both genres are aimed toward the same point – you can’t kill your way out of loneliness.
Paris, December, post-pandemic- A black-gloved killer (Michael Fassbender) misses his shot and immediately becomes his employers’ new target. He rushes home to the Dominican Republic to find his girlfriend beaten and raped, but recovering well. The killer sets off on a quest that takes him to four corners of the U.S. to take revenge on everyone responsible.
Reel Entropy 