Regardless of what you feel about Silver Linings Playbook, American Hustle, or The Fighter, you have to applaud David O. Russell's auteurism. He really knows how to put his stamp on a film. Much like Woody Allen or Quentin Tarantino, there's something to be said of a filmmaker who does it his own way no matter what.
Joy is an uplifting tale of the lady who invented the Miracle Mop. It's about the true struggle of the American dream. Jennifer Lawrence plays Joy, a single mother from a dysfunctional family. But that family of hers all lives under her roof. This includes her ex-husband, her divorced parents, her two children, and her grandmother. Joy has a lot of ideas, but doesn't live in a world where doing anything about them makes any sense. Nobody around her is successful. Even though setting is never really established (we never get the year or location), we can tell that it's a town where everyone just lives to survive. Until one day, when Joy's father starts dating a rich widow, who's acquiescently convinced to fund one of Joy's inventions.
The first act of this film is spent establishing the craziness of Joy's life. She doesn't truly present her product until about 45 minutes in. Before that, we spend time trying to get accustomed to the oddness of this movie, with Russell perhaps borrowing, in a way, from Wes Anderson, taking pages right out of his book.
Then the film really starts getting good when Joy makes a deal to sell her product on QVC. This is also when Bradley Cooper enters the film as Neil Walker, an executive at QVC. We get a behind the scenes look at something we never thought we'd get--a home shopping television channel. It's probably something we never even realized we wanted to get. But when it's there, we love it. It's, by far, one of the best things about this movie.
It's hard to believe that there was once a time when QVC was revolutionary. "People can actually shop from the comfort of their own home?!" And Joy sprinkles this detail in there as well.
If Russell can keep one thing constant throughout his films, it's the chaos he creates. This chaos comes from overlapping dialogue, intrusive camera angles, and a lot of yelling. Whether you see it as a good thing (Silver Linings Playbook and The Fighter) or unnecessary (American Hustle), his style is established.
In Joy, it works as both good and bad. The good is used when Russell juxtaposes Joy's chaotic home life with the magic of television. The bad is during the beginning when it's all we see and we need desperately to escape from it.
The whole film is very surrealistic. Joy's mother is seen watching soap operas intermittently throughout. But we are let in on the story. Russell hires actual soap opera stars, including Susan Lucci, to play the fictional soap opera characters. We are also inside Joy's heads a few times as she dreams of different things, including starring in the soap opera herself.
As a character, it's hard for us to put Joy's personality in a box. She doesn't smile much. Her demeanor is sometimes reserved, but explosive at other times. She is both strong and vulnerable, depending on the circumstance. You might say that this is attributed to the complexity of us as humans. Or you can just say that it has to do with the director's uncertainty of his character. Nonetheless, it's fun watching Lawrence perform a vast array of moods.
But I really like this film. A lot, actually. Joy's hunger to make it in this capitalist society is inspiring. Her story isn't necessarily a unique one, but her situation is. So many of us have ideas, but the fear of failing hinders us. This film shows all of that. It also shows how one might overcome it.
Twizard Rating: 91
Maybe not exactly the way you'd like to top off the Hunger Game series, but in a franchise where only 50% of the movies were great, does it really matter? The sad part is this didn't have to be the case. If Mockingjay hadn't been spliced into two separate chapters, we would have looked at this series with only one below par entry. But now there are two.
Obviously Mockingjay Part 2 is better than Part 1 in every way possible, except for being a good substitute for sleeping pills. But this film is the ending, which we'd like to see be a little bit better.
At least if it's been a year since you've watched the last Hunger Games, there isn't much that you have to remember because nothing really happened. Basically, Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) goes crazy and strangles Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence). And in this film, Katniss et al are on a mission to attack the capital and kill Snow (Donald Sutherland). Snow expects all this, so he sets up some traps for them along the way--the highlight of the film.
Perhaps the most obvious pitfall in this movie is the tortured Katniss. Now, it isn't Lawrence's fault. She plays the part convincingly, but so much so that it almost hinders the film altogether. She comes off as lackadaisical and it really slows down the movie. It's a shame though. All that depth they spent time heavily building in the previous films is wasted away in this one. She acts like a zombie the entire time--save for one powerful moment about ten minutes in when she's intensely talking to a man who's pointing a gun at her head. After that she's all but absent.
What made the first two Hunger Games so good is that it separated the series from the rest of the YA genre. It was unique to itself. But a third of the way through this film, beginning with Katniss and her friends' journey to the capital, it turns into every other dystopian teen movie--mutant creatures and all. There's nothing original about it. There's no moral struggle. There's nothing making us feel like anything is at stake. And there's really no point.
At this movie's best, it still knows how to build tension and suspense with its action scenes--a trait last seen long ago somewhere in the 2nd film. The effects and visuals are great like always, and I appreciate the "game board" aspect being brought back too. I just wanted the film to be a better conclusion to the series.
But there is still an unresolved love triangle coming into this film. Will Katniss end up with Peeta or Gale (Liam Hemsworth)? I know this is necessary in many films directed towards teenagers, but here it's not only unnecessary, but it gives the series less credibility--especially considering the forced nature of the conflict. There's never anything really separating the two guys. She has no real reason to choose one over the other, which then forces a decision to come down to mere physical preference--a trait that openly welcomes a younger, more naive demographic--the demographic that will rid this movie of all credibility. In most love triangles, the two lovers are opposing archetypes--Han Solo and Luke Skywalker in Star Wars, Brad Pitt and Edward Norton's characters in Fight Club, and even Edward and Jacob in Twilight--but here, the two men are basically just the same nice guy. We never feel like she can realistically make a decision. We can't either. And I think the filmmakers knew this, which is why they abruptly give us a reason not to like one of them with about 10 minutes left in the entire series. It's really the first sign of differentiation between the two male leads. And so it goes, the decision is pretty much made for Katniss. But it has to be, seeing as they're the same person, which makes everything that happened in the previous four films feel like a total waste of time.
In Harry Potter, the series never focuses too heavily on the romance between the characters. While Mockingjay Part 2 is still deeper than most other YA films, the love triangle distracts from the overall point of the series, which is the last thing you want as the franchise wraps itself up. It was just too strong in this one.
As the film ends, it never really climaxes--it just tapers off. Oh yeah, we get a betrayal from a character which no one cares about since the character just got introduced to us in the last movie and we got no time to get to know them. There's no sense of shock or betrayal that a good twist would have given us.
It seems like I hate this installment, although it's actually entertaining--much unlike Part 1. But overall, the film is way too into itself, presumably due to the hype that it's gained since its inception back in 2012. As a standalone movie, Part 2 has all the thrills you would need, but in the context of this series it makes us realize that we would have been fine wrapping it up after the 2nd film.
Hey, at least I wasn't falling asleep.
Twizard Rating: 67
We were fooled. Don't act like you didn't see it coming. Quit being oblivious and biased. This movie is really bad. It's boring. I should have known from the opening title where it says "Mockingjay Part 1". There is no hunger games. The games are over. The action is over. I just was hoping for a good story at least. I was hoping for ANY story.
This is the most shameless attempt to make double the money on their franchise finale. Studios wonder why so many people pirate movies, but it's because they mess with us like this. It's atrocious of them. The events could have been "accomplished" in less than an hour--and I'm being generous. But no, it was 2 hours and 3 minutes. And you know they had to make it at least 2 hours, because if it was any shorter it would have been too blatant that they were making it into two separate movies just to make more money. But instead they decided on making us wait until the movie was over to confirm that fact.
I wrote in my notes, "slow moving first act." I soon realized that the entire movie would be like this. But I was hoping for at least a nice twist at the end maybe, but that didn't happen either. Nothing happened in the whole movie. We just sit around watching the characters move about the screen while we occasionally check our watches. There's little-to-no suspense, there's no action, and there's barely even any humor. The political commentary about democracy isn't even consequential anymore because we obviously agree in favor of it. There isn't any internal conflict for the audience to mull over.
At least if you found The Hobbit boring, you loved being enveloped in their magical world with picturesque landscapes and interesting creatures. With the Hunger Games' world, you have a dystopian future containing nothing of desire, and by the end of this movie you're gonna want out.
And I can't blame the director. He was just dealt the hand that the studio gave him. They need the extra billion dollars.
You'll hear good things from fangirls, but don't be suckered in to this one. Rent it.
Twizard Rating: 53
