Not Built in a Day

I know I'm a little late to the Games here, but after watching Catching Fire  I finally got around to reading the trilogy .  And what surprised me the most wasn't the first-person present narration of the books (although that was both surprising and annoying) but the persistent focus on hunger .  Having only seen the movies, I had no sense that food, hunger, and poverty played such an important role in the novels; that part of the story isn't easily translated to the screen, so in the films it gets passed over in favor of the flashy action sequences.  But hunger is a thread woven throughout The Hunger Games , from Katniss's hunting expeditions, to the stark poverty of the District, to the lavish fare of the Capitol, to the search for food and water in the arena.  Katniss and Peeta's relationship is defined by his gift of bread when they are children, just as Katniss and Gale's relationship is defined by their shared struggle to provide food for their families. ...

Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice. From what I’ve tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire. But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate To say that for destruction ice Is also great And would suffice. - Robert Frost In Snowpiercer , director Bong Joon-ho gets to have his ice and his fire, too. I'm a big fan of the apocalyptic action thriller, especially when it involves a focus on questionable science (see also: The Core , The Day After Tomorrow , Armageddon ), but I did not enjoy this film. I don't enjoy gory or overly violent movies, and had to close my eyes during violent episodes throughout the movie. So with that caveat, I have a few comments.  For a more general review of the movie, check out the NYTimes' review . The film has some scenes of beauty, both of the train's interior and of the frozen tundra outside.  What's left of the world is snowy, but not with deep enough snow to hide the frozen forms of the de...

For those of you who haven't figured it out yet, I have pretty weird taste in movies.  I like action and adventure films, but I also like animated films from Disney and Studio Ghibli.  Well, this one from Studio Ghibli (more specifically, the English dub version by Disney), takes the cake for weirdness.  To quote one imdb user review, it was "very, very, very strange." Very strange indeed. "Pom Poko" is from Studio Ghibli, but is not a Miyazaki film, directed instead by Isao Takahata.  The movie follows a group of magical  raccoon dogs ( tanuki but misleadingly called "raccoons" in the movie) living in the Tama Hills outside Tokyo as their forest is turned into a giant housing development project ( Tama New Town ), one of the largest developments in Japan.  It felt like the director was deeply conflicted about the entire subject of the film.  The tanuki of the film are the same ones of Japanese folklore, and able to shapeshift, so they do everythi...

A couple weeks ago I watched Her with some friends, the new Spike Jonze film that follows the romance between a man and his computer's operating system.  While I wasn't very interested in the story itself (spoiler alert: man finds his true love, his true love finds better things to do), I was impressed with the film's vision of a future Los Angeles.  This near-future LA is a city of trains; clean, wide-open spaces; high rises; and high technology.  This future seems like a really nice place, where one's only worry is finding love, and where everyone, including the everyman hero of the film, can fall asleep with a gorgeous nighttime vista of the city just outside his floor-to-ceiling windows.  The colors were beautiful, the advertising tasteful, the buildings new and efficient.  Turns out the movie was filmed in Shanghai , with glimpses of current LA landmarks thrown in to make the setting believable.  I came out feeling much more impressed with the main ch...

In a sense, many action movies are "about" architecture or engage directly with buildings; think of Ethan Hunt scaling skyscrapers and crawling through ducts in all the Mission: Impossible movies, or car chases through city centers and urban parcours in the Bourne movies.  Some other obvious ones are  Blade Runner , known for its futuristic nighttime cityscapes that launched a thousand architectural dreams, and, apparently, Die Hard , as described eloquently in BLDGBLOG .  (Also thanks to Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG for inspiring this entire line of thought.)  Here are a few more action + architecture movies I've seen recently that I think are of particular interest. The Towering Inferno (1974): architect as hero, building systems as dangerous adversaries or heroic resources (but ultimately the architect is instructed, at the end of the film, to subordinate himself to the firefighter, who apparently knows best about how tall to make buildings) Earthquake (19...

Of the three Gary Hustwit documentaries I've seen, this being the third and last, I thought Urbanized was the best by far.  It's like a primer on the most-discussed issues of urbanism today.  So while I can't say I learned much from the movie, Urbanized is a great introduction to this range of topics, and I'm supposed to know this stuff anyway as part of my profession.  The visuals are also great: if you're an urbanism buff, you'll enjoy trying to figure out which city is being shown before the titles are given; the aerial views comparing cities are pretty spectacular; and there are some fun interviews with people around the world, including government officials in Santiago, Chile; Bogota, Colombia; and in New York City.  I should warn the urbanism buffs, though, that you may get impatient sometimes with the pacing, since so much will already be familiar.  But it's still worth a viewing.  For everyone else, you will probably learn a lot, including some thi...

Abstract: Decent documentary film, whose value is more in raising questions about the ethics of access to art than in telling the story of the victimized Barnes Foundation. The Barnes Foundation opened its new museum in Philadelphia this year despite the years of legal battles described in this 2009 documentary, The Art of the Steal .  The movie left me feeling soundly depressed about the state of the fine arts in this country, but also feeling caught in the middle of a bigger argument.  That argument is about the proper place of elitism in art.  But first, to summarize briefly the history of the Barnes Foundation:  Assembled by a wealthy industrialist, the Barnes art collection is considered to be the best collection of impressionist and early modern paintings anywhere, and valued at $25 billion.  This man, Albert Barnes, established an art school based on this collection, and endowed the school (the Barnes Foundation) to remain as an educational ...

No, I don't know anything about fashion, and no, I didn't pick out this movie (that honor belongs to Justin).  But I feel obligated to review it because "Bill Cunningham New York" was one of the best films I've seen in a while.  This documentary made me want to go downtown, track down Bill Cunningham, and give him a hug.  And then maybe find the filmmakers and give them a hug, too, for good measure. The documentary follows the New York Times' 83/84-year-old fashion photographer Bill Cunningham, who has been photographing street fashion since the 1950s or 60s in New York.  The film shows him to be almost naively honest, moral, and fair, rejecting money and anything that would compromise his artistic vision or his genuinely positive message that fashion represents our self-expression.  He lived (at the time of filming) in a tiny one-room apartment filled with filing cabinets of his photographs, with no kitchen and no bathroom ("just more rooms to clean...

I can't pretend to be exceptionally knowledgeable about product design, but as an almost-architect, I like to think I know a decent amount.  So I've considered it my duty to watch Gary Hustwit's trilogy on design, Helvetica (on typefaces), Objectified (on product/industrial design), and Urbanized (on urban design).  I haven't gotten to the third one yet, but I wanted to go ahead and discuss the first two before I forget. Like Helvetica , I thought Objectified was a nice, shiny tribute to the design world, providing a narrow range of viewpoints on design ("does design matter more than everything else, or just more than most things?") without really convincing the viewer that design matters at all.  The sequences showing items in production were cool, but none of the talking heads and silent panning shots did much to persuade me of anything.  I wish the director had done more editorializing.  The most engaging person he interviewed explained how Apple lapt...