Things that already meet each other

Last night I started, but only got halfway through, the new Netflix teen dystopia movie Uglies. I wasn't particularly enjoying the movie, but that's not why I got only halfway through it. It was because of our new diabolically comfortable living room couch, which I may see fit to write about at length at some point, due to the way it's eating into my same-night movie completion rate.

But I don't need to have finished Uglies to write about what I'm writing about today.

I'm not sure if you've noticed, but Netflix has gotten into the habit of shorthanding the appeal of a movie by suggesting it is the love child of two other movies. At the same time, it is complimenting its viewers by considering them familiar with the old show biz pitch shorthand for what a studio exec might expect from a script they are considering buying.

"It's Star Wars meets Casablanca" goes the old pitch, and in theory, the exec's eyes light up with dreams of Oscars and box office dollars. (I don't know what movie that would be, but presumably there is one out there that meets that description.)

So in its descriptions for its movies -- not every movie, because it wouldn't work with every movie -- Netflix has taken to giving you, the viewer, the same sort of pitch, hoping you will watch.

Even when it's hilarious.

Now let me first say that the point of the "Movie A meets Movie B" template is that the two movies are distinctly different from one another. There may be some way they are complementary -- if they aren't in some way complementary, the movie will probably be a disaster -- but you do think of different things when you consider each movie in isolation. The way they blend gives the movie its sense of new vitality, a perfect combination of what a studio considers safe and what a studio considers a safe-ish risk.

So that's why I find the description for Uglies to be particularly hilarious:

"It's Divergent meets The Hunger Games."

Now, I haven't seen Divergent, so you can correct me if I'm wrong. But isn't Divergent itself The Hunger Games meets Divergent? And isn't The Hunger Games itself Divergent meets The Hunger Games?

Obviously Divergent and The Hunger Games are not the same movie. If memory serves, people in Divergent have some sort of mental powers. 

But saying that a new YA movie is like the love child of these two movies is kind of like saying that a new teen sex comedy is like American Pie meets Superbad. Or that a new sci-fi movie is like Star Wars meets Star Trek. Or that a new period piece about servants working in a fancy mansion is like Remains of the Day meets Downton Abbey.

I'm not suggesting Netflix is wrong to market movies using this convention. It's clever and efficient. And the average person -- the person who might actually be the target audience of Uglies -- is unlikely to parse the semantics of the recommendation like I am doing here. 

I do think there are ways to do it better though.

From the half of Uglies I've seen, I can tell you the movie is about a future society where all citizens are given cosmetic surgery at age 16 to make them beautiful. This makes everyone extremely shallow, except for the stalwart few who resist the mandatory surgery and stay their same "ugly" self. (I'm sorry, but it is not possible to make Joey King ugly.)

If I were trying to replace one of the two movies in the pitch for Uglies with another movie that would deliver us a more nuanced pitch, I might say that it's Divergent meets Gattaca. (While I have not gone out and watched Divergent since writing the above paragraph, this movie does seem to have more in common with Divergent than The Hunger Games.)

Gattaca, as I remember it, was also about beauty and genetic perfection. And it was also set in a world with tall futuristic buildings and young people. 

The trouble is, that same average viewer doesn't know Gattaca from Battlestar Galactica from Attica, the prison in New York. ("Attica! Attica!") 

And so it is, regrettably, far better for Netflix to say "Obvious thing you know and love #1 + obvious thing you know and love #2 = thing you will obviously love."

Fighting gun violence with gun violence

We've just passed two years since Sandy Hook, and I've just seen Odd Thomas, and unfortunately, the two are related.

Based on a popular series of books by Dean Koontz, Odd Thomas is aiming at that ever-desirable YA audience, using the approach of a show on the CW network. It's about a guy who can see dead people and other ghoulish harbingers of death (see poster to your right), but these days, that kind of thing is perfectly fine for the teen set. Once a book/movie series about teenagers fighting each other to the death became all the rage, the sanitization of teen subject matter was permanently put to rest.

It's not a very good movie -- if it were slightly less polished and had a less famous cast, it could easily be Vampire Academy. And if this were a pilot to a TV show, which it often feels like, I probably wouldn't tune in for the second episode.

But the biggest problem with Odd Thomas is not its quality (which is sometimes good enough) or its cast (I'm an Anton Yelchin fan), or even the fact that it relies on the title character's narration/voiceover to explain just about everything that's happening (which is a lot more than probably should be happening). Its problem is the probably accidental callousness with which it handles gun violence.

And if you don't want to know any more about Odd Thomas, heed this SPOILER WARNING before continuing.

Sure, The Hunger Games is pretty inflammatory subject matter in an age when people are excessively concerned about youth-on-youth violence. But at least in The Hunger Games, only the bad guys use guns. The good guys never do.

Not so with Odd Thomas.

At this point I should tell you about the actual plot of the movie. The title character -- whose first name is, in fact, Odd -- has been having strange visions/dreams about a gun massacre he believes is going to occur at a bowling alley. In this vision he can see victims wearing bowling jackets riddled with bullet holes. As it turns out, the site of the gun massacre is really a local shopping mall, and the bullet-riddled victims happen to be the staff of the bowling alley, who are eating there in the food court. (Now, why a bowling alley staff would all go to eat together at the same time, I couldn't tell you.)

Odd's main quest is to piece together his supernatural perceptions and figure out who the shooter or shooters will be. Once he does this, it's naturally a race against time to prevent it from happening.

Which he doesn't, quite, except that he gets there early enough to apparently stop the shooters from claiming any victims (* there's an asterisk on that one for those who've seen the film), despite spraying the mall with machine gun fire. In addition to fighting the shooters, Odd is also fighting a major onslaught of those ghoulie goblins you see in the poster above, but he breaks free from them just enough to run up and deliver a point-blank pistol blast to the middle of one shooter's forehead.

Hmm. Something not quite right about this.

That made me flash back to a scene earlier in the movie, when Odd's girlfriend (Addison Timlin) is randomly packing heat to protect herself.

Whether it means to or not, Odd Thomas is delivering a variation on that sickening rationalization by the NRA when it comes to how to stop school shootings and the like: "The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun."

Really, Odd Thomas? Is that really what you want to be telling us?

Now if this were just some regular-old action movie with clearly adult characters, it wouldn't raise my eyebrows so much. Good guys with guns have been stopping bad guys with guns for time immemorial.

But Odd Thomas is quite clearly not a product intended for adults. It is aimed at all the same targets -- so to speak -- as these other YA properties, yet it displays an irresponsible casualness about mass shootings that is alarming.

Oh, it's not that Odd Thomas doesn't get that it's a movie with a topical subject matter, and that "shootings are bad." It's that it is completely tone deaf about the solution applied to solve the problem. The solution is, basically, to have more guns.

And it shouldn't be lost on any of us just how young Yelchin looks. He's 25, but he could still be getting cast as high school students if he wanted. (While also playing Chekov in the new Star Trek movies -- a strange dichotomy indeed.) Timlin, who plays his gun-packing girlfriend, is only 23. Simply put, these kids look young because they basically are kids.

At least the shooters aren't kids. In fact, the identity of the shooters reveals another weird topicality in the movie: they are cops. That's right, bad cops with guns are on a rampage, just as cops with guns seem to be on a rampage against America's disadvantaged and disenfranchised in 2014. I don't know that this adds anything to the argument -- it's just an odd coincidence.

I'm not going to get up on any soapbox about depictions of violence in the media (though I did have an interesting conversation with a co-worker last week about gun violence in video games). I generally believe that freedom of speech means creating entertainment that depicts whatever you want it to depict.

I guess I just think it's foolish for the filmmaker (Stephen Sommers of The Mummy, oddly enough) not to recognize the heightened climate of awareness about gun violence and the ways it can be dealt with that read as sensitive. Perhaps that's how Koontz wrote the book -- I don't know, I haven't read it -- but it seems like that shooter could have been taken out in a way that didn't involve such a literal, and such an up-close-and-personal, taste of his own medicine.

At least the mall these cops are attacking is populated mostly by white people.

Reversing the normal order

With books that get made into movies, I usually do one of two things: 1) Read the book and then see the movie; 2) See the movie and never read the book. (I suppose there are also plenty of situations where I do neither.)

Not so with The Hunger Games. I'm sure this has happened before, but not in a long while: I saw the movie and then circled back to read the book. I suppose I should say, to "read" the book -- I listened to the unabridged audio book, which is the same as reading it in terms of the processing your brain does.

I hadn't planned to do that. In fact, my original plan had been to try to read the novel before seeing the movie, as discussed here. When that plan didn't pan out, I assumed there was no more "plan" related to The Hunger Games at all.

But in early December, I was at the library looking for the next audio book for my commute, and came across Suzanne Collins' novel. Even then I might not have selected it, but I had my son with me, and he was being particularly squirmy. So I just grabbed it and went, deciding at the very least that it would make an interesting experiment in order reversal. With an audio book, which has the benefit of being a more passive experience than sitting down to read, you can afford to take gambles on reading experiences. Which is just one reason I've been enjoying the audio book phase of my life over the past six months since we moved 25 miles from my office. I may even "read" some harlequin romance just to see how bad it really is.

I could write this post just about what I gleaned from my experience of this story by reversing the order, but I added an extra layer to the venture by watching the movie again this past weekend. My wife hadn't seen it, and had it on her list of movies she wanted to watch around Christmastime (most of which I had already seen). I probably would have been interested in seeing The Hunger Games again anyway, but having just read the book gave me extra incentive.

Let's just say that the movie, which came out early in the year and has been steadily inching down my list, immediately shot up a dozen spots upon second viewing. And having read the book in between definitely made me appreciate how good a movie it actually is.  

SPOILER ALERT: I will probably spoil aspects of the plot as we continue. So if you have somehow still neither read the book nor seen the movie, you may choose to bail at this point.

For starters, let me say that I loved the book -- to a point. I found that the first two-thirds of it raced along, and Collins' prose manages to be both direct and evocative at the same time. I got more insight on some parts of the movie I initially thought were underdeveloped, and I really enjoyed having unfettered access to Katniss Everdeen's thoughts. In case you haven't read the book, it's told entirely from her perspective. We hear what she's thinking at every moment, and we know only what she knows.

But the final third of the book dragged for me. This may have been where knowing how it ends really affected my enjoyment. In either scenario of consuming a story for the second time -- whether as a film or as a book -- you're often looking forward to when such-and-such happens, to how they chose to depict such-and-such. However, that wait can seem interminable in text form. A quick analysis of the pace of the story's events and the number of discs remaining told me that the book was going to spend a lot of time in the arena, whereas the film's action is a bit more front-loaded. And I quickly realized that the movie's front-loading was to its advantage.

Simply put, there's way too much of the book where Katniss and Peeta are "playing house" in the arena. We're down to just a few tributes remaining, and the announcement has already been made that this year's rules are changing to allow two winners, as long as they both come from the same district. At this point, the novel pretty much grinds to a halt. The danger seems to disappear, and Katniss and Peeta have literally days upon days of hunting, gathering, treating Peeta's wounds and falling in love (though Katniss does not recognize it as such, thinking instead that it's part of their game strategy).

And here we truly see the novel's status as a product for young adults. It's called a YA novel, but really, that means teens. And teens want to know all the ins and outs of how people their own age fall in love. It's the thing that preoccupies them the most, and one can't blame Collins for lingering on that aspect of the story for longer than most regular adults could possibly stand. To be clear, she never loses focus on the overall thrust of the story, but she indulges in the star-crossed blossoming love between Katniss and Peeta more than one would think she needed to.

Apparently, she didn't think she needed to dwell here, either, once the novel became a movie. As one of the three credited screenwriters on the movie, Collins leaves much more unsaid about what develops between Peeta and Katniss. Whereas they kiss probably a dozen times in the book, a movie can afford to be a lot more subtle, can choose individual moments and give them greater significance. It has to, because a movie is essentially an efficient form of storytelling, while novels are generally more flabby. So in the movie, Katniss and Peeta share only a single kiss -- two at most. Which is just as it should be. And a bone is definitely thrown to the adults who will help make the movie a hit, as a couple time-lapse sundowns and sunups show the passage of their time together that the novel explicates in exhausting detail.

The most important other difference between the novel and the movie is the viewer's perspective on the events. As I said, the novel is told entirely from Katniss' perspective. We meet and understand characters only as she meets and understands them. Characters she does not meet are really not characters at all. Which creates a strange kind of void in the book, especially when you've already seen the movie. The only character who personifies an antagonist is probably Cato, the District 2 "career tribute" who is widely viewed as the arena's alpha male. Katniss never meets the Gamemaker Seneca Crane (played in the movie by Wes Bentley) nor President Coriolanus Snow (played in the movie by Donald Sutherland), although Snow is referred to. So for the people who have only seen the movie, the two faces they most associate with the nefarious Capitol don't even appear in the book. In the movie they can appear, because the perspective is omniscient.

This is a key difference. I didn't necessarily think it was to the novel's detriment that there is no personification of what Katniss is fighting -- fighting in the larger metaphorical sense, not in the literal sense of her competitors in the arena. But that never would have flown in a movie, to have just an abstract faceless villain. So while I'm not necessarily sure this is a misstep in Collins' novel, it's definitely a smart decision by the movie to make these two characters flesh and blood. Especially since Sutherland is so wonderfully chilling (which goes with his name, I suppose). His story to Crane about why there is a victor in the games is one of the movie's most telling moments, the moment that really gets us inside the mindset of a totalitarian regime fully wary of its loose grip on power.

However, the existence of Bentley's character in the movie but not the book played tricks on me. One of the main drawbacks of reading a book after you see the movie (or even after you're aware a movie exists) is that you can't help but see the characters as the actors who were cast in those roles. If you cherish the way a novel allows you to imagine how the words might look, you lose that as soon as a movie version becomes widely publicized. That had a particularly strange effect on me as I was reading the novel when it came to Bentley. I remembered that Bentley was in the movie, but apparently, not what role he played. So when Katniss' sympathetic stylist Cinna made his first appearance in the novel, my mind latched on to this character as the character Bentley must have played. So for the rest of the book, Bentley was Cinna. It was to my surprise when I watched the movie again, and Bentley's character is being interviewed by Caesar Flickerman (Stanley Tucci) at the start. When Cinna appears probably 45 minutes later, I thought "Duh -- it's Lenny Kravitz." Still, any time I'd see Bentley again, I subconsciously thought "Cinna, what are you doing creating unholy hounds from hell that are sent into the arena to kill Katniss?"

Having Snow and Crane appear as antagonists (albeit a conflicted antagonist in Crane's case) also has the effect of softening the portrayal of the monstrous tribute Cato (Alexander Ludwig). He's still a lethal killer and a massive douchebag, which is in part so we don't feel so bad about his eventual demise. In fact, a number of characters are portrayed as vicious and sadistic, which I think helps us process their deaths better. But with Cato in particular, his death scene allows for the possibility that he is not just a single-minded killing machine, but rather a confused 18-year-old who has spent his life preparing for an event in which the odds were never really in his favor. We don't quite give ourselves over to fully sympathizing with him, but his final moments on screen remind us that the true enemy is the Capitol, not this man-sized boy who is just doing what society has raised him to do. I don't know that (or I should say, can't remember whether) we get that kind of ambiguity in Cato's final moments of the book. Since he's the only real antagonist, he has to fulfill that role more unwaveringly. This moment of ambiguity gives us a good taste of what I know the thrust of the next two books will be, which is to overthrow the Capitol. We get that spirit of rebellion more overtly in the book, since we have direct access to Katniss' thoughts.

However, I should say that there are certain things the novel definitely does better. For example -- and this may be intentional to minimize the horror of what's happening to these children -- the novel does a much better job keeping track of how many tributes are remaining in the games. Upon first viewing, I was frustrated by how poorly the tributes' deaths were marked, and was surprised at how rarely they used the effect of showing their profiles in the sky after they've died. There were also times in the movie (such as Rue's death) when there is inexplicably no cannon blast accompanying the death. The novel mentions a cannon blast at the death of every fallen tribute, and discusses seeing each one appearing in the sky at day's end.

Then there was Elizabeth Banks' character, the wonderfully named Effie Trinket. When I first watched the movie, I didn't really get what her role was supposed to be, since none of the novel's dialogue about her trying to get assigned to a better district appeared in the movie. I got that she was some kind of envoy, but her role remained pretty nebulous to me. I didn't have this problem the second time -- but I think that's only because the novel helped me get a better idea of who she was.

It may just be my much-discussed notion that the first version of any story you experience is the version you're going to like best, but my ultimate conclusion, especially after my second viewing, was that the movie version of The Hunger Games was a better distillation of Collins' core ingredients than the novel. Not only do I find the casting flawless (again, a hard assessment to make since I saw the movie first), but I find that I can apply to this movie one of the highest compliments I can give any movie: There are no wasted scenes. So even clocking in at 2 hours and 20 minutes, The Hunger Games feels streamlined and fast-paced. It's a major success, a success the fullness of which I now appreciate all the more given my knowledge of the source material that was adapted into the movie.

Lest you think the novel comes off poorly in this discussion, let me say this: This is not likely an order reversal I will undertake again with this series. Its "flaws" notwithstanding, reading The Hunger Games excited me enough that I definitely plan to read Collins' next novel in the series, Catching Fire, before the movie hits theaters next Thanksgiving.

Because let's face it: Reading a book is a lot more exciting if you don't know what's going to happen, and if apparent slow points in the plot have the effect of building tension and anticipation rather than stalling before an inevitable conclusion.

Now all I need to do is read Catching Fire before November. Which will be easy if I can find it in audio book form -- and sadly, not if I can't.

Oh heck, even a slow reader like me can probably find the time before November to make it through the page-turner that I'm sure Catching Fire is. Might make some good beach reading. Which is probably the last thing anyone's thinking about at this time of year ...

Not so Brave after all?

That sound you hear is a sigh of relief from hardcore Pixar fans upon the release of Brave.

True to its name, the film represents Pixar's return to its risk-taking ways of old. After two straight sequels -- one that was well received (Toy Story 3) and one that wasn't (Cars 2) -- the company is finally returning to something brand new, something with uncertain merchandising potential featuring characters we've never met before. The return is temporary, as the sequel to Monsters Inc. (called Monsters University) is due out in June of 2013. (I just read that it is technically a prequel.)

But I'm kind of wondering if Pixar isn't relying on our sense of familiarity for this one, too.

Oh, there are surface similarities to How to Train Your Dragon, but that's not what I'm talking about. It's actually a bit more shrewd than that.

Remember a little movie called The Hunger Games that came out in March?

Yeah, that movie also featured a tough female protagonist who's handy with a bow and arrow.

Don't think this didn't cross their minds over at Pixar.

The actual release date of the Hunger Games movie would have been largely serendipitous. But back when they announced what was then called The Bear and the Bow in April of 2008, they had to know that The Hunger Games would be made into a movie, and that by June of 2012, it would already be either a big hit, or a highly anticipated release sometime in the near future.

Hadn't they?

Ha. No. See, this is what happens when you start writing a blog post before fully researching the thing you're writing about.

Suzanne Collins' first Hunger Games book was not published until September of 2008 -- nearly six months after the movie that would become Brave was announced.

So The Hunger Games and Brave are actually just another case of that phenomenon we see so often in Hollywood -- the convergence of similar ideas that are ready to hit the multiplexes within months of each other. Often times, one of those ideas is a direct rip-off of the other, even if it makes it to theaters first. In this case, though, it seems like just a coincidence.

Of course, it's not like The Hunger Games and Brave are similar outside of the fact that a young girl wields a bow and arrow in both. It's not like these are two competing movies about the life of runner Steve Prefontaine.

So why did I make you read a whole post in which my conclusion ultimately contradicted my original thesis?

Hey, I'm lucky if I get the time (or have the ideas) to write anything these days. If I've got actual content up on the page, I'm publishing it.

Here's hoping you love Brave ... and that I start finding the time to post more often.

Guess I never ended up reading Hunger Games

I'm pretty disappointed in myself this morning.

Months ago, I vowed to read The Hunger Games before the movie hit theaters. Today, it's hitting theaters. And I haven't read it.

Yet more proof that I have become a hopeless reader. And maybe that's what disappoints me more than anything.

I have always been a slow reader, but at least in the past, I used to make my way through a couple books a year. At a minimum. But lately, I don't seem to make my way through anything.

It would be tempting to say that I don't find the time, because for the past 19 months I've been a father, and that kind of thing leaves you less time overall. But there has been no discernible drop in the number of movies I've seen -- those, I fit in. It's the reading that has really suffered.

Which, I try to tell myself, is okay. Fact is, movies are my "reading" -- they're the texts I'm consuming, because they're my passion. So while my friends may read more books than I do, I certainly see more movies than they do. Your value judgments on which practice is more objectively useful are yours -- but since this is a film blog and you're reading it, I'm guessing you're at least sympathetic to my position.

And I do this not only because of a personal love, but for professional reasons. If I wanted to be a book critic -- which I think would be a terrible job for me, because I read so slowly -- I'd probably read more books. But I'm a film critic, so films are my books.

But back to The Hunger Games. While I don't generally think it's necessary or even desirable to have read a particular book before you see the movie, I do think there can be a certain thrill to seeing something you read come to life on the big screen. From time to time, I think it's useful to create this situation for myself.

And The Hunger Games seemed like a good choice. I know it's sort of aimed at teens, but not to the same extent as Twilight, and a number of friends whose tastes I respect have spoken highly of it. Not to mention that it seemed like just the kind of quick, accessible reading to renew my interest in the joys of getting lost in a good book.

If not for a little twist of fate, I might have actually read it. A friend of mine was planning to loan me the book, but I didn't pick it up from him soon enough and he ended up loaning it to somebody else. With the pressure of having to read it and return it to the person who loaned it to me (even though he certainly wasn't planning to read it again himself), I certainly would have prioritized it. But without that pressure, it was left to me to either borrow it from someone else or buy it. With the ball in my court, I dropped it.

Yeah, there were a couple times I flirted with buying it. I had (still have) an Amazon gift card that would have been perfect for it. I also picked it up off the shelf a couple times in book stores, weighing the possibility of a purchase. But in each case, something stopped me -- like the fact that I'm still reading a book of Raymond Carver short stories my wife got me for my birthday in October, and have made almost no progress on it in the last three months. She actually bought me that book with the hope that the shorter stories would encourage faster reading, since she knows I aspire to read more. (When in fact, the opposite could be true -- you power quickly through a book because you become invested in its characters.) If I bought The Hunger Games before I finished the Carver stories, it would signal a certain defeat to both my wife and to me.

I guess I could still read the book before I see the movie. I am not by any means committed to seeing this movie in the theater, even though its 68 Metascore indicates that director Gary Ross seems to have brought it to the big screen successfully.

But now I'm also wondering if it wouldn't just be better to see the movie without reading the book. Sometimes, already knowing what will happen in a movie is a drawback to enjoying it as much as you might otherwise.

Let's take the example of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, arguably the most popular book in recent years other than The Hunger Games. (More popular, I'm sure.) I didn't read Stieg Larsson's novel, but I did see its Swedish film adaptation prior to seeing David Fincher's in December. I'd say that knowing how the novel ends, from seeing the first adaptation, did in fact affect my enjoyment of Fincher's movie. Then again, this may be a bad example, because in the end I just don't find the mystery itself in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo all that satisfying. It's also not a great example for this particular post because I didn't read the book. Reasons already discussed.

We can also look at the flip side -- enjoying a movie more because I hadn't read the book. I think one of the reasons I responded so positively to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part II was because I watched it in suspense, not knowing what would happen -- whether one of our heroes would not survive the final chapter of this tale. If I'd read the Harry Potter series, I would have been watching the movie primarily to see how successfully they translated it to the screen, not getting caught up in a story whose twists and turns were, blissfully, still a mystery to me.

The nice thing about The Hunger Games, as it is now, is that I don't know what happens. Yeah, I know that the characters played by Jennifer Lawrence and Josh Hutcherson are pretty likely to survive the first movie. But I don't know what happens with a lot of the other characters -- in fact, I don't yet even know those characters. Since this is a story about life and death, there are definitely going to be a number of people who die. Maybe I'm better off not knowing. Maybe I'll enjoy the movie even more.

Fortunately, I don't have to make up my mind too quickly. This movie will be in theaters at least until May, and I wouldn't be going in the first couple weekends regardless. And I don't have to worry about anyone spoiling the movie for me, I wouldn't think -- the benefit of it already existing as a book is that if people intended to spoil it for me, they probably would have done it already.

If you plan to see The Hunger Games weekend, good luck fighting the lines, and I hope it's at least better than the Twilight movies.

Hunger-y eyes

I've been having a staring contest with Jennifer Lawrence since last Friday.

That's when this issue of Entertainment Weekly arrived in my mail. It's been lying on the coffee table since, and it -- or more appropriately, she -- keeps catching my eye. And then it's an epic stare down.

Not really, but can't you tell this woman means business? In fact, she alone may be responsible for my sudden interest in The Hunger Games, a movie franchise I was ready to write off as another Twilight (partially because EW hyped it that way) until learning more about it recently -- learning that although it may involve teenagers, it's not a sodden romance meant to make 12-year-old girls swoon, and learning that some people whose tastes I respect have read the books and loved them. The first Hunger Games movie is due out next March.

I've had a developing fascination with Jennifer Lawrence over the four-and-a-half months since I first saw her in Winter's Bone. At first I was merely impressed by her acting, which carries an actor-heavy movie and doesn't for a moment seem false. Then, seeing her get cleaned up for awards shows, I was amazed at how she was able to disguise her natural radiance in Winter's Bone. I mean, hubba hubba. I'd thought she was an indie actress, someone with an unconventional beauty like Melissa Leo -- if you even want to call Melissa Leo beautiful. But no, she was a genuine looker, and had completely sublimated that part of her in order to play Ree in Winter's Bone. (The fact that the character never has anything to smile about might be partly responsible for that sublimation.)

My fascination kicked up a notch when I learned that she'd be playing the young Mystique in X-Men: First Class. Given that I already considered her something of a chameleon, just from the difference in her appearance between Winter's Bone and real life, the role of a shape shifter seemed to suit her perfectly. At about the same time last week, I saw the first pictures of her as Katniss Everdeen (the main character in The Hunger Games), a role for which she's dying her hair brown, and learned that she also plays a cheerleader in The Beaver, which I've been meaning to see. That's five roles (if you consider her real life to be a "role") in which she is completely different in each role.

Hallelujah.

It's so rare these days to find an actor -- especially a young actor -- who is capable of reinventing him or herself in every single role. Even most actors we consider to be really good don't necessarily have a huge amount of range. Just pulling out a random example, consider someone like Anthony Hopkins. Most people would say that he turns in award-worthy work in almost every film -- or at least he used to, before he was making the likes of Thor and The Rite. But even in his glory days, was Hopkins really demonstrating "range"? Or was every character he played some version of Sir Anthony Hopkins?

I realize this is sort of an unfair argument. Few successful actors are truly chameleons, because they get cast precisely for a trait they've displayed that makes them right for a certain role. And with Hopkins in particular, no, Hannibal Lecter is probably not a lot like Richard Nixon (though we Democrats might assert a similarity between them).

But there are two other names I always think of in this discussion, of actors most people like despite the fact that their range is minimal. I'm thinking of George Clooney, who's won an Oscar, and Jake Gyllenhaal, who's been nominated. Both of these guys are good basically every time out, but are they really different from movie to movie? Aren't they always some version, a very close version, of George or Jake?

I'm getting a little off track here, so let's return to the woman of the hour, Jennifer Lawrence. I'm concentrating on four films here, only two of which have actually been released, and only one of which I've seen. It's a bit premature to be discussing her range, especially praising her abilities respective to some of the indisputable titans of the industry.

But let's just say she's got my attention, and there's something about her presence that has me interested to see whatever she's going to do next. Lest you think I'm merely fascinated with her because she's pretty, please consider that I was raving about her after seeing her as an Ozarks redneck -- when I didn't even know whether she was attractive or not.

And something about those eyes -- this girl is intense. She'll stare you down. She'll make you take notice.

I might have to flip my Entertainment Weekly upside down before she starts making me feel uncomfortable.