This post is part of the Backstage Blogathon, hosted by Movies Silently and by Sister Celluloid, focusing on the various ways the entertainment industry portrays itself on film.
I’ve long been a fan of all things Mel Brooks, and I have a particular fondness for The Producers. Brooks’ first film, which earned him his only Academy Award, isn’t as brilliantly funny as Blazing Saddles or Young Frankenstein, nor as specific a parody as Spaceballs or Robin Hood: Men in Tights. Nevertheless, it’s definitely a classic, anchored by two perfectly matched comedians and featuring one of the most hilarious musical numbers of all time. But until I decided to write about it for the Backstage Blogathon, I had never really considered its portrayal of the entertainment industry and what it has to say about putting on a show (or even a movie). It was always such a silly premise, two producers trying to swindle money away from old women by putting on a sure-fire flop, that the wackiness distracted from the fact that the film is genuinely a satire of getting a show made, specifically in the way it approaches the various players involved in putting on the production: the writer, the director, the actor, and of course the producers.
Mockingjay, the final book in Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games trilogy, always felt unfilmable to me. It broke drastically from the formula of the previous books, with no true Hunger Games as a part of the plot, covering instead a vast, complex revolution through the eyes of a damaged, broken, hopeless teenager. It was epic in scale yet filled with intimate, intense, but often internal emotions. It required basically reintroducing the audience to the universe, now filled with entirely different situations and concerns than of which we were aware in the first two books. And to cap it all off, it was one of the most dark, tragic, violent, and depressing finales to a beloved sci-fi series in recent memory. So the fact that The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2 not only works as a cohesive narrative, but is about as good a film version of an unfilmable book as possible, is praiseworthy, even if it struggles at times under the weight of its own story as well as immense expectations.
The Love Pirate 