Jennifer Lawrence's silentmoviephobia.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/11/movies/jennifer-lawrence-in-silver-linings-playbook.html

Mainly a routine NEW YORK TIMES puff piece on Jennifer Lawrence focused on her role/performance in David O. Russell's possible mainstream hit THE SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK.

But Ms. Lawrence's candor heads towards unapologetic ignorance in this passage:
“I like making movies, but that doesn’t mean I want to watch a black-and-white, freaking boring” — here she amped up the sarcasm with an unprintable word — “silent movie,” she said.

It's easy to say that her attitude is common to her generation--haven't seen too many, don't wanna see them, they're all boring.  And she lives in a time where "old movies" tend to be the Rob Schneider vehicles she buys for her home library.

And it's probably useless to convince her that old "freaking boring" silent comedies such as Harold Lloyd's SAFETY LAST, Buster Keaton's BATTLING BUTLER and Charlie Chaplin's THE KID might have greater long-term value than say, Schneider's THE ANIMAL.

Plus it's a waste of time to say that late-period silent dramas such as BEGGARS OF LIFE, PANDORA'S BOX (the first two starring the never out-of-date Louise Brooks), UNDERWORLD and THE KISS have greater visual and dramatic sophistication than Ms. Lawrence's modestly entertaining (due to performances) but shaky-Cammed and timidly adapted THE HUNGER GAMES.

So, I know to keep my freaking mouth shut should I ever encounter Jennifer Lawrence in Los Angeles.

The battle for her cinematic soul has been won.

A few comments on THE HUNGER GAMES.

Yes, I broke down and saw THE HUNGER GAMES.  And, no, I haven't seen the BATTLE ROYALE films--so I had no existing bias about comparing one battle-to-the-death vision to another.

It wasn't excellent and it wasn't terrible, either.  Just another opening film of a young-person's-book series (don't like using the word "franchise"), carried handily by Jennifer Lawrence and much of the supporting cast.

Given Gary Ross' track record as a MOR writer-then writer/director (BIG, DAVE, PLEASANTVILLE, SEABISCUIT), I wasn't expecting an action classic like the just-opened THE RAID: REDEMPTION, but THE HUNGER GAMES a la Ross is a proficient-enough film which suffers from some conceptual timidity.

Not having read the Suzanne Collins trilogy of books, I'm not completely aware of how much watering down was accomplished to make the current, reach-for-smelling-salts, edition of the MPAA grant a PG-13 rating.  But it was too easily noticeable that a key violent sequence (beginning of the Games) was cut in such a way that it looked like someone had presssed a Fast Forward button on a VCR/DVD player to avoid dwelling on messiness and particular details of murders (presuming this was the sequence subjected to additional editing by the British Board of Film Censors to achieve the UK equivalent to PG-13).

More on the editing---because a film can be edited digitally on computers doesn't mean that most of the shots have to be chopped to the length of time it would take a person to snap a frail wishbone.  Granted, Gary Ross isn't Michael Bay and the goings-on are intelligible, but it doesn't hurt to hold a shot/shots in a sequence more often for greater effect (such as in the scene involving Katniss and Peeta the night before the games begin).

In terms of the depictions of terror/anguish amongst the young people waiting to see if they will be asked to kill and/or die, I'm assuming that intensity was muted during the scripting stage to avoid uncomfortable parent/child conversations and/or screening walkouts.  And, in a film which depicts a lottery system for choosing participants not unlike the Vietman-era draft, the young people's reactions tend towards the stoic, it's-better-to-obey-than-rebel variety (with Katniss' younger sister being the major exception).  Perhaps to Lionsgate execs, it's a sensible creative decision given that THE HUNGER GAMES, on the day I saw it, played in a multiplex running a US Marines commercial exhorting potential applicants to run towards dangerous situations.

Kudos to Tom Stern (usually a cinematographer for Clint Eastwood) for not overindulging in the desaturated-color-during-shooting-or-in-postproduction process that he went to town on in Eastwood's recent J. EDGAR.

Finally, a footnote: Peter Watkins' 1971 film PUNISHMENT PARK isn't great as human drama (it's intended more as antiwar/antiauthority social commentary), but it's worth a DVD rental as a 60's Counterculture ancestor to THE HUNGER GAMES (the game the youthful participants play in PUNISHMENT PARK is a variant on Capturing the Flag).

Jennifer Lawrence explains Hollywood sexism re film casting.

Excerpted from Nicole Sperling's LOS ANGELES TIMES article on soon-to-be-superstar Jennifer Lawrence (THE HUNGER GAMES):
Despite her reputation as a promising young actress, Lawrence said her career hit a speed bump   after "Winter's Bone." She had trouble landing auditions for more feminine characters, so to   shake up her image, the actress posed in a skimpy bikini for a well-orchestrated photo shoot in   Esquire magazine.      "There's just no imagination" in Hollywood, she said. "I wanted to show people 'Winter's Bone'   for the performance, but it ended up having the opposite effect. People were like, no, she's not   feminine, she's not sexual."      Lawrence endured a good heap of criticism for what many saw as an exploitative play, but it   worked. "A lot of people said, 'Oh, now we have a great actress come along and she's showing her boobs.' But that's exactly what I had to do so I could keep working. Honestly, that photo shoot is   what helped me get 'X-Men,'" she said, referring to the comic-book blockbuster"X-Men: First   Class"in which she played the sexy mutant Mystique.

Jennifer Lawrence's simple-but-profound remark about today's Hollywood.

Unlike, say, TWILIGHT's Kristen Stewart, Jennifer Lawrence is eager to embrace being a star of a big young-adult series ("franchise") of movies based on a group of young-adult novels.

To show you how willing she is to be noncontroversial, here's Jennifer talking to SPIN's Phoebe Reilly in a column relating to Ms. Lawrence's tastes in music:
[PHOEBE REILLY]: What were you listening to the first time you smoked pot?
[JENNIFER LAWRENCE]: I so cannot answer that question.  I'm in a franchise.