![]() Such subversion is worrying the whiskers off of icy dictator President Snow (Donald Sutherland), who has a mighty bone to pick with Katniss, and arranges the novel tournament as a clean way to kill her off (his approval rating drops a bit with the faux, pre-Games announcement that the fan favorite isn’t just engaged to Peeta, she’s also bearing his child). He’s left virtually speechless when District 7’s uninhibited badass Johanna Mason (Jena Malone) hollers “Fuck you!” to the Capitol, as well as when all the on-stage victors cut the scripted bullshit and join hands-a throng of supposed opponents standing united. In a very different way, Hunger Games emcee Caesar Flickerman (Stanley Tucci), another dolled-up cartoon employed to mask the Capitol’s in-plain-sight evils, gets his own reality check when presenting returning victors to the upper crust. ![]() Effie isn’t the only pivotal Capitolite to notice that there’s trouble in paradise, and that Katniss has set off a ripple effect that’s influencing all the economically diverse Districts (the further it is from the Capital, the less wealth a District has). If Gary Ross’s The Hunger Games found its urgency in the horrors of kid-on-kid fatalities, a backdrop of an idea that gave eerie weight to Collins’s first book, then Francis Lawrence’s Catching Fire finds it in the collapsing of a societal facade, and the unifying, class-trumping bonds such a phenomenon can create. And even Effie, a picture of privileged, blinder-wearing, Capitol hypocrisy, is being forced to feel-to truly face her world’s radical injustices. Katniss’s concocted act of defiance in the last film, wherein she and Peeta threatened suicide in favor of killing each other, didn’t just yield a dual triumph, but the start of an uprising. But just as Catching Fire never feels like it’s merely peddling a Chosen One narrative (or, worse, an unfounded Special Girl saga a la Stephenie Meyer’s oeuvre), Effie’s break in character seems less rooted in personal bias than the growing, common notion that something’s epically off in Panem. ![]() Of course, in this moment, Effie is reading the names of the chosen victors from District 12, who include co-protagonists, ostensible lovebirds, and last year’s winners, Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) and Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson), a tailored pair Effie regards as the crowd-pleasing achievement of her career. (Spoiler alert: the Capitol annually sends the Districts’ youth to compete in televised, fight-to-the-death bloodsport.) After the unprecedented announcement that the latest Hunger Games will force two past winners, or “victors,” from each District into a deathtrap-filled arena, Effie, the irrepressible fraud whose job includes gleefully declaring which males and females will fight, gets mildly choked up, her meticulous mascara slightly running. ![]() Of the many surprisingly poignant moments in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, the most jarring comes courtesy of Effie Trinket (Elizabeth Banks), the über-styled PR puppet who serves the corrupt Capitol, and is tasked, like many, to coddle the oppressed, dystopian Districts of Panem, distracting them from the horrors that pervade their daily lives.
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