Mockingjay and Costume Design: Real or not Real?

Previously: Capitol Couture in the Hunger Games, and Capitol Couture: Catching Fire.

In terms of costume design, first two Hunger Games movies never quite lived up to my expectations. It wasn't that the costumes were bad -- far from it -- but they seemed far too homogeneous. Given free rein to create the most outlandish designs imaginable, the Capitol fashjons were disappointingly conservative and homogeneous.

Mockingjay, Part 1 was another matter entirely. With no Hunger Games, Capitol makeovers, or District 12, the story focused on Panem's growing revolution, shown through the eyes of the propaganda war between the Capitol and District 13. Before the film even came out, YouTube propaganda clips began to illustrate the calculated nature of President Snow's public image.

Mockingjay flipped the cliché of dark and light, with the villainous President Snow surrounding himself with pure white to match his signature white roses. His brainwashed prisoners Peeta (dressed in an uncharacteristically stiff suit and a painful-looking white paper collar) and Johanna presented a united front, fitting in with Snow's clean, luxurious aesthetic. Meanwhile Katniss, daughter of coal miners, wears black body armour and fatigues.

In the earlier films, this kind of contrast was meant to highlight Katniss's salt-of-the-earth nature with Snow's obsessively controlled image, but this time it's more complex. Katniss may look more practical and less "styled" than Snow and his entourage, but that's because her District 13 stylists decided this was the best way to market her to the rebels. Her Mockingjay armor (in real life, modeled off a Japanese archery breastplate) was designed for her by Cinna, and continues the asymmetrical theme of previous outfits she wore to public appearances.

Posts from elsewhere: Captain America, Constantine, and Agents of SHIELD.

I hope to have enough time for another costume design post by the end of the year, but in the meantime, here are some other things you may enjoy!

End-of-year guest post at the Book Smugglers blog.

Each year the Book Smugglers invite various authors and bloggers to write guests posts during the holiday period, and this year I was one of them! Most people discuss and recommend books from the past year (it's a book blog, after all), but I decided to talk about a single movie: Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Obvs.

While CATWS wasn't the best film I saw in 2014 -- or even my "favorite," technically speaking -- it's certainly the one I wrote about the most. I love this movie and its fandom, and this post explains why (along with a bunch of fanfic and art recommendations).

Why NBC's Constantine failed to live up to its comic book origins

I haven't decided yet whether to continue writing about Constantine here. It doesn't feel particularly constructive to keep writing negative reviews of a mediocre show, so I may just leave it until the season finale. Constantine has improved a little over the past couple of episodes, but not enough that I actually care about it being renewed or not. Hellblazer is one of my favourite comics, and this show is just... disappointing.

"Previously on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D." podcast

I co-host a weekly Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. podcast over at Film Divider! We're now up to season 2, episode 8. Catch up here!

A Hero at the End of the World, by Erin Claiborne

Reminder that this book is awesome and you ought to be reading it! Find out more here.

The three main problems with NBC's 'Constantine.'

Previously: Constantine, "Non Est Asylum" and "The Darkness Beneath."

After six episodes, Constantine has graduated past "unwatchably bad" and settled into a network TV formula. It's better than it was at the start, but it's definitely not good.

Aside from obvious issues like clunky dialogue, Constantine has three serious ongoing problems:

1. It's virtually indistinguishable from other genre shows of the same type, ie Supernatural.
2. Both of the supporting characters, Chas and Zed, are completely pointless.
3. It's often racist.

There's no better example of problem #1 than last week's episode, "Rage of Caliban." The plot was an unimaginative spin on "young child possessed by demons" horror movie tropes, practically begging for some kind of genre-savvy humor. It even takes place on Halloween, and the guest characters are a suburban family so bland they'd probably be rejected from a cereal commercial for being too generic.

Out of six episodes, only two have really felt individual to this show: "The Devil's Vinyl" (a reasonably interesting riff on the urban legend of a blues musician selling his soul to the devil) and "A Feast of Friends", which was adapted from Hellblazer #1 and had a satisfyingly unpleasant ending.

Every other episode is either painfully predictable, or reliant on familiar genre cliches. No wonder Constantine's ratings are dropping: It's just retreading the same ground that Supernatural has been covering for the past decade, along with a handful others like Grimm, Sleepy Hollow, and Teen Wolf. Constantine has failed to carve out a niche of its own.