Great expectations

For fans of The Hunger Games, 2012 can’t come soon enough. After it was announced in March this year that Winter’s Bone actress Jennifer Lawrence had been cast as heroine Katniss Everdeen, information about the project — a movie adaptation of Suzanne Collins’ best-selling novel set in post-apocalyptic America — began to trickle. From more casting news and production stills to last month’s Vanity Fair photograph, the build-up to The Hunger Games, which has a March 23, 2012 release date, has been a slow and steady service of revelations. There is no doubt that a lot of people hope that this will become yet another book-to-film phenomenon.

While the new year looks set to be filled with big-budget blockbusters — The Dark Knight Rises, The Amazing Spider-Man, The Avengers and The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey among them — I’ve trained my eye on the quieter offerings at January’s Sundance Film Festival. There’s The First Time, a coming-of-age drama with a stellar young cast: Brittany Robertson (The CW’s The Secret Circle), Craig Roberts (Submarine), James Frecheville (Animal Kingdom), Victoria Justice (Nickelodeon’s Victorious) and Dylan O’Brien (MTV’s Teen Wolf). Then there’s Save The Date, starring Lizzy Caplan and Alison Brie as two very different sisters — one is married while the other attempts to recover from a recent breakup.

Down with the Capitol: The eagerly anticipated The Hunger Games stars Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss Everdeen and Liam Hemsworth as Gale Hawthorne

Meanwhile, the midnight movies at the Park City event, part of a free-wheeling category called NEXT, promise to be a bit more leftfield. 90210’s AnnaLynne McCord topbills the inevitably campy Excision, about a “disturbed and delusional high school student with aspirations of a career in medicine.” Shut Up and Play the Hits, directed by Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace, follows the band LCD Soundsystem and frontman James Murphy as they play their final gig at Madison Square Garden. And though the idea seems two years too late, I Am Not a Hipster, featuring actors so underground no one knows them, should still be interesting. “Set in the indie music and art scene, this is a character-driven story exploring themes of love, loss and what it means to be creative in the face of tragedy,” according to the synopsis. Okay.

Returning Shows, Brand-New Series

As far as the small screen is concerned, I’m looking forward to both returning shows and brand-new series. MTV had quite a 2011 with its original scripted programs and I can’t wait for the sophomore seasons of Awkward, to check up on the Jenna-Matty-Jake love triangle, and Teen Wolf, which has bulked up its Beacon Hills population with more lupine characters.    

I also plan to tune in to Apartment 23, an ABC sitcom that dives into the ups and downs of living in the Big Apple. Lots of shows have tried to fill the void that Friends left nearly a decade ago, but this iteration has Breaking Bad’s Krysten Ritter teaming up with Dawson’s Creek’s James Van Der Beek. For slightly more serious fare, there’s NBC’s Awake, about a police detective who has a life-changing car accident. With its intriguing concept, the sci-fi show should appeal to those who loved Inception. Hopefully, producers would’ve learned to sidestep the baffling twists that have bogged down similar shows such as Lost, The Event and FlashForward.  

Favorite fresh faces: Victoria Justice and Dylan O’Brien appear in The First Time, which is set to premiere at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival.

Music-Blog Hot Topics

Friendly Fires’ “Pala” is definitely the sound of my 2011, but aside from that perfect album, I too discovered other noteworthy, slightly less mainstream acts this year, such as organic electronic Chilean-American artist Nicolas Jaar, New Zealand electro-jazz vocalist Kimbra and Belgian-Australian singer Gotye. Thanks to the Internet, I stumbled upon Lana Del Rey, a New York native turned music-blog hot topic. As I wait for her debut album “Born To Die” to be released at the end of January 2012, I’ll tide myself over with remixes of Blue Jeans, Born To Die and Video Games, the luminous breakout single that also inspired designer Prabal Gurung’s 2012 spring collection. (British transmorpher Jamie Woon’s pitch-shifting version is my favorite.)

The month of March will be made more memorable by SXSW Music, one of the largest music festivals in the United States. For four glorious days, more than 2,000 performers will play in more than 90 venues around downtown Austin, Texas. Next year’s lineup has already revealed and it includes several acts I wouldn’t mind seeing: Beach Fossils, Yuksek, Delta Spirit, Lissy Trullie and Filipino band Taken By Cars.

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