The inevitable Hunger Games thread

TH otm. I hate this movie and I haven't even seen it.

this conversation reminds me of how my parents rave over a movie or tv programme's attention to costume detail and barely care about the plot or characters while i'm the other way around

you are all probably right that the costumery is inaccurate but it's not something that matters to me, really

there's no "accuracy" here, it's sci-fi, it just seems dumb, much like the plot and the characters

it's a shame because the PREMISE and the general outline of the setting is just killer (no pun intended), sort of a mashup of lord of the flies, the lottery, the most dangerous game, battle royale and brave new world - right in my wheelhouse

Catching Fire trailer. Phillip Seymour Hoffman's in this?!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=jyPnQw_Lqds

I didn't know where else to put this but LOLOLOL

http://d3j5vwomefv46c.cloudfront.net/photos/large/767569614.gif?1367957167

(JLaw photobombing Sarah Jessica Parker at Met Ball - Marillon Cotillard and Lena Dunham loling in background)

Maybe it's just me, but for me, this movie doesn't really BEGIN until Lenny Kravitz walks on screen.

Also, Alicia Keys? You totally just read Hunger Games before you wrote that song, don't even front like you didn't.

btw tho this is my 2nd viewing

hunger games is like the cure, you know. Like "subsersive" stuff for normals.

Uniforms in the arena are like 2004 u.s. badminton team uniforms.

girl power

I saw this about two months ago at home with my wife on DVD. It was ok. The story was tethered to the book, so it had more exposition than the movie actually needed and (I don't doubt) far less than the book contained. The costumes, sets and effects looked good enough that you knew what they were aiming at. The acting was nothing special, but the lead who played katniss carried her part well enough on the whole and she was the only person who really mattered. Of course the veteran actors were much better in their small roles.

It struck me as a decently workmanlike adaptation of a very long book written for a YA audience. I'm sure that audience lapped it up. Good for them. Just ok for me.

Just finished books two and three in short succession. It might be just exhaustion from doing too much at once, but boy did these fall off. Book one had lots of problems but it was relatively tight, and the central questions/conflicts for the main character locked in with the themes of the book and basically it made sense.

Books two and three, besides being just a brutal exercise in thinking up every sadistic thing you could do to the cast (and blaming it on the villains) are repetitious, flabby and unfocused - episodic rambles punctuated by unearned deaths, indistinguishable convalescence scenes, and a thousand sleepless nights. On one level I get some of this: our protagonist is a subaltern trauma victim many times over and I'm glad that's not prettified out of the picture; as well, I think she (mostly) manages to make the violence totally unglamorous and horrifying, and keep up the attack on the world that finds it entertaining (in the first book) and a necessary evil (in the last). Even the endlessly fretted-over romance story has all kinds of good ideas going in - I imagine the line between liking someone and performing that affection resonates like crazy for the teen audience. But things are just so unimaginative. She has more or less 1-2 ideas per character, all based on how they relate to Katniss and nothing more, and they almost never surprise you. It's all about plot, then, but the plot is stuck on replay for so much of the series. There are huge chunks of the second book I can't remember and I read the entire thing yesterday.

Also suffers intensely from the Harry Potter problem where our protagonist grows nowhere and learns nothing, or maybe learns the same lesson repeatedly to no avail. This is a real problem for a series whose climax hinges on a big, ambiguous moral choice (the outcome of which being btw covered up by both characters and author); the reasoning behind it is fuzzy and can as easily be chalked up to the same kind of emotionally-driven impulse with which she starts the series. It's telling that the other characters can interpret it as insanity, and that so many times the narration has to insist how much has changed since page one of book one, because you might otherwise not realize it. Versus something like the end of Nausicaa (with a similar choice made), it's all very hollow. And I agree about how undeveloped the world feels - very detailed in certain ways and bafflingly vague in others.

It's annoying, because the outline/major themes really SHOULD be in a smash kids' book series. Like, this is basically Society of the Spectacle crossed with The Culture Industry, set in the Tripod trilogy by John Christopher, and specifically trying to make a point about reality TV and pro sports and what they might say about us. Okay, sure. But they could be better books along the way.

I did like a few things - the political intrigues, some of the monsters/etc., and everything we learn about the past winners (which is coincidentally some of the most useful world-building, maybe because it's Katniss finding things out rather than her laying them out for us, and there remain unanswered questions).

The ending is bugging me more and more even as I'm typing this. Ugh!

Also something very ''Star Wars prequels'' about a lot of the characters from later on...sketchily introduced and they show up constantly in conferences/battles but all they do is talk and die. If they have physical traits or individual personalities or speech patterns or ways of moving around a room, the book doesn't let it show. They just talk and die, talk and die, in shot-reverse-shot.

I saw this Catching Fire film and I can safely say beyond any shadow of a doubt that it was the worst most incredibly dull film I have ever seen.

you are nuts.

like ok if you didn't like it but if you think this is the 'worst most dull thing' ever I got a stack of DVDs for you.

Well, I may have been going for dramatic effect...

Walter Chaw/my thoughts exactly:

It'll make the money it will make, earn no new converts to the flock, and be the type of movie you hope no one ever brings up in polite company because you don't want to look like an asshole.

I loved it. But I also loved the first film.

if it was worse than the first one "worst most incredibly dull film" seems entirely possible bring on yr stack of dvds bro

The first one felt like it was five hours long. Not bad so much as interminable.

Some movies should be labeled clearly "This movie is for someone else, but not for YOU!" I'm pretty sure that those who found the movie insufferable are just not in the intended audience demographic. I don't plan to see it any time soon for just this reason.

See also: the Twilight film series.

I already saw The Running Man and Rollerball and Battle Royale, I think I'll sit this whole thing out out.

So weird how it's always art geared towards women, children, etc. that people (I won't say that I know you well enough to say that people doing this are always men, like the poster above me) feel they should announce that they're not partaking in. I'm not saying it's a strict rule, there's definitely stuff geared towards straight white men that people do this to as well, but it's mostly stuff like Hunger Games, Twilight, Taylor Swift, pop music in general, etc. that dudes are like, I'M GONNA SIT THIS ONE OUT AND LET THE WHOLE WORLD KNOW.

http://images.chron.com/blogs/askacat/hatcat.JPG

Murgatroid OTM

This was pretty good

First one was pretty entertaining too.

Seriously, I'll take the vaguely left-leaning dystopian scifi action over boarding school wizards any day

I honestly don't get why people are saying how Catching Fire is a MASSIVE improvement over the first movie. I mean, it IS an improvement, but the improvements are subtle (more moments of levity, the cast seems generally more into it this time, etc.) so the improvements don't make it that much better.

Artforum:

"What are The Hunger Games books, and now movies, really about? Exactly what it looks like: war. ...

Two things are certain in America: War and sequels."

http://www.artforum.com/film/id=44211

i went with mr veg to see this today -- haven't read the books...i was kinda bored through most of this. dug PSH but mostly just because he was just being PSH without a mohawk ponytail or a tophat or stupid circus clothes

well of course

http://www.cinemablend.com/new/Course-Hunger-Games-Has-Digitally-Recreate-Philip-Seymour-Hoffman-Mockingjay-41552.html

It's a good thing we have important satirical works like The Hunger Games to remind us of the horrors of a possible future where human life and death become irrelevant to the needs of narrative in a palliatory mass-media spectacle.

that's not what hunger games is about at all!

i love the voice of cinema blend

it's in there! xpost

so I got into a semi-argument the other night about this. I haven't read the books because I am not a 13yo girl; watched the first movie at the urging of my wife and a friend of ours. Friend was over on the weekend and we got to talking about it - basically I find the whole fascist police state conceit reactionary and that ruined everything else about it for me (the Minotaur myth parallels, the Jon Armstrong-style pop/fashion oppression parodic bits etc.) My problem with it is that if you're going to go the sci-fi dystopian route than your dystopia is only as effective as far as it mirrors actual current conditions/threats/fears. But the whole fascist police state thing is out-of-date - fascist police states aren't a threat in America, and the only people who think so are Tea Party reactionary idiots who think Obamacare's gonna take away their guns and give them to illegal immigrants etc. So why contruct a dystopia where an authoritarian state is the boogeyman? The current threats to our society are more explicitly capitalist in nature. Oligarchy, destruction of the ecosystem, corporate surveillance - the state is primarily a tangential player/enabler in these threats, it's not the driving force at all. So placing the state at the center of it and then building this silly pop culture scaffolding around it to support it doesn't really speak to any kind of fear I have, if anything it seems like misdirection by a right wing crank, which makes me suspicious of the whole enterprise.

I get that this doesn't even register w most people, who just want to see girl kick ass ooh look silly meta-media commentary and oh which guy will she end up with but it irritates me to have this reactionary crap out there in the broader culture. It seems like a misuse of the dystopian trope.

and then there's the Battle Royale thing, a book/movie that I preferred and seemed to be more relevant and w a more interesting angle

But... the angle of Battle Royale was also the reinforcement of the power of a fascist police state so I'm not sure how it's more relevant? (Better executed absolutely, but the Hunger Games story does twist in upon itself in some very interesting ways by the end of the third book.)

Battle Royale was way more entertaining - but as I remember the backstory is never really explained very well. Hunger Games is supposed to be a spectacle at least, but Battle Royale was done in secret, wasn't it? The kids seemed to have no idea about it.

found the evil government painfully relevant tbh in the first 2 movies. it's much more about the way power reinforces itself and how it operates from the individual outwards than it is about critiquing a particular formation of government.

the parallels to Battle Royale aren't that close either. the gov in BR is much more frightened of/repulsed by its teenage victims. HG's gov's relationship with youth is more celebratory, and it sacrifices them to get at their families, not because it fears youth itself.

Battle Royale also takes place on the Korean peninsula iirc

xp

BR - the first one, anyway - at its heart is a neat inversion of the sentiment behind Lord of the Flies

HG seems more about how a hypermediated environment eats up youth to serve adult ends

The Battle Royale precedent is really not that bothersome to me tbh - I will say that given China and North Korea and the uniquely weird conservative bent of Japan's gov't and their history as an actual fascist state, the Asian fascist police state dystopia seems more resonant/relevant.

But Hunger Games takes place in America. and it's an America that is by and large completely unrecognizable to me, apart from the ludicrous gameshow window dressing.

xp

i don't think the gameshow is window dressing, seeing as it gives the series its title and the plot revolves around it - hence also the Roman names - the whole thing is about bread and circuses

An unpopular opinion, I know, but I really hate Battle Royale. If it's a satire, what exactly is being satirized? If the adults are the villains, why introduce some evil kids if not solely for the purpose of a big Lethal Weapon-style showdown? That Hunger Games essentially looks like a watered down copy of something I already disliked is the main reason why I've stayed away from that whole thing.

kids in battle royale aren't aware they've been chosen until they're there (w/ a few exceptions). there is awareness in the media, you have the media swarming around a 'winner' at the beginning but it's not a tv show like the hunger games iirc. the program there is some sort of deliberate anti-youth thing, obv echoes of columbine w/ it but the paranoia it's tapping seems more similar to the early 90s fear of 'superpredators'. battle royale 2 probably closer thematically to hunger games w/ it's war on terror metaphor. hunger games pretty openly and somewhat on the nose response to iraq war, poor youth being sent to their deaths in a spectacle for the benefit of the rich. the fascist state is anti-bush crit though my understanding is the politics of the books are more nuanced and cynical than that (my understanding is the rebels are revealed to be fairly worthless as well, meet the new boss same as the old boss).