The inevitable Hunger Games thread

haha someone mentioned these to me at party twice last week

i like the idea it's the same guy

it's three a.m. you have your coat on. you are about to leave. bleary-eyed, gin-breathed, he plucks your sleeve. mockingbird, man, he says. mockingbird. do you get it? mocking ... bird.

i really loved this film

haven't read the books, hadn't really known much except the basic premise.

it does feel like a v relevant phenomenon; despite the "fantasia dystopia" setting the issues it tackles/parallels were...rather close to the bone. i didn't realise it would be so obviously red state vs blue state (or...a more general working class vs elites?). all the villains poncing around like lady gaga while the heroes are all-hunting all-toiling mining folk.

So basically Katniss kisses and hugs him a lot for the cameras in a play-acted way. If anything, I like mush, but this was weird and insincere.

this was one of the things i liked most, it's a direct parallel of how "romances", even fake ones, increase the popularity of contestants on reality tv shows. thought it was an interesting reflection of how, even though the narrative is ostensibly about katniss not playing their game and "showing them up" or whatever, she still had to play a different sort of game in order to get to that position. the penultimate scene of the cheesy victors' interview felt like a slightly hollow victory.

i found the scene where the little girl dies incredibly affecting - not, actually, because of katniss laying flowers on her, but the sudden unexpected moment where she looks up and salutes the cameras, which cut to that being screened in the girl's district.

wondering whether i should read the books atm.

the books are a fun read. now thinking about it i liked the first book best.

SPOILERS
SPOILERS
SPOILERS
SPOILERS

what's interesting about the books is that in the end it is less red vs blue, and more like, everyone sucks, just sometimes sometime ppl appear to suck a little less. i found the end of the final book pretty bleak tbh.

should i read the first book? i love margaret atwood + battle royale, cf first post in thread.

i read the books a couple of weeks ago and they are no margaret atwood + battle royale, but they are entertaining and suitably dystopian and easy to breeze through, movie-like. but the writing itself isn't literature or anything, and i think whoever edited the books was drunk half the time. i dl-ed them and actually checked the first book against the sample pages on amazon because i thought i was reading something that had been translated back to english from another language. the characters are pretty one-note, but their interactions are usually interesting. the plot is great though: stuff happens! a lot of stuff!

^^ otm

reading these has reminded me how much i really enjoy YA lit, though, need to join the local library and get back into it.

it is less red vs blue, and more like, everyone sucks, just sometimes some ppl appear to suck a little less.

fuck, Hunger Games otm

seeing it on Saturday morning. Mr Veg was even curious enough to come with. Hope it's good!

I just started the first book. It's enjoyable!

the outrage over the Prue casting really does show that people are racist idiots though

is that rue in the film? what's the outrage?

thought that girl gave an astoundingly effective performance considering how small a part it was - for all the attention that the ~love triangle~ gets, i thought the relationship between katniss and rue was a strikingly real contrast to the are-they-faking-it-or-does-she-just-not-reciprocate awkwardness of the relationship between katniss and peeta.

(i can't get over the stupid names :( i mean katniss is kind of acceptable but PEETA? ffs)

sorry yeah, Rue (obv the names are not quite sticking yet)

re: controversy - http://www.racialicious.com/2011/11/15/yes-there-are-black-people-in-your-hunger-games-the-strange-case-of-rue-cinna/

This is nerdy but interesting.

ugh @ the rue controversy. though to be fair, some of those tweets are gross but things like "i didn't picture her like this but rue is amazing" aren't that bad, i'm not surprised at people not reading YA literature closely and so missing pertinent details.

i wonder if it's a case of rue's delicacy being emphasised more than her race in the text, and people defaulting to a stereotype of "delicacy" as...blonde and white and fragile.

i presume collins ensured that the privileged capitol-dwellers were multi-ethnic on purpose, but the segregation of the districts struck me (and in the book, rue's district, which seemed to be primarily black in the film, is agriculture-focused...echoes of plantations? the amazing thing about this is how it contains echoes of so many disparate things that have actually happened or are still happening - it really does cover the entire range of ways in which humans can be appalling to each other)

<3 that yglesias article!

yet more parallels with Real Life that i hadn't thought of.

i wonder if it's a case of rue's delicacy being emphasised more than her race in the text, and people defaulting to a stereotype of "delicacy" as...blonde and white and fragile.

def think that there is an element of this going on.

http://entertainment.salon.com/2012/03/22/the_sexual_politics_of_the_hunger_games/singleton/

Yeah the book states a few times that Rue and people in her district have "dark/er skin and dark hair," but I guess people read how they read...
xp
I lolled at the dying of skin and multi-coloured wigs of people in the Capitol partly because it made me think of Ilx thread title "I don't care if you're black white orange or purple...". Something to that I'm sure, though I could be reading in too much...

can't figure out who is in more of a nerdout frenzy to see this movie tonight, my son or my wife... prolly the latter

I thought the movie was pretty great -- can't imagine anyone who's a fan of the book being disappointed.

Also, I wrote a bit about the parallels between The Hunger Games and ancient Rome (deliberately not hyperlinked b/c this was for work):
www.britannica.com/blogs/2012/03/bread-circuses-the-hunger-games-ancient-rome/

One thing that's gnawed at me about the Hunger Games world, though: How big are each of the districts? I know District 12 is supposed to be one of the smaller ones, but in both the books and the movie, it feels more like a single town than an entire state/province. Did whatever calamity that befell civilization long ago wipe out most of the continent's population?

I think so?

also I did not know that about the word "panem"! thanks based spreadsheet

I haven't read the books but i found this to be a real slog. Didn't know the running time going in but i did have a sneaking suspicion that it would be long cos these things generally are. 2 hours and 22 minutes though? Such a shoddily conceived future too.

apparently the future is a duran duran video

what in god's name is this whole phenomenon? it seems i can't get away from it--on the bus, on the train, in a bookstore, in the rain...

teenage nation. vile.

STAY HUNGRY

i liked this; jennifer lawrence is pretty amazing in it, she definitely elevates the movie.

I thought Prue was great, I wish they'd given her more time early in the movie to establish why she was ranked high and attached her self to Jennifer Lawrence, but tbh I did envision her as the albino crazy girl from Harry Potter. Lenny Kravitz was fantastic, dude just has so much charisma.

Movie felt like it took forever, over-explained a bunch at the beginning and kind of botched any of the mental battles Jennifer Lawrence's character goes through in the book.

Think it kind of fails as a dystopia - the Capitol wackiness is overdone (book and film), and generally I think techno-dystopias need to be fraying at the edges. Like, Blade Runner has amazing future-tech (aside from tiny CRT screens everywhere) but it's dirty and off enough that you know this isn't a future promised land.

also, the shakey cam was out of control in this

loved the movie, feel like it "fixed" all the things i disliked about the book. we're not trapped in katniss's first-person present-tense narration so we get all this new material, like the game-maker's headquarters, president snow's strategizing, the riot in rue's district, etc. book-katniss has to kind of guess what's going on or hear about it second-hand in future books, and it always felt flat and less than lifelike to me. seeing it all as it was happening was awesome and gave a much fuller sense of the actual world and stakes.

i'm cool that we lost most of katniss's mental battles in the movie version because i found book-katniss to be pretty unlikable, tbh. maybe it's a cop-out to make her more noble/less flawed here, but i actually gave a shit about her + her family in the movie while i was always annoyed by her in the book. part of that was jennifer lawrence being really compelling in the role, but it helped that they pared down the "katniss acts fakey cheerful/schmoopy with peeta for the cameras" to the bare minimum. when she did "act" she seemed genuinely conflicted and confused about her own true emotions, and it played off nicely imo.

rue's death scene was devastating. i kept waiting for it to be over so i could get a handle on my emotions, but then they cut to the district saluting, and then rioting, and then they cut back to katniss full-on sobbing in the forest...aghhhhhh

but then they cut to the district saluting

this bit made me genuinely tear up. it might be katniss' story but rue is really the heart of the film.

would've liked, perhaps, a bit of focus on the tv audience reactions - it's taken as a given that a "romance" will boost ratings but i'd have liked to actually see that happen - maybe to see the gamemakers talk about how ratings were going up or down, or maybe to see the action as it was broadcast on tv.

also, the shakey cam was out of control in this

it made someone i went with feel seasick - i thought it was a little overdone but also very effective in ratcheting up the tension - when she hallucinates and when her hearing goes you really feel how vulnerable she is.

I presume part of the reason it was in there was to avoid showing too much violence but it was still annoying. The one moment i enjoyed in this was "Peeta" doing his camouflage thing, which looked hilarious. He was such a drip

feel like these books could conceivably make good movies, sadly

many xps John, that was a good article! (also "thank you based spreadsheet" made me LOL)

Thanks!

Yeah, I liked all those backstage scenes -- cool to see the HG command center, and the convos between Snow and Seneca were nicely effective (esp. in terms of foreshadowing future events). I do, however, think that the absence of an interior monologue makes the Katniss-Peeta relationship harder to read. In the book, it seems pretty clear that her affections toward him in the arena are all for show (or at least that's what she tells herself); I wasn't sure the film made that clear.

actually i think that was one of the better aspects, keeping it fairly ambiguous

Yeah, maybe.

I couldn't remember whether the "deprived future = clothes revert to the Great Depression" was actually that explicit in the book.

I thought the shaky cam was a cheap but effective way of raising tension and uncertainty, I was terrified in places despite the fact that it was a very faithful adapation, no plot surprises really.

Also very good at the Reaping, the sense of "Oh shit this is going to happen and we can't do anything about it, oh shit this is actually happening to me" - the handling of shock really reminded me of something - I actually want to say Saving Private Ryan?

Also very good with the hallucination effects! Though I was amused that the hallucinatory effects may include exposition.

also, the shakey cam was out of control in this

otm! it's a difficult balance tho. i wanted some actual wide, steady shots as opposed to the ridiculous all-claustrophobic-closeups-all-the-time shakey cam. but that could either result in a beautifully shot film that presents its world definitively, or it could be corny as fuck. (speaking of which, they should've upped the roy-battiness of cato's monologue at the end by a million)

as someone who's never read the books, i'm sure i'd have more problems with it if i'd read the books. it seemed like they skimmed over a lot of decent character stuff in order to hit all the right points. went by very fast; wasn't confusing but it didn't really get very deep into anything. and there were obviously a lot of actual statements for the film to make, but it didn't really try to be plain about any of them. like most of the HP films, it was just content to transfer the scenes to screen in a manageable way, rather than trying to transport themes in a way that would let them shine cinematically. bleh. also, really surprised that they hardly showed the broadcast itself. how can you avoid showing the audience how the narrative is being edited and presented?

on the plus side, tucci is the best

also, why did they have to make katniss white, GOD

the tooch! didn't even know he was in it.

he's the future-seacrest. highlight of the film imo.