The inevitable Hunger Games thread

oh, wait i flipped on my alternate universe browser.

One thing that the film I think drops is the fact that the district that wins gets like double its food rations for the next year, so for the subsidence districts, that's nearly life-or-death for a lot of them. Peeta's talk about how if no-one watched, that would really fuck'em up is veering close to "Workers Control the Means of Production!" - which is obviously one of the things I love about the film, that since the book has been written, the OWS has brought particular topicality to it.

One thing I'm curious about is what else the people at home watch - like is the rest of the programming Panem's Next Top Garishly Coloured Model, or Food Tips for Bark and Small Rodents? Or is that the only thing actually broadcast all year?

I was pretty certain (but maybe wrong) that they dealt with the sponsorships? You have Woody Harrelson in the train car talking about how you have to get sponsors to get you stuff like fire and cover, and you have to be likable to get them (the scene where he advises Katniss to keep the knife, as Peeta is much better at glad-handing than her), and later you have that Woody looking worried / Woody slapping backs and shaking hands / package for Peeta montage.

Also agreed that I wish that one other team wasn't composed entirely of dicks and bullies.

Team 11 = Rue and Thrash (the big guy who offs the knife-thrower) did alright, and you could imagine that some of the dudes who last ~10 secs were nice if you met them in a social setting.

But yeah, I think Katniss gets her chance in the early-game scene where she meets Foxface in the forest and they just run in separate directions - her plan is much more "Survive with my appalachian skills" than "kill everyone".

Or she gets her high moral ground from her high district number :)

Just because it was depicted subtly doesn't mean anyone would miss the gist of viscous blood spraying across the screen or bloody weapons being bashed about.

This was the weird thing - I think the scene where Rue dies is pretty much the only bloody weapon!

nah there's bloody weapons elsewhere. Katniss isn't wielding them though

Ah though, that might just be the UK

from that article: Could that grim and gritty Baby-sitters Club revamp be far behind?

oh my god i would be the happiest person if they did this. speaking of, whatever happened to the diablo cody-helmed Sweet Valley High movie? or did she give up on it and write Young Adult instead?

they covered the sponsorships - i guess i'd have just enjoyed seeing a rich capitol sponsor being ~moved~ by the showmance and deciding to send them medicine because of it - could've been a pretty effective scene.

they covered why some of the kids were "baddies" too, ie the ones from the richer districts are trained for it from an early age (hence "careers") and traditionally ally with each other at the start. obviously it suits suzanne collins' purpose that katniss is only ever put in a position of having to fight the careers, rather than eg if she and rue had succeeded in eliminating them first and were left as the last two themselves.

i was reading ahead and some of the winning tributes who crop up later in the series have pretty interesting strategies - eg there's one who spends her time in training weeping and acting weak and deliberately gets a low score so no one thinks she's a threat (which is why katniss was targeted more than foxface in this film) - then hides for most of the games then reveals herself to be fairly good at killing right at the end.

i love the fact that you're really into this lex

All I know is that the Hunger Games, the TV show, must be the most boring required viewing ever. Like when Katniss is asleep for two days? Or Team Asshole is just camping by the river or whatever? Not riveting.

So my wife told me that when things like the killer dogs and whatnot happen in the book, you don't know they're the TV show's doing, since it's all Katniss POV.

Hey, look, it's "The Running Man," condensed to 11 minutes!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZOeIsbj1fQ&feature=related

i'm sure if katniss and rue were the last two katniss would kill herself though. it never really deals with the moment allies have to turn into enemies -- that would've been real interesting from the baddie crowd. (and again, if cato and the rest of them were turned into roy batty figures instead of just that disposable "this is all i know how to do!!" line, they would've gotten some humanity to them. maybe the book humanizes them more.)

one thing i liked is that katniss isn't some magical hero-who-sees-the-light figure (in this book at least). i'm always prepared for the young hero to make silly "CAN'T YOU SEE WHAT THEY'RE DOING TO US!?!?" monologues and then destroying the system, but nope. no matter how heroic and goodhearted she is, she's still just another kid playing their game.

All I know is that the Hunger Games, the TV show, must be the most boring required viewing ever. Like when Katniss is asleep for two days? Or Team Asshole is just camping by the river or whatever? Not riveting.

lol josh you can easily sub in big brother w/r/t this complaint and yet that era happened to us!

(and again, if cato and the rest of them were turned into roy batty figures instead of just that disposable "this is all i know how to do!!" line, they would've gotten some humanity to them. maybe the book humanizes them more.)

i understand the sequels feature former "career" tributes in more depth, so maybe that happens then

lol josh you can easily sub in big brother w/r/t this complaint and yet that era happened to us!

But Big Brother is not required viewing! If our dystopian future included mandatory Big Brother viewing, the entire population would either be up in arms after a season or two or suicidal.

One thing I'm curious about is what else the people at home watch - like is the rest of the programming Panem's Next Top Garishly Coloured Model, or Food Tips for Bark and Small Rodents? Or is that the only thing actually broadcast all year?

(MILD SPOILER)
There's a whole thing in Mockingjay about the propaganda aired regarding District 13.

BTW, I'm kind of fascinated that Jennifer Lawrence has become this lightning rod for body politics. Like, people calling her too "big boned" or whatever for this role. And then I just read (and maybe this is old news) that the reason she did that skeezy Esquire spread was to prove to apparently many doubters that she could be sexual post-"Winter's Bone," which is what got her the "X-Men" role, which surely helped her land this tentpole opportunity. Just weird all around, and kind of cruel, this oddly Zeitgeisty debate. Lawrence does "Winter's Bone" and people say she can't be hot. Then she does "Hunger Games," and people call her fat. I'm worried she's either going to be a tough as nails adult or go off the deep end.

Does the book specify Katniss as model-thin?

"Almost all of the boys and at least half of the girls are bigger than I am, even though many of the tributes have never been fed properly. ... I may be smaller naturally, but overall my family's resourcefulness has given me an edge in that area. I stand straight, and while I'm thin, I"m strong. The meat and plants from the woods combined with the exertion it took to get them have given me a healthier body than most of those I see around me."

Xp I feel there was some mention of fat people=rich, thin people=poor, but Katniss is also a hunter! She/her family get by fairly well between that and the many extra times her name is in the draw for grain, so her (very tiny, model thin with boobs) size is pretty reasonable. Of course I'm a fat old lady so what do I know. She runs pretty well for Hollywood Obese :*(

Too bad I can't see what gets posted when I'm typing in Zing! Well quoted jaymc.

holy shit that's some awkward prose

MILD BUT VAGUE SPOILER
Book readers - what will they do with Rue's district's riot now that they pulled it out of her tour? I hope they won't skip that altogether - I wanted to see all the districts.

basically any discussion about a woman's body is going to be cruel iirc

and the "fat people rich thin people poor" idea is so antiquated i can't defend any story taking place in the present or future using it.

Okay, wtf is actually "awkward" about that prose?

So basically Katniss in the book is a typical late bloomer girl, sort of skinny and awkward? Regardless, it's not like she looks like some hulk in the movie. Maybe they should have given her mountain teeth again?

Never read the book, but there's a literal-mindedness of that paragraph that does scan weird. "My family's resourcefulness has given me an edge in that area" just doesn't sound like anything anyone would ever say or think. It's like what someone pointed out way upthread with some character exclaiming "OMG, killer mutant bees genetically engineered by the government!" Like, everyone would know what they are so they don't need to be described except for the sake of the reader. Same with that "I am thin but stand straight, for I have foraged and eaten healthily" stuff.

Just an observation, why someone would find it awkward.

the whole book is like that. just plain, lifeless, over-explanatory prose. collins seems like the type of writer who would have to be convinced not to write exact mathematical measurements of things in lieu of actually describing them.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/01/hunger-games-movie_n_1314053.html

you'll have to overlook the "high schooler writing for huffpo" thing, but this is a pretty interesting article. i was joking before about "making katniss white" but i had no idea that there's been a lot of debate over her race within the fandom. lawrence was great, but it would've been good to see a POC in that role.

what sucks isn't that they cast jennifer lawrence, who is absolutely fantastic, but that they limited the casting call to white actresses. wtf.

iirc i read somewhere that JL is from appalachia (ie where district 12 is supposed to be)? you might see that as positive representation, or maybe a reason she could capture the character so well.

(i wasn't familiar with JL prior to the film, didn't know what she "really" looked at, and would not necessarily have guessed she was 100% caucasian.)

some coverage from when the debate happened:

http://www.racebending.com/v4/featured/media-takes-note-of-the-hunger-games-casting/

the scene if the opening f the hunger games was legit jarring and then the Steve reich music came in and I was like c'mon are u tryina hit all my emotional buttons

i had no idea it was steve reich! that was the best bit of the film, gave me high hopes about the rest of the Games scenes, but alas.

xp to lex: i'm not sure it's relevant to mention the actual geography in relation to today's demographics. i don't know what year the book takes place in but it sounds like centuries have passed since north america was a thing. following current trends you'd expect there to be much much fewer white people throughout the entire country regardless of where different racial demos are concentrated (though you'd expect that to change too).

can't believe I'm writing this, but... denby is OTM. surely the end is nigh.

But the rest of “The Hunger Games” is pretty much a disaster—disjointed, muffled, and even, at times, boring. Collins herself labored on the script, along with Gary Ross and Billy Ray, and Ross (“Pleasantville,” “Seabiscuit”) directed. Working with the cinematographer Tom Stern, Ross shoots in a style that I have come to despise. A handheld camera whips nervously from one angle to another; the fragments are then jammed together without any regard for space. You feel like you’ve been tossed into a washing machine (don’t sit in the front rows without Dramamine). Even when two people are just talking calmly, Ross jerks the camera around. Why? As the sense of danger increases, he has nothing to build toward. Visually, he’s already gone over the top. And the action itself is a thrashing, incoherent blur—kids tumbling on the ground or wrestling with each other. Katniss stalks various kids with her bow and arrow, but she kills only one intentionally—a domineering sadist—and you don’t see the arrow hit him; you don’t even see him fall. Ross consistently drains away all the tensions built into the grisly story—the growing wariness and suspicion that each teen-ager must feel as the number of those still alive begins to diminish, or the horror (or glee) that some of them experience as they commit murder. The camera rushes through the wilderness, but, in the end, the movie looks less like a fight to the death than like a scavenger hunt. Katniss is always finding something useful in a tree or lying on the ground.

this was good, jerky camera aside, and j-lawr is a total movie star, she's amazing

^^ agree with all of this except "it was good"

i wasn't particularly bothered by the jerky-cam like a lot of ppl, or at least i don't recall ever being like "whoa, dude, chill out with that"

you literally couldn't see anything during the action scenes. It was like Bourne times a million

honestly during the initial bloodbath i was pretty glad for that

yeah i said upthread it was probably partly deliberate cos kids killing each other and everything. Still annoying though

much bigger problem during the action scenes is that when peetah and that vicious psychopath kid were fighting at the end they looked so much alike i couldn't tell who was who (blonde buff young caucasians all look the same to me i guess)

ok yeah actually i remember that being annoying

You know, I like Gary Ross, and I think he's a really smart guy, but he was probably the wrong person to make this.

this was good, jerky camera aside, and j-lawr is a total movie star, she's amazing

― A Little Princess btw (s1ocki), Wednesday, March 28, 2012 6:03 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

just learned that the girl who played the district 1 tribute (spoiler: the one thresh kills) was the (spoiler) "little girl" in Orphan. i'm old and losing touch with just how quickly teenagers age.

also one of the boy tributes is a quaid

whoa like dennis or randy's kid?

The shakycam only bothered me in the first, introductory segments. That said, Ross clearly isn't much of an action director. But the non-action segments were handled with reasonable proficiency. (Basically, I concur w/ s1ocki's assessment.)

jack quaid, son of dennis quaid and meg ryan, as spearboy

also foxface was in Dev2.0!

http://userserve-ak.last.fm/serve/_/47729979/Devo+20+devo20.jpg

The song "Beautiful World" remains mostly unchanged until the end, where the words, "It's a beautiful world for you/It's not for me" have been changed to "It's a beautiful world for you/I guess me too". In addition, the bridge lyrics "Boy and girl with the new clothes on/You can shake it to me all night long hey hey" have been changed to "Boy and girl with the new clothes on/You can pose and party all day long hey hey".

Additionally, the song "The Winner" is a re-recording with new lyrics of "If the Shoe Fits" by Jihad Jerry & the Evildoers. The anti-George W. Bush sentiment was replaced by a song about perseverance and thinking for oneself.

You know, I like Gary Ross, and I think he's a really smart guy, but he was probably the wrong person to make this.

― Josh in Chicago, Wednesday, March 28, 2012 11:57 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

otm. he's pretty decent at the non-action scenes, and in bigging up the political elements, but ugh he couldn't come up with anything better to circumnavigate the R rating this material deserves?

i think it was a cop-out in regards to Katniss dealing with the morality of the situation (she didn't have to kill anyone decent, and the bad were hilariously awful with their maniacal laughter). I think the sequels can be better though. I've never read the books so I don't know anything about how it all turns out. I know they won't but I hope they nix the love triangle, because that just looks like pain.