The inevitable Hunger Games thread

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.

just finished the first book. the prose gets a bit better but only because you start to internalize how strange everything is. the love story with peeta, and the confusion there, i think is actually sort of brilliant in the book. of course katniss is unbearably dense about his true feelings, but it's still an interesting dynamic. the movie sacrifices it mostly because unless they had JLaw narrating everything it would've been hard to actually express her confusion/assumptions.

and re: above, it's actually implied in the book that the career tributes (esp cato) are unhinged and slightly maniacal, presumably because of their upbringing.

Took my daughter to see it yesterday. She's 11. She loved it, I thought it was way above par for a film aimed at early teens. (Have not read books btw.)

I don't have any problem with the non-ramping up of the glee of killing, or the fear of death, nor with the actual action being subdued. If they'd done anything else it wouldn't have been a film 11-15 year olds could have actually got in to see. The film isn't meant to be a telling meditation of human cruelty, it's meant to be an exciting film for teenagers with JUST ENOUGH meditation of human cruelty to give it a point. I thought it succeeded on those terms.

xpost I wondered how they would deal with Katniss having to kill people. I'm just pleased they actually managed it. I thought she'd somehow scrape through without having to actually kill anyone. What did you expect, given she's the heroine and she clearly has a moral code? That she'd go on a WTF killing spree? The rules of storytelling mean she is not allowed to do that, otherwise she could no longer be the heroine? So killing only psychos, and helping the good but being unable to prevent their deaths seemed to me to be a reasonable compromise.

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)

i could tell them apart but this was the only time the shakeycam got annoying for me too, because it was so jerky that you couldn't tell what katniss actually shot such that she'd hit cato without him taking peeta with him.

(i looked it up afterwards, she shoots cato's hand so he's forced to release peeta as he falls backwards.)

The scene in the book is impressively hardcore, where they spend several hours trying not to slip off the cornucopia and being cold and hungry and pretty much near death, and after Cato falls there's, like, several more hours of him fighting and the dogs chewing him up. I think it's like next morning when they realise that they haven't heard the death-cannon and then Katniss fires a mercy arrow at the shambling hulk in the mouth of the cornucopia.

Also in the books, the dogs contained the souls(?) of the dead contestants - Katniss notices Glimmer's eyes are in one that's chasing her, etc. Wish they'd tried a little harder to give them the contestants' characteristics, could've been kind of trippy.

and re: above, it's actually implied in the book that the career tributes (esp cato) are unhinged and slightly maniacal, presumably because of their upbringing.

god, this sort of stuff is so precisely what lends itself so well to teenage obsession - the story doesn't just contain the story but all these rabbithole back stories which are unwritten (by collins) but fascinating to think about

i'm sure the fanfic community are on it though

I think the dogs are just genetically modified to resemble the previous contestants and freak the surviving ones out - it's a great creepy detail, but you can see that it'd be jumping up and down yelling "cut me! cut meeeee!" at the first script rewrite.

Yeah, w/o 1st-person narration, it'd be hard to indicate exactly what the deal was.

The scene in the book is impressively hardcore, where they spend several hours trying not to slip off the cornucopia and being cold and hungry and pretty much near death, and after Cato falls there's, like, several more hours of him fighting and the dogs chewing him up. I think it's like next morning when they realise that they haven't heard the death-cannon and then Katniss fires a mercy arrow at the shambling hulk in the mouth of the cornucopia.

bela tarr's the hunger games

Via Geeta:

http://www.wired.com/underwire/2012/03/rare-electronic-music-hunger-games/

god, this sort of stuff is so precisely what lends itself so well to teenage obsession - the story doesn't just contain the story but all these rabbithole back stories which are unwritten (by collins) but fascinating to think about

i actually thought the opposite while reading it, at least in comparison to JK Rowling (who of course wrote hundreds of pages of backstory that were never used). Collins didn't seem to immerse herself in her own universe as much; half the tributes were never given names or characteristics and the world itself isn't terrifically defined. honestly, the Careers are better characterized in the film. some of this is the difference between fantasy and dystopian sci-fi i guess, but some of it just doesn't reflect well on the author.

otoh, the book is very good at creating implications without having katniss outright say them. i was split on her character -- half the time she's either unconvincingly poor (ie written by someone who didn't really work very hard at making her life of hunger very convincing) or she's quite convincing as typical member of an oppressed society, in that she isn't some magical figure who sees through all the bullshit when everyone else doesn't. one of the best things that happens towards the end is katniss thinking about how, if she wins, she'll be doomed to taking up Haymitch's mantle and mentoring kids every year; at that point, you have to realize how good of a mentor she would be and how far she's come since the initial train ride to the capitol. she's clearly come to understand the game and how to win it. and then you realize how arbitrary it is, that all of her character development has happened within the arena (literally and figuratively) of this arbitrary game that has no real value to anyone outside the capitol. sort of a brilliant move on Collins' part imo

anyway i'll stop the armchair book critic stuff now

Via Geeta:

http://www.wired.com/underwire/2012/03/rare-electronic-music-hunger-games/

― Ned Raggett, Thursday, March 29, 2012 1:57 PM (13 minutes ago)

this is awesome. plus she's gonna make out pretty good on performance royalties.

between that and the steve reich it's definitely one of the cooler soundtracks ive heard in years

i thought this was pretty okay. it had some good themes and jlaw has star quality. seems like a good thing for kids to be into

also good training for apocalpyse scenarios, zombie or otherwise

Further on Laurie Spiegel and "Sediment" (and royalties):

http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2012/03/30/laurie_spiegel_s_sediment_in_the_hunger_games_how_the_new_movie_righted_a_musical_wrong.html

And if you (like me) haven't seen the film but would like to see the scene and hear how the music was used...

http://lincolnmoreira.tumblr.com/post/19877170785/the-hunger-games-cornucopia-scene

Funny review from bassist extraordinaire Tony Levin (!):

The Hunger Games: (and Catching Fire, Mockingjay) by Suzanne Collins ***
Not bad... why is it that young adult books are sometimes the most fun reads?
And I had to check out the movie, of course, in case it was as good as the book. Not bad, but not great at all. Jiggly camera technique made me want to walk out.
Will books someday include jiggly camera elements? "She ran through the forest, clutching her bow, while she and the whole forest jiggled up and down, making you the reader a bit nauseous. Then she stopped to rest, but everything continued to jiggle and twitch."

http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2012/04/the_hunger_games_is_sexist_fai.html

assume you have a 5 year old daughter with one hit point left whose life depends on your selection.

And the reason why showing off-- or, as the movie ever so subtly puts it, "showing them up"-- is so important is that women still secretly believe they are inferior to men. I know most of you aren't going to want to hear that, and, indeed, the vast majority of you will woefully willfully misquote me as having said, "women are inferior to men," but that's because your brain is broken. I read the book. You need to read with a highlighter.

yeah idk this is pretty terrible

did this person read the followup books as well as The Hunger Games, because the overriding theme of the story has absolutely nothing to do with patriarchal oppresion and everything to do with power being a corrupting force

hey ladies, u only think katniss is a badass bc u secretly believe u are inferior to men, u know who is a real badass? this character:

http://biffbampop.files.wordpress.com/2009/07/milla_jovovich_alice.jpg

I mean, in the context of the story, Katniss's blatant impotence is pretty much the point; she's a 16-year-old girl who has been pulled into a meat grinder, much like the other kids.

Also the whole thing about Thresh being retarded is some hardcore "look into a mirror" shit

"Do you know why Thresh doesn't kill Katniss but instead lets her go? Because Thresh is black."

what the fucking fuck