The inevitable Hunger Games thread

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

Really any post that throws in a passive-aggressive "Sorry" at the end is going to be terrible.

it's one thing to have a point of view but I don't think I've ever seen escalating "I see through the veil" rhetoric (including my own) that didn't culminate in the author proving the efficacy of his/her argument by lovingly his/her head up his/her own ass

I have a hard time believing that blogger isn't actually a 15-year-old.

ugh these books are SO ANNOYING

i sort of agree but my sister loves them and is like the hunger games-whisperer and has a real point of view about them and is so eloquent in their defense that she's kind of worn me down.

the movie was horrible, though.

yeah the more distance i get from the movie, the worse it seems to me. and from what i understand the rest of the books are all much worse than the first one??

i thought the second book was terrible, third book is absolutely bizarre and actually kind of redeemed the trilogy for me in some weird way, just by being so stubbornly weird

i'm not sure what max's beef is. none of them are particularly well-written. the first and the last ones do the thing my sister likes the best, which is basically testify to the truth that all social order is founded on violence. earlier in this thread i said i liked the last book because it's the political one but truthfully this series is kind of apolitical, which is baffling to me. my sister and i get in arguments about this, and she's always like, look, susan collins is an army brat, if you want a revolutionary dystopian young adult novel you have to write it yourself. but still, it seems like a missed opportunity.

the second one is probably the weakest.

xp

my sister likes how katniss is a battered shell at the end of the third one because that's what war does. she resents that rape is not depicted as a war crime in the books, though, which might give you some sense of the intensity of the perspective she brings to these books.

i should just invite my sister to this thread; she has a lot of thoughts4u

the third book i think is hamstrung by that goddamned first-person present-tense narration. important events and potentially interesting character moments are just narrated-past willy-nilly, when otherwise they might be good opportunities for world-building and character shading. and while i can see the validity of saying "catatonic katniss works because it reflects the realities of war," it annoys me because collins isn't very good at reflecting other "realities" -- like the relationship between katniss and her family. imo it becomes an amateurish scribble after the first book, there is no nuance to how prim/the mom deal with their sudden wealth/change in status or how everything that happens changes the way katniss relates to them.

yeah, collins really drops the ball on primm as a character after the first novel

my sister says the books should be adapted in a band of bros-style miniseries, btw, not three movies.

all three are brought way down by first-person present tense

xp i doubt 1/3 of a miniseries would've made anyone $400 million

yeah i mean it's an impractical suggestion for sure. she was really mad after we saw the movie. i just feel like all opinions i had on these books have been replaced by her very strong feelings.

I keep getting asked at work if I have read these books.

I guess that's better than family members telling me I should read Twilight.

let's throw fifty shades of grey into the matrix too