The inevitable Hunger Games thread

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

i mean http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/fifty-shades-of-grey-wayback-machine_b49124

i want to read horseshoe's sister's thoughts4u!

not bovd about the books but the film disappointed, chris nolan kinda thing of good premise and strong exposition thwarted and retrospectively diminished by lack of basic action film competence - series of set pieces but no sense of rising tension, like at the finale where its abruptly down to three and you had little idea, and then drably petering out ahead of the doubtless already-in production sequel

guess if they'd called it "hunger games part i" some of that would have been ameliorated but even still its no less unacceptable to overlook the satisfactions of a standalone film imo. old man shaking his fist @ cloud at this point though i know

it's not even action film competence tbh, i mean these are basic film values in whatever

i guess i found the books partic. annoying because there are all these flashes of good and interesting ideas that get completely lost in collins terrible writing and characterization.

thomp otm upthread about her exposition, christ

It's strange to me that this series is held up as being well written or more quality than Twilight when it's not. I mean, some of the ideas in the series might be more interesting than a girl mooning over a virgin vampire but what's the point when they're not executed in a satisfying or thoughtful way?

I didn't think these books were terribly written, or at the very least the concept was interesting enough that the writing style didn't get in my way.

i mean dont get me wrong, i finished them, but collins needs to stop telling and start showing

Eh, not really.

haha ok

nah max otm, even some minor changes would've strengthened the books considerably while retaining the cool parts of the plot. like when katniss and peeta toured all the districts at the start of catching fire, it would've been greatly improved if it had been like 30% more showing what the different districts were like, and 30% less katniss talking about all the different outfits cinna made for her and having night terrors unless she sleeps in peeta's arms.

The main point, though, is that Katniss isn't paying attention to the various districts because she's so preoccupied with appeasing the mayor to protect her family, plus she kind of didn't give a shit about any of the other tributes besides Rue so why should she she give a shit about their districts?

I mean, what you're talking about would be an interesting story, possibly even a more interesting one, but it's not actually the story being told, which is how Katniss is massively self-involved and mostly non-observant to the forces pushing her around like a chess piece until late into the third book.

i saw the movie w/ my wife, who's read the books, and coming out of the theater the #1 thing that bothered me about the movie turned out to be one of the things that according to her was changed the most from the book -- that District 11 rioting after Rue dies thing was apparently not in the book? felt kind of forced and tacked on even before i knew that.

iirc it happens, but you dont learn that it happens until book 2?

I think that's right; there's no way Katniss could know about it in book 1 anyway given that she was in a death arena at the time

yeah i guess the bigger change is the book POV to movie POV from first person to omniscient third person

I think the thing I liked the most about the book was the limited point of view; Katniss was central to the conflict but spent most of the story behaving like the self-involved teen she was, not really breaking out of that role until the end of the third book. A lot of the details weren't really necessary to get across the point of the story, which seemed to me to be about the corruption of power paralleled with the consequences of actions/inaction.

i really liked the movie. books r 4 nerds.