The inevitable Hunger Games thread

yeah, that sounds very right

i dunno i just figured we were gonna get some treasure-of-the-sierra-madre type paranoid shiz out of this, it's the whole reason i watched. it had nothing, i repeat nothing to do with watching the impossibly gorgeous jennifer lawrence shoot magically replenishing arrows around the place in tight clothing

i think we were shown very brief shots of haymitch chatting up some rich people, presumably convincing them to be sponsors. then haymitch is the one in charge of sending items along using that sponsorship money. it makes more sense in the movie than the book actually, because in the book it gets MORE expensive to send things the farther along in the game it is...for some reason? and the districts themselves send along, like, a chunk of bread to their player and it represents incredible cost and sacrifice for them to do so. idk

Oh i see, Woody's the go-between! Ahhh. I was confused because in the movie he's watching her on TV, we see her wincing in pain from her wound and then we cut to him looking determined and striding purposefully away, like he's about to "get on the case" somehow and then next thing you know there's a parachute floating toward her with a note from him inside. I guess he went to his contact list of sponsors and was like "OK now's the time to make good on your promises, this girl's goin down"

i think we covered upthread how the "hunger games as tv show" was a bit of a missed opportunity from the perspective of seeing it through the viewers' eyes

the "hunger games as moral dilemma" was a missed opportunity as well, which leaves you with nothing much left over, other than close-ups of jennifer lawrence looking gorgeous which, you know what i'm OK with that actually

My memory is that Woody gladhanding is inbetween the "Katniss needs help" and "Katniss gets help" scenes, I think. What's not as clear in the movie is that being the only person from District 12 to win the games doesn't actually confer much status on him - he's basically the town drunk 51 weeks of the year.

I thought he lived in the Capitol cause of his celeb status

Maybe I should have watched this movie at some point before 1am

They established this very neatly in the book, but I can see why the scene where he first meets Katniss and Peeta and then throws up all over the floor might've been the first to go.

I felt with the clothing that the more working class districts had kept to sort of functional, plain wear because they have to work in them. Harder to work in a castoff bright blue wig and fake McQueen heels or whatever! Also: they probably sew their own clothes, so a simpler pattern would be easier/use less fabric? It's been a while since I read the books so not certain if that's touched upon. The Capitol people by and large are very wasteful [TINY SPOILER: they have a pill or drink that makes them throw up so they can gorge themselves on food at parties!], unlikely that they'd even think to donate!

The sponsorship thing could definitely have been clearer in the movie - I almost missed the scene of Woody talking to them, iirc you can't even hear what he's saying? Poor planning for those who hadn't read the books! It was pretty shit to cut out the scene where Rue's district sends Katniss a piece of their distinctive bread after Rue's death. That was a pretty touching moment in the books. Because the district is so poor, she assumes almost everyone in the district chipped in to get that piece to her.

functional's one thing but heritage vintage patterns from ca. 300 years ago?

well, if they are even using patterns? just simple, functional clothes imo. what would you have them wear?

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ayV4QQAggPY/T4LxSdCW1DI/AAAAAAAAHOk/P3vBvM1dtEg/s1600/katniss+reaping+sign.jpg

I haven't seen the movie but please, those are not somehow fashion-neutral "simple, functional" clothes. Simple and functional would be T-tunics and shapeless, pull-on pants with drawstring waists. There would be no pleats, no gathers, no belts, and one size would fit most. Every single person in that picture is wearing something that has extra, unnecessary fabric and work in it.

Buttons? BUTTONS? Do you know how much work buttonholes are??? The poors of the future will be wearing shapeless pull-over tunics made of recycled fibers flattened into a colorless mulch.

iirc (from teh books) that dress was her mother's 'fancy' dress and her mother came from a higher-class than her father and had kept a bunch of fancier stuff

well, I was talking about in comparison to the Capitol's dress, which is the 'current fashion' in Panem:

http://theinsider.retailmenot.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/2/files/2012/03/Capitol-citizens.jpg

just cuz they're poor doesn't mean they don't deserve buttons ;_; I had forgotten about that detail, rrobyn!

and everybody kind of dressed up for that day
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Well then that was a poor choice of photos to show people wearing "simple, functional" clothes, wasn't it.

such is my memory, haha - i can remember little details about people's lives but i can't remember the name of the day people get picked to go to the hunger games
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meow meow!
lol ;)
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Laurel, I feel like you're being a bit condescending? Maybe you don't mean to be. I was simply responding to TH's post where he says "in a society where inequality is stretched to such extremes having clothes in an entirely different vocabulary doesn't make sense; they'd be living on cast-offs, ... subsequently mended 20 times but still retaining a spangle here and there"

Do you disagree with my ideas that the Capitol people probably *don't* donate a lot of castoffs to the districts, or that the clothes they wear are useless for working in anyway? Next time I will say simpleR to appease the seamstresses around, but those outfits (and as rrobyn pointed out - those are their fineries, they dress up because that is a big 'event') are still much more functional than the crazy shit going on in the capitol. And it's set in the future, would be weird to have them decided to throw all construction knowledge aside and go back to draw-string pants.

So the riches of the future will dress like insane, colorblind Victorians, good to know.

i think there's def a "movie ugly" thing going on with costumes though, yknow, the designer sack

i just thought the aping of Depression-era tech and fashion was obviously v effective as a shorthand for "these people have it tough" but unimaginative and pretty unlikely, not two qualities i really want from speculative fiction

and there are still seamstresses and dressmakers and tailors in district 12 i would think
and katniss has her dad's leather jacket and who knows where that came from - the past! i assume
the hunger games is obv so full of holes, as previously pointed out, but whatevs!

TH otm. I hate this movie and I haven't even seen it.

this conversation reminds me of how my parents rave over a movie or tv programme's attention to costume detail and barely care about the plot or characters while i'm the other way around

you are all probably right that the costumery is inaccurate but it's not something that matters to me, really

there's no "accuracy" here, it's sci-fi, it just seems dumb, much like the plot and the characters

it's a shame because the PREMISE and the general outline of the setting is just killer (no pun intended), sort of a mashup of lord of the flies, the lottery, the most dangerous game, battle royale and brave new world - right in my wheelhouse

Catching Fire trailer. Phillip Seymour Hoffman's in this?!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=jyPnQw_Lqds

I didn't know where else to put this but LOLOLOL

http://d3j5vwomefv46c.cloudfront.net/photos/large/767569614.gif?1367957167

(JLaw photobombing Sarah Jessica Parker at Met Ball - Marillon Cotillard and Lena Dunham loling in background)

Maybe it's just me, but for me, this movie doesn't really BEGIN until Lenny Kravitz walks on screen.

Also, Alicia Keys? You totally just read Hunger Games before you wrote that song, don't even front like you didn't.

btw tho this is my 2nd viewing

hunger games is like the cure, you know. Like "subsersive" stuff for normals.

Uniforms in the arena are like 2004 u.s. badminton team uniforms.

girl power

I saw this about two months ago at home with my wife on DVD. It was ok. The story was tethered to the book, so it had more exposition than the movie actually needed and (I don't doubt) far less than the book contained. The costumes, sets and effects looked good enough that you knew what they were aiming at. The acting was nothing special, but the lead who played katniss carried her part well enough on the whole and she was the only person who really mattered. Of course the veteran actors were much better in their small roles.

It struck me as a decently workmanlike adaptation of a very long book written for a YA audience. I'm sure that audience lapped it up. Good for them. Just ok for me.

Just finished books two and three in short succession. It might be just exhaustion from doing too much at once, but boy did these fall off. Book one had lots of problems but it was relatively tight, and the central questions/conflicts for the main character locked in with the themes of the book and basically it made sense.

Books two and three, besides being just a brutal exercise in thinking up every sadistic thing you could do to the cast (and blaming it on the villains) are repetitious, flabby and unfocused - episodic rambles punctuated by unearned deaths, indistinguishable convalescence scenes, and a thousand sleepless nights. On one level I get some of this: our protagonist is a subaltern trauma victim many times over and I'm glad that's not prettified out of the picture; as well, I think she (mostly) manages to make the violence totally unglamorous and horrifying, and keep up the attack on the world that finds it entertaining (in the first book) and a necessary evil (in the last). Even the endlessly fretted-over romance story has all kinds of good ideas going in - I imagine the line between liking someone and performing that affection resonates like crazy for the teen audience. But things are just so unimaginative. She has more or less 1-2 ideas per character, all based on how they relate to Katniss and nothing more, and they almost never surprise you. It's all about plot, then, but the plot is stuck on replay for so much of the series. There are huge chunks of the second book I can't remember and I read the entire thing yesterday.

Also suffers intensely from the Harry Potter problem where our protagonist grows nowhere and learns nothing, or maybe learns the same lesson repeatedly to no avail. This is a real problem for a series whose climax hinges on a big, ambiguous moral choice (the outcome of which being btw covered up by both characters and author); the reasoning behind it is fuzzy and can as easily be chalked up to the same kind of emotionally-driven impulse with which she starts the series. It's telling that the other characters can interpret it as insanity, and that so many times the narration has to insist how much has changed since page one of book one, because you might otherwise not realize it. Versus something like the end of Nausicaa (with a similar choice made), it's all very hollow. And I agree about how undeveloped the world feels - very detailed in certain ways and bafflingly vague in others.

It's annoying, because the outline/major themes really SHOULD be in a smash kids' book series. Like, this is basically Society of the Spectacle crossed with The Culture Industry, set in the Tripod trilogy by John Christopher, and specifically trying to make a point about reality TV and pro sports and what they might say about us. Okay, sure. But they could be better books along the way.

I did like a few things - the political intrigues, some of the monsters/etc., and everything we learn about the past winners (which is coincidentally some of the most useful world-building, maybe because it's Katniss finding things out rather than her laying them out for us, and there remain unanswered questions).

The ending is bugging me more and more even as I'm typing this. Ugh!

Also something very ''Star Wars prequels'' about a lot of the characters from later on...sketchily introduced and they show up constantly in conferences/battles but all they do is talk and die. If they have physical traits or individual personalities or speech patterns or ways of moving around a room, the book doesn't let it show. They just talk and die, talk and die, in shot-reverse-shot.

I saw this Catching Fire film and I can safely say beyond any shadow of a doubt that it was the worst most incredibly dull film I have ever seen.

you are nuts.

like ok if you didn't like it but if you think this is the 'worst most dull thing' ever I got a stack of DVDs for you.

Well, I may have been going for dramatic effect...

Walter Chaw/my thoughts exactly:

It'll make the money it will make, earn no new converts to the flock, and be the type of movie you hope no one ever brings up in polite company because you don't want to look like an asshole.

I loved it. But I also loved the first film.

if it was worse than the first one "worst most incredibly dull film" seems entirely possible bring on yr stack of dvds bro

The first one felt like it was five hours long. Not bad so much as interminable.

Some movies should be labeled clearly "This movie is for someone else, but not for YOU!" I'm pretty sure that those who found the movie insufferable are just not in the intended audience demographic. I don't plan to see it any time soon for just this reason.