The Hunger Games

[hells_half_acre]

My sister is in town for the weekend, and her son wanted to see The Hunger Games. Luckily, Vancouver happens to have a theatre that is STILL PLAYING IT.

I went along...

I have not read the books...

But I keep hearing all this stuff about Katniss/Peeta or Katniss/Gale (or Peniss and Kale?)...but but...did people see the same movie that I did? Because where the hell are my Katniss/Cinna shippers?!? This is my OTP....at least for the movie.

Anyway, good times. Really well done movie. Katniss was a really great character. I also liked how the wounds/injuries were realistic...in that when they got injured, it was srs bsns...and Katniss actually went into shell shock when something exploded close to her.  

But, like I said, I haven't read the books, so I have no idea whether it's a faithful adaptation or not. I just thought it was a good film.

Comments

[claudiapriscus.livejournal.com]

I read the book on an airplane recently. I think this is one of the rare occasions when the movie is probably better than the book; it wasn't bad, not at all, and there were a few small things that the movie left out or skimmed over for obvious and practical reasons...but the writing is a little on the rough side, a little heavy on the exposition. It made me want to go into beta-mode, because the potential was there but the writing was clunky as hell, at least in the first third of the book or so. Once it got into the whole fight or die territory, it was on studier ground. But the great thing about movie adaptions is that they add polish. The telling, not showing, is an easy vice to fall into in writing, but a lot harder to do in a visual medium like the movies.

[hells-half-acre.livejournal.com]

Yeah, when I was watching the movie and seeing the Districts and then the Capital and whatnot, I was actually thinking to myself "I bet these are all huge paragraphs in the books that are explaining everything in long drown out detail." :P

[claudiapriscus.livejournal.com]

There are, but they're kind of the wrong details. Much of Katniss' inner monologue reads like a 14 year old's essay on...oh, the Irish Troubles or something like that that's a very complex and nuanced issue? But it's a weird thing for someone to be thinking, outside a school assignment.

Another part of it is that I was willing to accept, for the purposes of the story, that things are as they are, but some of the explanations didn't do much expect to draw attention to the ways in which the world doesn't really make sense...which I'd been happily ignoring or handwaving up until that point, you know? For example, it's repeatedly mentioned that the whole system is designed to keep the districts in line and to crush their spirits. But it's kind of an Evil Overlord (who hasn't read the list) kind of plan, because from a real-world perspective, every little aspect of the system seems designed to foment rebellion, not to quell it. The real world has presented many, many ways in which to completely and very successfully oppress a population without tipping them over into outright rebellion. North Korea is practically a study in how far you can push it without going over the edge. However, keep a large number of people starving, or in danger of starvation...while constantly rubbing their faces in their oppression, without even a good propaganda arm, while also broadcasting people's suffering and nobility in the face of their oppressors...does not seem to be a very good way to do it. Which is not to say all fantasy premises need to be plausible; it's just that if you stop to explain these things as, "well, they make us do this because they want to humiliate us" and "we're kept on the edge of starvation because they're punishing us and want us to be oppressed" it can force the reader to consider these things. And it just doesn't add up.

Here's an example of the early prose:
"Gale knows his anger at Madge is misdirected, on other days, deep in the woods, I've listened to him rant about how the tesserae are just another tool to cause misery in our district. A way to plant hatred between the starving workers of the Seam and those who can generally count on super and thereby ensure we will never trust one another. "It's to the Capitol's advantage to have us divided among ourselves," he might say if there were no ears to hear but mine. If it wasn't a reaping day. If a girl with a gold pin and no tesserae had not made what I'm sure she thought was a harmless comment."

There's nothing wrong with it, it's just...clunky. Especially in context.

[hells-half-acre.livejournal.com]

Hmm, yeah, that IS pretty clunky for an internal monologue.

And yes, I was sort of having similar thoughts in the movie, like "um, if this is supposed to be preventing a rebellion...they're getting it backwards." :P

Though, it did remind me of some theories on what caused WWII...extremely vaguely.