Like Snickers, It Satisfies
The Deep Pleasures of The Hunger Games
THE HUNGER GAMES Yummy goodness!
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dir. Gary Ross
The Hunger Games: The IMAX Experience
dir. Gary Ross
This is how you adapt a novel into a satisfying movie. Granted, The Hunger Games was practically begging to be made into a film. With its gripping love triangle, its dystopian America where the poor are kept far away from the foppish, ruling 1 percent, and its tournament where teenagers from around the reconstituted United States are annually pitted against one another in a battle to the death for the amusement of the nation, the book practically reads like a screenplay already. You don't so much read it as smash it directly into your brain through your face; even people who hate to read manage to swallow The Hunger Games whole in less than 24 hours.
But it helps that the movie version of The Hunger Games isn't some cheapo Twilight-style cash-grab. The film is divided into three distinct portions. Gary Ross's direction starts out almost impressionistically—a series of long, wobbly shots of our hero, Katniss Everdeen (yes, really), as she hunts animals in the forbidden area of District 12. As Katniss, Jennifer Lawrence is dead-on: She's strong and quiet, but savage and sharp when she has to be. The film was shot in the North Carolina Appalachians, and Lawrence looks as comfortable in the lush green woods as a native. T Bone Burnett's spare soundtrack, too, is made up of flourishes of bluegrass music that you just wander upon, like a moment of birdsong overheard in the woods.
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As Katniss is transported to the Capitol to prepare for the Games, Ross's direction becomes more confident and showy. We meet her support staff, coiffed up in ridiculous high fashion. The cast, again, is just right: Stanley Tucci and Elizabeth Banks, especially, are basically the human version of pampered, poofy dogs.
And the Hunger Games themselves are exactly as Collins wrote them: swift moments of brutality surrounded by long purgatories spent hiding in the woods, waiting for something terrible to happen. Hardcore fans are sure to miss three or four small details that didn't survive the transition from the 337-page novel to the 140-minute movie, but that's just quibbling. The movie stands as a work of art on its own, and that's the best possible tribute to the book that I can imagine. 
1
Got taken by someone with two free tickets, still not worth the two hours of my life.
Exactly. I can't wait to see it come alive on screen.
6
Squee! Really, really looking forward to Hunger Games.
Even if that arrow was originally resting on her outstretched finger, it definitely suggests Lawrence was not taught how to shoot a bow (good way to mess up your finger and disturb the trajectory of the arrow). We should also note that: she is holding the knocked arrow at chin level; her string is not dampened (which it probably would be on a hunting bow); the arrow is probably half a foot too long; the arrow is knocked off of the typical served portion of the string; her "expert archer" character apparently needs to wear finger protection for what amounts to a 25# bow.
I guess you can make a weak case about "instinctive shooting", but it looks to me like Jane Austen meets Survivorman.
I agree that this is true, but don't agree that it is a positive recommendation. I read the first two of the books in about six hours each, as excellent reading for on an airplane or something. I got them for free, and I still won't pay for the third, although I might read it eventually.
Books that you can read that fast are not great books. They are extremely silly books, without complexity of grammar, of story, or of character. Nothing surprising happened in the books at all, and there was no real depth of description of anything.
There are also some pretty gigantic narrative holes. I think people may not notice them because they are papered over with violence porn. But hey, we can feel good about reading about graphic violence, because the message of the book is anti-authoritarian!
Also, Katniss Everdeen has got to be the stupidest heroine-who-outsmarts-people ever.
Some of the archery passages in the book were a little off (I enjoyed reading it nevertheless), but would it have been so difficult to spare an hour on set to teach an actress how to at least hold a bow correctly?
25
I want to put it out there that I haven't read the book (I did however read The Most Dangerous Game), but after watching the trailer and reading a few reviews, I've gotten the impression that this is quite a morbid and unwholesome film. I can't exactly say why I get that feeling, but I mean c'mon, isn't it taboo in our society to kill kids? Plus don't we already have enough of a problem in this country of kids shooting, maiming and killing each other in school?
This movie seems, eek I don't know, just plain negative... Good movie directing and a love story or two can make any disturbing plot or ideology agreeable to the audience in cinema, but the underlying story still comes across loud and clear.
To somebody who's seen the film: What was the underlying story/moral of this film? Was it something negative like I'm assuming? Or am I totally off-base and making a fool of myself in my first comment on the Stranger.. -Chris
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