I've seen too much!

[hermione_vader]

I spent Saturday mostly just watching stuff.  It was 100% intentional, but it yielded interesting results.

First, I took my brother to see The Hunger Games.  BEWARE!  HERE THAR BE SPOILERS!!!

I read the first book last month, and I generally liked the world that it created, but Suzanne Collins' actual prose was pretty weak.  I liked Katniss as a

Comments

[visiblemarket]

Jennifer Lawrence was soooo fantastic, wasn't she? Katniss is such an internal character, and obviously with first person narration in the book that's easy to show, but on film and without voice over (and I was so glad they didn't do voice overs) it really hinges on the actor. With Jennifer Lawrence, though, her face is so damn expressive but in a quiet way (the look on her face during the tribute parade? I almost cried!), she was perfect.

Haymitch, Effie, and Cinna were great, but I wish we'd gotten more of them, Cinna especially. Lenny Kravitz was just lovely.

I wish we'd gotten more of Foxface too, but I get why they couldn't. It was pretty hard to show how clever she was on film as compared to through Katniss's narration, and I guess it came across, but not quite as well.

I didn't mind the shakey-cam so much, because I got why they did it (to show just how unbalanced Katniss was, and also to hide a lot of the gorier stuff) but in a way I felt like hiding the gorier stuff was kind of cheating. Like, I know they wanted it PG13 so that most of the kids who read the book could see the movie, but...somehow the little tiny cut that was Peeta's OMG so deadly leg wound and Katniss's burn didn't look that bad, either, and stuff like Peeta not losing his leg made it all a little less real than the books were.

But overall I agree, it was a very good adaptation of a book with solid characters and prose but meh prose.

[hermione_vader]

Yes, she absolutely was! I think you really hit on the main point---you could tell exactly what she was feeling and when she suppressed her emotions and all that, and it wasn't over the top at all. She felt pretty real, as far as protagonists go. And I completely agree with you about forgoing narration---it would have been really superfluous and annoying onscreen.

Yes, they definitely could have had one or two more scenes.

Oh, yeah, Foxface! She's hard to portray because she never speaks, but I thought that actress really looked the part (though I imagined her hair streaming behind her, not up in Princess Leia-style buns).

I thought the shaky-cam was effective during the Reaping and the train ride after since it's very disorienting for Katniss, but I definitely thought the overuse of it during the initial bloodbath and the Feast was cheating. The Dark Knight showed violence without blood spurting everywhere and got a PG-13 rating, so HG could have done that, too. Oh, well. I thought Katniss's burn looked pretty bad, but I agree about Peeta's wound (though it didn't look like much fun).