(no subject)
-Some thoughts:
-I assumed Effie be a stand-in for Katniss's prep team in the film. This makes sense, since the prep team are barely in the movies and the audience has no real reason to give a shit about them or even remember that they exist. As such, I was disappointed that she wasn't discovered chained down in a dirty holding cell, like Venia, Flavius, and Octavia in the books. The movie seems to be playing the long game on showing President Coin's true nature and I guess shackling people to a wall and leaving them to rot in their own urine would have shown her hand too soon. I loved Effie's surprise cameo at the end of the novel, though, making you question everything you know about her as a character. As it stands, Effie was just really annoying here. I enjoyed what they did with her character in the first movie ("That is mahogany," will never not be funny to me) and she was fine in the last one, but here, she felt like a desperate attempt at comedic relief. Please stop stabbing me in the eyes with the ice pick that is supposed to be her humor, movie. I know things are dark, but this is too much. I actually double-checked to make sure Elizabeth Banks wasn't one of the producers, because her character was just so overdone here.
-"The Hanging Tree." I saw yesterday that it's trending on YouTube, with good reason. As a general rule, I don't like it when characters sing in non-musicals. It's generally gratuitous, so I was fully prepared to cringe, right up to the moment that Katniss started singing. The Lumineers wrote the most haunting, evocative little melody for this fictional folk song--and as icing on the cake, the mockingjays begin hesitantly tweeting along as Katniss sings it. I was genuinely surprised to find myself tearing up almost immediately. When a chorus of other voices joined in, it fell into very serious danger of becoming tacky, but then the scene with the dam went down and redeemed it entirely. That score. God damn, James Newton Howard, you know your business. I was trying to suppress sniffles the whole time, wiping my eyes with the napkins in my hand that were all buttery from the popcorn Adam and I were sharing.
-Finnick's exposition about President Snow's atrocities put up (literally) alongside the rescue mission was a stroke of genius. I've seen a few people online complaining that they found it difficult to focus on both things at once, but I felt like that added to the intensity of the moment: you simultaneously want Finnick to say more and shut the hell up so we can concentrate on what's happening on the surveillance cameras. I wondered if maybe the distraction was intentional, not only because uncut scenes of explanatory dialogue like that have a tendency to be dry, but also due to the fact that some of the things Finnick says are so gut-wrenching. It's been a while since I've read the book and I'd forgotten that Snow was guilty of renting out victors into motherfucking sex slavery. Dammit, Katniss, fuck this despicable human being's entire universe up.
-I fully expected the split to occur as soon as Peeta began choking Katniss. Seeing Peeta hidden from public view and losing his mind as we hear Coin's "mission accomplished" speech was much more powerful.
-I was at the theater like, "Josh Hutcherson, WHAT. THE FUCK?" but I read later that the weight loss is all CGI. Since the idea of actors doing terribly unhealthy things to their bodies in preparation for a role has always freaked me out a little, this is good to hear.
-My last name is Coin and I love that there's a fictional character in a well-known piece of literature that shares that with me. And she's one stone-cold badass. Not necessarily a good one, but a badass, nevertheless.
Please feel free to fangirl/fanboy along with me. I love seeing other people gush about the things I love.