Episode 207 Topics Include:
- Movies
- Movies
- Yep, more movies.
- Featured Review: The Hunger Games
Running Time: 1 hour, 33 minutes
Episode Songs:
Knights of Cydonia - The Vitamin String Quartet.
This Podcast May Include Some Explicit Language
...It Also Most Likely Contains Some Spoilers
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i kind of hated the Hunger Games movie, and you guys probably know i'm a huge superfan of the books, the third book is the best thing i've ever read. the movie is like Diet Hunger Games. i was also really bored (Jesse, i almost started to doze off early on the movie too XD).
ReplyDeleteit was a limp, tepid version of the books which are super intense and violent in terms of physical combat/action, and super intense emotionally, which the movie also failed with. i felt like it was made only for people who have read the books (although my favorite movie reviewer had never read the book and he loved it, so there must be some crossover appeal). i imagine if a viewer had never read the books that they must feel like i did when i saw a couple of the Harry Potter movies, they don't fill in the blanks and refer to stuff in the book that they don't explain in the film (splinching??).
they cut out why it's called the Hunger Games and why the games take place, i don't know why since it's kind of pivotal, heh.
the country in the story, Panem, is North America and District 12 i believe is in the Appalachian region, but in the books they never go into the geography beyond that. there's apparently no connection to other continents or countries, it's totally isolated. they also never delve into what the cataclysm was that caused things to collapse, it's just lost to the annals of history and nobody teaches it in schools or anything so it's lost knowledge, i guess. so you'd still probably hate the books, Rian, it's not hard sci-fi and they don't get into those details.
in the books training for the Games is illegal but it happens illicitly, but in the movie it's legal apparently and the kids go to an academy or something? i don't know.
my comment was TOO LONG and it wouldn't let me post it, so i gotta split it up into two parts! haha.
part 2!
ReplyDeletethe mutant dogs at the end of the movie is pretty different in the book. in the books, when a kid dies a hovercraft shows up and picks up the corpse and takes it away, and a big thing in the books is that the Capitol does a lot of genetic manipulation and creates mutant creatures like the super-wasps in the movie, and the dogs at the end are suggested to be the corpses of the dead kids mutated into monsters (it's never explicitly revealed because again it's all from Katniss's perspective, so you never see anything that she doesn't personally witness). the dogs also didn't spring out of the ground (?).
the sci-fi is definitely back seat in the books, it's not hard sci-fi like i said, and they never explain anything about how the games work because it's all from Katniss's first person perspective, so in the books it never shows the game room or the gamemaker's manipulating things, so from Katniss's perspective stuff just happens in the arena and it seems spontaneous and basically it's magical. it's like how do some of our high-tech gadgets work? who knows, to us it seems magical, i don't know how the hell a cell phone works and from my perspective it's basically magic, haha.
the racial aspects you guys mentioned were weird, too. Rue is most likely black in the book, she's described as having dark brown skin. the racial dynamics in the book are totally different, the movie kind of reversed it and made it strange and uncomfortable.
anyway, crappy movie. it doesn't do anything to justify itself, it's not something like Jurassic Park where even if you felt the movie was narratively inferior to the book, the movie still has the awesome dinosaur effects to make it worthwhile. but the Hunger Games doesn't do anything new or justify itself with showing you some awesome gory violence or having the special effects of the mutant dogs, it doesn't put its own spin on the source other than watering it down, so why bother. i'm glad it's out there, i'm glad there's a reasonably solid high-profile movie out there with a female protagonist, i hope it ushers in more, so because of that alone i give it ONE STAR.
here's my review post i wrote earlier this month if you guys are curious: http://mooncalfe.livejournal.com/190600.html
It sounds like we're pretty much on the same page about the movie. I haven't read the books, so I can't comment on those, but I will say that EVERY single other person I've spoken to about the books says that the last one is the worst and a big let-down after the first two. Having not read them myself, I took it for granted that the final book was generally regarded as disappointing because of the other conversations I'd had, so it's interesting to hear that it's your favorite.
Deletei've heard that too, about the third book, but it was absolutely my favorite one of the 3. it killed me all the way through, totally floored me. i don't think anything has made me more emotional than that book! knocked me flat. really great character work, the places the characters go in the third book just blew my frickin' mind.
Deletei think most people seem to like 2nd book the best but that's my least favorite of the 3, but it's still amazing of course. i'm backwards, i guess!
I call bullshit on Jesse for giving this movie a 2 because of action, but 5 on Harry Potter's "wizard battle" which is just two dudes standing there.
ReplyDeleteI wondered what someone who didn't read the book would think about this as soon as I left the theater. I liked the movie slightly more than Rian. I read and loved the books, and agree with Ross on the "diet" version. Too much shakey cam was my only complaint, but I had inside information.
Also, I liked the 2 Spurlock movies I swa and really want to see this one now!