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Tag Archives: movies

Catching Fire: In Which I Give Philip Seymour Hoffman All The Credit

10 Tuesday Dec 2013

Posted by IfByYes in Life and Love

≈ 14 Comments

Tags

acting, caesar flickerman, catching fire, directing, hunger games, movies, philip seymour hoffman, reviews

catching fire mockingjay dress*slow clap*

I… have NO COMPLAINTS.

It’s… PERFECT.

catching fire old man

As you know, this is not something I say lightly. I have a reputation for being somewhat picky when it comes to movies.

The first Hunger Games movie really disappointed me, and the irony of the advertising has horrified me.

I THINK YOU MISSED THE POINT

But… Catching Fire is wonderful.

They hit all the right notes.

I mean, sure, they cut out a lot of stuff, but after all, the movie is very long as-is. They can never put an entire book into a two hour movie. And I accept the cuts they made. I understand why they changed the things they changed, and I am okay with it.

Because they left all the right things in.

catching fire finnick

Little things – like Finnick’s sugar, Johanna Mason stripping in the elevator, Chaff’s kiss, great Peeta/Katniss exchanges, fantastic Haymitch/Effie moments. The old man in District 11. Caesar Flickerman’s face when Peeta proposes – oh, that made us laugh out loud!

The actual time in the arena happens on a much shorter timeline, but pretty much the entirety of it is there, just condensed. Even Katniss armed with one syringe against the capital. It’s all there, and it’s right.

The characters are SO much better done in this movie. Effie’s inherent EFFIENESS is made very clear, and she provides some great laughable moments. Caesar Flickerman is more schmoozy, mugging the camera, more on par with who I see in my head when I read.

CATCHING-FIRE-CAESAR

Instead of mute pawns moving through a strangely silent world, the characters are full of life and the plot feels vibrant and immediate. Peeta’s motivations are a little more clear, and so are Katniss’s, although they still utterly fail at heating up a room with their lukewarm romance.

Haymitch is more of a lovable abrasive drunk than a strangely charming hero. Effie is more ridiculous. 

PH and I thoroughly enjoyed the entire movie, welcoming each scene in bewildered delight.

…and we figure it’s because of Philip Seymour Hoffman.

"Why yes, I do always play a douchebag but I am excellent at it, you must admit."

“Why yes, I do always play a douchebag but I am excellent at it, you must admit.”

Because he is only in good movies. I don’t always LIKE them. Master was weird and Doubt was depressing, and Capote is just disturbing…. but the movies are always GOOD.

Philip Seymour Hoffman must have just infused his native brilliance into every scene.

I mean, yeah, sure, I could credit Francis Lawrence, the director, for the loss of annoying bouncy-cam and the infusion of actual personalities into the acting… but the previous director, Gary Ross, wrote/directed several other films that I like a lot, like Pleasantville, Big, and Dave.

I can’t begin to understand why someone who has produced such sweet and occasionally moving movies was completely unable to replicate the sweetness of Peeta, or put any heart into the film. Maybe he was trying too hard not to be himself, I don’t know.

Maybe the new writers just “got” the series more. Maybe Francis Lawrence, who did I Am Legend and Constantine, just got the genre better.

Or maybe it is because of Philip Seymour Hoffman.

All I know is… it is FANTASTIC.

PH and I will own Catching Fire… but not The Hunger Games.

…Who knows, with the same writers and director, maybe they can even get me to enjoy Mockingjay.

And THAT will be a feat.

Who Needs Science Or Logic? Not Star Trek: Into Darkness!

11 Tuesday Jun 2013

Posted by IfByYes in Life and Love, Perfect Husband, Well, That's Just Stupid

≈ 22 Comments

Tags

benedict cumberbatch, Enterprise, fail, khan, logic, movies, reviews, science, star trek, star trek: into darkness

A friend took Owl so we could go to a movie this weekend, so I dragged PH to Star Trek: Into Darkness.

Not because I thought it would be good but because I figured it would at least interest him.

It definitely INTERESTED him.

It also may have shrivelled his soul.

I’m not an original Star Trek fan. As much as I love George Takei, my knowledge of Star Trek starts with Captain Picard.

But PH is a genuine Trekkie, he even owns a detailed manual to the Enterprise, which he consults occasionally, so I was surprised that he was so accepting of the 2009 reboot. He was okay with the ending – he felt it left room for the director to make new story lines instead of simply rehashing old stuff.

So I figured this movie would be about the same.

Yeah, about that…

PH’s brain nearly exploded about two minutes into the movie, and it just went downhill from there. Even I, as a non-Trekkie, was offended.

If you are a Star Trek fan, you probably shouldn’t see this movie.

The funny thing is, when we mention it to people, including people who claim to be fans of the original series, they have all said “What? It was good…” Then PH starts pointing things out, and they go “Oh, well, yeah… yeah… you’re right… that didn’t make sense…”

So allow me to rephrase.

If you kind of liked Star Trek and you like movies that are shiny (like me), you should see this movie.

It is VERY shiny.

If you are a Star Trek fan and consider yourself a PURIST, which I think all true Trekkies DO, you should NOT see this movie.

Nor should you see it if you have an interest in, oh, SCIENCE.

I’ll start with non-spoilers, so don’t be afraid. I’ll warn you before I give away anything remotely important.

Continue reading →

Giggling Over The Hobbit

31 Thursday Jan 2013

Posted by IfByYes in Life and Love

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

movies, reviews, the hobbit, tolkien

So, PH and I went to see the Hobbit the other night.

We went in knowing that we were going to be grumbly. We knew they would have to reverse engineer some things because Middle Earth changed significantly between The Hobbit and Lord of The Rings.

In order to make things match up with the LOTR world, they’d have to fix some inconsistencies – goblins instead of orcs, elves being more faerie-like than the archetypal Tolkien elves, etc.

Not to mention that The Hobbit makes me a little grumbly anyway, because what on Middle Earth was Gandalf doing helping these dwarves anyway? Thorin is a stupid, greedy little twerp who doesn’t really deserve that mountain any more than Smaug does. At least Smaug is clever (although apparently not clever enough to cover his bald spot).

And then Gandalf just goes “Oh, I’m going to go off and get rid of this Necromancer guy, you guys just hang out with the Wood Elves while I’m at it,” and disappears to have a battle with EFFING SAURON while we just watch the hobbit and dwarves go down a river in a barrels.

That being said, I enjoy The Hobbit as a book more so than The Lord Of The Rings trilogy, because it is much more concise and to-the-point without so much wandering off the point and rambling sentences about people’s great grandfathers.

So, I went in prepared to be amused and entertained without too much risk of being deeply offended.

And I’m not offended, but some of their choices make me go “wut?”

Some choices were good. They turned Thorin into an actually admirable character, which makes the whole Gandalf helping them thing much more rational. They also built up the whole Necromancer thing, which makes total sense.

Bilbo was fairly well done, if too slim.

They retrofitted the look of the elves to match the characters from LOTR which again makes sense, and brought in Galadriel just so that there would be at least ONE female in the entire movie.

Sure.

But I really didn’t get some of their other choices.

Like the whole Pale Orc thing.

They took a single sentence from The Hobbit about a goblin named Azog and turned it into this whole blood feud thing.

This goblin killed Thorin’s grandfather, and the story is mentioned with more detail in the LOTR trilogy, but they changed all of those details anyway.

Instead they made up this tale about how Thorin avenged his grandfather’s death by chopping off the Pale Orc’s left hand, and somehow Thorin assumed that this had killed the dude. Then of course it is revealed that OMG! The orc is still alive and now he’s PISSED!

This big white orc has apparently come down from the mines of Moria (remember how much of a pain those were for Frodo and company to get to in the first LOTR movie?) just to hunt down Thorin. In the place of his left hand he now has this weird metal stick thing with branches that make it look like a snowman’s arm.

You won’t find a picture of it anywhere because it looks so ridiculous, so all photos of this character are either right profile shots or above the shoulder shots.

This was the only one I could find:

frostythesnoworc

So anyway, Frosty The Snow Orc is now on the hunt for Thorin, the way Captain Hook wants to kill the crocodile.

This elaborate addition probably plumped the movie out by forty minutes or so, which I could understand if the movie was otherwise looking thin (after all, they are breaking a single book which was short by Tolkien standards into a freaking trilogy) but the movie is almost three hours long!

Cut out Frosty and you’ll still have a two hour movie!

WHY DOES FROSTY EXIST?

It doesn’t help that orcs have been ruined for Perfect Husband and me by JourneyQuest, because of scenes like this:

I defy you to watch that video and then watch orcs talking in The Hobbit without giggling to yourself.

We couldn’t do it.

The first time the orcs started having subtitled grunting conversations we started laughing, and discovered that we were both imagining them arguing over grammar.

So all in all, we got some good laughs out of The Hobbit.

Maybe just not in the places where we were supposed to.

Wreck It Ralph – Perfectly Built

23 Wednesday Jan 2013

Posted by IfByYes in Life and Love, My Blag is on the Interwebs

≈ 12 Comments

Tags

disney, jane lynch, lassiter, movies, plots, reviews, sarah silverman, Stories, wreck it ralph

I’ve been meaning to write about Wreck It Ralph since Perfect Husband and I saw it in theatres back in November. I thought you’d want to know about it since it was TOTALLY WICKED.

Wreck-it_Ralph

That’s right. I have zero complaints.

Me, the one who has found several movies to be… unsatisfactory.

*cough*Brave/HowToTrainYourDragon/MiloAndOtis/HungerGames/

TheHelp/HalfBloodPrince/DeathlyHallowsPartI…*cough*

Zero complaints.

ZE-RO.

I think it would be a fantastic movie for either gender of child to watch, although, since there are guns and enormous carnivorous bugs, I imagine it wouldn’t be great for little kids.

I think it carries an excellent message that it conveys eloquently.

I think it is filled with retro charm.

I think that the characters are three dimensional ones who grow and change throughout the story.

I think the humour is witty and sometimes understated.

I think the main female characters provide excellent role models for young girls.

I think that the development of the plot was a delight to experience.

A plot is a difficult and challenging thing to build well.

Believe me, I suck at them. Too simple, and it’s boring to sit through a predictable and pedestrian story, like, well, most children’s movies and an awful lot of adult ones. Too haphazard and you get a story that doesn’t seem to know where it wants to go, like Happy Feet.

But Wreck It Ralph is just… beautiful.

Every time I thought I knew where it was going, it threw a new wrench in the works. Every time I thought I knew how it fit together, it introduced a new twist. And yet everything did fit together, very well.

Yes, it had a couple of predictable bits, but then it was satisfying to see something so carefully constructed come to fruition.

jane-lynch-wreck-it

I love Jane Lynch. Sure, she’s basically Sue from Glee, but I LOVE SUE FROM GLEE.

Vanellope

I love Sarah Silverman and the character of Vanellope. I even wore candy-striped hair pins at Christmas because they made me feel like her.

I love Ralph, of course.

I love the eye candy, by which I mean THE CANDY.

It’s just… perfect.

I can’t wait for Owl to be old enough to enjoy it. It has cars, it has candy, it has strong female characters, it has strong male characters, and only a couple of poop jokes.

Perfect.

Murder and Otis?

29 Saturday Sep 2012

Posted by IfByYes in Life and Love, My Blag is on the Interwebs, Vids and Vlogs

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

animals, cruelty, cruelty to animals, milo and otis, movies, reviews, videos

So, I was trawling through Netflix on my day off and spotted Milo and Otis.

Remember that film?

Admit it, you think about it every time you see a pug, and you can’t hear one of those names without thinking of the other.

I adored the movie as the kid. It had talking animals and British accents, and who could ask for more?

Plus, I loved that it gave such a… graphic depiction of live mammalian birth.

Nothing like a bit of sex ed in your children’s family viewing.

I’m starting to keep an eye out for movies that would be good for Owl to watch when he’s older, so I pressed play.

Aw, it’s so cute! With the British voices, and little animal antics! How did they get that mother cat to swim after her kitten like that?

Awww.

Ahhh…

Uh…?

After twenty minutes I turned it off because… I was beginning to feel disturbed.

Continue reading →

Brave: Not Brave Enough

24 Sunday Jun 2012

Posted by IfByYes in My Blag is on the Interwebs

≈ 9 Comments

Tags

brave, disney, feminism, movie reviews, movies, pixar

As part of our anniversary gift to ourselves (on top of a dinner out on our actual anniversary) Perfect Husband and I took ourselves to see Pixar’s Brave tonight.

I really wanted it to be good. No, more than good. Great.

Mostly because I disagree so strongly with this article.

It’s not that I think Pixar is infallible. I don’t. Cars deeply disappointed me, being a re-make of Doc Hollywood.

Nor has it escaped me that Pixar’s ratio of male to female characters is, like, 3:1 and that in 12 films they have NEVER had a female protagonist before (You could go out on a limb and point to Mrs Incredible as a co-star, but that’s the best you could do.)

Even in A Bug’s Life, featuring ants, they made the protagonist male even though MOST ANTS ARE FEMALE.

But the problem is not with Pixar.

Continue reading →

In Which Carol Takes Fiction Way Too Seriously

22 Sunday Apr 2012

Posted by IfByYes in I'm Sure This Happens To Everyone..., Life and Love, Me vs The Sad

≈ 49 Comments

Tags

children, empathy, love, motherhood, movie scenes, movies, pain, parenthood, Sophie's choice, tears

So, there we are, having a nice evening together watching a documentary on Hollywood and the way it has presented the Holocaust. We found it on Netflix, which has a wealth of fascinating documentaries which we are slowly going through, because we are GIANT DORKS.

Anyway, we’re watching and it’s all well and good until they go and spring this on me:

A scene from Sophie’s Choice. Specifically, THE scene from Sophie’s Choice.

YES. THAT SCENE. Come on, even people like me, who have never seen Sophie’s Choice, have an idea about what her choice is. I wish to all things holy I still only had a vague idea.

I didn’t know details. Friends had told me not to watch the movie, and I listened to them. And then they went and sprang it on me anyway and now I feel like I can never get my brain clean again.

Have you ever watched a movie scene like that? Something that makes you wish with your whole heart and soul that you could do a complete Eternal Sunlight Of The Spotless Mind on yourself so you would no longer have that memory adding pain to your existence?

When I was a kid, most of those moments were to do with death and gore:

The dead body from Stand By Me, who shocked me with his open eyes.

A tv movie about Jack The Ripper, which only showed blood-spattered walls and a vomiting policeman, but which played on my imagination with all of the sinister genius of Hitchcock.

A shot of a dead soldier from the Gulf War, burned beyond recognition, who haunted me (especially in dark stairwells, where my imagination always placed him walking up behind me) for years afterwards.

Thankfully, I am getting better about my dead body phobia. I went through the Catacombs in Paris (terrified, but I did it). I only shudder slightly when I open the freezer at work. PH still can’t convince me to attend a Bodies exhibition, but that movie last night did spring a charred body in a crematorium oven and while I screamed, it did not haunt me.

But there is another kind of scene that has always tended to bother me, and that usually has to do with the death or a parent or the death of a parent’s child. You’d think it would be the death of animals, and it’s true that I will cry over Old Yeller far more than I will cry over Jack Dawson, and that the inevitable death of a German Shepherd is often the most bothersome scene in your standard thriller movie. But my real soft spot is children.

There’s something about the parent-child bond which has always triggered my emotions strongly.

I consider the parent-child relationship to be the “romance” of children’s literature, and I will weep over a child’s reunion with his parent in a way that I rarely do in adult romances.

I sobbed when I watched Juno and heard the words “would you like to meet your son?”

I burst into tears reading a For Better of For Worse compendium, when April is drowning and John is reaching for his daughter and thinks “if I do one more thing in life, please let me do this”.

Tears like that – they’re good. They’re healing.

But there are other scenes…

Like the scene from The Pianist, where the woman sobs over a baby she accidentally smothered when hiding from the Nazis. That one tormented me, and came flooding back years later when Owl was a newborn Babby.

Like the part of Schindler’s List (the book, not the movie) where a baby is dashed against a wall.

And just recently, a scene from a documentary on Hiroshima (yes, I know, I should probably stop watching war documentaries) where a woman retells the death of her child, and how she wasn’t brave enough to stay with her as she died. That scene broke both PH and me, and for days afterwards one of us would shout “OH, NO! THAT SCENE IS IN MY HEAD” and the other would come swooping in with a distraction as quickly as possible.

Well. I thought that Hiroshima scene was the ultimate in empathetic suffering. For a bit I felt as though my heart could never be whole again. That kind of scene tortures me in a way that a hundred charred soldiers never could. But thankfully time is kind, and the memory has faded a bit.

And then they went and sprang that AWFUL SCENE FROM SOPHIE’S CHOICE on me.

Guys, I know it sounds stupid, because it’s just a movie and it’s fiction, but I am in a lot of mental anguish right now. I can’t really explain why I find it SO BAD. I can’t blame motherhood, either, because I know it would have hurt me every bit as much if I had seen this years ago.

I keep alternately suffering the unspeakable horror of the moral dilemma, the unendurable guilt of the choice, and the heartbroken and terrified betrayal of the child as she is given to death and carried from the person whom we trust above all others to cherish and protect us – Mother.

To try and keep myself from falling into the mother’s place and then the child’s again and again and again, I read last night until I started falling asleep over my book (which NEVER happens). I spent all night dreaming up reunions between mother and child in which I was both the overjoyed mother and the unforgiving and traumatised daughter. I spent hours of dream time trying to inject a dog with morphine who, in my dream, was the little girl – I needed to numb her pain.

The pain of it is messing up my mind.

In driving between dog training appointments today, I ended up on the wrong road – and have NO MEMORY of how I got there. I WAS on the correct road, but I must have turned right at a stop light and continued up a totally different street COMPLETELY UNAWARE OF WHAT I HAD DONE. I didn’t realize my mistake for a good 2 kilometres, and how the mistake even happened will forever be a mystery. I can see making a wrong turn, but how do you make a completely unnecessary turn and not even know about it?

Then, during the appointment, I was supposed to go out, get something from my car, and then knock and ring the doorbell, to help accustom the dog to people coming and going from the house. I just walked right back in again, with no knock. I had totally forgotten the purpose of my being outside at all.

When I got home and reported all of this, PH took away my right to drive for the day. He’s a little concerned about me.

I’m pretty my reaction to the scene is not normal, otherwise there would be big disclaimers on the scene warning people not to operate heavy machinery after watching.

I mean, it’s a famous scene and it won Streep an Oscar, but when I google it, it is casually mentioned as a powerful and moving scene by people who rate the movie highly and “love” it. It is a powerful scene. Streep deserved her award. But I wish the movie had never been made, because then I wouldn’t be hurting so much right now.

I told you that PH has been trying to convince me to go to the Bodies exhibition in Vegas on our summer vacation, and my attitude has been HELL NO. But if I could wipe my mind clean of that scene… if Meryl Streep’s words and if that little girl’s scream of hurt and fear could be wiped from my brain… I would attend that exhibition joyfully.

What movie scene has affected you the most? What’s your achilles heel?

Happy Hunger Games: And May The Irony Be Ever In Your Favour.

07 Saturday Apr 2012

Posted by IfByYes in Shhh, I'm Reading

≈ 12 Comments

Tags

books, critique, humans, irony, literature, movie reviews, movies, reflection, reviews, sheep, the hunger games, violence

PH and I FINALLY got to see The Hunger Games! It took us a while to find a sitter, but my friend Pug Mama saved the day and took Owl for the afternoon yesterday.

You all know how excited I have been to see this movie. I was practically bouncing with anticipation as we waited for the movie to start.

So, now I’ve seen it.

I’m not sure what I think.

Overall, it was good. Really. I mean, the book is pure action, so it’s hard to mess up. The best thing was that they didn’t just turn it into a pure action thriller. They actually put soul into the movie.

  • The Reaping and the death of Rue were both excellently done. Very moving.
  • The plot is pretty much all there, and they actually added some behind-the-scenes stuff that you don’t get to see in the book, because the book is told in the first person. That was pretty cool. Seneca Crane, for example, was a much bigger character than in the book (and I LOVED how they handled his, er, final scene).
  • Several scenes were PERFECTLY set up for Catching Fire. Just watching them, PH and I were exchanging meaningful looks, knowing how these scenes would be reflected in the next movie and come to take on new meaning
    based on subsequent events.
  • Things LOOKED right (well, except the Cornucopia, which was bizarre). You know things are done well when you recognize the character right off, and I recognized almost everyone).

I only have three serious complaints.

I mean, yes, there were small things, peas in the mattress so to speak, like Haymitch being far too pleasant (“If only Heath Ledger were still alive…” says PH), Peeta’s eyes being the wrong colour, the deletion of certain important lines (“Stay alive” being one of them) and so on. But those little niggling details will always be present in any movie adaption of a book.

No, there are only three real problems with the movie. The odd thing is, while the touches I was missing were small, they really affect how I feel about the movie. These two differences make the difference between “yeah, that was pretty good” and “OH YEAH I’M WATCHING THIS OVER AND OVER”.

Complaint 1: The PG effect.

You weren't planning on seeing anything in this movie, were you?

I was somewhat prepared for this. I knew it was listed as PG13, so I figured they’d HAVE to tone it down.

In fact, I thought they’d totally alter Cato’s death, so I was surprised that they showed as much of it as they did.

And it wasn’t as bad as some movies, like The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, where people manage to stab and kill their enemies without getting so much as a drop of blood on their swords (I’m sorry, but when find yourself taming down C.S. Lewis, you have toned things down too much). But this was the frigging HUNGER GAMES, man.

Now, I’m no lover of blood and gore. I don’t watch horror or even thriller movies. I even avoid your standard action flick. But sometimes, when they tone down bloody moments in book, the impact of the scene is lessened.

This happened with The Golden Compass. They took an awesome coming-of-age story and tried to aim it at the under-10 set and it didn’t work. If they had left in the blood, the betrayal, and the sexual overtones, they would have had a better movie and more income.

Well, The Hunger Games wasn’t that bad. But in their attempt to keep it PG13, they blurred out a lot of the action. They did the jiggly-camera thing CONSTANTLY during action sequences, so you couldn’t really see WHAT was going on, and I found it highly annoying. I came to watch a movie, not to get seasick. I realize you don’t want the 13 year olds to see too much, but I object to the fact that I don’t get to see what’s going on either.

Complaint 2: The Peeta Complication

I wasn’t wholly satisfied with the whole Peeta romance thing. I’m not sure that they did a good job in conveying how conflicted Katniss is about Peeta:

  1. He saved her life.
  2. She promised her sister she would do her best to win.
  3. Winning means that Peeta has to die.
  4. Which means she might have to kill him.

Exactly how am I supposed to work a thank-you in there? Somehow it just won’t seem as sincere if I’m trying to slit his throat.

And she can’t figure out Peeta’s game. On the one hand, he announces his big love for her, holds her hand and so on. He wants to train together. He compliments her.

On the other hand, he’s the one who convinces Haymitch to actually make an effort and give them some help. He is the one who demands to hear strategy, who closets himself with Haymitch and comes out with an act to charm the cameras.

He hasn’t accepted his death. He is already fighting hard to stay alive…. Which…means kind Peeta Mellark, the boy who gave me the bread, is fighting hard to kill me.

So then she thinks she has started playing his game, too – acting for the cameras, playing up the show. But is it just a show?

And speaking of shows…

Complaint 3: Self-Awareness, Or Lack Thereof

How despicable we must seem to you.

Now, for this, I would love to hear from people who have watched the movie but have not read the books, because I may be underestimating people.

The movie-makers did a good job of portraying the emotions of the movie, the general awfulness of being thrown into an arena to fight for your life while people cheered, and the sickness of the popularity of The Games. They kept in all kinds of important minute details (by the way, I loved the touch of dressing the Avoxes like mimes).

But there were a couple of potential finishing touches that they seemed to shy away from…

When you read The Hunger Games, and its sequel, Catching Fire, there are certain recurring (I would even say near-constant) themes whenever Katniss has to interact with people from The Capitol, and when she is in the midst of The Games.

Your average person from The Capitol has no idea what it is like to be Katniss. Their decadent life is so far removed from her life of hardship and struggle that they completely lack the ability to empathize with her. They simply don’t realize or think about how much her life must suck.

While you do have evil tyrants like President Snow around, your average person from The Capitol is simply thoughtless.

What do they do all day, these people in the Capitol, besides decorating their bodies and waiting around for a new shipment of tributes to roll in and die for their entertainment?

Katniss’s prep team is a perfect example.

They are portrayed as kindly, friendly people who genuinely care about Katniss. And yet they are constantly saying thoughtless little things that show how little they understand Katniss’s situation.

It’s hard to hate my prep team. They’re such total idiots.

And then there are characters like Effie Trinket – almost admirable in many ways, but with that Capitol taint on them.

Effie takes both of us by the hand and, with actual tears in her eyes, wishes us well. Thanks us for being the best tributes it has ever been her privilege to sponsor. And then, because it’s Effie and she’s apparently required by law to say something awful, she adds “I wouldn’t be surprised if I got promoted to a decent district next year!” Then she kisses us each on the cheek and hurries out, overcome with either the emotional parting or the possible improvement of her fortunes.

Much of that is eradicated from the movie. Oh, you see the cheering crowds in the Caesar Flickerman audience. You see Effie’s cheerful “Happy Hunger Games!” and you are certainly aware of the fact that this is being treated like a big show. But at any point (and tell me, those of you who haven’t read the books) do you realize that WE are The Capitol?

There are two layers to The Games. The first is the primary purpose of the Games – to instil fear and despair into the districts, while also giving them something to dream about – the hope of winning The Games.

But to the people in the Capitol, it’s just a great reality TV show. They don’t think of the kids going into the arena as being real human beings. They don’t wonder how it would feel to be ripped from your family and thrown to your near-certain death for the entertainment of others. Even when they are moved to tears by Katniss’s protection of her sister, or Peeta’s star-crossed lover act, they don’t really register that these are real people.

I think the movie could have riffed on that more than they did. We see people in Districts 11 and 12 watching the Games, but they are watching straight footage – the same thing we see on the big screen. And yet, in the book, The Hunger Games is clearly a TV show, with narration, editing, and “highlights”. They could have shown us the SHOW – not the Caesar Flickerman show, but the actual Hunger Games show. They could have dressed it up to look like Survivor.

Playing Survivor is so much like being a contestant on the Hunger Games, at times I find it hard to believe that author Suzanne Collins hasn’t been a Survivor contestant herself. – Stephen Fishbach, Survivor Finalist.

And they could have shown the people in The Capitol, sitting around, watching children die while they munched popcorn.

Just like us.

Our society is only a step or two away from that of Panem’s Capitol, and Suzanne Collins isn’t gentle in trying to get that across to us. The way that Katniss looks at the Capitol – well, isn’t that how many third world countries look at us?

See how we fret over a few extra pounds, while children starve to death in the same countries that provide us with our morning breakfast cereal?

See how we put ourselves into survival situations for the hope of a million dollars, when people everywhere are living that situation for the hope of… well… survival?

They say the average child has seen 8,000 murders on television before finishing elementary school. By age 18, that number has increased to 200,000.

We can say “oh, yeah, but they aren’t REAL murders. It’s acting. We don’t sit and watch real people die for our entertainment.” And that’s true. But our society is tame by historical standards, as Suzanne Collins once again points out with all of the subtlety of a sledge hammer.

Don’t most Capitol characters sport Roman names? What were the Gladiators, but tributes forced to fight for their lives while people cheered?

Human beings are naturally bloodthirsty. I don’t like it, but it’s true.

So, someone wrote a book commenting on it. Then we took that book and turned it into a movie, and we all turned up in droves, excited to watch children die.

How those tributes would despise us.

Do you know what have seen in stores? A small book with glossy colour pages.   It’s a Tribute Guide.

Each page has a picture of one of the tributes, and their name, age, district etc. Even sicker, it openly addresses itself to “Citizens of Panem”.

So here’s the movie company, promoting their movie, marketing it to us as though we were those Capitol fans, excited for the 74th annual Hunger Games. And there’s no finger pointing, no attempt to make us feel ashamed.
Why would there be? Suggest that we are sick to buy their merchandise, or to see their movie? That would be craziness, surely. So they don’t.

They don’t try to hold up a mirror to us, to make us ask ourselves “are these Capitol people really all that different from us?”

Of course they don’t.

They are like The Capitol themselves, selling sensationalism, selling death, even as they tone down the gore and blur the death scenes, so that parents can feel better about bringing their children in to join the fun.

But I wish they had. It sounds ironic, but that would have made me feel a lot better about the whole thing.

Even as I wish that the movie had been bloodier.

Why Do I Like This Series??

02 Friday Dec 2011

Posted by IfByYes in Shhh, I'm Reading

≈ 9 Comments

Tags

books, literature, movies, the hunger games

I’m unreasonably excited for the upcoming Hunger Games movie. Feast your eyes on THIS:

DOESN’T IT LOOK FREAKING AWESOME??

I know, whenever a movie comes out that is based on a book, I get all sniffy and complain about how the movie makers totally missed the point of the story.

There’s a chance that could happen with The Hunger Games, too, but I have hope.

For one thing, The Hunger Games is naturally action-packed. They won’t have to make many changes to the story to keep the action going.

For another thing, The Hunger Games doesn’t have as many points as a complex story like Harry Potter.

I can never quite explain why I like The Hunger Games so much. It’s brutal, thuggish, and the story just gets more and more heartwrenching as you go through the series. By the end of Mockingjay, you begin to realize that nothing is sacred, and that Suzanne Collins doesn’t have any intention of showering you with a fluffy deus-ex-machina ending.

It kind of reminds me of 1984.

More than a little, actually.

I don’t LIKE 1984.

Furthermore, The Hunger Games is written in first person present tense.

I don’t DO present tense. I think it’s stupid and pretentious. The only time I can handle it is when it is journal format, like the Beka Cooper series or Bridget Jones’s Diary. Even then, most sentences are in the past tense because the protagonist is summing up something that happened earlier in the day.

But The Hunger Games is so gripping that I don’t even notice the tense.

That says something.

Maybe it’s not so much that I like The Hunger Games as that I like the reading of it.

The fact is, ultimately, that it is good writing. The story sucks you in, you rarely see the plot twists coming (even once you begin to realize that nothing should be as it seems) and the characters are believable and will stay with you after the series is done.

Katniss is frustrating as a protagonist, sometimes, because she tends to float along on the winds of fate much of the time, afraid to take a real stance on the political issues in which she finds herself entrenched.

That being said, you can’t really blame her, once you understand that her loved ones come first and see what a rat bastard President Snow is.

Peeta is a likeable character, too – he fits the teenage-novel-boy-swain mold well without being sickening or Edward Culleny about it.

The world is believable, too, and despite it’s awfulness, it’s one you sort of want to go back to, because it is just so different from our own…

If you haven’t read The Hunger Games, should you?

If you like a good read, definitely.

It is gripping, intense, and it is political at the same time.

If you like to debate morality, this series will give you lots of fodder.

Is it right to lie to someone to save their life?

Is it right to kill someone who is trying to kill you?

Is it right to kill people in the name of freedom?

How about in the name of peace?

If so – how many people?

Is it right to support an evil regime to save your family?

Is it right to fight an evil regime, knowing that someone you love will be tortured if you do? 

Could you die for someone you love? 

When you have to choose between two different kinds of evil, which do you choose? 

The entire series is a frigging ethical debate that will set your mind spinning until you don’t know WHAT is right, or WHAT you would do in the same situation.

It’s a damn good series.

It’s not a comfortable series.

I think it should be awesome to translate to the screen. Although they may have to tone down the violence a bit.

Especially if they make Mockingjay. 

And then, of course, there’s the ultimate question that stems from The Hunger Games:

Are you on Team Gale, or Team Peeta?

Guest Post At The Squeee!

05 Monday Sep 2011

Posted by IfByYes in My Blag is on the Interwebs, Shhh, I'm Reading

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

books, Fassbender, feminism, interpretations, Jane Eyre, Jane Eyre 2011, literature, movies, reading, reviews, Rochester

Hey guys, The Squeee has kindly posted one of my Jane Eyre rants. I’d love it if you would check it out:

http://www.thesqueee.co.uk/2011/09/problem-with-jane-eyre-adaptations.html

For those who have come over from The Squeee, my original review of the 2011 movie is here.

You might also be interested in:

Jane Eyre vs Bella Swan

The Twibashing Series (Round 3 is coming soon!)

Magic in the Potterverse

Other book-related posts

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