Hunger Games: Two Thumbs Up - Page 5

Actually, pretty much anyone who is going to learn how to really fight with a sword will use a wooden one. You can't learn unless you fight full speed and unscripted, and you can't spar unscripted with a metal sword, that's called dueling and it leads to death. Also wooden swords can be just as heavy as metal ones.

Not that any of this matter BTW, I know this is your current pop culture baby, I mean, Harry Potter is moldering in the grave, and Herromine is getting too old for you, you need someone to creep on.

That's true, but it will also be part of the process of working with real swords (you can't become proficient through wooden sword use alone and if you only used a wooden sword it would most likely be detrimental).

Even if the weights are similar, they still have a very different feel. Using a bokken and a training katana (iaito) are very different.

Well, this thread sure went from 0 to Dwight Schrute in under 4 seconds.

Saw the movie tonight. Have to say, it did not live up to my expectations. Somewhat disappointed.

Agreed. The more I had time to sit back and ruminate on the movie, the more I realize it was pretty disappointing. (Often a movie gets better with distance, but in this case, I'm really starting to reevaluate it downward).

^ I agree. I didn't know anything about the Hunger Games a week ago. My brother's girlfriend talked him into reading the book and he liked it enough to recommend it to me. Since it was only $5 in the Kindle version I decided to grab it. Have to say the book impressed me, it was a fun and well paced read that I finished in a couple days.

After the book I was excited for the movie but was very let down. Now I know that movies often leave stuff out but it seems they left out not just details but also a lot of the underlying substance of the book (there was basically no evidence of the internal struggle that Katniss faced regarding her feelings for Peeta vs. Gale). I also thought it looked horrible. Someone buy them a damn steadycam, please!!! I understand that a little shaky camera work can add to moment....but not when it's used for the entire 2 hours! I hate that style of filming, it seems such a fallback when they can't seem to create enough drama and tension on their own so they resort to shaky handheld camera action instead.

Only thing I did like was the casting. Katniss, Haymitch, Peeta, Rue, Prim, Cinna were well cast I thought and I found them all believable as their respective characters.

I just think this movie could have been so much more.

Now, I quite liked the movie. This is especially surprising since I don't like sci-fi, and I am sick to death of kick-ass warrior women. In all, I would give it about a "B+."

As others have noted, some things are kind of incomprehensible if you haven't read the book, e.g., when the Careers had Katniss bayed in the tree: In the book, it was a pine tree, and the branches couldn't support their weight. In the movie you are left wondering why she could climb it and the others couldn't--except that they make Cato such a dumb sh*t he tries to climb the tree holding a sword in one hand. In the book, he sensibly tucks in his belt.

Another complaint was that in book the Careers are all much bigger and stronger that the other Tributes (except Thresh). In the movie, the Career Girls didn't look one whit more redoubtable than Kat, perhaps less so.

In all, though, I found it a good movie and good entertainment.

Wasn't just the shaky cam that bugged me, but the production values in general. Aside from the scenes in the Gamemakers' control room -- which were legitimately cool, if derivative of Abrams's Star Trek and, to some extent, Minority Report -- everything looked pretty ho-hum.

 

I was thoroughly unimpressed with the design of the Capitol, for instance. It looked tiny. Like a winter ski resort in Utah or something. That scene where they pulled up in the train, and Peeta remarked about how "big" the Capitol was, coupled with the abject tininess of the Capitol in panoramic view, made me chuckle a bit. Where was the massive, pastel-colored, Huxleyesque monstrosity of a city that the books so aptly described? 

 

It's not often that I notice things like art direction, costume design, set decoration, and so forth in big-budget movies. I guess I've come to expect those things, and to take them for granted. But here, for the first time in ages, I noticed their absence.

 

 

The costume design for the interviews was pretty poor. They just CGI'd some flames on top of a shitty leather bodysuit and then on top of a chiffon dress. The author put a lot of detail in describing those dresses, was one of the few visuals she really set up in the books. Would have been nice to have a little more fidelity for that.


The movie overall was fun, but they really left out the angle about how the love story started out forced on both sides, then ended up seriously conflicted from Katniss. It was more like "Yeah, just run with this," then she actually fell for him. Also wish they'd have shown them eating more of the Capitol's food, there wasn't nearly enough in the movie to link the "Hunger" in the title into the story.

Read the other two books in the trilogy since seeing the movie. As somebody observed earlier, the third, The Mockingjay, is pretty "dark." However, by eschewing the Manichaeanism inherent in most popular entertainment--with clear cut "good guys" vs. "bad guys"--it is in many ways more true to reality, if you can use that term to describe a sci-fi novel!

I note they are planning the stretch the two remaining novels in the series into three movies. Well, I guess they gotta milk a lucrative franchise for all it's worth! I have to wonder how convincing Jennifer Lawrence is going to be as a teenager when she's 25 or thereabouts when they wrap up the series.

I haven't read the books, and thought the movie sucked. It dragged on and on.

The major reason I went to see the movie was because I liked Jennifer Lawrence so much in "Winter's Bone." Anyway, Jennifer just went up a whole row of pegs in my estimation. Evidently she had gotten some flak from PETA for skinning a squirrel in "Winter's Bone." Her response: "Screw PETA!"

Now i really love that girl!

Just got around to seeing The Hunger Games (great beach book and fan of jennifer lawrence). The movie was terrible in its own right and an awful adaptation of the book.
Edited by marblehouse - 4/21/12 at 9:32pm

I finally went and saw it last night. I wanted to like it more than I actually liked it. I can see now how people who hadn't read the book would have said "WTF is going on?" in the movie--it was more like a highlight reel of major scenes in a much, much longer movie. I felt like there was hardly any character development at all.

Took my daughter to see it today. I haven't read the book but I could tell the story was very condensed. We saw so little of the competitors in the games that their deaths never really meant anything. None of the relationships felt like they had any real history or importance. I thought the action and the visual elements were handled pretty well. Jennifer Lawrence is a really promising young actress (and she got a lot of ass for a lil white girl too), Woody Harrelson is always great, even if he's a bit underused. Hell, I was surprised that Lenny Kravitz turned in a decent performance. I thought it was pretty much ok.