Escape to the Movies: The Hunger Games

rayen020

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May 20, 2009
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you know i don't see a whole lotta movies in theatres so i might be slightly biased, but it wasn't bad. I don't know, bob actually says that and then reels off every minor and major flaw in a rant seemingly lifted from a yahtzee video with all the name changed.

For my money. i got a decent if somewhat predictable story, that does have some gut wrenching moments even if it's just cause seeing a youngish child die hurts me in a way i can't quite understand. It does surprise you at times but not in a way that makes you "OMG!". It's a par for the course movie. Fans made the base 155mil but i feel it earned that.

About the flaws though, the shaky cam is something that annoyed even my wife a person who really really liked the movie and is not particularly movie savvy. Neither of us really liked the ending cause it seemed like the writer punked out at the end to start a franchise (they should have died, and epilogue about the uprising that overturned the current order, or at least ended the hunger games, would've made more of a statement). And for me the dark lens causes problems. I can see that they're trying to make the world seem drab and repressed but they succeed so well, the movie comes out very bland. Every costume, even the bright ones, feels like it's been stored in an attic for too long. and the same dark lens that the first twilight movie felt it needed to have is used constantly.

Woody Harleson is still playing Tallahassee which is kinda unfortunate since there are no zombies to kill. Wes Bentley wants to be Zuse from Tron but the story won't let him. And Katniss and Peeta are seemingly dead until the games, at which point i think they're kinda fun.

Overall a decent movie, something to be watched with popcorn, just make sure you get the big tub because it is a loooonnnnng movie. All of the flaws in the movie seem to be constraints and interpretation of the the book, so i guess its a good adaptation. And bobs is absolutely right the bad guy government is tremendously stupid in an unfathomable way.
 

verylost

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DeaDRabbiT said:
verylost said:
DeaDRabbiT said:
I think Bob set out to dislike the movie. I also don't believe Bob read the source material. Almost everything he complained about are things expressly put forth by Suzanne Collins' vision.
If he has to read the book to understand the movie then what's the point of seeing the movie exactly?

DeaDRabbiT said:
Normally I'm all for people having their own opinions, but I do find it annoying when someones opinion wreaks of an opinion chosen specifically to be counter to the majority opinion. That's just my opinion.
Or he just disagrees with the majority opinion that is possible right?
As far as your first query, is that a serious one? I mean If he had read the book, he would have known that there was a deeper meaning to Katniss being named Katniss (other than it just being future shtick) and if he had read the books, he might have a better understanding of why it's not inconceivable that the Capitol government would not be concerned that some of the youngest citizens of the 12 districts are being trained to be savage warriors IE: They aren't supposed to be training to be savage warriors, they are supposed to be starving, and only privy to training the week before the games.
eh? her name has a deeper meaning ok then they should explain it in the movie somehow. I shouldn't have to read the book to get different concepts of a movie. Its like if they started Harry Potter right when he got to hogwarts and essentially said "you want the backstory? Read the book"

DeaDRabbiT said:
In regard to your second comment, like I said, when it's someones prerogative to have a counter opinion just for the sake of having a counter opinion. That is a situation in which I find that person annoying. And in the case of "The Hunger Games" it's very tempting to shit on something, just because everyone else seems to love it. Hence the 85% on RT, and Bob's smug ass being all "I don't see what all the majority hub bub is about, this movie is shit."

I usually agree with Bob, but in the end I think he is just trying to be difficult about this film. I think if everyone shit on this movie, he would probably be giving a glowing review. That's just what I took away from this review.
COMPLETELY ignoring what I said which is "he could actually not like the movie". it has an 85 on Rotten tomatoes but a 67 on Metacritic which aggregates both Positive and Negative reviews. and he never said it's shit he said its just ok.
 

Raso719

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May 7, 2011
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Dear Hollywood.

If you're gonna have 2 dudes who have the same hair color and the same hair cut wrestle each other in the same outfit on a darkly lit set HOLD THE FRACKING CAMERA STILL! HOLD IT STILL! HOLD THE DAMN THING STILL!

Sincerely,
Me.

PS: The same goes for any action scene to be honest.
 

eljawa

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Nov 20, 2009
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I heavily disagree with Bob on this review. The movie's biggest issue is the slow pacing of the actual hunger games and the way that the love triangle feels inserted and unnatural. The shaky cam, in my opinion, helped to create the feeling of chaos that Katniss would have felt, where as carefully staged action sequences bob prefers would have implied that Katniss was a professional fighter.

The first 90 or so minutes of the film are fantastic. The scenes of the tributes getting interviewed, the atmosphere in district 12, Jennifer Lawrence's acting, the tension felt as the games get closer, etc.

I do recommend this movie to people. It isn't the work of art it could have been, but it is still fantastic.
 

Alexander Bonney

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EnigmaticSevens said:
Alexander Bonney said:
EnigmaticSevens said:
I agree with your complaints towards the review to a certain degree, and I feel like maybe Bob was really just trying to vent steam at the young adult genre after dealing with the atrocity that is the Twilight series, but I feel like some of your comparisons were a little too highbrow for, like I said, a film derived from a young adult novel. I personally feel like not even the novel invoked such an extensive repertoire of subtle nuances as listed in your post. And yes, the similarities to other works are severe enough to warrant a comparison. The shaky camera shots were awful, and some of them were clearly there to make up for everything else the correspondent action scene lacked. Many of Bob's criticisms were very accurate, and to denounce the entire review, and his credibility as a critic... Well, to be frank, you're overreacting. A lot.
wolfgirl90 said:
Well, that's the rub, isn't? In order to review a video game, you have to play it. In order to review a movie, you have to see. But should a reviewer be expected to thoroughly research the source material of the material they are about to review? Eh...in most cases, that's a bit too much.

Now, I will say that I didn't really like Movie Bob's review, if only because his new found snarkiness is getting on my nerves (I don't know if it is a joke or not). Some of his complaints sounded as if he just making stuff up as he went along. And as a fan of the books, I could easily explain many of the so called plot holes (such as the issues with the Arena).
Hah! No my friend, this is a bit too highbrow: http://www.amazon.com/The-Hunger-Games-Philosophy-Blackwell/dp/1118065077/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1332654978&sr=8-1 Yet even many of the points made in these litany of essays make good points. It'd be a fallacy to write off young adult literature as 'without subtext and subtlety.' Most are written by adults and adults are ingrained with the desire to preach to children, if if it's done unconsciously. All cultural products reveal aspects of a civilization's psyche, even children's shows (dear god, Gullah Gullah Island?) Hell, if we tried hard enough, we could probably find some deeply spiritual shit in Barney.

Now make not mistake, the film has a litany of strikes against it (so little dialogue and so much room and need for it, an overly ambitious pace, a tendency towards anticlimax, a plethora of points where a tweak or addition in dialogue would've made for a much more intense impact). The issue I have with Bob's review is the fact that it's not a review, it's a litany of adjectives with no attempt at justification. It's laziness. A cheap set? How so? The production values seemed more than up to par save for those hideous CGI flames. A generic forest? My dear, what a pity, I'm sorry the trees were not in fact Ents and the great Pan failed to make an appearance. (Let's put aside the fact, than anyone who calls a forest generic, has a whole other set of issues. I'll agree that the handheld cam was annoying at times, but at least I can see the director's attempt at a sense of immediacy. However, I reiterate, the action sequences are not actions, they are shots of teenage children killing eachother, this should not be pleasant, coherent or fun for you, you should not enjoy this. Now THAT is the tone of the books, with all pretense towards subtlety tossed out the window.

As far as the responsibility of a critic is concerned, I stand by what I've said. You 'review' one movie a week. If one intends to call the end product a 'review' by a 'critic,' instead of "man voicing opinions with pictures in the background",it implies a measure of research. Should he necessarily read the book, no (though it's a possibility, I chewed through all three of the bastards in three days). However, she familiarize himself with the setting, the characters, and the intent of the author? Hell yes. The man who takes the time to pull together the information required for an episode of the Big Picture, can't simply sidle away from this responsibility. Ahh but one important caveat. This is by no means a fault of Movie Bob alone, this a fault in the way we've come to construct reviews of cultural products in general, be they games, books, or movies. This shit gotta change. I'll not deny a strong bias though. I have to read a great many academic journals, and while I hardly expect that level of research, I sure as hell expect a worthwhile attempt. To do other wise is to literally speak out of one's ass. Now that's cool if we're just chatting with one another, but if you want to call this a job and consider it professional? Get to work.

Ah, yes, let's make one thing clear. While the tone may be scathing, I'm not exactly hot about this. I'm certainly not going to, you know, make a petition that he change his review less I boycott all his further endeavors. At the end of the day, you'll see the film or you wont, you'll like the film or you wont, and you know what? That's perfectly okay, bubu. But I do feel this is an excellent time to open a dialogue on the above points.

As far as the film is concerned, it set out to create an entertaining visual companion to the novels, and it succeeded. Based upon its own merits, it's relatively meh but with a few good bits. I'm not sold on the idea that it need be anything else. That's how it plays out, that's how it makes a metric ass load of money. Would it make more if was more accessible, sure. Is Lionsgate hurting for the viewer ship of non-book fans? Nah. The plain fact is that books by and large do not work as films(to a completely satisfactory degree), books work as television shows. Made a goddamn show. For a book to film translation to succeed on its own merits, it need only retain the general thrust of the novel, eschewing all else, becoming something fundamentally brilliant, but fundamentally different. Unfortunately, that shit is risky, and Lionsgate is not financing risky, it's financing something that will placate fans who ate up 29 million copies of the first book in the series alone, and keep them coming back for more. It really doesn't need to do anything else, and that's a pity, but that's the truth.

As side note: I'm really not getting this confusion with Arena, and I'm distancing myself from the book as much as possible. Man pushes button, shit happens in the Arena. By this point, the brain should realize, "Hmmm... this is some sort of absolutely controlled, enclosed space." It's obviously finite, and it's highly manipulable. I did not need an architectural blue print to grasp that in the Truman Show, and it's really not necessary now.

Raharu Haruha said:
Alright, so answer me these:

If betting is allowed, why didn't we see WAY more care packages? Wouldn't sponsors be air mailing grenades in left and right?

If the point of the games is to entertain the upper class, then why put stupid things like poisonous berries in there? That's retarded.

Why were there things like squirrels and mocking jays? It seems like that would then give the contestants the ability to hunt for food and survive in the doom forever. It would be a more realistic game if all food needed to be fought for.

Why did they decide to wait for Katniss to come down from the tree? That seems retarded in a sort of evil super villain way. I think I would have kept firing arrows up there until I got her.

How did the boy... I forget... not get stung by bees?

What's the deal with the hair dresser? He seems more sympathetic to Katniss, but why?

Why didn't the dude with the funny beard listen to the dude with the white beard?

When crazy knife chick ran at Katniss, why didn't she stab her with one of her crazy knifes?
(1.) A definite slip, could've easily been explained with a TINY BIT OF DIALOGUE while Haymitch was chatting with the Sponsors. Air dropping items is ludicrously expensive, and becomes exponentially more expensive as the games wear on. It usually requires several obscenely rich sponsors pooling their resources to get most parachutes dropped.

(2.) Poison makes it risky. Yeah so and so was all boss during training, and he seems like a great fighter, so you invest in him. A pity the dumbass ate the spotted mushrooms.

(3.) You assume that hunting is easy. If I took a kid from each of the 50 states that comprise the US, how many of them do you think know how to hunt? 8, if you're lucky.

(4.)And you would've lost all of your arrows leaving your bow lovely and useless. Once that quiver is empty, it's empty, and hunting through foliage to retrieve stray arrows is not exactly an option when there's a dozen people around looking to kill you.

(5.)Got stung plenty, everyone got stung, thus the lull in the action. How else would a little waif of a girl have to time to doctor our mighty huntress for two days. Things effectively came to a standstill while the major threats slept of the venom.

(6.)No society is Always Chaotic Evil, a handful of folks are bound to realize that, "Hey, this is some pretty morally questionable shit, perhaps we should... you know, work against it and stuff."

(7.) He did, he simply erred in judgement. Why does Icarus fly to close to the sun? He was making a helluva show, things just got out of hand, and at the end, he panicked and conceded when he should've blow the upstarts to smithereens.

(8.) People tend to be rather averse to being stabbed, they wiggle and struggle a lot. Believe it or not, knifing a struggling target is not a simple matter. Shift your weight the wrong way, and what was once a struggling sap, is now on top of you, and angry.
Alright, so uh, yeah, you win. I went back and watched the review, and while I must say I am a fan of Bob's work and it is usually spot on, that review was exceedingly pretentious and roughly half of his complaints were completely illegitimate. My opinions don't usually sway because of a post someone made on a forum, but you were pretty spot on. I still think some of your comparisons were a bit extreme, but yeah, that review was pretentious as ALL fuck.

Not that the movie wasn't barely above average, if that. But it didn't deserve all the crap Bob flung at it.
 

Raharu Haruha

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Alexander Bonney said:
EnigmaticSevens said:
Alexander Bonney said:
EnigmaticSevens said:
I agree with your complaints towards the review to a certain degree, and I feel like maybe Bob was really just trying to vent steam at the young adult genre after dealing with the atrocity that is the Twilight series, but I feel like some of your comparisons were a little too highbrow for, like I said, a film derived from a young adult novel. I personally feel like not even the novel invoked such an extensive repertoire of subtle nuances as listed in your post. And yes, the similarities to other works are severe enough to warrant a comparison. The shaky camera shots were awful, and some of them were clearly there to make up for everything else the correspondent action scene lacked. Many of Bob's criticisms were very accurate, and to denounce the entire review, and his credibility as a critic... Well, to be frank, you're overreacting. A lot.
wolfgirl90 said:
Well, that's the rub, isn't? In order to review a video game, you have to play it. In order to review a movie, you have to see. But should a reviewer be expected to thoroughly research the source material of the material they are about to review? Eh...in most cases, that's a bit too much.

Now, I will say that I didn't really like Movie Bob's review, if only because his new found snarkiness is getting on my nerves (I don't know if it is a joke or not). Some of his complaints sounded as if he just making stuff up as he went along. And as a fan of the books, I could easily explain many of the so called plot holes (such as the issues with the Arena).
Hah! No my friend, this is a bit too highbrow: http://www.amazon.com/The-Hunger-Games-Philosophy-Blackwell/dp/1118065077/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1332654978&sr=8-1 Yet even many of the points made in these litany of essays make good points. It'd be a fallacy to write off young adult literature as 'without subtext and subtlety.' Most are written by adults and adults are ingrained with the desire to preach to children, if if it's done unconsciously. All cultural products reveal aspects of a civilization's psyche, even children's shows (dear god, Gullah Gullah Island?) Hell, if we tried hard enough, we could probably find some deeply spiritual shit in Barney.

Now make not mistake, the film has a litany of strikes against it (so little dialogue and so much room and need for it, an overly ambitious pace, a tendency towards anticlimax, a plethora of points where a tweak or addition in dialogue would've made for a much more intense impact). The issue I have with Bob's review is the fact that it's not a review, it's a litany of adjectives with no attempt at justification. It's laziness. A cheap set? How so? The production values seemed more than up to par save for those hideous CGI flames. A generic forest? My dear, what a pity, I'm sorry the trees were not in fact Ents and the great Pan failed to make an appearance. (Let's put aside the fact, than anyone who calls a forest generic, has a whole other set of issues. I'll agree that the handheld cam was annoying at times, but at least I can see the director's attempt at a sense of immediacy. However, I reiterate, the action sequences are not actions, they are shots of teenage children killing eachother, this should not be pleasant, coherent or fun for you, you should not enjoy this. Now THAT is the tone of the books, with all pretense towards subtlety tossed out the window.

As far as the responsibility of a critic is concerned, I stand by what I've said. You 'review' one movie a week. If one intends to call the end product a 'review' by a 'critic,' instead of "man voicing opinions with pictures in the background",it implies a measure of research. Should he necessarily read the book, no (though it's a possibility, I chewed through all three of the bastards in three days). However, she familiarize himself with the setting, the characters, and the intent of the author? Hell yes. The man who takes the time to pull together the information required for an episode of the Big Picture, can't simply sidle away from this responsibility. Ahh but one important caveat. This is by no means a fault of Movie Bob alone, this a fault in the way we've come to construct reviews of cultural products in general, be they games, books, or movies. This shit gotta change. I'll not deny a strong bias though. I have to read a great many academic journals, and while I hardly expect that level of research, I sure as hell expect a worthwhile attempt. To do other wise is to literally speak out of one's ass. Now that's cool if we're just chatting with one another, but if you want to call this a job and consider it professional? Get to work.

Ah, yes, let's make one thing clear. While the tone may be scathing, I'm not exactly hot about this. I'm certainly not going to, you know, make a petition that he change his review less I boycott all his further endeavors. At the end of the day, you'll see the film or you wont, you'll like the film or you wont, and you know what? That's perfectly okay, bubu. But I do feel this is an excellent time to open a dialogue on the above points.

As far as the film is concerned, it set out to create an entertaining visual companion to the novels, and it succeeded. Based upon its own merits, it's relatively meh but with a few good bits. I'm not sold on the idea that it need be anything else. That's how it plays out, that's how it makes a metric ass load of money. Would it make more if was more accessible, sure. Is Lionsgate hurting for the viewer ship of non-book fans? Nah. The plain fact is that books by and large do not work as films(to a completely satisfactory degree), books work as television shows. Made a goddamn show. For a book to film translation to succeed on its own merits, it need only retain the general thrust of the novel, eschewing all else, becoming something fundamentally brilliant, but fundamentally different. Unfortunately, that shit is risky, and Lionsgate is not financing risky, it's financing something that will placate fans who ate up 29 million copies of the first book in the series alone, and keep them coming back for more. It really doesn't need to do anything else, and that's a pity, but that's the truth.

As side note: I'm really not getting this confusion with Arena, and I'm distancing myself from the book as much as possible. Man pushes button, shit happens in the Arena. By this point, the brain should realize, "Hmmm... this is some sort of absolutely controlled, enclosed space." It's obviously finite, and it's highly manipulable. I did not need an architectural blue print to grasp that in the Truman Show, and it's really not necessary now.

Raharu Haruha said:
Alright, so answer me these:

If betting is allowed, why didn't we see WAY more care packages? Wouldn't sponsors be air mailing grenades in left and right?

If the point of the games is to entertain the upper class, then why put stupid things like poisonous berries in there? That's retarded.

Why were there things like squirrels and mocking jays? It seems like that would then give the contestants the ability to hunt for food and survive in the doom forever. It would be a more realistic game if all food needed to be fought for.

Why did they decide to wait for Katniss to come down from the tree? That seems retarded in a sort of evil super villain way. I think I would have kept firing arrows up there until I got her.

How did the boy... I forget... not get stung by bees?

What's the deal with the hair dresser? He seems more sympathetic to Katniss, but why?

Why didn't the dude with the funny beard listen to the dude with the white beard?

When crazy knife chick ran at Katniss, why didn't she stab her with one of her crazy knifes?
(1.) A definite slip, could've easily been explained with a TINY BIT OF DIALOGUE while Haymitch was chatting with the Sponsors. Air dropping items is ludicrously expensive, and becomes exponentially more expensive as the games wear on. It usually requires several obscenely rich sponsors pooling their resources to get most parachutes dropped.

(2.) Poison makes it risky. Yeah so and so was all boss during training, and he seems like a great fighter, so you invest in him. A pity the dumbass ate the spotted mushrooms.

(3.) You assume that hunting is easy. If I took a kid from each of the 50 states that comprise the US, how many of them do you think know how to hunt? 8, if you're lucky.

(4.)And you would've lost all of your arrows leaving your bow lovely and useless. Once that quiver is empty, it's empty, and hunting through foliage to retrieve stray arrows is not exactly an option when there's a dozen people around looking to kill you.

(5.)Got stung plenty, everyone got stung, thus the lull in the action. How else would a little waif of a girl have to time to doctor our mighty huntress for two days. Things effectively came to a standstill while the major threats slept of the venom.

(6.)No society is Always Chaotic Evil, a handful of folks are bound to realize that, "Hey, this is some pretty morally questionable shit, perhaps we should... you know, work against it and stuff."

(7.) He did, he simply erred in judgement. Why does Icarus fly to close to the sun? He was making a helluva show, things just got out of hand, and at the end, he panicked and conceded when he should've blow the upstarts to smithereens.

(8.) People tend to be rather averse to being stabbed, they wiggle and struggle a lot. Believe it or not, knifing a struggling target is not a simple matter. Shift your weight the wrong way, and what was once a struggling sap, is now on top of you, and angry.
Alright, so uh, yeah, you win. I went back and watched the review, and while I must say I am a fan of Bob's work and it is usually spot on, that review was exceedingly pretentious and roughly half of his complaints were completely illegitimate. My opinions don't usually sway because of a post someone made on a forum, but you were pretty spot on. I still think some of your comparisons were a bit extreme, but yeah, that review was pretentious as ALL fuck.

Not that the movie wasn't barely above average, if that. But it didn't deserve all the crap Bob flung at it.
Oh, why thank you. This doesn't happen very often for me either. And I really wasn't trying to anger you or anything. I was just making fun of this Movie Bob fellow in the same way he made fun of the film, so I probably came off as pretentious myself.
 

fieryhotaru

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Jan 3, 2010
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I agree with almost everything Bob has said. The camerawork was nauseatingly horrible and because of that I couldn't see the action scenes. What I really didn't like was that they never explained why they had the Hunger Games in the first place (except for a really vague text intro). After the movie was over, I had to ask my friends that question, and when they explained it, the whole movie made sense! That's not good that I had to ask my friends (who have read the books). The movie people should not assume that EVERYBODY has read the books. It was a good movie, though, but it could have been WAY better.
 

TheDrunkNinja

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It can be said that the Hunger Games is a rip-off of Battle Royale in the same way it can be said that Bob ripped-off Yahtzee's name-changing gag: Technically true but not really something to make a fuss over in the long run.
 

Disthron

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Hay, just saw your latest Game Over Thinker episode. You really aught to stop talking about things you don't know about.
 

DeMorquist

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Lets break it down...

1. You sound like Yahtzee
2. I guess you needed to ***** about something after 2 weeks of ZOMG SO FUNNY! reviews...
 

bobmus

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May 25, 2010
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I felt the movie did a lot of things right, but I have to agree that the action scenes were headache-inducing, and a lot of the subtleties of the books were lost in translation.
 

wolfgirl90

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Raharu Haruha said:
If betting is allowed, why didn't we see WAY more care packages? Wouldn't sponsors be air mailing grenades in left and right?
Sponsors pay money to send the gifts. The more "extravagant" they are, the more expensive it is to send them. And sending gifts gets more expensive as the games go on. Only the crazy rich can send gifts in the first place (Districts can send gifts if they can get enough money together) and increasing the price makes sending the gifts more difficult. The people can get involved, but its really about the kids fighting each other. It wouldn't be any fun if people were sending medicine and food all the time.

Raharu Haruha said:
If the point of the games is to entertain the upper class, then why put stupid things like poisonous berries in there? That's retarded.
Right at the start of training, they offer the Tributes a variety of training options, but there is only so much time to train. Its up to them to figure out which classes are worth taking. If you already know how to hunt, then there is no point in taking that class; you are just wasting time. If you miss the class on sword fighting, you are screwed when a sword fighter comes along. If you bypass the class on foraging (which includes what berries to eat and which ones to avoid), you are screwed when you find some Nightlock and you can't figure out if its edible or not.

Raharu Haruha said:
Why were there things like squirrels and mocking jays? It seems like that would then give the contestants the ability to hunt for food and survive in the doom forever. It would be a more realistic game if all food needed to be fought for.
If you can hunt squirrels and mockingjays, then yeah, you might be fine. But not everybody knows how to hunt. In fact, hunting for food is illegal in the Districts (Katniss constantly breaks this law), so there isn't a good chance that the kids have a natural talent for hunting; they have to learn during training (IF they elect to get the training).

Plus, you can only "survive" for a certain amount of time on food alone. The Gamemakers will see to that; they can control everything from the lighting to the temperature to the amount of water to the type of flora and fauna available to the Tributes.

Raharu Haruha said:
Why did they decide to wait for Katniss to come down from the tree? That seems retarded in a sort of evil super villain way. I think I would have kept firing arrows up there until I got her.
The Careers did try shooting Katniss, but they can't shoot like her. Its smarter to keep up their weapon stocks for hunting (and more killing) instead of trying to shoot her out of the tree. Also, at the most, they would only have to wait a day. In extreme conditions, one needs a lot water.

They could have climbed the tree, but the Careers are bulkier and heavier than Katniss.

Raharu Haruha said:
How did the boy... I forget... not get stung by bees?
Everyone got stung by the Tracker Jackers. Nobody escaped without being stung. However (and the movie doesn't mention this), they ran to the lake to escape, so they didn't get stung as much.

Raharu Haruha said:
What's the deal with the hair dresser? He seems more sympathetic to Katniss, but why?
Cinna may live in the Capitol, but he doesn't like the idea of the Games; he hates them in fact (its hinted in the books that he may not have been born in the Capitol, what with his lack of a Capitol accent and his muted fashion sense). So he supports Katniss in her endeavors. Now, there is some secret agent stuff going on here, but I won't go into that.

Raharu Haruha said:
Why didn't the dude with the funny beard listen to the dude with the white beard?
Seneca Crane (funny beard) is the Head Gamemaker. His job is to give the people what they want, to produce an entertaining Hunger Games. As he said in the movie, he knows that the people like a spunky underdog and a heart wrenching love story, so he wants to give the viewers that. However, President Snow (white beard) knows the dangers of underdogs and the spark of hope they represent, so he wants it stopped.

Seneca changed the rules for ratings, but changed them back when Snow told him too, so he did listen. However, Katniss did the unexpected by threatening double suicide. As Gamemaker, Seneca could have stopped this from happening, but he didn't have the chance to. This fact doesn't matter to President Snow, however....

Raharu Haruha said:
When crazy knife chick ran at Katniss, why didn't she stab her with one of her crazy knifes?
Because Clove is sadistic and crazy. In the book, she is described as being quite brawny. Katniss maybe faster than Clove, but Clove is stronger than she is; she overpowers Katniss quite easily. She is insanely good with a knife, so if she wanted to quickly kill Katniss, she could have done it easily.

However, she wanted to take her time killing Katniss. She wanted to give her a slow and painful death. Clove has hated Katniss from the beginning and she wanted nothing more than to torture her. This delay lead to her downfall.
 

Therumancer

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Nov 28, 2007
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Litchhunter said:
"Aimed at young teenage girls."
Hold up, what? I was not aware that a book series involving the forceful slaughter of youth, a dark as hell setting, with extremely gruesome deaths was aimed at young teenage girls.
Even the love story is dark, with Katniss having to play along as to not get herself killed.
Just because a certain group likes it does not mean it is marketed toward them.
As for the movie, I liked it. After hearing the review I kind of got the feeling Bob was judging it harshly because of the supposed main fanbase. Sure, it wasn't the best thing ever, but it was better than a lot of movies I have seen recently.
Actually, aiming at young girls is increasingly popular. All of this dark stuff tends to appeal to that gender and age group and has for a long time. It's a market ripe for exploitation and with things like "Twilight" and various paranormal romance series taking off, it's not surprising people have branched out into other generes to try and hit the same buttons in a differant type of setting, this series is the one that happened to succeed the best.

This is not to say that something aimed at young girls is ONLY read or enjoyed by young girls, just that it's the intended audience and how it was marketed. It's like someone enjoying Shoujo anime, it might be aimed at girls, but that doesn't prevent it from carrying a degree of universal appeal to science fiction/fantasy nerds of the other gender as well.

People talk about how many things this series ripped off, including me, but something to understand is that it gets away with that due to the target audience being too young to be aware of most of those sources. Your average 13-15 year old girl nowadays might not have ever seen "The Running Man" or read the book, and really something like "Battle Royale" is at best a cult classic, known to nerds, but not a more mainstream audience of tween and teen girls. That's where the money is coming from, so the books sell, and it's enough to carry the movie, the big moneybringers aren't making the same comparisons that people on "The Escapist" do because they just aren't equipped with the same types of experience to do so.

That said this movie gives me hope that we will one day get a movie version of Carlton Mellick III's "Zombies And Shit". A tongue in cheek story set in a dystopian cyberpunk future (with cyberware) overrun by zombies where a district seperated city arms poor people and sends them into the zombie infested world to survive the zombies and kill each other in competition to get to the single one seated recovery drone. No pretensions of tributes or social justice, they do it for the lulz and because it's fun. Unlike "The Hunger Games" it involves a knock down drag out fight between a fully cyber-converted Mr. T and an ophidian based super soldier.... and I mean that right there would make it 100% more awesome than The Hunger Games could ever be. :)

(( I'll leave it to your collective imagination if I'm kidding about the last paragraph... though I will be surprised if anyone here has read that besides me )).
 

Kingsman

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...Wow. This was NOT what I was expecting at all. This movie had a number of problems in it, but for the book it was based off of, a slow pace was NOT one of them. You want slow pace, you watch the first Harry Potter movie.
 

chadachada123

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I liked it a lot, and I'm going to get the books now since everyone is saying that the books were way better.

Obviously, I'd have absolutely loved if the movie could have been R-rated with more obvious gore, espcially in regard to the asshole kids, but I thought that they really, really pushed what a PG-13 movie can do, and was surprised to find out that it's only rated PG-13.

I also didn't find the movie to be slow-paced. It paced itself pretty well, I felt.

---

HOWEVER. The shaky-cam was absolutely horrible. It made the action scenes go from incredibly awesome to impossible-to-watch. Shame, too, because the scenes were pretty gruesome. Well, would have been, if you could make out what was going on during them.

Still, I'd see it again. I liked it. The only plothole in the entire thing that I saw was that, during training, the girl that ended up:
dying of nightlock-poisoning was the same one doing the training for flora very effectively. She either ate them on purpose (suicide to avoid being killed in a worse manner?) or it's a plothole.

Otherwise, I think that the movie was pretty good, well above average, though I guess average for THIS type of movie, which is already a great genre anyway.
 

FinalHeart95

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Now that I've seen the movie, I can say that I thought it was really good. The beginning felt a bit rushed for whatever reason, and a lot of the motivations in the books were left out of the movie (like explaining Katniss' fondness for Rue). Also, some of the action scenes were kind of hard to follow because the camera was basically being thrown across the screen, so that was annoying. Still well worth watching though. Planning to go see it again this weekend actually!
 

Tarkand

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I couldn't shake what Bob said about the show not being as interesting as they made it out to be.

This is cross between a reality show (such as Survivor) and Gladiatorial Combat.

But see, what's interesting in a reality show is the interaction between different people. Here, the contestants are mostly alone in the woods. They will not be much talking going on. Not to mention (and I apologize to the teenagers among us) but teenagers aren't exactly known for their dazzling conversational skill when in a relaxed environment... which this is nothing but.

Gladiatorial combat where violent orgy that lasted for hours on end... here, aside from the first 5 minutes of slaughter, you get sporadic 'kills' from time to time.

When Katniss wakes up from her 4 days 'sleep', she's told 2 people died... that's an awful lot of nothing happening for 'interesting stuff' ratio. During training, they are told how half of them will not die from combat, but from the elements.

So yeah... You're basically watching kids starve to death in the woods for hours on end.

And somehow, this is a hit TV shows? Even if the show 'highlite reels' - we basically follow Katniss for 1hours and there's slow part and pacing issues.


The other problem is that this is clearly written with the teenage's girl sensibility in mind.

We're talking about a culture that has been watching kids butcher each other for 75 years. Those people are cruel, sadistic and brutal. Much like the roman of old...

I do not think it believable that they would give a damn about a cute teen love story. I don't think they'd care for the whole 'I don't kill people because I'm nice' angle Katniss has going either... 'fighters' who refused to compete with notoriously unpopular and had crowds cheering as they got dismembered back in the gladiatoral pit.

When those people see a cute little girl like Ru enter the Games, they do not think how unfair it is for her to be put in alongside 17 years old killing machine... they think of how great it will be when that aryan looking asshole is parading her head on a spear. And what more, that is the socially acceptable reaction for them.

And we're supposed to believe they'd care about some lovey-doey love story between teenagers? Really?

This also make character like the black customer feels rather awkward... why is he nice? How did he get a job in such a high position in something so important when he doesn't share the ruling cast's opinion? Again, I'm assuming if you read the books, more about him is explained... but you shouldn't need to read a book to enjoy a movie.

EnigmaticSevens said:
(1.) A definite slip, could've easily been explained with a TINY BIT OF DIALOGUE while Haymitch was chatting with the Sponsors. Air dropping items is ludicrously expensive, and becomes exponentially more expensive as the games wear on. It usually requires several obscenely rich sponsors pooling their resources to get most parachutes dropped.

(2.) Poison makes it risky. Yeah so and so was all boss during training, and he seems like a great fighter, so you invest in him. A pity the dumbass ate the spotted mushrooms.

(3.) You assume that hunting is easy. If I took a kid from each of the 50 states that comprise the US, how many of them do you think know how to hunt? 8, if you're lucky.

(4.)And you would've lost all of your arrows leaving your bow lovely and useless. Once that quiver is empty, it's empty, and hunting through foliage to retrieve stray arrows is not exactly an option when there's a dozen people around looking to kill you.

(5.)Got stung plenty, everyone got stung, thus the lull in the action. How else would a little waif of a girl have to time to doctor our mighty huntress for two days. Things effectively came to a standstill while the major threats slept of the venom.

(6.)No society is Always Chaotic Evil, a handful of folks are bound to realize that, "Hey, this is some pretty morally questionable shit, perhaps we should... you know, work against it and stuff."

(7.) He did, he simply erred in judgement. Why does Icarus fly to close to the sun? He was making a helluva show, things just got out of hand, and at the end, he panicked and conceded when he should've blow the upstarts to smithereens.

(8.) People tend to be rather averse to being stabbed, they wiggle and struggle a lot. Believe it or not, knifing a struggling target is not a simple matter. Shift your weight the wrong way, and what was once a struggling sap, is now on top of you, and angry.
Since you have a good grasp of the movie/book, maybe you can explain one more...

Why is there a riot after Ru dies?

I understand why the viewers are supposed to feel sad. She's young. She's cute has a button. She's nice. She's essentially the hero's sidekick.

But did they not know she was going to die? Have they not been watching this show for 75 years? Is there a riot after a kid die in every district and they decided not to show us? If anything, Ru actually had a pretty clean death compared to some of the other kid.

She died honorably even. Which considered the unfairness linked to her youth in this competition, should make her family and district proud.

On top of that, compared to every single contestant that died, she has the closest thing resembling a funeral, given to her but someone who's the closest thing to a people's champion the lower class have. This should be a great honor.

But nope, they flip their shit.

Why? I can't help but feel there's a mountain of context missing for those of us who have not read the book.

And that is lazy film making. You do not need to have read lord of the ring to understand what's happening in the LOTR movies... and it's freaking LOTR, not some teenage girl book...
 

katsabas

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Tarkand said:
Why is there a riot after Ru dies?

I understand why the viewers are supposed to feel sad. She's young. She's cute has a button. She's nice. She's essentially the hero's sidekick.

But did they not know she was going to die? Have they not been watching this show for 75 years? Is there a riot after a kid die in every district and they decided not to show us? If anything, Ru actually had a pretty clean death compared to some of the other kid.

She died honorably even. Which considered the unfairness linked to her youth in this competition, should make her family and district proud.

On top of that, compared to every single contestant that died, she has the closest thing resembling a funeral, given to her but someone who's the closest thing to a people's champion the lower class have. This should be a great honor.

But nope, they flip their shit.

Why? I can't help but feel there's a mountain of context missing for those of us who have not read the book.

And that is lazy film making. You do not need to have read lord of the ring to understand what's happening in the LOTR movies... and it's freaking LOTR, not some teenage girl book...
It wasn't about her death. It was about her funeral being made by someone from another district, which from what I gather, doesn't happen very often. When the districts lost the war and the Capitol decided to start the Hunger Games, they didn't do this just for entertainment's sake. This was punishment and a way to make the districts direct their fury against each other, instead of planning how to start a revolution. Mob control at its basic.

Now granted, it took 75 years for them to reach that conclusion but still.

The other reason was that Rue's district afforded to go over the edge. Why ? Cause a pretty fair amount of barley and food in general that the Capitol needed came from that district. You can see that in the movie and President Snow also mentions this.

I didn't think the love story was cute. Cato (the guy with the sword) left a 10 year old in charge to guard their supplies. The supplies get blown up. What does he do ? He doesn't care about what happened, he snaps the little boy's neck without even blinking. That's the sort of environment the love story takes place.

And don't even start with LOTR. The core story is understandable, but there are a miriad questions on the side. Assuming you haven't red the book, would you be able to tell me how come Gandalf ended up at the top of a mountain after fighting the Balrog and falling to the bottom of Moria ? Or the meaning of Elrond's phrase 'Anduril, flame of the west, forged from the shards of Narsil' ? Or who do the giant statues in the first film represent ? Or the reason why Sauron can see through the Palantir ? And that's only some of the questions.