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.