FILM MARCH 27, 2012
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There are several spoilers in this review of The Hunger Games, and I’ll get them out of the way early. The film shows precious little hunger and no sense of game. It’s a terrible movie, but it grossed $68.25 million on its first Friday. So that’s where your teenage daughters were over the weekend—or what they told you. And that’s why film critics sometimes feel their own futility.
I know, or I have heard, that the series of books by Suzanne Collins, of which The Hunger Games was the first, have sold all over the world in amazing numbers since 2008. I am amazed and daunted, and I might have tried reading one of them if the movie had suggested anything perverse or interesting. Even now, I can see that the plot motif, of teenagers in a contest where they must kill one another, might threaten sentimental ideas of what children are or ought to be. But the only way this movie takes on that issue is to disguise it, in case it interferes with the commercial inevitability that came to fruition on that first Friday (known at Lionsgate, the film’s distributor, as Good Friday).
The film places us in a post-apocalyptic world, though there is no sign of how the end came and no trace of a toxic aftermath. So the apocalypse is just a pretext for a peasant community lorded over by an eccentric super race and their police force. The rulers have whatever technologies the script needs; the ordinary people have very little, except bread, humble virtue (as in silent cinema), and waiting for the lottery. Every year, the ruling class put on a show: Teenagers from the twelve districts are selected at random to engage in mortal combat. Only one will survive.
Katniss Everdeen (the names do seem to have been affected by fall-out) becomes one of the contestants when she volunteers to take the place of her younger sister in the Games. I gather that in the book Katniss is 16, but here she is played by Jennifer Lawrence, who is 21. A couple of years ago, this actress was the lead in Winter’s Bone, and just a year ago she did a good job in The Beaver. There were teenage girls at the Hunger Games screening I saw who were in raptures over the movie Katniss, but I’m disappointed. Lawrence has great ability, and the publicity says she got in shape for this adventurous role. Still, she looks as well-fed or un-hungry as a star player on the UCLA water-polo team, and as placid or chlorinated.
This could be a great role: a kid fighting for her life, meeting her first love, and trying to survive in the woods (they shot in North Carolina). The film should have suspense, fear, and desperation, all focused on Katniss, but Lawrence seems reserved and biding her time—she has signed on for all four films in the series, and her rewards must be stupendous. I hope she won’t forget that in Winter’s Bone, where she probably had little more than per diem money, she got an Oscar nomination for a portrait of rural courage and persistence. If you want a bold, dangerous young woman who can look after herself (and it’s easy to understand that role model appealing to our daughters), I’d still go for Rooney Mara as Lizbeth Salander.
The handicaps reach further. Before I saw The Hunger Games I had to watch a trailer for The Hobbit (coming at Christmas), and it’s clear that this return to Tolkien is going to indulge Peter Jackson’s eye for the romantic grandeur of wild New Zealand scenery. The forest is the essential setting for The Hunger Games and there is a lot of tracking through the trees. But it’s drab, a cheesy and unimaginative landscape compared with Jackson’s work or Michael Mann’s vision of the outdoors in The Last of the Mohicans. Katniss climbs trees to escape from marauders, but we seldom feel we’re in trees, and there’s very little animal life.
But the greatest shortcoming is in the matter of combat. Whether the filmmakers like it or not, this is a story about kids killing other kids with knives, bows and arrows, and anything else they can get their hands on. If you don’t like that violence, and if you fear it will jeopardize the box office, then don’t do the story. Instead, the woeful director Gary Ross has elected to present the combat as a mess of trembling hand-held close-ups, rapid cuts, and an overall blurring, so that in effect we don’t see the action. To my mind this is nearly un-American: From Ford and Hawks, through Sam Fuller and Anthony Mann, to Coppola and Scorsese, our cinema has reveled in what is called “action” and made it something close to a philosophy. But in The Hunger Games you feel these scenes are like ink smudged in the rain. Perhaps it was calculated to get a PG-13 rating; perhaps Ross is a chump as a director (he made a similar hash of Seabiscuit); perhaps the script, by Ross, Suzanne Collins, and Billy Ray (who wrote Shattered Glass) never settled on the level of terror or savagery it was trying for. $68.25 million in a day is not going to persuade them to try harder on three more films.
I grieve for Jennifer Lawrence to think that vital years will be given over to the drivel of this franchise. It is sad to see Woody Harrelson in a role that need not exist, when he is becoming an odd and compelling actor. Donald Sutherland’s portentous mastermind figure is as hollow and predictable as his other work in recent years. The only person I want to see again is Stanley Tucci, who is witty, exact, and wicked as a blue-haired commentator to the games—they are a television entertainment, of course, a reality show. Tucci is a treasure as an actor. If he’s in a film for a minute, you want to see it. He is also a very good director (Joe Gould’s Secret), and I wish he had the freedom or the resources to do more things like that.
No one begrudges films that make more money than sense. There have always been such wonders on the screen—like Lawrence of Arabia, Jaws, and Star Wars. American films are crying out for pictures with authenticity, screen originality, and unquestioned public appeal. Occasionally such a film shows up: Inception, Toy Story 3, and True Grit. The phenomenon of The Hunger Games is depressing just because you can’t feel its $90 million on the screen, yet we’re overwhelmed by the gold rush of its revenue. The latest news—$155 million on the first weekend—is like a Goldman Sachs number: unreliable, subject to change, and all publicity.
David Thomson is the author of The New Biographical Dictionary of Film and The Moment of Psycho: How Alfred Hitchcock Taught America to Love Murder.
37 comments
I haven't yet read the books nor seen the movies. As a non-religious believer from childhood, my morality was more shaped by stories such as HUCKLEBERRY FINN, THE OX-BOW INCIDENT, "The Lottery," LORD OF THE FLIES, 1984, MAD MAX, THE GOOD SOLDIER SCHWEIK, CATCH-22, and similar (mostly grim and dystopian) books and films than by the Bible or sermons. My initial reaction to hearing about THE HUNGER GAMES is that they strive to join such cautionary tales. Of course, such horror stories exist not just in imaginative literature. Turkey/Armenia, Hitler and the Holocaust, Stalin and the Gulag, Rwanda, and so on indicate that no matter what the worst horrors the human imagination can create in literature and film, the human imagination can and will create in reality. Yes, I repeat myself. How can we stand ourselves? Well, all we can do is carry on and try to do better. Do a good deed tomorrow and refrain from doing a bad deed.
- skahn
March 27, 2012 at 12:20am
This is the third review I've read of HG after seeing the film with my 11-year-old son who has devoured the books, and all three of you have nearly identical complaints: 1. The violence isn't graphic enough. 2. The scenery is visually uninteresting. 3. Jennifer Lawrence is to voluptuous to play Jatniss Everdeen. 4. Lawrence's performance was flat. (David Denby in NYer disagrees here, given JL applause, but otherwise his review is in line with yours.) I tend to disagree with just about everything y'all have said. Let's take it in reverse order: 4. Lawrence's performance was fine and as multidimensional as the script allowed. She laughed, cried, made sarcastic jokes, froze in the spotlight, ambivalently kissed a boy whom she liked but did not love, and grimly held it together while under constant threat. She portrayed all of this quite plausibly, and I reckon the whole "she was great in Winter's Bone, but..." line is nothing but laziness and sour grapes. 3. 16-year-old girls are physically fully grown, and Katniss is a particularly tough girl. Lawrence was thin enough for the role, and you critics' demands that she develop an eating disorder to satisfy your requirements for verisimilitude are uncalled-for and nasty. 2. I agree that the film was a little flat visually, but I think that's partly because we've been so spoiled by the digitally enhance wonderland versions of wilderness that we've forgotten what the real thing looks like when it is simply filmed. The woods of which HG's reminded me of weren't Lord of the Rings', but those in Deliverance which, if you think about it, is exactly right. 1. Come on. You wanted more gore? More thrills? The whole point of this story is that all the combatants are victims, even the ones who have been purposefully bred into teen psychopaths. There is not supposed to be any glory in their deaths, even when it's our heroine who has done the killing. The movie took no pleasure in the violence and that, it seems to me, was the whole point.
- AaronW
March 27, 2012 at 12:33am
too voluptuous
- AaronW
March 27, 2012 at 12:34am
Aaron, D. Thomson wasn't asking that there be more gore so much as that the action scenes be visually coherent, and not a blur of blood.
- Curran1
March 27, 2012 at 12:44am
Well, okay, and I admit that they did make fairly obvious, artless use of the Greengrass-Bourne-Identy-camera-jiggle technique when filming the action, but Thompson and the other reviews make a point of the filmmakers' requirement to angle for a PG-13 rating, the implication being that they chose not to treat the violence honestly for the sake of a buck. Personally, I saw all the violence I needed--or that I wanted my kid to see--and the death seemed more emotionally engaging than in most other action movies I can think of.
- AaronW
March 27, 2012 at 1:06am
I think Hunger Games II should feature the winners cookin' people on up and eatin' 'em on down. I do wish movies would live up to their titles. It seems this one pulled its punches. I see Billy Ray is involved in this drivel. He wrote and directed Shattered Glass, a fine, fine film about a serious problem at TNR years ago. The writing, acting, and directing are most excellent. I've seen it twice, and I'd watch it twice more. Unlike Hunger Games, it's not aimed at teens who have been weaned on the cartoon characters in video games. The people in it are real, and that's much scarier than anything in a cartoon. Check it out.
- magboy47.
March 27, 2012 at 1:47am
Strange how coal mining remains a primary source of energy in a future where holographic creatures with real physical capacity to kill & maim can be conjured up by game-masters out of pure electrons or some such wizardry...this, & other contradictions & absurdities sort of detracted from the verisimilitude to a hurtful degree, I thought. But Lawrence was great, & I also liked the bizaare costumery of the over-class - sort of a deadent, late 18th century Euro-trash look. My 12 year son old thought the books (he's read the first two) were better than the film.
- Haole45
March 27, 2012 at 2:06am
My biggest complaint is that Katniss doesn't kill anyone for whom we're rooting, only the teen psychopaths. My hunch is the books are grimmer about what Katness must do to survive. If Katniss were forced to kill one or two of the more Bambi-like kids, critics' other complaints would not have as much force, as to my mind, they do. I did enjoy the movie despite its shortcomings--again, katniss needs to be morally compromised as she is not in this version--and thought Lawrence did a fine job.
- dimbulb
March 27, 2012 at 4:31am
Oh, and by the way: this IS a children's movie.... Peckinpah is not for children.
- dimbulb
March 27, 2012 at 4:33am
"Peckinpah is not for children" -- Look, if you're making a movie that requires adolescents to kill other adolescents, with knives, spears, and arrows, until only one is left standing, you're MAKING a Peckinpah movie. I agree that's "not for children". That you 'sanitise' it to get a PG-13 rating doesn't change that.
- AllanL5
March 27, 2012 at 8:08am
"Not for children..." In Africa...Uganda, I believe..."Lord's Resistance Army," etc. ... you may find examples of children being trained and armed to kill. Certainly, real life examples of activities and experiences not for children. We don't have to invent a dystopian imaginary future. Experiences not for children are right around the global corner. Even here in the United States if you live in a neighborhood with Crips and Bloods. How can we ... etc.
- skahn
March 27, 2012 at 11:52am
Meh...I'll be waiting for this release on netflix because there's nothing that draws me to it enough to go see it in the theater. I think the issues that critics raise about the movie are legitimate though. If your movie franchise is based upon a book series of post-apocalyptic teenagers that are reduced to performing in man-hunting games to survive and the books are violent then why make the movies tamer than the book? Is the issue that because the main hero is a girl instead of a boy that the violence need be less so? Are we to believe that Katniss is disturbed by her capacity for killing another human if that violence is covered in quick cuts and flashy "Bourne Identity" action sequences? It gives the opposite impression really when there is no hesitation but an automatic, subconscious 'kill' mode we see on the screen vs. a teenage girl that is being forced into becoming something less human to say she's survived? This where Lisbeth Salandar was more believable in that we read and saw that struggle of surviving but also when violence as retribution or necessity was required. I can think of plenty of post-apocalyptic movies that teenagers have seen over the many years and the verisimilitude was more visceral even if you had to suspend disbelief and in many of these cases the protagonist had little in the way of character development that would have led us to have some sort of attachment to the character and their situation. Maybe the issue is whether or not the studio is just looking to cash in on the success of the book series or is willing to take the opportunity to make the franchise stand on it's own. Will it be remembered 15 years from now as a morality tale or just another failure in creativity?
- singlspeed
March 27, 2012 at 12:56pm
Well, singlespeed, I hesitate to post again in this thread for fear of coming off like some crazed Hunger Games fanboy which I am not. It wasn't a great film by any means and is squarely targeted at the youth market, however I think it is better than a lot of reviewers are giving it credit for being, and I do think it made more emotional sense than a lot of sci fi action movies I have seen. "Are we to believe that Katniss is disturbed by her capacity for killing another human if that violence is covered in quick cuts and flashy "Bourne Identity" action sequences?" No. The violence was "covered" in this way for the practical reason of not wanting to show it too graphically to the kids in the audience. Call it commercial cowardice if you like, but unlike these reviewers, I didn't think it detracted from the experience. The excitement of the movie was generated by the sense of threat, not by the tension and release of villains get their just deserts.
- AaronW
March 27, 2012 at 1:45pm
skahn: you're missing the point. This is art we're talking about not real life. Artistic representation requires aesthetic distance from reality in order to be digestible to an audience of either children or adults. We don't make snuff films. We introduce real life to children through art but we don't hand them all that they're not yet ready to see. That ten-year-old children are being enslaved and murdered in Africa (or in a basement in Des Moines) does not mean other children should be brutalized by depictions of enslavement and murder. Etc.
- dimbulb
March 27, 2012 at 2:44pm
Aaron, I wouldn't accuse you of being a Hunger Games fanboy. Do those exist? I appreciate your view as to why the studios did what they did. And I can see why the studio tried to tone the violence down for the particular audience it was geared towards. I can also understand them trying to make a block-buster franchise out of the books. It's to be expected I suspect that whenever a book is adopted to the screen, the inevitable "it's not like the book" comparison is trotted out. I had mixed feelings about the Girl w/ the Dragon Tattoo books vs. movie(s) and found the American version was far better than the Swedish version (which tried to be too true to the books and got bogged down). I also suppose there will be people who see the movies without ever reading the books. Maybe we can hold out some expectation that, having such great source material, they will make HG able to stand on its own as an interpretation of the books and not simply relying on special affects to fill in plot & character voids I think we'll have to see how the future volumes of the Hunger Games franchise evolves. I haven't read the books (yet) but I tend to give SciFi moves a lot of room to fail, mostly because i'm a sci-fi fan, but it is because I keep hoping for one to step up and really do justice to the genre & possible transcend it. I'm still waiting for a movie to top Blade Runner in that category, IMO. Maybe the studio will take a chance and make the HG trilogy something to watch for years to come.
- singlspeed
March 27, 2012 at 5:17pm
Dimbulb [I assume without sarcasm that you are a fairly bright bulb], thank you for your comment. Cogently or not, I was prompted to think of Shakespeare's bloodiest and most violent play -- Titus Andronicus. I can't help wondering if children attended the original performances of that play, often thought to be his first play and thought to be his attempt to compete with the violent "revenge plays" of 16th century England. For that matter, in those times, public hangings (with their charming embellishments such as "drawing and quartering") were quite a popular form of entertainment. Did children attend such "entertainment?" Did children attend the guillotines during the Terror of the French Revolution? My 8-year-old granddaughter (AE) (with two mommies) has been raised in an atmosphere of very positive, PC, and gentle censorship where het books and videos are very carefully screened and selected. [When she was about five, the mommies asked me not to read the CAT IN THE HAT to her because it instilled bad attitudes and disrespect. An obedient grandparent, I obeyed.) However, I was astonished on a recent visit when AE told me that in her second grade class (at her very exclusive and compassion-stressing private school) she had been learning about the French Revolution. She then explained to me (in some detail) about the guillotine and how it worked. Shortly after that comment, she looked at our hens (who live lives of great security and protection against harm and will never be consumed by their owners) and started thinking about how she likes meat and how sad it makes her how animals have to be killed so she can eat meat. We live in a VERY strange world.
- skahn
March 27, 2012 at 7:07pm
By the way, for anyone with sick tastes, you can find a still-photo/video montage on YouTube of the last operation of the guillotine in France. As a person who eats meat, I think (perhaps irrationally) that any human who eats meat should once in a while participate in killing his food. Just to remind ourselves that we are omnivores. [I have done so, though not very often.]
- skahn
March 27, 2012 at 7:10pm
skahn: I don't wish to be OVERLY protective of kids. They imbibe fairy tales fairly happily when we let them. I just see the point in age-approprite art. I've actually performed Titus Andronicus. Adults have a harder time stomaching it than kids probably would.
- dimbulb
March 27, 2012 at 8:04pm
But isn't the idea of teens set up to kill each other the scary thing, rather than any particular representation of it on film? I doubt I'm going to see the movie, but it does seem puzzling to make a film with that premise and then try to make it more palatable. I remember years ago a clueless cable channel showed the Coen brothers' Fargo at 5:30 p.m. or something like that -- the movie was one long set of beeps as all the effing and blinding in the dialogue was blocked. But the question was -- why on earth show that movie at that timeslot? It made no sense. Although, as quite a young kid I watched war (WW2) movies aplenty. 633 Squadron!! Now there was a movie.
- ironyroad
March 27, 2012 at 8:11pm
I watched this movie earlier today. Although I have no problem with Jennifer Lawrence's looks or acting, I agree completely with David Thomson's review. Terrible, boring movie. The un-American editor[s] should be banished.
- Konstantin
March 27, 2012 at 9:10pm
The Guns of Navarone! Where Eagles Dare! Shocking violence.
- noga1
March 27, 2012 at 9:10pm
My daughter (12) saw it with a couple of friends and they pronounced it the BEST movie ever. Better than Twilight! She read the trilogy and it was so good ... much better than the Twilight trilogy.
- noga1
March 27, 2012 at 9:17pm
Dimbulb, your comment makes a great deal of sense. Ironyroad, again teenagers kill each other all the time. Sometimes as "child warriors" in places such as Uganda and sometimes as gang members here in good old USA. The range of behavior, ranging from amazingly virtuous to amazingly vicious in human beings is ... quite amazing. (Obviously, my vocabulary is sinking fast.) Konstantin, I suspect that your review is a good reason for me not to see the movie. Now...about the books...is there any reason to read or not read the books? (Addressed to anyone. I am more of a book person than a movie person, anyway.) Noga, why did your daughter (and her friends) like the movie so much? I have to admit that I have always had a complete disinterest in the Twilight movies, so that does not give me much of a calibration point.
- skahn
March 27, 2012 at 9:47pm
skahn, the only reason I might read the books is that my kid is reading them and I wonder if given that they're about what they're about I should have some idea what in hell my son is filling his mind with. Given that you're, I think, getting on in years with no chicks in the roost--other than your actual chickens, that is--I wouldn't you have much reason to waste your time with the Hunger Games franchise. I wasn't bored in the movie. Maybe that's because I was seeing it through my son's eyes, and he was eating it up. As far as I'm concerned the most boring sci fi flicks I've seen, much more boring than HG, were Inception and the second two Matrix movies. I don't think I can stand to sit through another CGI extravaganza where the laws of physics get violated in every second scene and the final showdown involves a fireworks explosion of the same blue-green lightning we've been seeing since Ghost Busters. There was a little of that in Hunger Games, but not much. I liked the fact that in Hunger Games one of the heroine's central stratagems was simply to climb a tree. It kind of took me back to the adventure movies of the 70s like "Who'll Stop the Rain" that I used to see on Saturday afternoon cable when I was a kid.
- AaronW
March 27, 2012 at 11:05pm
I wouldn't think you would have much reason...
- AaronW
March 27, 2012 at 11:06pm
Aaron, thank you for the review. As a child and young adult, I read an immense amount of science fiction. I never could much get into science fiction on film. My wife, on the other hand, really glommed on to science fiction on tv and in film. One reason I might consider reading/viewing is my granddaughter. I thought her very idealistic and protective mommies would never let her in a thousand light years of the Hunger Games, but now I am still processing her simultaneous study of French Revolution & guillotine in 2nd grade and her slide toward being a vegan because of her sadness at butchering animals so we omnivores can eat. Which maybe has something to do with "hunger games," now that I think of it.
- skahn
March 28, 2012 at 12:02am
Ah! The Guns of Navarone. Now that's some movie. When I was eleven or so my mom was going to see it the local movie theater, the Apollo (gone, alas, these many decades) near where I grew up in Dublin and I pestered her to take me too. She said alright. I remember being a bit scared and excited at the film. There are some scenes that I still find pretty compelling. When the German patrol boat stop and searches the fishing boat which is the vessel the British commando unit -- sent to blow up two massive German guns on a Greek island that are guarding against a seaborne invasion -- is using to get to the island. It's incredibly suspenseful and I still tense up knowing that the guy has the machine gun under the blanket he's pretending to sew. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjMrIj9cO68&feature=related The funny thing is, I look at it now and wonder what my mother was thinking during the film. There's another scene when the group discover that one of the two women in the local Greek resistance is a traitor working with the Nazi occupation forces. They can't let her go -- she'll betray the mission for sure. They can't keep her prisoner. David Niven and Gregory Peck have an argument over who's going to shoot her. David Niven doesn't want to do it (he thinks Peck is the officer in charge, it's his deal). Neither does Peck. Nobody else wants to do it. Peck does it.
- ironyroad
March 28, 2012 at 1:07am
I don't think the movie lacked the courage of its violent premise. I fault the movie more for the premise itself, which is highly distasteful and not adequately justified by allegorical or thematic purpose. The idea of a kiddie battle royal to the death is not only gross but unconvincing as any sort of vision of the future or commentary on the present. Its purpose as a story seems too close to its purpose *in* the story -- entertainment, thrills. Maybe the book makes a better case, but the movie, if it weren't so boring and silly, would seem exploitative and perverse. Like most Hollywood action movies, it speaks out of both sides of its mouth when it comes to violence. It's bad, sure, but it's exciting too, especially when wielded by a pretty young girl, an icky recent development in mainstream fare. I'd like to see someone call b.s. on this detente in the gender wars whereby naive, shallow feminism (Girl Power!) is aligned with the appetites of covert sickos. A mild introduction to the male gaze: for the 40 percent male audience last weekend (yes, 11-year-old boys included), Katniss's sex appeal, due in small part to her stoic toughness and lethal competence, was far and away the main attraction. This is a Pyrrhic victory for women and girls. It reminds me of a 30 Rock I saw recently where Liz complains on feminism grounds that there aren't enough women on death row, and where are the female serial killers? Maybe, dare I suggest, sexy violence shouldn't feature prominently in children's entertainment. I saw another movie the same day about a determined youngster who gets knocked around, who commits acts of violence, who dodges death up a tree in the woods. It's a beautiful French movie called The Kid with a Bike. The kid is a real kid (not a 21-year-old playing a 16-year-old). In fact, he's 11. His mother is gone, his pathetic father wants nothing to do with him, and he lives in an orphanage. He desperately seeks his dad, and then desperately seeks a father figure in the wrong places. Meanwhile, a hairdresser played by the gorgeous Cecile de France (Hereafter) offers a more affecting picture of female toughness -- really, human toughness -- that puts the film's men to shame, one based on the draining work of caring. She takes the kid in, at first on weekends, and, without thinking, she finds herself committed to him totally as a good parent would be -- this despite the fact that the damaged kid is no angel, and she has to do battle, sometimes literally, to save him. The Hunger Games is poorly shot (with a needlessly nausea-inducing jittery camera), and is hampered by bland music and ugly fake-looking effects and design. In The Kid with a Bike, the camera moves, but it doesn't have to shake in order for the film to be convincing. When the kid does commit violence -- with a bat, with a knife -- it's awful and heart-wrenching, as it should be, as it would be in life if someone we knew were involved. No trace of titillation -- not like the violence in the video games the kid plays with a slickly charming local gang leader, or the 20-odd violent deaths of children depicted in The Hunger Games (rated PG-13). The only music, and really only obvious directorial affect, consists of the first few bars of the slow movement of Beethoven's fifth piano concerto, repeated at strategic points in order to convey the possibility of grace, before the piece is allowed to continue over the closing credits. That word -- "grace" -- describes this movie perfectly. The theater was full for The Kid with a Bike, but it was the smallest theater at the multiplex, and it was full of senior citizens. This is a movie about a kid that maybe kids should see too, one that doesn't congratulate itself on its hard-boiled view of jaded, over-sexed youth (another unpleasant recent trend), but instead, like another French film The Class, depicts kids and adults' relationship to them with compelling honesty and sensitivity. After seeing The Kid with a Bike, I was ready for some mindless entertainment with The Hunger Games, and I wanted to see what the fuss was about, but I didn't realize quite how mindless it would be. It's not really soul-deadening, but it's not encouraging either, and, when it comes to both craft and purpose, it's disheartening to see such a mediocre effort do so well.
- JakeH
March 28, 2012 at 3:02am
Jeez, you make yourself sound quite bloodthirsty in your disappointment at not seeing teens kill each other in sufficient detail. I guess Lionsgate owes you your money back. Oh, and please don't make any movies.
- floydsm8
March 28, 2012 at 1:37pm
"David Niven and Gregory Peck have an argument over who's going to shoot her. David Niven doesn't want to do it (he thinks Peck is the officer in charge, it's his deal). Neither does Peck. Nobody else wants to do it. Peck does it." No he doesn't. It's Irene Papas' character who shoots her just as Peck is preparing to do so, thus excusing him from the duty to kill an unarmed young woman in cold blood. Funny that you should remember your mother in connection with this movie. I remember My mother being so impressed with the movie that she told me the story in detail the morning after she had seen it (Heichal theatre, Petah-Tiqva, no longer exists).
- noga1
March 28, 2012 at 5:45pm
Oh. Funny I had forgotten that, about Irene Papas. The Greek resistance were two guys in the novel, I remember that, altered to two women in the film. Goodbye Heichal theater, Petah-Tiquva; so long, Apollo theater, Dundrum.
- ironyroad
March 28, 2012 at 6:10pm
Not seen the movie, read the books. The first book (Hunger Games) was good, the others, not so much. By good, I don't mean to classify them it great literature, but it was an engaging story that built a world that held throughout the book, and a believable heroine.
- NR409654
March 28, 2012 at 7:05pm
You couldn't imagine a more stereotypical, black haired, implacably fierce, Greek resistance fighter woman than Irene. http://www.wearysloth.com/Gallery/ActorsP/13378-7848.gif This is just for nostalgia's sake: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HoGu8B1bNJQ I loved Alistair MacLean's novels but not those he wrote towards the end of his life. They became too formulized.
- noga1
March 28, 2012 at 7:07pm
p.s. I should have said, "in *no* small part due to her stoic toughness and lethal competence."
- JakeH
March 28, 2012 at 7:25pm
Why are so many of the titles of TNR's articles are presented as a question?
- noga1
March 28, 2012 at 7:59pm
I don't think "Why I hate The Hunger Games" is a question, strictly speaking.
- ironyroad
March 29, 2012 at 2:13am
The only film worse than The Hunger Games is The Deep Blue Sea.
- pyannone
April 8, 2012 at 5:23pm