The Hunger Games

I was just taken out on a date by my friend, Kris.  It was a girl date and it was so sweet of her to treat me.  I had such a great time!  I was expecting to eat something totally giryl like... fruit and cheese, but she was totally down for burgers at Red Robin.  Then, we went and watched The Hunger Games.

I have left the theater in tears on more than one occasion when I've watched a movie based on a book I love.  The Queen of the Damned and Memoirs of a Geisha, to name two.  After Memoirs of a Geisha, I kind of avoided movies made from books I liked.  They were always disappointing.  Even the Harry Potter movies.  Don't get me freaking started on the Percy Jackson movie.

The Hunger Games was pretty good.  I didn't leave the movie frustrated or disappointed.  There is really only one scene from the book I missed, which was the scene when Katniss is starving and the people of District 11 scrape up money to send her bread.  I felt it was important because it was mentioned that was the first time a District sponsored another tribute.  Also, I don't think they really stressed that people were STARVING in the districts, the outlying districts especially.  Katniss hunted because she had to feed her family and she did it because she almost died from starvation.  They show Peeta giving Katniss the burnt bread, but they don't show WHY.  From the movie, it seems he gave her the burnt bread because she was sitting in the rain.  She was sitting in the rain because she had basically given up and she had fallen on  that spot and couldn't get back up, weak with hunger.  He burnt the bread on purpose, getting beaten by his mother for doing so, and then gave her that bread.  That bread gave her hope and the next day she started to hunt.  Rue was from district 11, the farming district, yet she often went to bed hungry.

When I try to explain the book to people "There is this game see?  And each district has to give 2 tributes to fight to the death on tv.  Oh the tributes are kids." people always give me a weird look. Especially after mentioning that it's a Young Adult book.  Seeing the violence on the big screen was pretty disturbing.  Even though I knew Cato snaps that kid's neck, seeing it happen made me cringe.  I knew there was a bloodbath at the Cornicopia, seeing it made me feel queasy. 

There were also elements that they added that I liked.  I'm usually a stickler about a movie never straying from the book, but I liked that they added the scenes of the game control room, even though watching them torture kids with a smile on their face was disturbing.  I also liked that the dogs were regular dogs, not Capital Mutts, made to look like the dead tributes.  That, by fa,r was the most disturbing part of the book to me.

Overall, they did a phenominal job. I realize that there could have been so much more backstory, but it's hard to do. The movie was alreayd 2.5 hours long!!