shipperx | The Hunger Games

Article about The Hunger Games:

Excerpt:

What's the appropriate soundtrack for kids killing kids?" Entertainment Weekly asks in regard to the soundtrack for the highly-anticipated movie The Hunger Games that premieres in the U.S. on Friday, March 23. If you're a grown-up, maybe you're appalled by that question. And maybe you'll be even more appalled to know that millions of young people are so excited about the premiere that they've already made the movie one of the top-selling films ever on Fandango.

But before you choose to be appalled by a work of fiction or by a film adaptation, it's good to know that the concept that fuels The Hunger Games is both unthinkable and ever-thinkable, since it's a story that seems to get told over and over again. Equal parts dystopian classics like 1984 and Brave New World and pop-culture barnburners like Death Race 2000, The Running Man, and the Japanese kid-slaughter Battle Royale,

The Hunger Games reflects our secret and not-so-secret fears, which helps explain why it has captured more young readers than any recent books that don't feature Harry Potter or sparkly vampires {...} Setting aside whether something is good or not so good (Twilight in my estimation is not so good, and yet there are screaming audiences for it), people are often drawn to a work at a given moment because it exudes a peculiar relevance for them {...} that help explain why Publishers Weekly called The Hunger Games "the right book at the right time."

The Hunger Games is a powerful metaphor for the Great Recession, for this moment when even younger readers may be aware that their parents or older siblings are struggling to make ends meet in an increasingly dog-eat-dog economy. It's only a slightly-exaggerated look at our "reality TV" culture. And it reflects our long-running military adventures {...}

Some of the early reviews (of the movie) from England tell us what the book and the previews have already shown us: that, as The Guardian put it, "the America of The Hunger Games looks a lot like the 30s Depression." And that vision of economic hardship is as it should be -- a narrative that shows young people competing to the death against each other so that those they love can have enough to eat is just a more-violent version of the Ayn Randian capitalism {...} God help anybody who falls under the wheels, because nobody else will.

Panem, the nation where The Hunger Games takes place, is the Latin word for "bread," and clearly related to the Latin phrase "panem et circenses" -- "bread and circuses." Author Suzanne Collins intended that The Hunger Games satirize our culture, where we watch "real life" on television and are thus distracted from our own real lives. As the Romans knew, if the people are entertained, they are less likely to notice {...}

An Early Review of the Movie:

An Excerpt:

{...} The film is set in the post-apocalyptic country of Panem, which is divided into twelve districts. Each year, every district must offer up a girl and a boy to take part in the eponymous games, a brutal fight to the death, which is screened across the country and controlled by an overseeing producer.

Katniss Evergreen (Jennifer Lawrence) a resident of one of the poorest districts, lives with her mother and younger sister Primrose. Unable to find work, she scours the countryside for food, hunting squirrels and birds. When the Reaping, the selection of the two entrants to the Hunger Games picks out Primrose and a baker's son Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson), Katniss offers herself as a volunteer in place of her sister. Peeta and Katniss travel to the Capitol. After five days of training, they are pitched against the other twenty two entrants, only one of which will emerge victorious.

Before the film has been released, there has been argument over how much of a debt the film owes to Battle Royale (2000), the Japanese film in which high school students are forced to compete towards the same grizzly outcome. Yet while The Hunger Games does share certain similarities with Battle Royale, the scenario employed by both films is used to ask different questions about the nature of different societies. Battle Royale can be seen as a satirical take on the Japanese authorities' hostility towards a youth culture which it refuses to countenance or attempt to understand. The Hunger Games, on the other hand, is more concerned with the Western world's relationship with violence and reality television.

In the run-up to the film's release, star of the film Jennifer Lawrence compared the film's subject material to the very public breakdown of reality TV star Kim Kardashian's marriage. This, a very tragic and supposedly private event, was knowingly recorded on camera and then broadcast for entertainment. In the same way that reality television is edited and staged to affect an emotional response from the viewer, in the film we see both Katniss and Peeta complicit in manipulating the audience to ensure their own survival.

Yet although the subject material is compelling, does it make for an entertaining film? The answer for the most part is yes. The film is not didactic and grants the audience the intelligence to grasp with the issues that the narrative is conveying. As the film's lead, Jennifer Lawrence carries on her good work from Winter's Bone, with a performance that mixes gritty stoicism with vulnerability, unable to withstand the realities of the horrors she is being asked to carry out in the name of public entertainment {...}