Hungry for More: The Hunger Games

I thought I would give it some time for the glory of the Hunger Games to settle down before talking about it. For those of you who have read the book, I think you will be pleased by the adaptation, it does a pretty good job of sticking to the story, with some slight tweaks to keep the ball rolling. 

The casting was relatively correct, I say relatively because, though I love her and think she is a tremendous actress, when I was watching the movie I was overcome by the fact that Katniss was just too big. She was about twice the size of some of the other characters and looked like the obvious winner. It was nothing that  Jennifer Lawrence, could do really, she played the part well, her facial expressions were perfect. But she was just…too old, and you could tell. In the scene where Clove is on top of her with a knife, all I kept thinking was, “dude you are twice her size, just throw her off you, there is no way she could pin you like that.”

I was pleasantly surprised with Peeta. He's not my favorite character in the book because he seems, well, weak compared to Katniss, and who wants a guy who's weak? Which is why rugged, manly Gale (though he did not fulfill my expectations but we will get to that in a sec) seemed like the obvious choice of a love interest to me. But in the movie, Josh Hutcherson made me root for him and, more than anything else, he stayed true to the character without overdoing the hopeless romantic stereotype.

Shout outs to the perfection that was Essie and Haymitch. Thumbs down to whoever style Gale, he was supposed to be rugged and poor, not a featured Abecrombie model with perfect hair and not a spec of dirt on his perfectly pressed white shirt. 

The cinematography was the other thing that got my attention. Rarely do I sit in a film and think, “Wow, the camera angles are awesome,” but that is what I was doing during parts of this movie. They did a great job of catching the essence of each moment – with the close ups when something serious was happening, and the longer shots to show how massive the capital was, the bleakness of the Districts or the intense landscape of the games. Some of the shots were just genius, keeping the story close to the audience and making it feel intimate, just like the novel. 

Can't wait for Catching Fire? Neither can I.