The Hunger Games
by
Suzanne Collins
Made into a movie starring Liam Hemsworth better known for his sometime association with Miley Cyrus. The other ‘man’ is Josh Hutcherson who has a much larger acting experience and the girl at the centre of it all is played by Jennifer Lawrence. Picked up a copy of the DVD but decided to read the book first so back to it. By the way the individual books are a better buy in E-Book Format than the trilogy as a whole.
To stick with movie terminology for a moment this is a high-concept novel written for young adults. Bucking the trend toward paranormal romance involving werewolves, vampires, and other magical creatures the people here are real but the reality they inhabit is a distopian society of an imaginary future. Genre bending it plays like a Reality TV Show the action playing out in the present with constant flashbacks to the past. Whether this be intended as a parody in the manner of Orwell’s 1984 is unclear.
The gender neutral names given the teens leaves their sex in doubt for several chapters however it soon becomes apparent that basic survival is nore important than romance here. Despite the hype surrounding Liam Hemsworth his part in the movie is played down even more than the character Gale in the book. As Jennifer Lawrence says in an interview in the supplements disk movie scripts tend to ruin the book. The reality TV Show analogy is apt, the action being to a large degree scripted, in this case totally so.
The book and the movie are so intertwined I’ll do a single blog entry regarding both. Whereas a book tells you how it happened, a movie shows you; therefore a scene that may take several pages to set up in text passes in seconds on screen. On the other hand before CGI things the imagination can do are damn near impossible sometimes on screen. Holllywood loves young romance so it could not resist playing up the relationship between Peeta and Katniss.
Whether or not Suzanne Collins is aware of it the short story The Lottery by Shirley Jackson published in the June 26, 1948 edition of The New Yorker bears a striking resemblence to this plot line, or should I put it the other way round. The other parallel is The Most Dangerous Game based on a short story by Richard Connell that dates back to 1924 proving that there isn’t very much new under the sun.
To stick with movie terminology for a moment this is a high-concept novel written for young adults. Bucking the trend toward paranormal romance involving werewolves, vampires, and other magical creatures the people here are real but the reality they inhabit is a distopian society of an imaginary future. Genre bending it plays like a Reality TV Show the action playing out in the present with constant flashbacks to the past. Whether this be intended as a parody in the manner of Orwell’s 1984 is unclear.
The gender neutral names given the teens leaves their sex in doubt for several chapters however it soon becomes apparent that basic survival is nore important than romance here. Despite the hype surrounding Liam Hemsworth his part in the movie is played down even more than the character Gale in the book. As Jennifer Lawrence says in an interview in the supplements disk movie scripts tend to ruin the book. The reality TV Show analogy is apt, the action being to a large degree scripted, in this case totally so.
The book and the movie are so intertwined I’ll do a single blog entry regarding both. Whereas a book tells you how it happened, a movie shows you; therefore a scene that may take several pages to set up in text passes in seconds on screen. On the other hand before CGI things the imagination can do are damn near impossible sometimes on screen. Holllywood loves young romance so it could not resist playing up the relationship between Peeta and Katniss.
Whether or not Suzanne Collins is aware of it the short story The Lottery by Shirley Jackson published in the June 26, 1948 edition of The New Yorker bears a striking resemblence to this plot line, or should I put it the other way round. The other parallel is The Most Dangerous Game based on a short story by Richard Connell that dates back to 1924 proving that there isn’t very much new under the sun.
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