Some thoughts on The Hunger Games, the movie this time

Once I'd finished writing up my thoughts about the Hunger Games books, I went ahead and watched the movie. I have to say I wasn't overly impressed.

The major flaw of the movie is the same one I see in a lot of movies based on books: The movie never felt like a coherent story of its own, it was just the book on super duper fast-forward. Most of the important bits from the book are there, in some form, but they've been trimmed for time almost to the point of losing their meaning, and they go by so quickly that I have no idea how anyone who hasn't read the book will have any clue what's going on. All the scenes are there but nothing gets the time or attention it deserves. The entire alliance with Rue lasts ten minutes onscreen. The time Katniss and Peeta spend in the cave is just over nine minutes. The fire attack is less than one. Scene after scene it's the same thing: get the gist of it onscreen and then move on to the next one.

The loss of Katniss's internal monologue really hurts the story as well. So much of what's going on is only going on in her head, how she's feeling, what she's planning, especially in the arena where there can be no external dialogue because she's trying to hide silently. There's no real way around that when you're turning a first person narrative into a movie, but it still hurt the story. The filmmakers efforts to mimic the first-person perspective consisted mainly of trying to confuse the audience in a few places when Katniss was confused: Blurring the shot when she's knocked out by the explosion, or using extreme-closeup shakycam to turn a fight or a run through the woods into an incomprehensible mess.

One advantage to ditching the first-person is that the movie can have scenes that aren't from Katniss's perspective, and does so to great effect. There are several scenes between Gamemaker Seneca Crane and President Snow, and scenes in the Gamemakers' control room, that help move the story along. And a scene from District 11 after Rue dies that helps setup the situation we'll find there during the victory tour in Catching Fire. Several times the movie cuts away to Caesar Flickerman hosting the coverage of the Games so he can supply the audience with information that came from Katniss's internal thoughts in the book.

The filmmakers captured the look and feel of the world very well, I thought. District 12 looked wonderfully drab, except of course for the three incredibly beautiful movie stars who live there. The Capitol was a bit of a mixed bag, the first shots of it, the long view from the train and the shots of people in the streets, weren't as impressive as I was looking for, but the interior shots in various buildings looked very good. The arena looked good as well.

The acting was another mixed bag. I thought Jennifer Lawrence was good as Katniss, she communicated Katniss's mental state in a way that helped make up for the lost internal monologue. Josh Hutcherson is very bland as Peeta. Liam Hemsworth doesn't really do much more than pout a lot as Gale. The supporting cast is better: Woody Harrelson is very good as Haymitch, though the movie doesn't really touch on the more serious sides of his character. Lenny Kravitz is good as Cinna, for the minute or so he's on screen. Donald Sutherland is sufficiently creepy and slimy as President Snow.

Overall, while there were things I liked about the movie, it skipped so quickly through almost everything it did that it was ultimately unsatisfying. Though I see it made $155 million dollars this weekend, so what the fuck do I know?

Final grade: B-

This is what it's like to be a huge nerd

This originally began as a comment on the Blog of Doom, but now that I got this whole thing fixed, I guess I caught the posting bug again. Will it continue? Who knows! History suggests no!

So on Oscar night, I was reflecting on how much more interesting the awards were back when I watched more movies. Back in the 90s I used to go to movies all the time, and I'd see three or five at a time. I'd see practically everything playing that I had any interest in, and some stuff I wasn't really interested in. But in 2011, I saw exactly two movies in the theater - The Muppets and Harry Potter 8. And they weren't exactly nominated for a lot of big awards.

(As an aside, WTF was with not performing the Best Original Song nominees? Other than curiosity as to whether or not Billy Crystal hosting was still as good as I thought it was ten years ago, the "Man or Muppet" performance was the one thing I was really looking forward to on the show.)

So the thought occurred to me, yes I used to go to a lot of movies and now I go to few, but exactly how many more more movies per year was I watching at my peak? This called for quantification! This called for data! So I went on Box Office Mojo and went through the top 200 grossing films of each year and counted how many I had seen in the theater. Turns out my peak was 26 films in 1998. So question answered, but now I had a data set of every year I've been alive and how many movies I saw in the theater in each of them. I made a graph of it:

And since it didn't occur to me to note them all on my first pass-through, I went through the top 200 of each year again, to verify my data and to note down the films themselves. So now I have a complete list of every movie I've ever seen in a theater. I can tell you that in my life I've seen 201 movies in the theater, and that the 200th movie I ever saw in a theater was Harry Potter 8. The 100th was one of the 22 I saw in 1999. I can tell you that in the six-year period between 1997 and 2002 I saw a total of 105 movies, and that in the entire rest of my life I've only seen 96, and that at my recent pace it'l be at least 2014 before the rest of my lifetime catches up with that 6-year period.

Data makes everything awesome.