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The Party!!

Penelope at The Reading Fever put on an awesome party for some Utah book bloggers to go see The Hunger Games! We went to Chili’s for a late dinner, there was a raffle and I won the totally awesome The Hunger Games: Official Illustrated Movie Companion!  And my friend Miriam won a refillable cup.  Plus, Penelope got all of us Team Katniss bracelets that have the date on them. Thank you sooo much Penelope!! You rock!

And then, since we had assigned seats, we showed up to the movie 10 minutes before it started and I paid $7.50 for water and Reese’s Pieces. I wore all black with my Mockingjay pin.

The movie crowd was a little nuts.  There was lots of screaming during the trailers – especially The Host and Breaking Dawn Part 2.  Thankfully, they calmed down and were almost completely silent through the movie, well except for some screaming at ONE part :)  And some sniffling.  I sniffled a little too.  I think Enna came with lots of kleenex.

Movie Review

(Slightly spoilery.  But not much.  I mean, you’ve read the books, right?  I’m not gonna reveal more than the books.)

Wow. Intense and gruesome are how I described the movie to my husband this morning.  There’s a lot of blood and it’s almost worse just seeing the blood and the after-math of the violence than seeing it play out on screen because I’m sure my imagination is worse.  The costumes were amazing.  There was the extreme fashions of the capital and the poverty of District 12.  The costumes of District 12 reminded me a lot of World War II.  I was really excited to listen to the soundtrack of the movie and I was surprised at how little music there was throughout the movie.  A lot of scenes were just the actors talking – there didn’t need to be all this music to make you feel something.  The acting, especially from the teenagers, was amazing.  Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) and Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence) did an especially superb job portraying real and intense pain.  And the way they filmed it with the camera movements and editing made it feel like a documentary.  This movie is going to win awards.  Lots of them.

What blew me away the most about this movie was how similar the supposedly futuristic society is to ours.  The idea of celebrity, violence as entertainment, our obsession with luxury and fashion are all things we do now.  I know that the books have all these themes, but there’s something about watching it that really got to me.  When I sat and thought about it, it’s disturbing how close our society is to doing something like this.  At one point in the movie, all the tributes are brought out on horse drawn chariots and it drove home the point that as a society we HAVE done something like this before.  History can repeat itself.  When I left the theater, I deeply felt how disturbing it is to watch violence and call it entertainment.  A lot of movies have tried to accomplish that before, but this is the only movie where I felt like it came across to the point that I wanted to change.  There’s a scene in the movie where Haymitch is watching these kids play with a toy sword and the brother chases his sister around with it while the parents laugh.  Talk about an eye opener.  There are so many little things in this movie that make you feel like all of this is so wrong.  Gayle points out to Katniss at the beginning that if no one watched it, there wouldn’t be a Hunger Games.  And Katniss says, “But they won’t stop.”  But I’m going to.  I just don’t feel like watching violent movies anymore.

I loved this movie.  It made me think deep thoughts, it was so moving and amazingly well done.  What did you think?