Bell and Whistle Cage Match: Movies

Qualifications for entry: movie must have been release last November and either a) star someone with the last name "Hemsworth" or b) be based on a book with the word "Game" or "Games" in the title.

The contenders:

 vs.vs.

That's right, kids, a three-way showdown!

Fight!

Hunger Memes

You know what that last post was lacking? Memes.

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That's "All My Thoughts On The Hunger Games Jumbled Together In One Post." Spoilers, or something.

It's 12:20 AM, and I've got fifty pages left in Mockingjay. A certain firebomb has just gone off in the Capitol (you who have read it know what that means). I have to get up at 6 AM. Do I push through, stay up an hour or two longer to finish, then just be a wreck the next day? Do I risk simply not being able to keep my eyes open and falling asleep with twenty pages left? I opt to save it for later, so I can plow through until the end in one big chunk.

The first thing I do when I get in to work the next morning, after answering the two or three emails waiting for me, is finish the book. This proves to be a mistake, as I can't concentrate on anything else for the rest of the day, and keep going over the ending in my head, trying to make sense of it.

I don't think I've ever read a book which changed tone so quickly. At 100 pages left, it's a war thriller; with 50, a shock; at 10, I have resigned myself to the fact that it's a deeply depressing book about the futility of struggle, mired in the inhuman morality which infects all the characters. Then, on the next to last page the tone of the book completely turns and it ends with one of the most hopeful, positive endings you could ask for.

(If you disagree on that last point, I'll explain myself at the end.)

The Hunger Games

Well, I might as well turn this blog into an archive of my comments on other sites. I recently (as in, five minutes ago) commented on a Video Game/Entertainment website's forums about the Hunger Games and thought I could expand on what I had said a bit more here. I write, after all, not for your benefit, but because it's cathartic for me; it helps me develop my thoughts into something tangible and releases the roiling pressure of the ideas imprisoned in my head.

So, the question posed on the forum was "what did you think of The Hunger Games?" The emotion bubbling under the surface of my thoughts since I caught it on Blu-ray, like, the day after release (thanks, Netflix!) was that I hated the movie. Not because it was bad, but because, I realized, it was true. Every bit of it was true. In fact, I nominate The Hunger Games as Exhibit B for the argument that something can be, in every sense, counter-factual and at the same time be, in every sense, entirely true.

So how was it a true story?