tea and hunger games.

[rmd]

If you enjoyed Professor Elemental's Cup of Brown Joy and want more rap about tea, check out Doc Brown's Angry Rap about ProperTea


So, I saw the Hunger Games movie last week and then went off and borrowed the book and read it. IMAO, the book has better worldbuilding, but the movie is much tighter - a well-done adaptation of the source material, I think. I have one question about the plot and one comment on the book/movie difference below, however, after an lj-cut as spoiler-space.


So, Peeta goes off and joins the career tribute alliance when the games begin. This seems somewhat out of character for him based on everything else we know. Is this just weirdly characterized behavior, or is it foreshadowing for something later in the series?

Also, the mutant dog/attack-critters near the end are much creepier in the book. I'm not sure it would've worked well on-screen, so it's a good call not to, but, yeah, creepy.

Comments

[donnad.livejournal.com]

I read the whole series in about 4 days.

I didn't see anything more about that in the other books. I think it was a "make friends and they are less likely to want to kill you right away" move rather than something the author was planning to build on. If she was planning more with that, it didn't happen.

I have not seen the movie yet, did they actually cut out the mutts? That seems odd. I can't recall which book so I wont say much more about it, but Katniss refers to them a couple times after the games.

[mizkit.livejournal.com]

They didn't cut them out, but they didn't make them obviously the dead Tributes, or even anything other than dog-like monsters. But rmd is correct in that it would've been really hard to pull it off on-screen, I think, though it was indeed creepy in the books.

[rmd.livejournal.com]

Yeah - they were just vicious hyena-like killer canine things. None of the creepy recycled tributes "Maybe Rue will eat your face off" stuff.

[solarbird]

Except.

They did acknowledge what happened in the book with the hounds, visually, very briefly, in that you get a brief but clearly intentional shot of what looked like awfully human eyes on one of the hounds.

I took this as a reference to what they couldn't do from the book, and I think taking it out was the right call - as a fan. It wouldn't've worked on screen.

Peeta had done a pretty good job chatting up some of the pros beforehand in training, or so I remember. I took it as part of that. You saw more of that at the end of the first book and the first film where he turns it on and suddenly he's Mister Television during the post-Games interviews.

Unrelated to any of this, last weekend's Foxtrot made me very happy. :D