In this week’s ‘Hunger’-focused episode of ‘Talk Nerdy,’ we compare the soon-to-be-released film to Suzanne Collins’ novel. By Josh Wigler Jennifer Lawrence in “The Hunger Games” Photo: Lionsgate “The Hunger Games” are upon us at last. In the land of Panem, this would not be news worth celebrating. In our day and age of modern movie-going, however, the arrival of Gary Ross’ cinematic take on Suzanne Collins’ dystopian novel is anything but bad. Indeed, “The Hunger Games” is more than “not bad” — it’s great. It might even be exceptional. In fact, I’m ready to call it: Respectfully, I strongly feel the “Hunger Games” movie is better than the “Hunger Games” book. Before you kill me, hear me out, and I’ll try to walk you through my reasons.
The BBC’s biopic The Girl aims to explore Alfred Hitchcock ‘s fascination with actress Tippi Hedren, and from the first image of Toby Jones as Hitch and Sienna Miller as his The Birds and Marnie muse this promises to be an intriguing watch. But mimicry/homage aside — as evidenced by the near-perfect recreation of Hitch & Hedren’s famous Birds promo photo — will The Gir l get everything right about their relationship? Like the fact that, as Hedren has been saying for years now, Hitch stalled her career because she turned him down? Hedren is a consultant on The Girl , one of two Hitchcock-centered features in the works (the other: Alfred Hitchcock And The Making Of Psycho , with Anthony Hopkins and Scarlett Johansson), which is directed by Julian Jarrold ( Kinky Boots , Red Riding 1974 ). Still, the Daily Mail reports , Hedren is worried the film won’t depict the extremes to which she had to be strong in the face of Hitchcock’s dominance and sexual advances. “I admired Hitch tremendously for his great talent and still do,” she said. “Yet, at the same time, I loathed him for his off-set behavior and the way he came on to me sexually…He was a great director – and he destroyed it all by his behavior when he got me alone.” “There were so many wonderful films we could have made together but it was all thrown away because of his mindless lust…I was a highly moral girl. I couldn’t submit to him no matter that he threatened and did ruin my career.” Exactly how deep into the Hitch-Hedren symbiotic relationship The Girl will go remains to be seen, but it would appear Jarrold’s paying painstaking attention to detail to some degree; compare the above first image from The Girl with the vintage Birds promo shot it mimics, from the wrinkle in Hitch’s brow to Hedren’s perfect blonde ‘do. What’s different, beside the angle of the prop bird at their feet and the color of Hedren’s pumps? Jones’ and Miller’s expressions are decidedly not as forcedly sunny as those of their counterparts, and she sits angled away from the director, all of which suggests there’s more stormy unrest behind the scenes between the two than seen in the original picture. [ Daily Mail via The Playlist ]
Movie events have become deadly little things, highly mechanized gadgets thrown by studio marketing departments into an audience’s midst in advance; then we just stand around and wait for them to explode. The Hunger Games , adapted from the first of Suzanne Collins’ hugely successful trio of young adult novels, was decreed an event long before it became anything close to a movie: More than a year ago its studio, Lionsgate, launched a not-so-stealthy advertising campaign that made extensive use of social media to coax potential fans into convincing one another that they had to see this movie. The marketing was so nervily persuasive that you had to wonder: How could any movie – especially one that, as it turns out, is largely and surprisingly naturalistic, as opposed to the usual toppling tower of special effects – possibly hope to measure up? The surprise of The Hunger Games isn’t that it lives up to its hype – it’s that it plays as if that hype never even existed, which may be the trickiest achievement a big movie can pull off these days. The picture takes place in a dystopian future, in a dictatorship called Panem that’s a thinly disguised version what used to be the United States. Panem’s richest and most privileged citizens live in the capitol city – called, conveniently, Capitol – while everyone else toils away in the 12 outlying districts to provide everything those Capitol dwellers might need, from food to coal to luxury goods. At some point in Panem’s history, the underlings in the districts revolted, French Revolution-style. As punishment, each district must now offer up two of its youngsters between the ages of 12 and 18, a boy and a girl chosen by lottery, to compete in a televised yearly event called the Hunger Games. The young people, called Tributes, kill one another off in an elaborately controlled stadium environment until there’s just one left standing: That kid earns accolades for his or her home district – and, more importantly, food. As allegories go, this is a pretty obvious one, particularly in the era of the 99%, although neither Collins nor Gary Ross, director of the movie version, really needs to belabor the point: The focus, in the book and in the movie, is on the storytelling: If the larger ideas are pretty elephantine ones, at least they emerge from the story rather than obscure it with their meaty flanks. Jennifer Lawrence plays 16-year-old Katniss Everdeen, a denizen of the poorest section of Panem, District 12, which specializes in coal production – Katniss’ father, a miner, was killed in a mining accident, leaving the young woman to fend for the family by using her crackerjack archery skills to hunt game (illegally) in the nearby forest. When Katniss’ impossibly young and extremely fragile sister Prim is chosen to compete in the Hunger Games – the announcements are made on a national holiday known, creepily, as Reaping Day – Katniss steps forward as a volunteer, desperate to take Prim’s place. Her male counterpart is the baker’s son, Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson, who played Laser, Annette Bening and Julianne Moore’s son in The Kids Are All Right ), and the complication, as you might guess, is that he’s been sort-of-secretly in love with Katniss since childhood. Now the two will be life-and-death adversaries, and Katniss’ mistrust of Peeta’s motives – complicated by her own confused affections, given her exceedingly independent nature – provides the movie with some strong but delicate bone structure. The Hunger Games may offer some reasonably effective metaphorical statements about class divisions in this country — and about the house-of-cards crassness of reality TV – but in the end, it works because of its deft handling of an even more universal theme: This is a movie about an independent-minded girl who just isn’t sure she can trust a boy, as true to the spirit of the Shirelles as it is to Greek myth. There’s action here, too, and a great deal of vitality that feels true both to the spirit of Collins’ book and to the idea of movie entertainment as it exists – or ought to exist – outside the framework of mere movie marketing. Ross previously brought us the 1998 Pleasantville , as well as the disappointingly perfunctory 2003 Seabiscuit , and there are ways in which The Hunger Games (whose script he adapted, along with Collins and Billy Ray) feels workmanlike instead of genuinely inventive. For one thing, Ross overuses the handheld camera, particularly in scenes that are supposed to be intimate and deeply emotional: When Katniss gets Prim ready for her first Reaping Day, she tucks in the tail of the little girl’s shirt with the kind of efficient tenderness that the best big sisters have in their DNA. The family lives in what appears to be a simple wooden house, if not a shack. In the book, Collins notes that District 12 is located in what used to be called Appalachia, and if the movie doesn’t stress that outright, it at least implies as much: Ross and cinematographer Tom Stern channel the mood of Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange with their muted — though not blanched — color palette and austere compositions. (James Newton Howard wrote the movie’s restrained score, and there’s additional music by roots-music craftsman T. Bone Burnett, which tells you something about the picture’s commitment to capturing the aura of this distinctly American landscape.) Ross’ instincts are so good that you wonder, particularly in the District 12 scenes, why he didn’t just screw the camera into the damned tripod: The stillness would have been classical and elegant and better suited to the emotional tone and texture of this part of the story. Still, there’s so much in The Hunger Games that Ross gets right. He understands the nature of visual storytelling, trusting the audience to follow the narrative without spelling out every little thing in actual dialogue. He trusts us to pick up on telling details – for example, the lacy, little-girl anklets worn by the youngest Tribute, a sparkplug named Rue (played beautifully by a young actress named Amandla Stenberg), when she appears for her pre-competition televised interview. And The Hunger Games , mercifully, doesn’t suffer from overproductionitis. The picture, like the book it’s based on, has a number of fantastical elements – the glossy, gleaming futuristic edifices of the Capitol; a competition arena that resembles the natural world but can be controlled by technicians to create extra challenges for the participants, like rolling balls of fire and snarling creatures that are half-dog, half-lion. Even so, it relies mostly on a deceptively soothing kind of naturalism. These trees look like real trees; the sunlight certainly seems bright and strong. Their familiarity only adds to the story’s sense of menace, particularly when the going gets really ugly, as it inevitably does: At one point a crew of bloodthirsty Tributes surround a tree Katniss has climbed for safety, exhorting one of their members to “kill her.” The action in The Hunger Games is often a bit of a jumble – it’s sometimes hard to tell who’s coming from where. But Ross takes care to give the violence — which is discreet but visceral — the proper amount of weight. These are, after all, young people killing other young people. And one scene, in particular, conjures just the right level of Ophelia-floating-down-the-river grace — the simplest wildflowers become a kind of benediction. The picture makes room for a number of standout supporting actors: Stanley Tucci as an unctuous yet sympathetic games commentator; Elizabeth Banks as the fluttery, ineffectual official helper-outer Effie Trinket; Woody Harrelson as Katniss and Peeta’s boozy mentor; and Lenny Kravitz, sadly underused, as Cinna, who’s in charge of “styling” the District 12 entrants. (At one point in the pregame festivities, he puts Katniss in a dress whose fluttery, feathery skirt turns to fire as she twirls.) Wes Bentley has a turn as a smooth, unnerving semi-villain, and Donald Sutherland shows up as a malevolent elder statesman, a role he digs into with sly gusto. But Lawrence holds the real key to the effectiveness of The Hunger Games , and she plays Katniss as the best kind of fallible heroine. Hutcherson may be teen-heartthrob material – in other words, wholly nonthreatening — but he has the right amount of prickly sweetness to make the character of Peeta work: He can’t be too much of a sap, or you’d wonder what the hell Katniss sees in him. And as Lawrence plays her, Katniss – a sturdy girl, both physically and emotionally – deserves the best. There’s something primal about the way Katniss strides through the forest in the movie’s early scenes, stalking a deer with a rudimentary bow and arrow. She aims for the head and then, distracted by a District 12 pal (his name is Gale, and he’s played by Liam Hemsworth), misses. Lawrence has all the boldness and delicacy of her intended prey: Like that deer, she doesn’t miss a trick — her senses are aquiver every moment. Her Katniss is both tender and fierce, a character with contours and shadows, not just a cutout-and-keep role model. When she succumbs at last to Peeta’s earnest charms, it’s as if she’s finally captured the most elusive of prey, if only temporarily: She’s at peace with herself, but her very restlessness is part and parcel of that peace. As Katniss, Lawrence never stops moving: Even in her stillness, she always hits her mark. Read more on The Hunger Games here . Follow Stephanie Zacharek on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
‘It’s amazing, honestly, to watch her effortlessly flip back and forth,’ Josh Hutcherson tells MTV News of castmate’s performance as Katniss. By Kara Warner, with reporting by Josh Horowitz Josh Hutcherson Photo: MTV News Although there were a few skeptics out there who questioned the casting of Jennifer Lawrence in “The Hunger Games,” most of that chatter died down when Lionsgate started releasing photos and clips of the Oscar nominee in action as Katniss Everdeen. Now, as we inch closer and closer toward the release date of the highly anticipated film, Lawrence’s castmates have been saying how she embodies the spirit of the beloved and critically acclaimed protagonist created by author Suzanne Collins. Lawrence’s co-star and real-life friend Josh Hutcherson recently told MTV News that despite being a very different person from Katniss, the actress’ ability to quickly turn the character on and off was startling. “She is literally 180 degrees different from Katniss,” Hutcherson said. “It’s amazing, honestly, to watch her effortlessly flip back and forth, because she’s very fun, very hilarious, and to watch her on ‘Action!’ go boom, right into the character is kind of impressive, so much so that she’s talking and being Jennifer up until they’re rolling sound and when they say ‘Action!’ boom, [she goes] right into character.” Hutcherson said Lawrence’s abilities are so good they’re unsettling. “That’s what crazy people do. Crazy people change who they are as a person just like that, so she’s a crazy person,” he joked. We asked Hutcherson to clarify that statement, just to be sure that he does indeed think Lawrence is crazy. “100 percent,” he said with a smile, still joking. “I’ve said that for a long time.” Check out everything we’ve got on “The Hunger Games.” For young Hollywood news, fashion and “Twilight” updates around the clock, visit HollywoodCrush.MTV.com . Related Videos MTV Rough Cut: Josh Hutcherson Related Photos ‘Hunger Games’ World Premiere Red Carpet The Hunger Games
Now here’s an image that could inspire a rebellion: Jennifer Lawrence hit the premiere of The Hunger Games in shiny, glowing gold, joining cast mates Josh Hutcherson, Liam Hemsworth, Elizabeth Banks, Woody Harrelson, and more to celebrate the upcoming YA event movie. Well, OK — that number’s not quite bow and arrow, running-through-the-woods killing people-friendly, but JenLaw destroyed everyone else on that black carpet, including guest (and… secret Hunger Games fan?) Sylvester Stallone. Photos after the jump! Click to launch the slideshow . Get more on The Hunger Games , in theaters March 23.
With the cast of The Hunger Games gathering in Los Angeles tonight for that blockbuster’s world premiere – return go THG tomorrow for all the scoop and all the fashion! – Lionsgate has released another sneak peek at the upcoming big screen adaption. It features Peeta talking to Caesar Flickerman (Stanley Tucci) and responding to a question about his love life? Does he have a special someone? Yes, sort of. Will he be able to date her if he wins The Hunger Games? No. Find out why in this clip from the film and lay your eyes on when Katniss first meets Cinna … The Hunger Games Clip: Crushing on Katniss
A hard fought measure to legalize same-sex marriage will officially be signed into law in Maryland today. The signing is set for 5 p.m. in the State House. A marriage bill came within a whisker of passage in 2011, but was shelved in the House of Delegates at the last minute when leaders fell a few votes shy. Securing those “few votes” this year took up much of the first 45 days of Maryland’s General Assembly’s legislative session, but it eventually got done. Gov. Martin O’Malley will sign the bill into law today. Though both the House and the Senate chambers are dominated by Democrats, same-sex marriage was not an easy sell for the Democratic governor. Even with the governor’s signature today, same sex couples won’t get Maryland marriage certificates until the law goes into effect in January 2013. There’s also the threat of a vote to overrule the law. Fired-up opponents have pledged to collect 100,000 signatures opposing the bill by June 30. That’s about twice what they would need to trigger a state-wide referendum on the controversial topic, which would appear on the ballot in November. Maryland joins Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, New Hampshire, Vermont, Iowa and Washington in permitting same sex marriage rights. California’s controversial Prop 8, which banned same sex marriage, was recently declared unconstitutional , but faces a protracted appeals process.
Tick… tick… tick… The most exciting clock in Hollywood is ticking down, as The Hunger Games opens nationwide two weeks from tomorrow. In anticipation of the event, the movie’s publicity machine is in full force, with the latest issue of Entertainment Weekly dedicated to the franchise and star Jennifer Lawrence gracing the cover of Glamour UK this month. Three new photos from the film have emerged, meanwhile, two of which feature Lawrence as Katniss Everdeen, one of which focuses on Peeta during The Hunger Games themselves and another which gives us a look at Lenny Kravitz as Cinna. Click on each now for a larger version:
‘I found the character of Katniss to be so intriguing,’ the actor playing Seneca Crane tells MTV News. By Kara Warner, with reporting by Josh Horowitz Wes Bentley Photo: MTV News We’ve already heard “Hunger Games” star Wes Bentley address the fan fervor surrounding his role as Seneca Crane — or, more specifically, the beard that was specially crafted for his character. Now it’s time to get into his thoughts on the impact of Suzanne Collins’ best-selling trilogy as a whole and what he thought about reading them for the first time knowing he might be bringing Crane to life on the big screen. “I think they’re fantastic novels. She’s a great writer, very poetic at times, and I love that,” Bentley told MTV News. “What struck me first was that it was politically sophisticated, a level at which you don’t see in adult novels. I also found it very exciting, and I found the character of Katniss to be so intriguing and so inspiring and very clever. I love to see that in a book.” Speaking to getting into the character of Seneca Crane , Bentley didn’t want to give away too much but did reveal that he felt that he had a lot to work with, thanks to director Gary Ross. “Gary created a great version of the character from the script, and I had a lot of fun with it,” Bentley said. “We had a blast.” The “American Beauty” actor also said he tried to maintain “tunnel vision” with regard to the constant online chatter and debates over the film’s casting, but his wife thwarted those efforts. “I was sort of aware of that excitement about the book,” he said. “My wife was trying to tell me how people felt about me being cast, which seemed positive, but I didn’t want to hear much about it; I just wanted to focus on the work.” Bentley said if he could play any other role in the film, it would be Katniss, because she is such a strong character. He also deftly avoided the Team Peeta or Team Gale question by emphasizing the fact that the story is about survival, not romance. “I don’t even think it plays like that,” he said. “[Katniss] is a strong individual character who is having to do something much bigger. It’s about survival.” Check out everything we’ve got on “The Hunger Games.” For young Hollywood news, fashion and “Twilight” updates around the clock, visit HollywoodCrush.MTV.com . Related Videos MTV Rough Cut: ‘Hunger Games’
Need poetic inspiration for the Hunger Games haiku you’re composing for tickets to the premiere ? Look no further than the newly unveiled Hunger Games Super Bowl trailer, which will air this weekend and features new footage of special moments with Prim, Gale (Liam Hemsworth), Cinna (Lenny Kravitz), and Caesar Flickerman (Stanley Tucci), the all-important mockingjay pin, and the deadly goings-on in the Games. Via Yahoo! Movies : Quite a breathless, pulse-quickening 60 seconds. And a reminder that these kids aren’t playing with pads on for points; could this spot actually bring in the male-driven Super Bowl demographic? Don’t forget to enter Movieline’s premiere giveaway contest , candidates!
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