Everybody's Seen It

Yes. Go see The Hunger Games.

Doing better than Twilight and deserves to. Jennifer Lawrence is great, exactly how I pictured the Katniss character. In fact, most of characters (apart from the crazy looking Capitol ones) look and act pretty dead-on to my recollection. Including the two black contestants from District 11 that seem to have certain wacknut elements Twittering their discontent.

Seriously? I can't recall Suzanne Collins' exact words, but whatever she wrote about Rue and Thresh, I pictured them as black. There was absolutely no dissonance for me from the film. Cinna read black too. WTF people? Honestly, Lenny Kravitz is great in the film. The most heart-in-mouth sequence is between him and Katniss.

I'm oddly gratified that this is doing so well. I feel bad Lawrence isn't getting paid enough (1/2 mil plus residuals) but her ticket is in after this one. Probably my gratification has to do with it crapping all over Twilight. I've watched the Twilight films on DVD with my daughter, and Bella is just the whiniest, neediest, common-sense lackingest fem-douche on the planet. I haven't read those books, and can't imagine I'd ever want to.

If I have a criticism of Hunger Games, it is that it is almost too fast-paced. As juvenile fiction published by Scholastic, the books don't have much padding and are paced pretty much just like a film. But the movie is STILL almost breakneck, with no real pause to get a clearer understanding of why all this happens or who the characters are. I'm all in favor of the old 1960s style of picking up the characterization as you go in reading fiction, and the Hunger Games books certainly are that. But this film could still stand another half hour or so of meat on it. As it stands it is pretty much the Cliff's Notes version of an already spare novel. It hits all the major points and events... and is pretty damn dramatic and intense in places... but it seems edited to assume anyone watching it is already familiar with the story. It'll be interesting to see if a DVD fleshes this out a bit.

Wowie Jeez.

It has been almost FIVE MONTHS since I last posted here? Sorry!

A bit back I noted my posting was too infrequent and would try to do better, but then I got hit with the holidays and leaving my job. I have taken a really long time to recover my impetus to write.

I also mentioned previously that I had a reviewing gig, but I resigned... some time before this 'disappearance' actually.

I don't generally like to bring much about my personal life into this blog... I never conceived it as an avenue for me to vent apart from hobby, pop culture, and entertainment matters. So suffice it to say, that while all is not perfect in the Knight of Gold's real world, I feel like this thing has been neglected too long. And I didn't even know how long until I just logged in and saw the date on that last post!

I have still been playing games, watching movies, reading books yadda yadda. So I'll try to catch up and get back to be the web's only real paragon of good taste.