Hunger sated

I suppose I should go on record with some kind of opinion about The Hunger Games, both book and movie, now that the movie is finally beginning to fade from sight after several spectacular weeks at the top of the charts.

Actually, I don't have an extreme or unique opinion of any kind on this matter. Simply put, I thought The Hunger Games was a pretty good book that was adapted into a pretty good movie. There were some things I thought the book did better than the movie and some things I thought the movie did better than the book, but overall I liked both just fine.  I can't say I absolutely loved the book or movie, but I thought both were solid and perfectly satisfying.

I might go into some of the things in the book and movie that caught my fancy in a future post, but for now I'll just say that it was refreshing to see, in both versions of the story, a narrative aimed at young teens that A) was genuinely interesting to this non-teen, and B) carried a decent amount of emotional complexity and dark thematic material.

While the story construction and pacing are all over the map in the final two books in the series, Catching Fire and Mockingjay, both books had some particularly interesting ideas and plot points that I'm looking forward to seeing dramatized in their inevitable film versions. Many of those elements center around the idea that, sadly, opportunism isn't always limited to the activities of the "bad guys".

So, as said at the outset, if you haven't already checked out The Hunger Games, either book or movie, try one or both out. The book is a click away on Kindle (currently going for five bucks) and the movie is still in a lot of theaters.