I started reading The Hunger Games on Thursday night, finished it on Saturday afternoon, and then saw the movie on Sunday night: such fun!
Can’t remember the last time I read a book with such eagerness. I loved its blend of high-tech futuristic sci-fi with semi-old fashioned wilderness survival, its exploration of violence and resistance and redemption, creativity, culture, exploitation, and consumption.
And? It was just a very entertaining, engaging read.
The movie was not disappointing, either.
(Although I confess that, reading the book, I somehow assumed that everyone in Panem would be multiracial; these racist responses to the film are completely baffling.)
BUT–I do confess that I was a little surprised that food–which was almost a character in the book–was barely little more than a cameo in the film. Hunger (ahem!) is such an important part of what motivates and drives life in most of the districts, while the Capitol is marked by excess.
Yeah, I know that food/eating is kind of a preoccupation of mine, but to my mind, a strength of The Hunger Games is that Collins shows clearly that the highest cannot stand without the lowest: that technology, power, entertainment need raw materials and crops from the earth; that hungry people have energy for little else except finding food; that hunger and thirst lead all but inexorably to violence and murder but, occasionally, miraculously, to communion and love.
And so while I didn’t expect the film to be another great food movie, I’d kind of hoped that food would get more than a cameo.
I can only think it didn’t because it was made by well-fed people from the Capitol…
I like that in the books as well how she shows the brutal food chain of the capital’s excess at the expense of the districts. But I did enjoy the visualization of the food in the movie, I thought they did a good job portraying the excess but to a gross degree…the food was abundant, but not entirely appetizing in its neon colors and unnatural form.
Well, that was the thing…the food needed to be irresistible, otherwise why would Katniss say that it was the most impressive thing about the Capitol? (But then, that line was not in the movie!)
I haven’t seen the movie yet … sorry to hear that the food didn’t get much play! I got an “unofficial” Hunger Games cookbook for Christmas. Looking through it more than a year after I’d read the books, it was a reminder of how big a part food played in the stories. (Well, duh, it’s called the Hunger Games for a reason!) Fun cookbook — but I don’t think I’ll be trying the recipes for squirrel and the like any time soon
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