billytea,

I flipped out at that part of the book. FLIPPED THE FUCK OUT. And the fact that the issue (in various incarnations) keeps coming up in the trilogy makes it even more disturbing and awful.

BTW, I did not know that Rue and Thresh were African American. Damn. As if all my buttons weren't pushed by the story anyway, this is going to fuck me up on screen.

Note that I've seen Winter's Bone, so maybe that's unfair to Ms Lawrence.

You mean you haven't seen it? Because she played oppressed very well in that.

I truly wish they'd have to justify Caucasian every time they used it.

yeah. There's really no reason that any of the characters in Hunger Games couldn't be any race. There's nothing in the story where race comes into play, unless I totally misread (like Jesse says, privilege!)or am misremembering. So many options to cast good people without regard to race.

there are specific descriptions of people from certain districts being athletic and blonde, but that's all I recalled except for Katniss herself being olive skinned.

there are specific descriptions of people from certain districts being athletic and blonde, but that's all I recalled except for Katniss herself being olive skinned.

Sure, but the important thing to the story is that they are athletic, I think, not that they are blond.

there are specific descriptions of people from certain districts being athletic and blonde, but that's all I recalled except for Katniss herself being olive skinned.

I think that could have been a class shorthand, but it wasn't really emphasized.

lisah, you know I didn't get that. Katniss contrasted herself pretty specifically (skin tone, hair color) with the district 1 & 2 (?) people. So yes, there was a hunger element, but it seemed to me from those two in particular, there seemed to be a skin tone as well.

I thought it was class shorthand too - and why Kat's mother and little sister are blonde but she takes after her father - who was not in the same social class.

From Slate's review of Limitless, emphasis mine:

The guinea pig in this thought experiment is Eddie Morra (Bradley Cooper), an unkempt, unaccomplished writer with a book deal but no idea how to get past that tricky first sentence. (Director Neil Burger establishes Eddie's writer's block with the standard tableaux—the writer staring at a blank computer screen, the writer enjoying a midday cocktail—and with a more ingenious, more disturbing scene of artistic stagnation: the writer eating a cold pizza crust while perched on the toilet.

OK, if the scenes of Bradley Cooper smugging it up bigtime in the trailer hadn't already put me off seeing the movie (seriously, are we intended to root for DeNiro in this?), that right there would have done the trick.

I saw a clip of a fight scene from it (including Bruce Lee flashbacks) and I'm still pretty sold on it. I vehemently believe that muscle memory is going to play a big part in making you a good fighter, but it posited a decently reasonable "I grokked this from TV." Better than No Ordinary Family ever has.