Or he can only think of "dressing up" in terms of Pretty Woman or Sex and the City.

Fortunately he's getting a lot of WTFs in the comments, but he's also defending his viewpoint.

I will say that I can see how only seeing the movie would make one think that. The emphasis on the reality TV/sponsor aspect is really strong.

He says he's read the books.

I think it's clear he's read the books, actually, given that he talks about Katniss's role as a symbol. I just don't understand how he doesn't see that Collins is not condoning the "dress-up" aspect in any way.

Ah, then he has no excuse. (I didn't read the article since I still have to edit my blog post and am not reading HG stuff until that's up tonight.)

SO GOOD. It was brutal and horrific and disturbing, even moreso from a third-person POV because we see it all for what it is, not through Katniss's filter of acceptance. I loved what they did with Snow and Crane, ESPECIALLY Crane's final scene. I hope Collins herself wrote that scene, because as far as I'm concerned, that's fucking canon. It felt completely immersive, uncomfortable and tense to watch with a few moments of humor scattered about. Sure, I have some quibbles here and there, but, mostly, I can't believe it was that good.

The big complaint from my group was the shaky-cam, especially in the scenes where it was like, "really? Here, you feel the need to do that?" I'll be interested to see it again when I'm not looking up at a pretty steep angle at an imax screen.

OMG, the production design. I mean, really.

P-C, that sounds exactly like our comments driving home after the movie this morning. It just grabs you from the beginning and doesn't let go. There were things that were omitted/changed but the additions made up for them.

Our audience, who had been kind of rowdy during the pre-show wait, was quiet with appropriate responses through the movie, so no one was bored.

What were the demographic like at your viewings? We were in Ann Arbor, so it was a lot of (white, female) undergrads.

Oh, the noises they made during the Titanic preview. The four of us, who saw it the first time round, were exceedingly eye-rolly.

The film made exceptionally good use of the change in POV to omniscient, which allowed for a lot more set-up of the political stuff that's coming. I am going to come down on the side of disliking the change in the origin of the pin. My fix for it would be for it to have been something that Katniss's mother pawned back in the day.

My viewing was mostly high school kids. For a long time I was one of only two adults in the theater, that changed as it got closer to the start of the movie, but it was still mostly teenagers.

The Titanic preview got basically no response until Celine started singing. These kids weren't around when the movie was first released, but man, that song.

Debet, I agree with you about the pin .