Not to mention that it seems weird to me to hide the brutality that is at the root of the themes of the original narrative. There is so much violence (framed within the games and outside of it) that to back down from showing some of it is a bit off-putting to me.

Lost in Space is on the cable TV. Wow, there are a whole bunch of people in this movie who are badly, badly miscast.

What pisses me off about that movie was that there was a part that was obviously written specifically for Bill Mumy, but they cast someone else in it.

I guess I don't understand how you can see enough of the fight choreography to say that the fights were put together apathetically. How could you tell, through the cinematography and the editing? And then I don't see why the choices made for the fights would have a bearing on the ability to tell the rest of the story. Those are kinda different skillsets.

It doesn't seem weird to me to hide it, since the movie's success probably hinges on the precise balance of brutality. I think we saw one death blow land, if memory serves, and one neck being broken. Everything else happened out of frame, however horrible it was implied to have been. Hiding this sustained violence, at the hands of or being dealt to our heroes--I totally see why they made it vague.

I just think they did it poorly.

Box Office Shocker: 'Hunger Games' Third Best Opening Weekend of All Time:

Lionsgate's book-to-film adaptation grosses a staggering $155 million, shattering records and surpassing any "Twilight" pic; overseas, "Hunger Games" opens to $59.3 million for a worldwide total of $214.3 million.

Suck it, Twilight!

The Mary Sue was just positing that there should have been commercials during Hunger Games, since it is the media event of the year in Panem. I find the idea fascinating.

Like this one?

That's what they linked to, yeah, although that's not quite what I'd imagine.

On the fight choreography and filming, I don't really know enough to totally analyze it, but I thought that it made sense for the first scene around the cornucopia to be confusing, since Katniss would have experienced it as confusing, and really, there's no good way to keep track of 24 people. But the last fight scene, I was having a lot of trouble keeping track of what was going on, since Peeta and Cato pretty much look the same from behind.

I also wish that they'd given names to all the tributes. There were a couple scenes where it seemed really awkward that some of them had names and others didn't. Or, like, in the interview scenes, Katniss and Peeta were introduced by first and last name, but the others we saw were just introduced by first name.

Also, I think it would have been useful to include at least one or two scenes of the Gamemakers deciding NOT to air something. There were several parts in the book where Katniss thought something like, "I'm sure no one is seeing this," that gave some good insight into what the Games were supposed to accomplish and what kinds of things would undermine that.