I’ve never read this book, but I did see the movie based on a few reviews. I think it helps if you go in realizing it is meant for kids. I enjoyed it and I liked how the characters used the game show aspect of the whole affair against itself at the end. If they’d actually had to kill each other or gotten killed themselves, I don’t think the movie would have been as interesting.

@ Steve:

Yes, the love triangle was wisely downplayed in the movie. I wasn’t sure if this was a bit part of the books, but I was glad they decided to keep it down to a few lingering glances rather than making a whole big thing out of it.

@ Travis McCrea:

I figured that. You know what’s funny though? Pre-LOTR that sentence would not hold water. Before Steve Jackson shown the world you can make an epic blockbuster movie by faithfully adopting a book, no one did this. All adaptations were “fixed up” for Hollywood almost never even resembling the original work.

@ Victoria:

Oh, I felt plenty of things for Katnis, but mostly because I happen to like Jenifer Lawrence. :P But yeah, I know what you mean. In the movie it almost seemed like her and her friend were the only real characters and only she got some sort of back-story, a family and life outside the games. All the other tributes were either portrayed as characterless jerks so that we didn’t feel sorry for them when they died. The few that did have a few lines of dialogue usually died off-screen.

@ Philipp:

I am. Die hard browncoat reporting it. I also liked Buffy. :)

Oh, and the browser detection plugin is criminally out of date. The author abandoned it it seems, and I’ve been way to lazy to fix it.

Oh, nice. My Debian Squeeze with a nightly Chromium build from identifies as Ubuntu with Chrome.

Something about this article makes me believe, you are a Joss Whedon fan ^^

I’ve read the book when I’ve heard about the hype it created, but I only managed the first one. The movie followed quite closely including the finale as I recall. The book for me felt as dull as the movie, and still kinda girly-girly – it spends a lot of time on looks and outfits and blahblah. And there are two guys as well.

I don’t know whether it was the bias of ‘the next Twilight’ or something else but I never felt anything for Katniss in the book and on the screen and I LOVE me some tough female character.

I have not read the book OR watched the movie (It’s black March, I will wait for the torrent)… but a comment on the ending of the film: It’s based on the book, so I am going to assume that the movie ending plays pretty close to the book ending.

So we should blame the author, not the movie. :P

Yeah, I saw the movie too. Was a pretty good adaptation of the book – though, as you wrote, it had to water down the violence. The book does not really end on an uplifting note, nor does the series. I recommend you read it. This is not the “which-dude-will-she-pick” romantic crap that most YA novels include. This is not really a “girls” series either.