Welcome to those new readers who are checking out this “bookish” site after reading about it in the LA Times this morning!

Taking a tally of those who love and those who loathe the film adaptation of the first novel in Suzanne Collins’ Panem Trilogy, the folks who are voting in the negative are a decided minority, and, frankly, rather apologetic to the Bolsheviks (Russian for “the majority”) who are as often as not enthusiastic, even evangelical, about their feelings. HogwartsProfessor, of course, is something of a contrarian site and much more about books than film. I know serious readers around the world check in here for the view-in-opposition to the critical mass and memes.

So I will oblige them today with two ideas I’m guessing they won’t read anywhere else, ideas many of you probably won’t like, especially if you’re as enthusiastic about the film as a fictional Capitol stylist discussing the real Hunger Games. [Read more…]

I’m just back from the theater and I want to open the discussion of the movie with an open forum, meaning I won’t pre-set the conversation with my own thoughts, and two sets of questions you can answer or disregard:

• First Set:

Best Moment? Worst Moment?

• Second Set:

Biggest Departure from the Sense or Detail of the Book that Upset You?

Most Delightful Capture of the Sense or Detail of the Novel that Made Your Day?

Have at it! You’re welcome, of course, to share all your thoughts about the LionsGate film. If you haven’t seen the movie, read on at your own risk!

I’m working on a longish post about the structures of The Hunger Games, their nine parts, their three books, and the series taken as a whole, so I apologize for the relative fluff I’ve been posting in our month of Panem Pandemonium here at Hogwarts Professor. The better stuff takes longer to write, as you’d guess.

In anticipation of that writing, though, and as something of an apology for my neglect, here are links to writers that are doing some heavier lifting or just fun writing about Hunger Games as literature and transformative experience: [Read more…]

While most of us out here in the Districts have to wait until the 23rd of March (tomorrow! late tonight!) to watch the film, the Hunger Games movie has been screened in the Capitol at a lavish roll-out event and in smaller bashes for the Mayors and Friends of the Gamesmakers out in the relative boonies. These Friends of the Capitol, friends with privileges, have written their flash impressions for those of us frozen at the Panem news trough and, in very short order, we have seen revealed the ends of the critical spectrum.

TIME magazine’s Richard Corliss says there is very little to admire or enjoy in Ross’ adaptation. Hypable.com, in strong contrast, as one might expect at a site “For fans, By fans” for all fandoms, a site that lives and dies in its relationship with the Gamesmakers, had only the scantiest of qualifications for the praise it ladles on everyone involved in the movie.

Reviewer Corliss concludes acidly in his ‘The Hunger Games: The Odds are Not in Your Favor (The movie version of Suzanne Collins’ best-seller misses the book’s ferocity, but who cares?) that “If they made books out of movies, this Hunger Games would never see print.” [Read more…]