Hogwarts Professor

Watching this interview, no, Miss Lawrence and the world she lives in are a moon shot away from Appalachia’s Seam and the hard-core survivor that is the heroine of The Hunger Games. But the back story of the actress and how she came to play Katniss is a stunner. She actually hails from Kentucky, coal country.

Go to Mockingjay.Net for the second and third parts of this Hollywood Access interview, if you must. I confess my first response to it was thinking up three snarky questions for the actress that no one has asked her, to my knowledge: [Read more…]

The most recent issue of AARP’s magazine, one of the country’s leading journals in terms of subscriptions and reader numbers, features The Hunger Games as a wonderful read — and one that senior readers needn’t be embarrassed by, even though it is officially “teen lit.” From Great Books for Any Age: Why the best new fiction for adults is written for teens (originally ’60 Going on 16′ — hat tip to Deborah!):

Hungry for a deep, dark, addictively absorbing novel? Read The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. The gripping story, a post-apocalyptic tale about a teenage girl who fights to survive lethal games televised for sport, has spent more than three years on The New York Times best-seller list, and the movie adaptation opens March 23.

The catch: It’s teen lit.

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A very good friend from Marine Corps years in Okinawa, Dr. Arthur Remillard, now teaches Religious Studies at St. Francis University. In my regular correspondence with him, I shared my interest in The Hunger Games; he picked up the first novel in the series  as an impulse buy at an airport. He has since shared his thoughts on the lead-off book and I have his permission to share them here as a launchpad to my speculations about the religious faith implicit to the Everdeen Saga:

About the book… I can see why you are jumping on this.  In terms of style, the story moves swiftly and the author has a unique gift in her ability to use words to create vivid scenes, yet keep the story moving at the same time.  And it is thoughtful enough that I didn’t feel stupider (is that a word?) for having read it.  The Christian imagery pretty much hit me in the forehead like a hammer.  Easter and Pentecost symbolism in no short supply, with bread and fire images on every other page.  I wonder if the author is a Methodist, or wrote with Methodist influence.  The flame and the cross matched by the male and female lead… Wesley’s notion of “sanctifying grace” appearing in the slow awareness that winning the game was merely a prelude to a more complicated battle ahead.  Etc.

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Raycom Media, part of the Tributes Network of news broadcasters, believe it or not, wrote to me yesterday for my answers to generic questions about teaching The Hunger Games. Several of you enjoyed sharing your answers to the previous questions from a reporter I shared here so I pass on this interrogation with the same pledge I made before, namely, if you send your answers and personal information to john at HogwartsProfessor dot com, I will pass them on to the Raycom reporter (whom I have urged to contact Prof. Joel Hunter at ASU’s Honor College and our own Prof. Baird-Hardy because they actually use the Panem Saga in their classrooms).

Without further ado, then:

Question 1.       What is your personal interest in the Hunger Games series? Have you taught the Hunger Games in the classroom before?

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We noted here that Director Gary ‘the Boss’ Ross was enamored of actor Donald Sutherland’s understanding of “where the nature of power comes from and he understood how pernicious that power was and how President Snow used that power.”

He gave me a glimpse into that side of the world that was more vivid than anything that I had seen. In fact Donald wrote me such a compelling backstory to his character that I ended up incorporating some of those ideas into a couple of scenes that I added for him which are still in the movie and I think are very good.

The studio clearly feels this atextual addition is also “very good” because in addition to the stills from the Snow-Crane scene they’ve been sharing with media, today they released another film clip that is that scene.

Three quick notes:
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