"The book is SO much better!" is the common rebuttal I get when I declare my lack of interest in reading a movie's original book. But I skip the book in favor of the movie for a few reasons:
- I have a difficult time concentrating reading a book. Before I know it, my mind has linked onto something in the text that took my mind on a tangent, so my eyes keep "reading" in the background, but my concentration of the plot has left and focused on whatever tangent my mind has taken, and before I know it, I have read 6 long paragraphs, and have to return to where my mind wandered from, and reread. I hate that.
- When I read a book, my eyes will look away at any given moment, and I'll get that "after-image" of the text lines in my line of vision, and wherever I look, the lines follow. It's annoying.
- I'm a slow reader, and always have been. I find it difficult to enjoy stories when I lose concentration, and then I take a lot longer to finish a book than the average person. The additional time it takes for me to read a book could be weeks to months, and it's consequently very discouraging. I sometimes literally have to give myself a chapter a day. I'm so slow, I actually count how many page turns it'll take to finish a chapter, and I do that as a motivation of how quickly I can finish it.
- If I watch the movie, I'm never disappointed, unless I walk in with high expectations based on the hype the movie has earned from its fans. There are a lot of people who will imagine a character's appearance, and when they look different in the movie, it makes them freak out and get pissed off. And this is an example of that anger...which I completely avoid.
- I'm done in less than 3 hours, and I get to hear some great music from the movie's composer.
It's been among the top 3 box office blockbusters besides Twilight and Harry Potter. It apparently made $155 million in its first weekend. That's about 1/6 of the Mega Millions jackpot we just had. The main reason I wanted to watch it, besides its massive popularity, was the fact that Josh Hutcherson is in it, and he. is. hot. Uber hot.
So besides the eye candy that Josh Hutcherson is, what did I think about the movie?
It was good. I enjoyed it. I can understand why it was so hyped up. Katniss (is that how you spell her name?) is a badass. She's very pretty, very good-hearted, and a very strong woman. She makes a great heroine for many ladies, showing that not all the heroes are guys winning the girl at the end. A girl can be both beautiful, and with strong enough skill and will, she can overcome tremendous obstacles. She can be intelligent, snarky, loving, gentle, and kind all at the same time. I know her character has served as an inspiration for many young women. They've seen how she can shoot an arrow. Legolas may have met his match, though she's a different species.
I'm more impressed with the world the author, Suzanne Collins, created. As crazy of a world in which it would be to live in, just like J.K. Rowling creating a world that made "muggle" a new word printed on a t-shirt at the mall, the post-apocalyptic world of the book was what I found most fascinating.
I can see guys, straight guys, getting into Peeta, as he is a gentleman indeed, who is very strong, and gets the girl. But this book, this story, is, I think, much more geared toward young women. They now have a story character they can look up to, so to me it makes perfect sense that so many young women would be obsessed with this story, thinking it's the "best book ever", and have probably already bought the remaining two books in the trilogy, and have probably finished reading them, and now wait, very impatiently, for the next two movies to come out.
If you haven't seen it, you should. It's entertaining, but if you let the hype influence your expectations, it might be a disappointing movie. Go in with no expectations, and let yourself invest in the characters during the duration of the movie.
Go now, and may the odds be ever in your favor.
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