Contrariwise

The best thing about still being between jobs is getting extra sleep. The second-best thing is having time to read recreationally. I subscribe to a few different newsletters, and I am proud to say that I managed to catch up on every single one of them. I left no interesting article unread. It was glorious and informative.

While I was killing time in North Carolina before my friend Niki’s wedding, I stopped at a Borders to preview books. I started with Practicing Catholic, but it was not captivating in the slightest. I managed to find The Hunger Games in the YA section (it was good to go back to a familiar zone), and based on rave reviews from Sarah and my housemate Mike D, dove in.

I was hooked in two pages. I only finished the first chapter before I had to go back to my hotel before the rehearsal, but it was on.

I must admit that, despite the supposed lack of originality in the basic plot, it is compelling. A fellow ACEr jokingly sent out the trailer of Battle Royale as a nonexample of starting the school year, and though it was awful, I was memorized by the concept (thanks, Wikipedia!) Katniss Everdeen (the names are so silly) is a sixteen-year-old resident of what remains of the United States, twelve districts surrounding the Capitol (roughly in Denver). As punishment for an uprising, one boy and one girl from each district is offered as a tribute to the government-sponsored Hunger Games, a televised fight to the death. Katniss, from the future Appalachia, finds herself thrown into the games and fighting for her life and her many loves. I love near-future dystopias (The Giver, anyone?), so I knew I wouldn’t be disappointed there.

I knew the novel would be YA, but Suzanne Collins’s writing style took the genre to a far different level. I knew how the novel would end (and not just that Katniss would live), but Collins’s writing kept me interested in the details of Katniss’s journey. Using the present tense is rare and difficult (I caught at least one moment that seemed awkward), but it was exactly what the novel needed. I did find it speeding up toward the last few chapters, but in hindsight, any more slowing would have seemed sluggish.

Sarah recently linked a blog post breaking down the reason for the dearth of YA fiction featuring boys. Collins’s novel, though told from the perspective of a girl, is a capital example of that defect: girl books often focus extensively on feelings and relationships. Katniss is such an unusual girl that she seems neither too girly nor unrealistically so.

The Hunger Games is a captivating story. It reminds me of my beloved Harry Potter in that the first book was complete in itself while clearly leaving the door open for future books. I look forward to the remaining two volumes of the series.

This post has been about two weeks in the making. Catching up on several months of email newsletters will do that to you. I have four movies to write about here, two quite old and two very new.

Just Wright (Queen Latifah, Common, James Pickens Jr.): I went to see this movie on a whim. The rest of my family was going, and I hate being left home while they go out to do something I enjoy (as opposed to being left home during, say, a soccer game). The acting was nothing special, though Queen Latifah definitely seemed more comfortable than Common did. The story is sports-based: she plays a physical therapist and huge New Jersey Nets fan who wanders into her favorite player’s path, but her “godsister” snags him as the one who’ll fulfill her dream of being an NBA trophy wife. (An awful dream, I know.) I’ve definitely seen better romantic comedies. I like it when rom-coms are actually funny; this really wasn’t. I wouldn’t recommend it unless you’re desperate to beat the heat.

Coraline: My ex-boyfriend loved Neil Gaiman, the author upon whose book this movie is based. I love stop-motion animation and have a soft spot for The Nightmare Before Christmas. The pacing was very, very slow. Much slower than I would expect from anything even for teenagers. It was dark, as I expected, but kid-friendly black comedy remains restricted to A Series of Unfortunate Events. Coraline Jones is a young girl who finds a secret door to another world (no white rabbit here) where everything is exactly as she wants it, but of course there’s something sinister. It reminded me less of Narnia and more of Pan’s Labyrinth, though far less violent, of course! I would recommend it as a late-night watch (which is when I saw it), but it wasn’t particularly magical.

Toy Story 3: I went with my mom to see it in 3-D. As I mentioned in my Avatar review, I am not a fan of 3-D movies because I already wear glasses. However, Avatar’s 3-D effects were noticeable enough to make that extra worth it. TS3‘s were not. That said, you must see the 2-D version! I was wary at first because threequels are so rarely good, but I am glad my friends’ facebook reviews convinced me otherwise. I enjoyed the story immensely because it picked up where the second left off and brought the movie to a beautiful closure. I definitely cried for the last five minutes, and I am not a movie crier. The Barbie-Ken relationship was very well handled, the new mystery was intriguing, and I felt absolutely satisfied with its end. Another winner for Disney and Pixar.

Enchanted: I was supposed to watch this movie at the CSC with all my friends (or at least the girls), but I was on my first ACE retreat that weekend. I caught it on Syfy last night, and it was glorious. I was disappointed that I couldn’t really hear McDreamy’s singing, but I loved Giselle. She knew how to work ingenue. I wasn’t quite satisfied with Nancy’s instantly marrying Prince Edward in the end. Wasn’t the whole point Giselle and Robert were making that true love takes time? I’m a big fan of “worlds collide”-type stories (not just Who Framed Roger Rabbit), so I loved Enchanted.

So, see, I have been watching something other than Degrassi this summer.