Movie Review: The Hunger Games (minor spoilers)

I know, I know ANOTHER Hunger Games movie review.  I promise it'll be different than everybody else's!  There may be minor spoilers, because, lets face it, 99% of everyone who are going to see it in theaters have already seen it. 

I have been waiting for this movie ever since I saw over a year ago that they were starting to cast the various characters.  I had my opinions---oh that Jennifer Lawrence, she's a looker, but is she Katniss? (spoiler alert--she nailed the part of Katniss).  Oooh Thor and Gale are brothers---what a fantastic gene pool!  Josh Hutchinson, what a baby face, does he have the chops to play Peeta convincingly?  Seriously, major kudos to the casting department.  ALL the characters / actors were wonderful. 

Lenny Kravitz was awesome as Cinna.  I wish he was featured more, as he did play a big part in Katniss' life in the Capital.  At the moment, I forget what piece of advice he gave Katniss during the movie (when they first met--something about making people like you), and I was like, "Girl, ALWAYS listen to Lenny!  He won't steer you wrong!"  Truth...when it doubt, what would Lenny Kravitz do? 

I liked that they featured the interactions between Seneca Crane and President Snow.  It showed more into the psyche of Snow, but also the human side of Seneca---yes he is producing the biggest show in the country, yes he needs to keep things interesting, but he has a bit of a conscience (I can never spell that word, sorry).  He's a pawn in Snow's game just like the tributes.

A lot has been said about Madge not being in the movie.  Big deal.  Girlfriend didn't do much for me when I was reading the book anyway.  I liked how they had Katniss get the pin from The Hob and give it to Prim for good luck and then Prim gave it back to Katniss after the reaping.  I think it made their relationship bond stronger. 

Oh how I cried when Rue died!  I knew I was going to.  I warned my husband and friend before we went in that I was going to.  I sat there with tears rolling down my face, unashamed.  How could it not affect you?  (except of course if you were the gentleman sitting in front of me, snoring loudly, I guess it didn't)....seriously, who pays $10.50 to take a nap?  Geesh.

The only thing that I felt was missing was that the mutts didn't have the dead tribute's eyes.  They didn't touch on that part of the book.  Maybe because it was getting to be really long at that point.  Maybe because that's a really deep thing to get in to.  Who knows.  (This was a topic up for debate at my house Tuesday night---were the mutts really mutations of the dead tributes or were they just created with similar eyes to get in to Katniss' head?)   

You can look at the books and movies at the superficial level and say they are just books about kids killing kids for sport.  But they are so much more than that (I'm not going to get in to that here).  For a book that has a lot of death, I think the director did a good job in showing the before and after, but not really the actual "killing" (of course, there were exceptions, there always are). 

All in all...I'd pay to see it again!  I loved it!