Gary Ross, director of "The Hunger Games"

with Gary Ross
in Movies, TV & Theater
on Wednesday, March 28, 2012 * * * * *

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Gary Ross, director of "The Hunger Games"

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Keywords:
adaptation
Jennifer Lawrence
Novel
Suzanne Collins
Katniss Everdeen
film
Hunger Games

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  • Comments 4
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    1. lamar_gibbons  03/30/2012 10:31 AM Report

      I agree with previous comment which read, "At a glance I'd say this is less a cautionary tale about totalitarianism than Hollywood's typical primitivism run amok."

      Does it strike anyone as perhaps a tad ironic / disingenuous when Gary Ross claims that "Hunger Games" is a social commentary on the use of violence/bloodsport for popular entertainment? or that this latest Big Box Office-trilogy-franchise is aiming to enlighten the culture about the dangers of celebrity worship? Give me a break.

    2. SharkswithfrikingLazers  03/29/2012 11:29 PM Report

      We watched Jennifer Lawrence in "Winter's Bone". She was very good and from the previews for "The Hunger Games" it looked like it was a perfect training movie.

      If she is in 100% of the film I hope she got a percentage of gross.

    3. SharkswithfrikingLazers  03/29/2012 11:23 PM Report

      The people have spoken: $152M in a weekend with a cost of $78M. Already up to $241M worldwide.

      My daughter saw it too.

    4. REMant  03/29/2012 11:42 AM Report

      At a glance I'd say this is less a cautionary tale about totalitarianism than Hollywood's typical primitivism run amok. It may be that the author has put one over on them, like Goethe with the Sorrows of Young Werther, but whatever, it illustrates the way thinking on this subject as done an about face. A hundred or two hundred years ago you might see such adolescents presented in the same light as noble savages, presumed naturally virtuous, confronted not by authoritarianism, but by the choice of Hercules (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Choice_of_Hercules).

      That all changed, however, with Freudian inhibitions, Boas' anthropology, Patten's campaign against saving, Progressive child-saving and education, theories of the family as a haven in a heartless world, and so forth, and prompted, like Bismarck's reforms, by a fear of populism. It is ironic, as well, that the champions of such moral hazard concerns were the very mercantilists Keynes relied on. Likewise, emigres blamed the rise of national socialism on aristocratic presumption rather than a reaction to the corrosiveness of their cosmopolitanism. The upshot is that nowadays everyone is seemingly a victim, abused and denied, and virtue made a code word for repression.

      But the issue shouldn't be, as is so often argued regarding prejudice, how it can be overcome, but why it exists in the first place, and the answer in both cases is surely that there is an inalienable utility in individualism (even the meaning of that word has changed!) which gives rise to mores of propriety and community standards, and is undermined by permissiveness. No doubt it can be overdone, and character (or holiness, another term for it) turned into self-abnegation, or even suicide, but the alternative can only be nonexistence. Both Locke and Smith struggled with this, and the answer is that neither extreme of primitivism can be right, and that is why Aristotle stressed seeking the mean in all things, and the Stoics, living according to nature.