It's Legitimately Beautiful Outside

Today looks and feels like Spring. Finally. I would give just about anything if this weather would last. One of the hardest things about moving here (besides, you know, working on a PhD) was having to get used to the weather. I am a sunshine-warm-weather girl through and through. I'm all about autumn (sweater weather!) as long as there's sun, and I can take maybe two weeks of winter tops, but here it seems like everyday is cold and rainy. Except today it's in the mid-50s with a completely blue sky! Zan and I drove to University Village this morning to drop off my black boots at the shoe repair, and when we drove back this afternoon to pick them up I rolled the windows down. Gorgeous.

While the boots were being repaired, we saw The Hunger Games. You may recall that I've been obsessed with these books since last March, and I'm still holding a grudge that they didn't cast me as Katniss. I have the shoes for it and everything. ;) But, I was really impressed with the movie, overall. It was fairly faithful to the books while still recognizing that film is a different art than novel-writing. I loved nearly all of the things they added to the film, and they didn't cut anything too very important (though, *SPOILERS* I did miss the District 11 bread parachute and I would not have taken that Mockingjay pin back from Prim after I gave it to her and her name got called as tribute. I would've thrown that thing as far away from me as possible).

The sound design was gorgeous and the costumes were fairly impressive (though Suzanne Collins wrote them beautifully, so the costume designer had good stuff to work with). I liked most of the use of shaky-cam, but it became a bit much near the end. Pacing during the Games got a bit slow-- though that could have been an artistic choice, since the point of the book is that the audience in Panem is feeling that things are a bit slow. I also loved most of the casting decisions-- especially Wes Bentley as Seneca, and I liked Woody Harrelson as Haymitch so much more than I expected-- but I was not very impressed with Peeta. He was fine, but... eh. Nothing special. Nothing that made me root for him the way I did with book-Peeta.

Overall, highly recommended film, but read the books first.