For several years now I’ve politely ignored friends and coworkers who try to talk me into reading Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games. A YA book about a televised contest where kids kill each other? It sounded both unpleasant and unoriginal (I’m enough of an old fart to have read Stephen King’s The Long Walk and The Running Man when they were collected in The Bachman Books in 1985). Who wants to read about a dystopian world where some evil police state makes kids fight to the death for everyone’s amusement? Even as mutterings of the book’s greatness started to rumble through the halls of EW, I just couldn’t get excited about it. I filed The Hunger Games away in the “not for me” part of my brain with stuff like Artemis Fowl and iCarly.

That was dumb. The Hunger Games has, of course, now blown up into a major cultural phenomenon, with countless copies sold and a big-deal movie in the works. Everyone in the pop-culture universe (or at least in our office) has read the thing, loves it, talks about it constantly. I felt left out. More than that, I started to wonder if my stubborn refusal to read it was standing in the way of something I might actually like, something that was every bit as exciting and entertaining as people kept insisting. Maybe, I finally thought, I should just get over it and read the damn thing.

So I dug it out of the pile in my office and forced myself to at least try the first chapter. READ FULL STORY »

Image Credit: Lee Roth/RothStock/PR PhotosDear Gary Ross: According to Variety, you’re all-but-officially the director of the Hunger Games movie. Congratulations! You haven’t directed a movie in seven years — Seabiscuit, saw it– and now you’re at the center of the next big young-adult franchise. Hooray! Now, I hope you won’t mind, but I have one minor request: Please, please, please, please, don’t make The Hunger Games gritty. Don’t shoot the movie with handheld cameras. Don’t bleach all the color out of the film stock until everything looks like rusted Depression-era gunmetal. Don’t forget: Katniss Everdeen is not Jason Bourne.

Now, I’m no snob. Gritty can be cool. Heck, calling a movie “gritty” used to be a compliment. Saving Private Ryan, The Lord of the Rings, and The Bourne Identity all took sainted genres known for glossy excess — the war film, the fantasy epic, the espionage thriller — and smeared them in mud. Actors spoke every line in an angry whisper. The color scheme was monochromatic, mostly hovering between comatose-blue and industrial-gray. It was awesome…for awhile. But now, “gritty” is everywhere. We’ve seen the Gritty James Bond movie, the Gritty Superhero movie, the Gritty Twilight movie, the Gritty Terminator movie. We’ve seen Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood, the single muddiest movie ever made. READ FULL STORY »