REVIEW: The Hunger Games (Movie)

Okay, okay, I know this is liteRANTER and not movieRanter, but I believe book to movie adaptations fall under my jurisdiction. Plus, it’s The Hunger Games. How can I resist?

Since I’m pretty sure most people know the general story line (and anyone who doesn’t probably won’t be reading a review of the movie, anyway), I’m going to skip a plot synopsis and get straight to the point.

Structure/POV

Let’s start with one of my favorite things about the movie: the expanded POV. As most of you know, the trilogy is written in the first person, meaning the entire story is from Katniss’ POV. And while this works very well for the books (switching POVs in a first person story is always tricky), obviously it wouldn’t come across as well in the movie. In order to expand the world of Panem and give us a good look at the wide variety of characters and motivations, the movie continually switches back and forth between Katniss, President Snow and Seneca Crane, and a variety of other characters, such as Haymitch and Caesar. Because of this, we aren’t faced with two straight hours of Katniss running around in the woods, and yet all the important stuff still plays out perfectly. It just has a few additions.

I particularly like the interaction between Snow and Seneca, as we get only the bare bones of Seneca’s story in the books. He fails as a game maker. He’s killed for it. In the movie, we’re able to watch Seneca’s demise unfold before our eyes. And boy, does he have a fitting end.

Plot Changes

I know you’ve probably seen a ton of these floating around. Obviously, due to the aforementioned POV changes, there’s a lot of new content that was never explored in the book. However, there are also quite a few things that were left out. And while none of them really detract from the story for me, personally, I thought I’d list a few you may want to know about.

The Mockingjay Pin: In the book, Madge gives Katniss the mockinjay pin. In the movie, Madge doesn’t exist. Well, she might, but she’s never seen. Instead, Katniss picks up the pin when she goes to trade her catch of the day. The vendor gives it to her for free. It then changes hands several times. Katniss gives it to Prim before the reaping. Prim gives it back after the reaping. Cinna sticks it on Katniss’ jacket before the games begin. And we continue to see it until the very end, when she wears it on her dress as she and Peeta are (begrudgingly) congratulated by Snow for winning.

Rue’s Death: One of the most emotional points (if not the most) in the story, Rue’s death is something that is hard to forget. However, there was a small difference between the book and movie. That is, Katniss does arrive on time to save her. She actually cuts the net open and frees Rue, only for the spear to still deal her a lethal blow. Not too big of a change, in my opinion, but your mileage may very. I actually find it even more bitter, considering Katniss actually has a chance to save her–and fails.

District 11 Riot: What D11 riot? Exactly. They added one. I found it to be a little odd, considering that Katniss has yet to truly become the mockingjay. But it’s definitely an emotional scene. A man, who seems to be Rue’s father, if appearance and reaction are anything to go by, viciously attacks the Peacekeepers, leading to an all out riot where food and machinery and buildings are destroyed. However, it doesn’t go far, as it’s brutally put down by the Peacekeepers.

There were quite a few more: the sleep syrum was never used to make Peeta fall asleep, Buttercup the cat was black and white instead of orange, Haymitch wasn’t at the reaping in the beginning, etc. These things don’t really have much of an impact on the movie, but for avid fans of the books, they may be an annoyance.

Technical Work

I know some of you have probably already heard about the “shaky camera work,” yeah? Well, despite my enjoyment of the movie, I’m afraid I have to complain about it, too. I understand exactly why they did it. They couldn’t well outright show vicious, gory battles between teens without upping the rating (which would have then alienated the target audience). That’s the price to pay for book to movie adaptations. The level of violence allowable in a YA book far exceeds that for a movie due to the transition from mental images to actual images. However, I did feel there were some times that they could have toned it down a bit. The camera was zipping back and forth so quickly in some parts that I couldn’t quite see what was even happening. It was a bit dizzying in places.

Overall Feelings

It’s good. Really good. I think the movie accurately sums up the essence of The Hunger Games without losing too much plot. There are some things that careful readers and watchers will notice that will no doubt annoy them, but overall, this is a fabulous movie. It’s well-executed in terms of POV and additional material. It doesn’t change anything major. It sets up the next movie perfectly, what with the final scene of a frustrated Snow marching up the steps as D12 cheers for Katniss and Peeta. Best movie I’ve seen in a long time, and I’m looking forward to see Catching Fire already.

 ***

Rating: 4/5

Beginnings are B*@$&%s (7 Reasons)

I hate beginnings.

It’s not the thinking-up of beginnings, the character introductions, the world-building, the spark that kindles a massive, complex plot. No, that I like. Its writing them down that gets me. Beginnings have a very strong tendency to discourage me from continuing to write the piece in question. Beginnings are the very first place where the story goes from an idea to an output, from abstract to concrete. And in so doing, all those whimsical little fantasies I have about the grandeur of my ideas come crashing down like a Jenga tower.

And I know for a fact that I am far from the only one who loathes writing beginnings. One of the very first things a novice writer learns is that beginnings are hard. For every hiccup and screw up and missed plot point and cliche, that’s one more reader you lose, one more agent that sends you a rejection. In fact, I’d dare claim that beginnings are the most often and most harshly judged part of a work, if only for the fact that they’re the first thing a reader’s eyes land on.

They’re like nukes, beginnings. They either blow your reader’s mind to oblivion, or they’re duds.

Regrettably, beginnings will always be a necessary part of a story. You just can’t get rid of them. It’s a bit hard to skip the beginning when the first page where anything is written automatically constitutes the beginning. You’d have to pull off some kind of massive paradox that makes the literary universe implode on itself in order to skip a beginning.

So apparently beginnings are a necessary evil. But that doesn’t mean we can’t beat them over the head with a baseball bat.

With that in mind, allow me to present:

7 Reasons Beginnings are Bitches 

1.) The First Line: The hook, line, and sinker of the beginning. And quite possibly the hardest thing of all to do right. For every story, there are literally a handful of opening lines that can even touch perfect with a ten-foot-pole, and you have to wade through lingual infinity to find them. For every good starting line, there are a billion bad ones, and if you choose the wrong one…well, there goes the reader. There is a very high likelihood that you will end up changing your first line in every single edit, on a seemingly never-ending quest to crown the victor. And it will never seem good enough, especially in comparison to the Literary Masters of the Universe. Open a classic, any classic, and immediately your first line will shrivel up and die from sheer inadequacy.

2.) The Protagonist Introduction: From where to place it to how to do it, introducing your protagonist is nearly as hard as starting the story off. There are so many considerations…Who? What? When? Where? Why? How? Each of those questions branches off into a thousand more, and in order to fit them all into one neatly packaged character introduction, you have to find some sort of balance between them. Shoving an angry, bitter protagonist at the reader’s face without any apparent rhyme or reason will leave a few question marks (and not the kind you’re hoping for). But start your character off doing some mundane task? Oh, Lord, the reader will think, it’s another one of those stories.

3.) The Not-Protagonist Introduction: The evil twin of number 2. Sometimes, stories don’t really start with the protagonist. They start with a character in some way related to the protagonist but who is not actually himself the protagonist. In introducing this character, not only must you take into consideration everything in number 2, but you must also somehow communicate to your reader that the character is not the protagonist. It is an assumption, borne from the readings of endless modern novels, that the first character you see is the protagonist. When that assumption proves untrue, your reader grinds to a halt, uncomprehending. By some manner of sorcery, you must keep the reader moving forward, else your poor protagonist may never even see the light of day.

4.) The Setting: Once you’ve got your character in place, you need to think about what place your character is in. This is so simple in your mind. You can see it: the dirty dungeon, the room with the blue curtains, the grassy field. But your reader obviously can’t. Unless you have some kind of fancy mind powers, of course. But for the average writer, establishing a believable setting without dumping detail vomit all over the place is quite challenging. Do you describe the bed and the nightstand? Do you add in the colors, too? Do you just say “a room”, leave it a blank cardboard box for your reader to fill in? Well, unfortunately, the answer changes depending on the reader. Some of them will toss a book for giving too many colors, the other will toss a book for not describing the number of wrinkles in the comforter. Can’t win ‘em all, unfortunately.

5.) The Backstory: Okay, so you’ve got a character in a place. Now, why is the character in that place? You can pretty easily imagine all the steps that lead up to the beginning. Just hit mental rewind. It’s that simple. Thing is, you can’t just stick all that stuff into your beginning. The beginning is the beginning for a reason. It’s where the story starts. If you can go back and start earlier without losing anything, then you’re starting in the wrong place. If your beginning is indeed in the right place, however, then you need to figure out a way to incorporate your character’s backstory without detracting from whatever action it is that gets the plot going. If you don’t, your reader may be left asking questions. What is the such-and-such stone? Why is so-and-so in a dungeon? What the hell is the pickle incident? These things must be interwoven throughout your beginning in order to paint a complete picture. Just not a too complete picture. You know, like XKCD instead of Van Gogh.

6.) The First Conflict: A lot of readers believe conflicting things about the main conflict. Either it 1) must start at the beginning 2) must not start at the beginning 3) must be hinted at in the beginning 4) must be led into by a lesser conflict in the beginning and so on and so forth. Geez, you must think, why can’t we all come to sort of consensus? Well, my friend, such is the nature of writing. The truth of the matter is that all of those things and more can be used to introduce conflict in a story. The first conflict in a story doesn’t have to be the main conflict, nor does it even have to directly lead to the main conflict. This is especially important for stories that start off with a character going from mundane land to magical holy-crap world in the span of the beginning. The first conflict can be something as simple as a forgotten lunchbox or as complicated as a parental divorce. The important thing about the first conflict is that must exist. The second most important thing is that must be engaging. Conflict isn’t really conflict unless there’s some (however subtle) element of tension.

7.) The Continuity Conundrum: This one encompasses several elements, from foreshadowing to general details. See, the thing about literature is that it tends to come in all shapes and sizes, and each of those shapes and sizes have their own general structures, including their own pitfalls. The continuity conundrum comes into play most often in novels, due to their lengths and marginal complexity. When writing a novel, you must be incredibly careful not to introduce any discontinuities into the story later down the road. But this is the beginning, you say! Well, of course, but you can’t introduce a discontinuity without first introducing the beginning detail that makes it so. Keeping track of the continuities you introduce in the beginning is essential to structuring the rest of the story. So basically, if you forget to add something in the beginning or add too much or add something that doesn’t match something later in the story, you run the risk of have a story that just doesn’t add up. While technically, discontinuities can be fixed in editing and later drafts, patch jobs to the plot and details often come off looking like patch jobs. So keep your details in check, lest your story turn into a nightmare world of changing character hair colors and personalities.

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So there you have it. Seven major things you can completely screw up with a slip of the index finger while writing a beginning. There are a lot more, of course. This is just the tip of the iceberg. But I picked some I feel are particularly important to pay attention to–and to prove that you really can’t win everything in the writing world. Some of these things are fixable. Others not so much. So, fellow writers, keep writing and try your best. And if you get pissed off at your beginning, just remember: beginnings are bitches.

REVIEW: “Daughter of Smoke & Bone” by Laini Taylor

I started this in January, but due to unfortunate timing on the part of school, I didn’t get around to finishing it until last week. I’d heard quite a lot about this book (and the author) before I started reading Daughter of Smoke & Bone, and most of it was raving praise. And you know, after finishing the book, I can understand why. However, there are a few things I would warn a potential reader about.

Before I tell you about them, though, let’s review what Daughter of Smoke & Bone is supposed to be about.

Synopsis

A teenage girl named Karou lives a double life in Prague. On the one hand, she’s a student at a special school for the arts. On the other, she run errands for monster-like beings called chimaera. These chimaera raised Karou, and she has no knowledge of her parentage or origins. The leader of these chimaera, Brimstone, collects teeth for a reason undisclosed to Karou. In exchange for these teeth, he gives tokens that grant wishes.

Available from Amazon for $10.67

As the story unfolds, the reader is pulled into the middle of a never ending war between chimaera and angels, some of whom appear on Earth to destroy the gateways that connect it to the other world, the doors that lead to Brimstone’s “wish shop.” This is where we meet the angel Akiva, the immediately obvious love interest. After a skirmish with Karou, who he perceives as a enemy, he finds himself–oh boy–strangely attracted to her.  This attraction, which Karou eventually submits to as well, spirals out into a detailed mystery of past lives and lost loves and ends with the discovery of just what Brimstone uses all those teeth for.

Now, here’s what I think about all this:

Characters

Taylor’s characters are interesting enough. Karou, the protagonist, is quite a well-developed lead, and I was thankful for this. I have a problem following stories where the main character isn’t fleshed out very well (though I seriously doubt Taylor will ever fall into this category of writers). She has a quite few characters that appear throughout the book, and I think she does a pretty good job of juggling them all. Karou remains the prime focus even while the other characters temporarily take the spotlight for certain scenes, which is how it should be, in my opinion.

But when it comes to characters, they rarely do well if the world they live in isn’t also well-developed. On that note:

World Building

By far Taylor’s strongest point, she uses words to craft a world in ways I’ve never seen writers utilize. Her prose is, quite frankly, gorgeous, and her detailed–yet streamlined–descriptions leave little to the imagination. It really helps you visualize the world Karou lives in, especially if you have little to no knowledge (like myself) of Prague (as well as several other foreign locations). Taylor’s worlds (yes, plural) are unique and distinct, and each setting comes with its own history, emotional attachments, and subplots.

Unfortunately, Taylor’s greatest strength may also be her weakness. Which brings me to:

Structure

This was my biggest problem with the story. Taylor creates a beautiful world with beautiful characters and basically infinite details to pull a plot out of. And in so doing, she fails to pull together a totally coherent plot. The world is so rich that the story becomes muddled with subplots that don’t play back into the main one, hints that never come to fruition, characters that appear when they detract more than they give from the scene, and a host of other problems.

Now, any one of those things, by itself, is not a deal breaker. Writers have a quite a bit of leeway in this regard. But as the story chugs along, the little structural problems begin to compound, and I strongly believe Taylor takes it a bit too far with the nearly never ending flashback. Huh? What nearly never ending flashback, you ask? Well, a little over halfway into the story, Taylor jumps into massive flashback that lasts for most of the remainder of the book. At this point, the book seems to become two books, the second half a virtual prequel to the first.

And don’t get me wrong. I know why Taylor did it, and I know many people think it works just fine, but I found the sudden halt of the current storyline in favor of what amounts to an extended backstory to be a bad decision. Karou’s story suddenly ceases to exist, and we’re instead introduced to an entirely new character. Now, I did find this character’s story interesting. Very much so. And this new character is intimately connected to Karou. But every chapter, I kept looking for the return to Karou, and I didn’t get it until the very end, at which point there’s a rather unsatisfying ending that I’m not entirely sure I understand the motivations for.

Conclusion

While Taylor’s prose is delightfully fresh and unique, and her characters are well-developed, I found Daughter of Smoke & Bone to be in need of a bit of structural editing. The typical YA love story angle didn’t bother me too much. It came with about as unique a spin as one can conceivably put on a YA paranormal romance. Where it really fell short, I feel, is the management of multiple story lines. By the end of the second half of the book (and the end of the story), everything seems a bit jumbled. I feel like Taylor would have been better off revealing the massive backstory in bits and pieces as opposed to one big chunk that cuts Karou’s story off so abruptly. The last chapter left me feeling a bit confused and apathetic.

At this point, I’m not sure if I’m going to continue the series or not.

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Rating: 3.5/5

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