WHAT hunger?!?!?!

Rating: 1/10 (23 July 2012)

Someone want to explain to me the title of this pitiful snore-fest? ANYONE -- I dare you! Answer one simple question that should be so obvious it's ridiculous: What the hell has HUNGER to do with the PLOT???!!! They're not fighting over food...they're not trying to FIND food...
But maybe I'm not supposed to understand. Maybe I'm supposed to read the book to understand. Just like "Seabiscuit."
But that's just the tip of the pathetic iceberg. Definitely hard to know where to start the postmortem on this turd...but let's begin with the camera-work.. and I use that term loosely.
For years, the Shakicam style -- jerky, hand-held zooms and sudden, erratic pans (not to be confused with good, hand-held documentary work) has gained popularity in both movies and television. It probably started on TV shows such as"NYPD Blue," then later, "The Office." I guess the idea is to simulate documentary filmmaking, or reality filmmaking, or whatever the hell they call it these days. Movies like "Cloverfield" and "Blair Witch Project" used this style to convince audiences they were watching a home movie. Fine -- they made their point.
But somebody want to tell me WHAT THE HELL HAS "HUNGER GAMES" GOT TO DO WITH A HOME MOVIE SOMEONE SHOT WITH THEIR CAMCORDER?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!
What was Gary Ross trying to prove? It can't have been Tom Stern's fault (Eastwood's current favorite cameraman). He's been shooting extremely steady shots, from tripods, for years. You know, normal scenes you can actually follow that aren't a blurred, frantic jumble of swish pans and out-of-focus abstract images.
The only explanation is that Ross, a middle-aged guy with absolutely NO connection to the average teenager or 20-something, must have figured this was the way to play down to the demographic that loved the book. The shaky "reality" look is the only way to be "hip" -- and show teens this is really their movie, part of their generation, part of their reality-TV/camcorder/mumble-core/Internet upbringing. Right?!?
Wrong. What an awful, misguided miscalculation. For this disastrous decision alone, Ross should be banished from the DGA. Strung up and publicly tortured. Maybe required to suffer through his own "hunger" game (whatever the hell that means -- I'm still not sure).
I won't go into the how stupid and clichéd the script is, how it rips off "The Running Man" and "Westworld" and "Rollerball"... or how the idiotic, contrived "happy" ending with Catnip Whatever and her cross-eyed, pseudo boyfriend hammered the final pitiful nail into the coffin of this pitiful attempt at cashing in on a book series by launching a money-making movie "franchise."
Let's just say this putrid waste of celluloid is an embarrassment to the world of cinema and a permanent black mark that will never be washed off the once-opulent silver screen.