Randi Rhodes Forums

Such hysteria!

I haven't seen the film yet, but I've read all the books. They're OK; not high lit, but enjoyable.

Have people been keeping up with all the hysteria?

The usual mouth-breathing inbred Aryan Neanderthal Nation are embarrassing themselves with tweets about the film having (gasp) Black People in it.

I'm not kidding. The usual inbred neanderthals have obviously been eating too much pink slime.

Looks like I need to go back to putting a Canadian Flag on my luggage when I travel overseas.

http://hungergamestweets.tumblr.com/page/6

Some of this nazi shyt will make you lose your lunch.

Yeah, a bunch of idiots appear to be distressed, mostly on twitter, that the film uses black actors to portray black characters. Go figure!

Apparently, the other issue/controversy with the film/book (haven't read it, haven't seen it) is the allegation that there may be some plagiarism.

The allegation is that Hunger Games may have plagiarized an earlier Japanese novel, Battle Royale, written in 2000.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_Roy ... ontroversy

This site wades into the controversy, and says the conclusion is ... not a slam-dunk.

http://io9.com/5888124/did-the-hunger-g ... tle-royale

I have no opinion, as I haven't read either.

Oh, I think it's even richer than that - and even more telling.

They're saying that, when reading the books they imagined the characters as white - despite the author's physical descriptions - and so were shocked and "disappointed" to see the actors cast were black.

The Pratchett story Color of Magic has a tourist who takes photos all the time. In the book it's clear the tourist is a wheel world metaphor for a Japanese tourist, and the land he's from is clearly a metaphor for Japan.

But in the movie they made the tourist out as an American tourist in Bermuda shorts, my wife saw the movie, and she had also read all wheel world books.

But when I said I thought they had bent the story in the movie she and I had quite a fight over it. She thought I was stereotyping Japanese. She apparently didn't see those Bermuda shorts. She didn't complain about Pratchett or the movie makers about stereotyping.

Actually, in a later book, Interesting Times, Rincewind visits the Agatean Empire home of Twoflower and it's clearly based on Japan.

Thank you Stoon, I like being correct.



I say, say "correct," never say "right." If one needs to turn right, say "helm to lee, starboard tack."

To get back to the topic of the book The Hunger Games, I'm just over halfway through it.

It's actually rather good for YA Lit. I liked the second book Catching Fire better than the other two. It was an unexpectedly good scenario where propaganda battles propaganda. If you notice, President Snow has the "White Rose and the scent of blood" like Richard III.

I just finished the first book last night, and now you're giving me spoilers? Bad Aquarian.

Sorry By "halfway through" I anticipated you were already into Book 2. I managed to read the trilogy in less than 2 days- was a page-turner.

You will not be disappointed.

Occasionally, I submit reader book reviews for The Guardian and gave this trilogy unexpectedly high marks.

The problem I have with Suzanne Collins is that since she is in the literature/movie industry I find it difficult to believe she had absolutely no knowledge of Battle Royale. Is Hunger Games a complete rip off of Battle Royale? No, I am not saying that. However the games are both done for social control, middle school aged kids are chosen to participate, there can only b one winner. Of course the U.S. movie industry as well as the trade publications will deny any resemblance because they have to, they are not unbiased observers.

Here is a link that gives a pretty good viewpoint.

http://www.hyphenmagazine.com/node/3741

Suzanne Collins gave original credit to the Classic Greek tale of Theseus and the Minotaur. Both stories are direct derivations of that far earlier work, but as it's in public domain both The Hunger Games and Takami's Battle Royale can "rip it off." Understand that the trilogy of The Hunger Games diverges completely from both Theseus and the Minotaur and Battle Royale at the end of the first book and completely by the next book. Taken as a complete trilogy, The Hunger Games is NOT like Takami's Battle Royale. I mentioned this in my book review and it seemed to palliate the Takami warriors.

I agree there are many differences and the social context is completely different. And I do not doubt that she drew from other Greek Mythology.

But do you believe her when she says she had "no knowledge of Battle Royale"? Especially considering she is a writer. Takami will tell you straight up he drew a lot of inspiration from Stephen King's The Running Man.

To me it seems many people in film and literature are reluctant to give credit to earlier works that came before them. Another example is A Tale of Two Sisters, written and directed by Jee-woon Kim, and adapted into the American version of The Uninvited which sucked and did not even resemble the original. Again Jee-woon Kim is completely up front about being inspired by Hitchcock. And I do not remember seeing Jee-woon Kim given any credit, although I could have missed it.

Do you have a link to the review you wrote? I would like to read it.

Alas, online review was well over a year ago and vaporized into the ether. It's one of those reader reviews that accompany a staff review. I don't bother saving them, as they're typically under 500 words and this one was unremarkable in that it simply endorsed the staff review.

I recommend The Hunger Games trilogy as a trilogy. For YA lit, it's surprisingly sophisticated. I read installment one in a single sitting and the trilogy in two days. The only other book I've read in a single sitting was Watership Down, which is also sociopolitical commentary disguised in a children's story.

Wanna read some intriguing stuff?

http://altlitlibrary.tumblr.com/

I saw the animated film version of that movie when I was a wee lad in 1978. Most of the kids' movies I had seen up to that point were Disney stories full of cheeriness and light. That one featured dying bunnies! I bawled through many parts of it. I have to admit that was a real problem; at that age, I wasn't really able to understand some of the deeper things going on. I was just sad at watching bunnies die.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watership_Down

[snip]

Watership Down has been described as an allegory, with the labours of Hazel, Fiver, Bigwig, and Silver "mirror[ing] the timeless struggles between tyranny and freedom, reason and blind emotion, and the individual and the corporate state."[17] Adams draws on classical heroic and quest themes from Homer and Virgil, creating a story with epic motifs.[18]

[snip]

The book explores the themes of exile, survival, heroism, political responsibility, and the "making of a hero and a community".[20] Joan Bridgman's analysis of Adams's works in The Contemporary Review identifies the community and hero motifs: "[T]he hero's journey into a realm of terrors to bring back some boon to save himself and his people" is a powerful element in Adams's tale. This theme derives from the author's exposure to the works of mythologist Joseph Campbell, especially his study of comparative mythology, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), and in particular, Campbell's "monomyth" theory, also based on Carl Jung's view of the unconscious mind, that "all the stories in the world are really one story.".[18]

The concept of the hero has invited comparisons between Watership Down's characters and those in Homer's Odyssey and Virgil's Aeneid.[17] Hazel's courage, Bigwig's strength, Blackberry's ingenuity and craftiness, and Dandelion's and Bluebell's poetry and storytelling all have parallels in the epic poem Odyssey.[21] Kenneth Kitchell declared, "Hazel stands in the tradition of Odysseus, Aeneas, and others".[22] Tolkien scholar John Rateliff calls Adams's novel an Aeneid "what-if" book: what if the seer Cassandra (Fiver) had been believed and she and a company had fled Troy (Sandleford Warren) before its destruction? What if Hazel and his companions, like Aeneas, encounter a seductive home at Cowslip's Warren (Land of the Lotus Eaters)? Rateliff goes on to compare the rabbits' battle with Woundwart's Efrafans to Aeneas's fight with Turnus's Latins. "By basing his story on one of the most popular books of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, Adams taps into a very old myth: the flight from disaster, the heroic refugee in search of a new home, a story that was already over a thousand years old when Virgil told it in 19 BC."[4]

[snip]

# In Stephen King's novel The Stand, protagonist Stu Redman reads Watership Down non-stop for two days.

# In ABC TV's show Lost, one of the main characters, Sawyer, is shown several times reading the book.

# In the film Donnie Darko, the book and its film adaptation are viewed and discussed.

[snip][end]

There's some "young adult fiction" that's crap. Don't even talk to me about Twilight.

But I think WD is a lot like HG; it draws its power from invoking powerful myths (in this case, the Aeneid or the Odyssey, instead of Theseus and the Minotaur.)