[smazibummigue]

I'm thrilled about it, too! I love the washed-out cinematography, particularly in the Reaping scene. The aesthetic looks to be very 'adult,' which is exactly what I was most worried about, re: the Hollywoodization of the book. It's a profoundly dark, unforgiving narrative, and I was anxious that they'd attempt to make it more palatable to quite young audiences (or at least frame it through what Hollywood seems to think kids can "handle").

I am a bit confused, though, over some of the blog-related uproar concerning the "whitewashing" of the cast. The comments on Jezebel and i09 are pretty heated. It's as if the past 6 months didn't happen, and everyone was suddenly SHOCKED AND APPALLED to discover that Jennifer Lawrence turned out to be, gasp!, white. Seemed that the original complaints about her casting had to do with her body type ("she's too big to be Katniss") and now, for whatever reason, the fact that she's not a POC has a bunch of people in an uproar. Not that I can't recognize the critique of Hollywood's white privilege, but I wasn't really expecting it to be so vitriolically directed at this particular film.

That aside, I think it's inspired casting. I actually sort of always saw Lawrence as Katniss while reading, I suppose because I thought her character in Winter's Bone (god! what a performance!) had so many affinities with Katniss. Elizabeth Banks and Woody Harrelson (bracketing the wig) seem like great choices, too. I'd pictured Cinna as more fem than Lenny Kravitz, but I'm interested to see him in the role.