The Hunger Games

PG-13, 2:22 run time

Starring: Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson, Woody Harrelson, Lenny Kravitz, Stanley Tucci and Donald Sutherland.

This is about a bunch of people that win the lottery and take a cooking class, just kidding. The movie is based on the first novel of a trilogy by Suzanne Collins. As usual the book was better than the movie. With that said though, the movie was pretty good. I don't think it will disappoint either fans of the book or general movie-goers. However, as my wife Noelle pointed out, it was easy to spot the people that have not read the books because they laughed out loud at certain parts that were not funny in the story but appeared as moments of levity to the crowds at the games.

For those of you unfamiliar with the story, it is set in the future 74 years after a major war in a country called Panem. Panem is made up The Capitol and 12 districts that each have some type of industrial specialty. The rich, and you assume victors of the previously mentioned war, live in the Capitol. They demand a "tribute" from each of the poorer twelve districts every year consisting of one boy and one girl between the ages of 12 and 18. These tributes are chosen at random in a lottery, and are taken to The Capitol where they must fight each other to the death until there is only one left. Our heroine 16 year old Katniss Everdeen is one of the tributes, but of course you probably already know this unless you've been living under a rock.

The movie did a fairly good job of sticking to the story line from the book. For fans of the novels, yes there are details that have been left out of the movie. But what did you expect? I don't know about you but my ass starts falling asleep around the 2 hour mark and the movie would have been 4 hours if they had tried to fit in everything. I think the screenwriters did a good job of including all of the major scenes without really changing too much. This might be the result of Ms. Collins being a co-writer. My only major disappointment is I will probably have to wait two or more years to watch the second and third installments. If I am the producers though, I would probably try to hurry up if I want to keep character continuity. You'll understand what I'm talking about when you see Donald Sutherland, the cat looks so old I'm not sure he'll still be around in another four years.