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I've lost my appetite for The Hunger Games
Cinema owners are fair drooling at the thought of the crowds their theatres will swallow when The Hunger Games opens to a global audience on Friday. Trailers of the US$65 million movie have been driving fans of the teenage dystopian book trilogy crazy, and film critics have been upping the ante with rave reviews since the world premiere in Los Angeles just over a week ago, breathlessly speculating that the movie version of the first book will put the Twilight series -- and even Harry Potter -- in the shade.
Does anyone need to be told that The Hunger Games is a dark fantasy set in a post-apocalyptic North America known as Panem -- where a wealthy Capitol is surrounded by 12 poorer districts, from each of which, as punishment for a past rebellion, every year a teenage boy and girl are selected and pitted against each other in a fight to the death? That they are groomed, styled, trained and then paraded for this in a devilish parody of a television reality show?
It all makes for nail-biting dramatic tension and the rise of a new heroine who makes Bella Swan look like a girl from a Mills and Boon romance. But... Good Reading Guide’s Clare Cannon has serious reservations about the books and says she won’t be seeing the movie. Watch her talk on video about her five reasons not seeing The Hunger Games.
Here's a clip from the film, which is rated PG13 in the US, and 12A in the UK after cutting out some blood and editing four violent scenes.
Clare Cannon is the editor of www.GoodReadingGuide.com and the manager of Portico Books in Sydney. For the Good Reading Guide’s full review of The Hunger Games, click here.

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