Awesome Things About The Hunger Games movie (spoilers)

All right, friends. I saw The Hunger Games this afternoon. Many of you were with me =). I will first just say what I said at dinner afterwards, which was that it was a complete moviegoing experience: I was cringing in my seat and covering my eyes at times, near tears at others, and even giggled a few times. Here are the things that I particularly enjoyed, in no particular order:

1) Woody Harrelson as Haymitch. Totally knocked it out of the park. He was funnier and more charming than Haymitch in the book, who was mainly just gross. I enjoyed his performance a lot.

2) Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss. There were parts of this movie where she was doubled over sobbing, and she totally sold it. She was awesome.

3) the way they incorporated the hosts' commentary to explain things that you wouldn't know unless you'd read the book, like what a tracker jacker is

4) the way the camera simulated Katniss's point of view when she was under the influence of tracker jacker venom

5) the scene when Katniss puts flowers over Rue's dead body. I know it had the same function in the book, but here I really *got it* that she was calling attention to the fact that someone was dead, and this was something we should feel bad about, not just view as entertainment.

6) the scene when Katniss goes to get the medicine for Peeta and gets into a really nasty fight with another tribute

7) the fact that they left out the scene where Peeta gets all mad when he finds out/determines that Katniss may have been faking her feelings for him. It was a life or death situation, and you didn't know for a long time whether Peeta was on the up-and-up, either, so I never really got where his anger came from, anyway.

8) Seneca Crane's beard, which, in his review, Roger Ebert humorously and accurately said that Satan would be envious of. There was debate over dinner about how you would shave a beard that way, or whether it was stuck on.

9)the random moments where I made myself giggle for no good reason. For example: Peeta can disguise himself to look like trees and rocks and stuff. There is one moment where Katniss is just walking around and Peeta just pops up, camouflaged. Katniss gives him this surprised look, like, "Peeta! You look like a f'ing rock!" Similarly, there is a moment where Peeta asks her to give him the bow and arrow, and she just looks at him like, "What are you going to do with it, bitch?" I commented over dinner that it was kind of too bad that it was a PG-13 movie, because I imagine that Hunger Games contestants would be swearing a lot more.

One random thought: I liked Stanley Tucci as Caesar Flickerman, but thought it would have been funny if Ryan Seacrest had played that part, though that might have been too obvious.

Anyway, that's it! It was great! Go see it!