S01E09 — The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes
SPOILER ALERT: This episode and transcript below contains major spoilers for The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes and for the entire original Hunger Games trilogy.
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Featuring hosts Timothy Haynes, Donna Haynes, Rebekah Edwards, and T. Josiah Haynes.
The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is, perhaps, the very best prequel any of us have experienced to a beloved book or series. A less spoiler-y alert: We LOVED the movie and book!
In our longest episode to date, the family discusses the many changes to Songbirds and Snakes‘ film compared to the inspiring book.
Listen to the other episodes on works in The Hunger Games:
Final Verdicts
If you haven’t listened to the episode yet, we recommend waiting to read our verdicts. (But you’re probably grown, so do what you want!)
In a weird twist, almost everyone (except Rebekah) preferred the book to the film for the additional context and characterization it offered.
Tim: The book is better
Donna: The book is better
Rebekah: The film is better (but only because I know the context of the book)
Josiah: The book is better
Full Episode Transcript
Prefer reading? Check out the full episode transcript below. It’s AI-generated from our audio, and if we’re being honest… no one sat to read the entire thing for accuracy. (After all, we were there the whole time.) 😉 We’re sorry in advance for any typos or transcription errors.
[00:00:00] Rebekah: Will you, will you read the book with me?
You should, it’s actually really good.
Hey everybody, Welcome to the book is better podcast. We are an audio only podcast of a family of four reviewing. Book to film adaptations, and we are so psyched for today’s episode. I can see everybody in the background, the cameras, which you can’t see is dancing. We’re super pumped because today we are going to be covering the Hunger Games, the Ballad of the Songbirds and Snakes.
This is a clean podcast, but we will talk about some pretty intense topics based on the content of this book today. Spoiler warning, we are going to spoil The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. And we will probably be talking about several themes throughout the entire original Hunger Games trilogy. So if you haven’t read or watched it and you want to do that first, then hit the pause button, go download the audio book.
Before we get started with our adaptation review, let’s do a little fun fact so that you can get to know us all a little better. Viola Davis said in an interview that she loved playing loving and caring motherly roles, but it was a lot of fun for her to portray tough, kick your butt characters too.
So here’s the trivia question of the day. Introduce yourself and let us know what character type, least like your personality, would you like to portray and why. I’m Rebecca. I am the daughter slash sister of the family. I think my answer is really easy. I can pull this from Dungeons and Dragons actually.
I have a character in a campaign, I don’t hardly ever play characters, but I have a character in a campaign we’re doing right now that is a super dark and broody warlock. And so when I’m like role playing in Dungeons and Dragons or doing things like that, I think The type of character least like me would be someone who’s like very broody, but with this undertone of I will kill anyone who hurts the people I love because right now I love to defend people I care about, but I’m not like tough or hardcore.
And so I don’t like there’s not that thing going for me. And so there’s something really intriguing about playing a character like that.
[00:02:24] Josiah: You’re so soft core.
[00:02:27] Donna: I’m mom, Donna, and my. character would be probably an investigative person. I’m thinking like National Treasure looking for secrets hidden in places that nobody else would necessarily think about and they require a little more deductive reasoning.
Those are fascinating stories for me. Even movies that I don’t think are Really great movies. That’s the kind of person I would, I think I’d love to portray. I think it’s, I think it’s what I’d like to do.
[00:03:00] Rebekah: Also, National Treasure, great movie.
[00:03:02] Josiah: I am T. Josiah Haynes, and I am the brother slash son of the family.
I think that the character least like my personality that I’d like to portray would be an evil dictator leader. Late Coriolanus Snow, perhaps?
[00:03:25] Donna: I think you missed the point of least like your personality.
[00:03:28] Josiah: No. I would be a benevolent ruler. Oh, in real life? No, in real life, yes. But this character type I’d to portray is a malevolent ruler.
You missed the difference. Yes, I see.
[00:03:44] Rebekah: The ruler part’s the same.
[00:03:46] Josiah: I want to be crazy. Crazy and everyone’s What’s he gonna do next? And then be in control of everything.
[00:03:54] Tim: My name’s Tim. I’m the husband and dad of the crew. When I was doing drama, I was usually cast as the the evil person.
It’s the villain. It’s usually easier to play the villain. There’s more depth of character, but I always wanted to be the romantic lead or perhaps the hero that just never gives up. It pushes through everything. Like in one of my wife’s favorite movies,
[00:04:22] Rebekah: my, my mom’s face. That was so cute. Our mom, our mother’s face, your wife, her face.
When you said I want to be the romantic lead was like, Ooh, the funny part is again. If it’s not like your personality, I feel like you’re the romantic lead in your life. Mom constantly talks about how hot you are. And so that does feel like you, but that’s
[00:04:42] Donna: adorable. I think even with the black eye and the bruise and the lip
[00:04:47] Rebekah: stitches.
Oh,
[00:04:50] Donna: accident, terrible and tragic outcome, hot, bad guy that was in a fight. For those
[00:04:59] Rebekah: of you who have no idea what we’re talking about, my dad suffered a fall last week. He is not in fact an elderly person who just tripped over something or whatever. There was a minor medical issue and he fainted, but he got a gnarly black eye and some stitches cause he cut his lip and.
Or we could just cut all
[00:05:18] Josiah: that and say he had a battle scar in a
[00:05:21] Rebekah: battle. We could just, we could lie. We could lie to our audience. I think that’s what audience is like is when they know that they can’t trust the people they’re listening to. So I’ve heard that helps.
[00:05:31] Josiah: Sure. They don’t know.
Am I going to go left? Am I going to go right? Am I going to tell them the truth? Am I going to lie to them? They’ll never know. As
[00:05:39] Rebekah: we get into the episode Josiah, would you like to give us a quick summary of the plot for people who may not have read the book? Oh,
[00:05:45] Josiah: thank you. I will do that. Okay.
Here’s the plot summary for the Ballad of Song, Birds, and Snakes, set 64 years before the original Hunger Games. The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes follows a young Coriolanus Snow, an ambitious student of the capital’s academy, who many years later becomes Pan Am’s authoritarian president. For the present, Snow hides his family’s poverty, but his fortunes seem to be turning when he’s chosen to mentor in the Tenth Hunger Games, a chance to regain his wealth.
These games lack the grandeur of later years from the original trilogy, being rudimentary and brutal, showing the capital’s shaky grips on the districts. Snow mentors Lucy Gray Baird, a defiant and talented singer from District 12. As he works to ensure her victory, driven by both affection and ambition, he makes some risky choices.
Lucy triumphs against all odds! But Snow is sent to District 12 as a peacekeeper, as punishment for cheating to secure Lucy Gray’s victory. Although he briefly considers a different life with Lucy Gray, his ambitions lead to betrayal and a return to the ca His actions not only regain his family’s status, but also set him on the path to power.
Contributing to the evolution. Of the Hunger Games. Dah!
[00:07:29] Rebekah: So for those of you who may not have heard the podcast before, we are going to review some differences from the book to the film. We’ve got three categories of differences we work from, but we may go back and forth between them.
The differences. Categories we use are differences in plot and timeline, differences in characterization, and then differences in the setting. So who wants to
[00:07:52] Josiah: start
[00:07:53] Tim: us out? The film opens with what is in the book, actually a memory of Corio’s. During, it’s actually in the second chapter in the book but he reflects on the savagery of human nature and his time during the war when there was very little food and people did pretty rotten things in order to secure food, and they lived on it.
Beans and cabbage and cabbage water and potato water and whatever they could use. And later we even learned they lived sometimes on paste because it would fill their stomach.
[00:08:32] Donna: I really liked what they did at the, in the beginning of the movie. I wondered how they were going to handle all that set up of who he is and who Tigress is and their family.
And I thought using the two children, I thought the children were believable. So I just thought I thought they made a good choice
[00:08:51] Rebekah: there. I agree. I think it was an incredible like bit of filmmaking because you open and I don’t even know how long that scene was. What maybe two, two and a half minutes. But you have a lot of the show don’t tell thing going on where you learn not only they were in the war.
There were bodies in the streets. They were foraging for food cause he and tigers had to feed their grand ma’am. And you see that cannibalism was happening in the Capitol, which the book goes into more detail about how that happens. And some of the people they knew and stuff, which was not important for the film.
But you learn about the cannibalism and you learn very briefly about the fact that rabies at one point ravaged the Capitol.
[00:09:28] Josiah: I don’t want to sway your guys’s opinion, but. My headline for this episode will be they worked too hard on making Coriolanus, young Coriolanus, relatable and likable, and they forgot to add in the parts that are problematic and that he is not That make him despicable.
that make him a bad person at the same time. And there’s nuance. And so I do think I liked the scene, the flashback scene of him and Tigress, his kids in isolation. But now that we’re talking about it, I’m realizing, yeah, they worked harder in the movie to make him more likable while taking out things that made him less likable later.
I think there’s an
[00:10:16] Tim: interesting trend in things these days of trying to make. The villains give them a backstory and give, sometimes give them an excuse to be the people that they are. It was because of their background is because of this thing that happened. There’ve been lots of movies about the villains backstory.
And I think this does probably lean heavily on that side, but the book is very balanced that way.
[00:10:40] Josiah: I
[00:10:40] Rebekah: think that the way that they did it made sense though in the movie because I see that and I go, this is someone who turned evil because he took similar trauma to what we saw happen to Katniss in the Hunger Games, but he like based on his background, based on the terrible ideals of where he lived and his father and all of those things.
He went the complete opposite direction. And so I thought it made sense. I didn’t mind at the beginning that he was relatable in that
[00:11:05] Josiah: way. No, I didn’t mind it at the beginning. I wonder, Dad, if that trend of the villains, if that was popularized by 2003s. Wicked on Broadway, perhaps
[00:11:18] Tim: because that was followed by Maleficent and we got the movie about Cruella de Vil and we’ve had several of those kinds of things
[00:11:27] Donna: I think there’s a I think there’s a balance there of what we see in movies of Trying to say. Oh, feel bad for Iron Man because he lost his parents Mhm. That is horrible, but you don’t get to keep going back and picking that up.
[00:11:40] Tim: This is his transition from, I’m a victim to, I’m not going
[00:11:44] Josiah: to be taken advantage of.
Yeah. In the book, the Plinth Prize is not mentioned until Corio kills a tribute rescuing Sejanus from the arena. It’s Sejanus’s father’s idea of repaying Coriolanus for rescuing his son.
[00:12:00] Rebekah: After Coriolanus has rescued Sejanus, he went through this thing where he thought he was going to ask Sejanus’s dad for money.
His dad made a comment to Coriolanus that made Corio think that he would reward him in some way. And when Sejanus and Corio show up, Sejanus also mentions, Oh, I was in a bike accident or whatever. And then Lucky Flickerman says, Oh, you have some pretty big news to share with us. And he lowers his eyes and I’m just going to read what he says.
Yes, so Janus finally began, we the Plinth family would like to announce that we will be giving a prize for a full ride to the university to the mentor whose tribute wins the Hunger Games.
[00:12:38] Josiah: In the book, there are multiple scholarships that Quirio is hoping to get at the beginning that he doesn’t get.
Unlike in the movie, the Plinth Prize is not mentioned until after Corio kills a Tribute rescuing Sejanus from the arena. And it’s Sejanus father’s idea of repaying Coriolanus for rescuing his son. But in the film, the Plinth Prize is mentioned at the beginning. It’s the primary prize that the mentors are seeking, are hoping to win.
It’s a huge amount of money, maybe it’s just a scholarship, but it’s probably just a lot of money anyway. How to win the prize is supposedly changed at the beginning of the film from the academy student with the best grades to the student who manages to best mentor their tribute in the games. And unlike in the book, I believe, In the movie, it’s specifically your tribute winning is a huge factor, it’s not necessarily the only thing we’re going to pay attention to.
[00:13:33] Rebekah: I thought it, it was a, an interesting change. Like I noticed it right away. That was the first thing I wrote in my notes when I was watching the movie yesterday, because I thought, I don’t think the plinth prize was a thing at first. And so then I had to do all this research to figure out where it came from, but I thought it was a good change.
in that it draws you in to be like, Oh just in a way that the tributes didn’t know they were going to be going to the games. The mentors in the movie don’t actually know that they’re going to be mentoring until right before it starts. And so I thought it created this sense of Oh, surprise.
And we got to go and things are moving and I liked it.
[00:14:06] Donna: Arachne being stabbed in the throat by her tribute is a little bit different in the film. I was glad they kept it because I thought it showed, it gave the opportunity to see the other mentors and you only got, you didn’t get to see a whole lot of the other mentors except for besides Sejanus, unless they had some interaction with Coriolanus.
But in the movie she’s killed and of course it affects Lucy and Corio and they’re together in the book, the description’s much more graphic. Festus is with Corio, Lucy Gray vomits, and Snow and Lucy seem to experience like post war trauma responses. But that’s a lot of this was similar to what they had to do in the original trilogy.
Because I’d question whether anybody would have taken children to see the original trilogy. Had they gone too much farther with the graphic stuff that went
[00:15:07] Rebekah: to keep the rating at PG 13 specifically. To keep the rating where it was and all that. It was still effective. Yes. But it definitely wasn’t quite as intense.
And I thought it was also a good thing. in terms of they reduced how many characters they focused on in the movie versus the book, how many you get to know. And so like Festus, who’s another mentor not being there, it makes sense because it’s we didn’t really need to get to know Festus. And so it’s just him and so Janus.
And so I thought that was really interesting. I thought it was weird that they The peacekeepers like show up and yanked snow away and force him to leave, but then leave so Janus for some reason that is not in the book either. That was the only part of the scene that I was like, why are the peacekeepers treating snow?
Like he did something wrong. And then also, why would you also leave another mentor? Like that part didn’t totally fit for me, but
[00:15:56] Josiah: otherwise I thought it was good
[00:15:57] Tim: in the movie. They came together. In the book so Janus shows up shortly after snow goes there. So he was actually the first in the book.
And then the other mentors decide, Hey, we’re going to get in on this kind of action too. I thought it was interesting that Clemencia the one who was supposed to have co written the paper in the book, her lie that she co wrote the paper is just off the cuff, whereas it seems a little more pre planned.
In the film, I also found it strange that they didn’t follow her story any farther. Yes,
[00:16:33] Donna: that’s what I
[00:16:34] Rebekah: wanted to talk about quite a bit. For those who haven’t read the book, Clemencia is actually mentioned throughout. the whole book. She comes back as a mentor right at the beginning of the games.
After her snake bite, she comes back. Her eyes are yellowing. Her skin is turning like she’s clearly becoming a mutation for those, the way that they had mutations in the original series. There are also some in this book. So she’s like going crazy. She’s really mean. I believe she’s Reaper’s mentor.
Is that right? She’s like very. Unhelpful when it comes. Yeah, she’s Reaper’s mentor. I have the list in front of me. Clemency is really unhelpful to her tribute. And like literally other mentors, including Coriolanus, but others like pointed out and they’re like, what are you doing? Like you’re not helping him.
What are, and she’s I’m making the games last longer. And she becomes really mean in a way that she hadn’t really shown in the book beforehand. I feel like what you get of her early on is like harsh. And then She just disappears. Okay, the reason I wanted to ask this though, at the end of the film, again, they never bring her up.
They never mention her. You never see her face. It is as if she died, but she doesn’t. But at the end, in the final scene where Snow is there with Dr. Gall, there is a pool in the floor and a massive snake like creature is swimming around in it and it looks person sized. And I know, I, I thought watching it, I was like, is that Clemencia, but it’s only like an Easter egg for the book readers to be like, Oh, is that Clemencia?
Did you get, what did you guys pick up on that? Or what did you think? I wondered
[00:18:08] Tim: what that was. I saw it. I thought maybe it was going to rear up out of the pool when Corio came by, but I did not make that connection though. That’s certainly. An interesting thought
[00:18:20] Josiah: I would have liked at least a little follow up on Clemencia in the movie because I think it’s one of volumnia galls Evilist.
Yeah. Yes is oh, yeah one of my students. Yes. I’m she might die. I might kill her. It’s like what? Yeah,
[00:18:37] Tim: I’m not sure It was pretty all of the evil motivation or it’s not quite as clear quite as quickly that she’s not just a little Crazy, she’s evil But there are some other things that are dropped from the book to the movie.
There, the funerals for the academy students that are killed. By reacting at the zoo and in the bombing those aren’t in the movie to die in the initial bombing and a third guy, a submarine succumbs to his injuries days later. And there’s this parade through the streets and it is.
Not PG 13 friendly. And I’m just as glad that they dropped a lot of that stuff. A lot of that part from the movie.
[00:19:18] Josiah: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:19:18] Rebekah: I will also say on that specific note, they changed who the third mentor is that dies. So Gais Breen is just like one of the mentors. It’s not really all that relevant in the movie.
The mentor that dies is the nephew of the current president. , who is.
[00:19:36] Josiah: Felix Raven?
[00:19:39] Rebekah: Yes. Felix Raven Still. He’s the mentor for Dill, the other District 11 tribute. So he’s the nephew of the current president of Pen Em. Another small change there because in the movie he’s the son of the president while in the book he’s the nephew of the president.
So in the movie it’s used to basically distract from Reaper. Collecting all of the bodies and gall comes on the news immediately after you see this like touching scene, it reminded me of Katniss burying Rue like under the flowers and stuff. And they come on with Dr. Gall talking about how Felix has died and the rebels are such savages.
And so they like make this big pomp and circumstance over a capital citizen, that was a mentor dying and blah, blah, blah. I looked in the book. Felix doesn’t die in the book. He literally lives. Like he’s just when Dil dies in the book, he just is given one last interview and goes off.
[00:20:30] Josiah: I think that’s probably a good change.
And in the
[00:20:32] Tim: movie, she also says, so the president has approved continuing the Hunger Games because at this point, nobody’s watching, it’s very low attendance at watching and things. So they’re not sure if it’s going to continue.
[00:20:46] Josiah: It usually would end in an hour or something, right? Yeah, they said they were very
[00:20:51] Rebekah: surprised.
I think they said a few of them lasted for several hours. Remember, Flickerman had
[00:20:56] Josiah: reservations for that dinner reservations. So I guess the change that I want to talk about is how many tributes there were in the beginning of the 10th Hunger Games. Because, you start with 24 or two from each district.
But in the book, you only have 14 tributes, and then a 15th is hung up. yOu have the 14 viable tributes at the beginning, and in my head, when I was reading the book, I was thinking, Oh, okay, I’m starting to see how Lucy Gray has a chance, because I assumed she was going to win, and it started to make sense to me.
Oh, because almost half of them were taken out before the games. That would help her out a lot. But in the movie, I think it was an okay change. Not only is it easier to remember all of these kids faces, more than just their names on a piece of paper with the visual medium, but you have that brutal, awful, but very important scene at the very beginning of The Hunger Games where so many tributes die at once.
aNd I started tearing up in the IMAX. I got to see it in IMAX, did I, did any of you get to see it in IMAX? Nice. No, not yet.
[00:22:09] Rebekah: No, I live in the land of terrible theaters.
[00:22:13] Josiah: There are more tributes in the film. I feel like there might be like 21 tributes at the beginning of or, what’s, what’s the number of tributes at the beginning of the 10th Hunger Games in the film?
I actually
[00:22:26] Rebekah: went back a second time to see the movie and there were 19 tributes plus Marcus at the beginning of the games in the film. So it was five more than we saw in the book. And I think part of that is because they didn’t cut anyone that was killed by like starvation or the elements like in the zoo for not being taken care of.
[00:22:45] Josiah: Which is just a departure from the book, which I think is fine because it serves having a big set piece fight scene in the movie. Whereas in the book it worked for me because it just made more sense that Lucy had a shot. That was the point of it, but I think it had a point in the movie that they changed it.
I thought that made sense. Was the
[00:23:05] Donna: bombing, was that a rebel bombing in the book? It was
[00:23:08] Rebekah: a rebel bombing because those inter the thing where the mentors were taking the tributes was being filmed. And so the rebels, it was exactly as is in the movie. It was the rebels planned it for the TV. No, they
[00:23:20] Tim: said they weren’t sure they could have planned.
The rebels could have planted those years and years ago because they hadn’t used that arena. This was the first time they were using
[00:23:29] Josiah: it again. My question, I think that in the book and movie. It’s unexplained and I’m thinking to myself and unexplained That’s like a huge plot point to have where are these rebels at?
[00:23:46] Tim: tHe media including dr. Gall Make sure that it’s the rebels that planted it. They planted it, you know for us
[00:23:54] Rebekah: So
[00:23:58] Tim: the media
[00:23:58] Josiah: used it that way
[00:24:00] Rebekah: yOu think it could have been a, like the thing where they killed Prim and pretended like the rebels
did
[00:24:05] Josiah: it?
[00:24:05] Tim: When I read the book, I was certain that
[00:24:07] Josiah: they had planned it, that it was the game makers that had
[00:24:12] Donna: planned the bomb that killed Prim?
[00:24:13] Rebekah: Yes. No, I do think the rebels planned the bomb that killed Prim. That was my point. They tried to pretend it was the capital, but they did it.
[00:24:20] Josiah: Oh, it was difficult for me to imagine the Hunger Games happening with all of the different tributes names. And a lot of that, I was like, all right, that’s not Lucy Gray.
That’s not Lucy Gray. OK, I there’s one of them that’s strong. Oh, gosh, I could not keep up in the book Hunger Games. And so I was really appreciative of having all those faces to remember. A lot easier to remember faces.
[00:24:46] Tim: And in the movie, they also helped with the screens. They had 24 screens up there with their names and they kept cutting to that at times.
So you keep seeing their names, even though you don’t hear them.
[00:25:01] Josiah: How have we not talked about this yet? The fact that Lucky Flickerman was giving a weather forecast with all of the districts mapped out. Yes, I was so excited. I was so excited. Oh, my
[00:25:14] Rebekah: gosh. Can somebody look that up? Can we see that? Is there
[00:25:16] Josiah: a it’ll be online yet.
But I remember that District 11 was Mexico.
[00:25:22] Rebekah: Wait, District 11 was what? It was Mexico? Yeah,
[00:25:25] Josiah: it was like more than Mexico. It was like It was North America, not just Yeah. And also, I thought it was odd that District 12 was, yes, very small, but it was on the coast.
[00:25:36] Donna: It’s not on the coast. It’s in
[00:25:37] Rebekah: coal mining.
12 doesn’t have a coast. They don’t know how
[00:25:40] Josiah: to swim. In the Lucky Flickerman weather forecast, I was surprised because It was like the edge of where Virginia would be I feel like
[00:25:50] Rebekah: it is in the Appalachian Mountains for sure But it
[00:25:52] Josiah: went on the weather map that he was using it went I remember it going to the coast Those are the two things I remembered 11 and 12 Being Mexico and on the coast that is wild.
Yeah, so I need I want to picture that So I don’t think I’m going to go
[00:26:09] Rebekah: back to the thing that Josiah was going to say. The bombing indeed was ambiguously planned. They said that it was the rebels, but that it was like they could have put it there in between the games because the arenas basically ignored.
whatever. So it was, it, the timing was definitely ambiguous in the movie. It was basically made it sound like it made it look like it was, they were bombed from the air, that it was very purposeful timing. So that is different. Just a couple of things I noticed before we get to the games itself, there’s more time that passes in the book between when the bombing happens and the first day of the games.
So there are additional funerals, Coriolanus recovers. Also, I will make a note about the funerals. Corio sang. At the first funeral for Arachne and he sang the, I believe the Anthem of
[00:26:56] Josiah: Panem, which I think of grand ma’am, and then they used it again, they used
[00:27:02] Tim: that recording
[00:27:03] Josiah: again as a second hologram
[00:27:06] Rebekah: because he was in the hospital.
And I think it was interesting, by the way, that they cut the funerals. I get why they cut them for time and all of that makes sense. But the fact that he also had a singing voice and sang some, I thought that drew such an interesting parallel between him and Lucy Gray, and it was just interesting.
Exactly. But they didn’t do that, which, I thought that was interesting. So Lucy Gray in the movie is just interviewed while snow is still in the hospital. And there’s, like I said, funerals, more time for him to heal. I looked it up. I think it’s still two or three days. It’s not like a lot, but it wasn’t.
Oh, the, this is literally the day before the games
[00:27:44] Tim: begins. I thought the tributes were there for a week before the game started about a week because they had, it had taken multiple days to get from their districts. Cause Lucy said I haven’t eaten in two days or whatever in the book. And then there
[00:27:59] Josiah: are other
[00:28:01] Rebekah: days, they’re afraid some of them are going to
[00:28:02] Donna: starve to
[00:28:03] Tim: death.
I thought it was interesting that they compress that time or at least didn’t say something about
[00:28:09] Rebekah: it. I also thought it was interesting that Lucy Gray did, she did have a guitar for her interview, but it was interesting that in the book she was given the guitar. Through snow who I don’t know if I remember I’m trying to think if she knew that it was from snow But I think he said he would get he was giving the get to he found it from someone in the book that he knew It was actually one of the people who knows about his family’s poverty and they gave him a guitar for free It was a musician who had closed up his shop as of the war and so he had a guitar and so it was like It was a little more of a connection point.
I think it speaks to in the book, it felt a little more believable that like Lucy Gray and choreo had become like romantically involved. It felt a little weird in the movie. Like it didn’t, I didn’t totally believe it at the it just didn’t feel like enough time had passed enough interactions had occurred.
So I thought that
[00:29:02] Donna: was, I agree. And the dude that gave him the guitar is the one who told him about Highbottom and his dad being friends. And I’m like, again, that’s one of those things I don’t understand about what goes on in editing. And I know people do this a lot and people do it and they’re better than.
I would be or whatever, but I didn’t get it because that conversation with the guy could have been less than a minute, two minutes, maybe because he like gave choreo the whole thought about your dad and high bottom. And they were, and it was made me
[00:29:35] Josiah: think of suddenly they were enemies. It was
[00:29:37] Donna: A nod to Harry Potter where, Oh yeah, James and Sirius.
They were friends. They, you didn’t know that, but blah, blah, blah. It gave you just a snippet of that background that made the high bottoms character a little more mysterious. I
[00:29:51] Josiah: thought I think that one of the problems is that pluribus bell is not in the rest of the story. And so you don’t want to just introduce a character who has no point in the rest of it, who has no efficient.
But Rebecca, I did think that the interview with Lucy Gray Was lacking in the movie. I did enjoy her singing every time she did it. I love Lucy Gray as a character I would have liked more Lucky. I mean they spent time with especially Katniss and Peeta And Caesar Flickerman in the original trilogy.
And that was part of the pageantry of it. And even if I know that the pageantry wasn’t really a thing, and this was the first year they were doing it, but I would have definitely liked to see more in the interview. And I think it was around the interview when Lucy Gray talked to Corio about Billy Tope.
Because didn’t she sing a song that was about. Yeah, I thought it would be a love
[00:30:53] Tim: song to him And he was mad because it sounded like she was singing about somebody in the district that she loved.
[00:30:58] Josiah: Yeah, Even though it was a little bit of a breakup song. Yeah, he was jealous and I really loved the line.
I Was the bet you lost in the reaping That stuck with me in the book and the movie. Yeah.
[00:31:11] Rebekah: And she gives more information to Corio about who she was talking about in the movie. In the book it’s just vague and he learns who Billy Tope is after he arrives in 12 and all that. In the movie she just like straight up says, it’s Billy Tope,
[00:31:23] Josiah: yeah, and I think that was better because I think that although I didn’t have a huge problem with it because it was a little less, it might have been a little less jarring in the movie than in the book. But I would have liked a little more setup for the third part of the movie, which we haven’t talked about yet The Peacekeeper part.
Sure. In the book when I was reading and I got to part three and I was like, oh There’s more book. That’s interesting. Is this good? Do I like this? And one of the things I was thinking when it was starting out was like, oh, yeah I’ve heard about Billy Taupe and Mayfair And I was thinking about a few of the things that Lucy Gray had talked about in District 12.
Oh yeah, I guess we did learn about that. That’ll that’s one thing to look forward to learning more about. I didn’t think I was gonna get to know Billy Tope or Mayfair, whatever her name was. But I did get to, and that being lost in the movie, I thought… made part three even more disconnected, which might have been the biggest problem with the film.
And
[00:32:28] Donna: when they did it at the beginning and Lucy was in the reaping and they make it pretty obvious if you’re paying attention, they made it pretty obvious that Mayfair worked something out and that somehow, yeah, we’re in the book. You didn’t get that. You saw what happened in the snake and blah, blah, blah.
I thought, so I thought that was okay. But to your point, Josiah, when you got to the third part, then that’s just another thing that they couldn’t have revealed there at the beginning. It just looks like the two in the book, you thought the two girls just had some hatred for each other. It was just something you didn’t know who they were at all.
So for Lucy Gray to drop the snake,
[00:33:09] Rebekah: whatever. Billy Tope did say something at the reaping though, right? He was like, I’m so sorry. I didn’t know. So it’s set up that it’s over a guy. Yeah.
[00:33:18] Donna: So they gave you that little piece, but in the book they don’t reveal the whole. The whole detail of it.
I don’t think do they until the third part. I think that’s
[00:33:29] Josiah: correct. First of all, in the movie, they reveal it in a very subtle way where Mayfair says something like, Oh, did you like that? I sent you to the Hunger Games. She doesn’t get out of this, whatever. Yeah. You know what? I would have really liked to see in the film.
Mayfair’s mayor father pick Lucy Gray’s name out of the Reaping Bowl. And they did not show it. They showed him going to the mic from the bowl with her name already. And I would have liked no knowing it. And I thought it would be good for rewatch value for other people. I would have liked to see the mayor actually pick the name from the bowl and to see how he did
[00:34:07] Rebekah: that.
You know how that could have been really powerful? What if he had picked her name from the bowl and you see his hand go in and all of the papers are blank because he already knows who it’s going to be. Or what if there’s no name? Or they all say Lucy Gray. Or they
[00:34:22] Donna: show it. He pulled out some other
[00:34:24] Josiah: name.
[00:34:26] Donna: Oh yeah, interesting. You’re right, to bring in a little, to bring that in. But, showing it at the beginning, still, maybe they’re thinking the non reading audience, the people, audience didn’t read the book, maybe they’re thinking, we need to let them know up front that there was something, that this went on.
But, you’re right, when you got to the last
[00:34:48] Rebekah: part. He was particularly happy about it. The mayor was very gleeful.
[00:34:52] Donna: Yes. But when you got to the Peacekeeper section, you’re right, it did go fast. There’s no way
[00:35:00] Josiah: around that part. Which is funny. I think a lot of people would say it was a waste of time and it was rushed.
Really? The third section? I think that film only view, I’ve listened to a couple reviews and I was disappointed. That it came off that way, but I understood where they were coming from Yeah That it was tacked on but it was also rushed
[00:35:25] Rebekah: in the book It was a pretty significantly long section and I have several things written down about what I didn’t cut
[00:35:31] Josiah: from that but I didn’t love how long it was because Yeah, I didn’t love how long the third section of the book was, but it was a great last two chapters and a good first two, but there was such a long middle point where I couldn’t quite keep my interest on everything going on.
But related to the third part of the movie and book, the Peacekeeper part, in the book, Just before the Hunger Games, so at the end of part one probably, Corio and Lucy Gray share a passionate kiss in full view of the other tributes and mentors. And I really don’t like that they cut it out of the film.
Same. I thought that was a huge… And it’s not even like I’m this big romantic, although I did fall hopelessly in love with the idea of Corio and Lucy having a nice life together in the book. Yeah, same. Ultimately, I knew that he was messed up. And knowing the third part of the book is all about Corio and Lucy Gray, I Trying to make a small town romance work I thought it was very jarring that they don’t kiss till part three, do they?
[00:36:45] Rebekah: I think it was it her? It might have been him. I think he pulls back from her when they’re at the zoo because they almost kiss through the bars And then I think he’s the one that kind of goes like he pulls his face back and then she looks a little embarrassed But like I thought that was such a weird choice like I don’t know.
And it was weird too, because in the movie, nobody was there like nobody could have seen them. And in the book, it was like public.
[00:37:10] Josiah: It was weird. I think in the book that it was a public kiss was so wild. I thought it was a great plot point of. Oh, wow. He really thinks he’s in love with this girl to the point where he’s going to he would be willing to sacrifice his image for.
And how is that not somehow cheating or illegal or something? But he’s not worried about it. And it’s crazy that he’s not worried about other people seeing and I’m so sad that they cut that.
[00:37:39] Donna: Remember going to the second Hunger Games when he visits Katniss and he’s got film of her kissing Gale.
I mean in his head, now does he know as an 18 year old, probably he wouldn’t be thinking this necessarily because he hadn’t gotten far enough into the games to even… I don’t think this way, but we know eventually we get, as he gets older, he realizes I can see everything you do. There’s nothing hidden from me, in my total control.
And so I kind of wonder, I thought about that where he can have secret thoughts. He can have secret plans. Nobody else can. As we get into the games at the beginning, in the original trilogy, you got. Bloodbaths they talk about the mentors talk about it blah blah blah,
[00:38:24] Rebekah: but in here like half the tributes die at the beginning
[00:38:27] Donna: exactly and in the book There’s not an initial bloodbath
[00:38:31] Josiah: like that because a lot of them are
[00:38:32] Donna: already dead right there are several already dead Reapers the only one ready to fight And everybody else takes off by the time they flee, by the time he takes a stand.
In general, I think that all the way through this up leading up to the games, except for them in the book, them showing Reaper as crazy and aggressive, the rest of them are either sickly or they don’t want to kill each other. They’re trying to either, they maybe stand up for each other or, Stay away from each other at best.
Yeah, interestingly enough you see where the games progress to By the 74th games. It’s you don’t get into a fight with other tributes. Don’t do it You stay away from each other the fights in the arena and that’s part of their Warnings and things like that to keep them all alive. Hopefully keep them all alive.
I thought that was interesting
[00:39:30] Josiah: one thing about the arena was that In the books, it was already battered, a common target for rebel bombers. And in the film, it looks like it’s more or less in good repair until it’s bombed in the movie during the Mentor tribute visit. And let me just say that I had trouble in the book visualizing the games happening.
That was just something my brain was struggling with. But I will say, to my credit, how the arena looked in the movie was more or less exactly how I pictured it in my mind from the book. It was like this gray, beige arena that was… Susanne Collins did a pretty good job of describing it as like this is where spectators go like a Sealing to Coliseum.
Yeah, and yeah, I thought that was pretty well Adapted but yes, I thought it was interested that the arena was already battered up before the Games in the book, but in the film they changed a little bit I did
[00:40:37] Rebekah: like in my first read through of the book I thought it was very interesting because there’s we can talk about a lot of this Later, but there were a lot of changes between obviously the 10th hunger games and the 74th that we get in the first of the original trilogy.
I thought it was really interesting that the word arena they were using in the future, like it started as just an actual, a normal arena. And it was so simple. I thought that was just. such a good like way to differentiate how the games had progressed over time. I loved that. And
[00:41:07] Tim: I think too, they did a good job of costuming, thinking about the costumes in the Hunger Games series and thinking about what it would have been 64 years earlier.
It looked like it was a takeoff from the forties and fifties in the United States kind of thing. It was different, but it seemed to fit in that kind of era. I thought the costuming was really good and set the stage for it being a very
[00:41:30] Rebekah: different time. Yeah. And the fashion in the districts that were so poor and couldn’t have fashion changing because that’s a privilege.
That’s a thing that has to do with wealth. Their fashion was essentially the same, which I also think was powerful.
[00:41:44] Donna: The costumes for the mentors, the school uniforms the skirt and the pants. Woo! I would never put a skirt on a guy, just, I just wouldn’t personal preference. But that, those pants with that pleated skirt and the jacket, I thought those It’s awesome.
I thought that was so awesome. And put the blue shirt on with it, I agree, it was spot on to make the whole experience right and coherent, make it cohesive. Yeah.
[00:42:09] Josiah: Yeah, it was good world building. The academy outfit was the right mixture of pomp and tradition and a futuristic setting. Yeah, I
[00:42:18] Tim: agree. In the arena in the book rather, has no cameras in those various tunnels that are exposed by the bombing.
In the movie, you get early in the game where the pack goes after Jessup and Lucy Gray. Those are not In the book nor any of the scenes that take place outside, outside of the public area
[00:42:37] Josiah: of
[00:42:38] Rebekah: the arena. You can only see the tributes in the stands and in the open floor of the arena.
[00:42:43] Tim: As if they weren’t prepared for them getting into the tunnels or things like that.
And Lucky says, we can see all of those places. We’ve got cameras there. He makes a specific… reFerence to the fact that they have
[00:42:58] Josiah: those when in the book that in 24 hours we installed a bunch of cameras that can’t be broken by the tributes.
[00:43:05] Rebekah: Which was a freaking fantastic choice, by the way, if you couldn’t have seen, I feel like that made the hunger games in this one so much more interesting to watch than it had been to read.
Cause in my opinion, by the time they said, I think lucky makes a. Nod do it in the book and he’s talks about how it’s so boring and it’s going on so long and block. I had the same thought. I was like, okay, can we get to the, whatever, cause this is, I’m losing it. This is
[00:43:28] Donna: Or all just hiding.
Bleuck. Yeah. Yes. When, what is it that that when you go through the turnstile, what is it that says.
[00:43:35] Josiah: Enjoy the show. Oh my gosh. Enjoy the show. Oh, I love that.
[00:43:39] Rebekah: Enjoy the show. That is from the book. I don’t know if you realize, but that is from the book and in the movie. He mentions it when he goes in to rescue Sejanus.
I found it last night when I was rereading. That’s
[00:43:48] Josiah: awesome. I was going to say, you still get a little bit of unpreparedness from the Capitol whenever Lucy goes behind the fan and Lucky says, We don’t have a camera back there, but we will next year. Yes.
[00:44:02] Donna: Talking about Lucky in the book, he hosts the games from Capital News where he works and the mentors are in the academy viewing the broadcast.
I’m really thankful that they did not do that. And I’m so glad for this change. The movie puts the mentors at the studio with him. And I would say he was probably the character I was most concerned about. working in the ensemble and what they did with him. I thought it was very cool. Yeah. He was a complete buffoon who, just wants some, a little bit of fame and he’s goofy and doesn’t, almost like the teenager that grows faster.
Their body grows faster than their coordination. He reminds me of that person. And so I was really glad that they did this where he could be in there with them. And have that interaction a little bit. And when he would say so and so out, or he was, Oh, that one’s, you got to leave.
[00:45:00] Tim: I thought it was interesting because in my childhood it was very common for the local TV stations, weatherman.
To also host a children’s show of some type and it was a strange kind of balance they do the weather in the evening and they’re the ones you know that introduced the cartoons or this special kids show Or whatever. I it was a throwback to that kind of thing
[00:45:25] Josiah: Wow, so strange How old is Suzanne Collins wonder if she would have a similar experience?
She may but I should also Original trilogy. Question
[00:45:35] Rebekah: 61 is the answer
[00:45:36] Donna: to that. She’s mom’s age. She’s 61.
[00:45:39] Josiah: Yeah. So did you say
[00:45:40] Rebekah: no dad’s age? Sorry, I’m 62. She’s dad’s age. She’s 61. You’re 62.
[00:45:45] Josiah: Man, I sniped that one. You did? That was a great guess. That was a
[00:45:51] Donna: fantastic guess.
[00:45:53] Josiah: And see that’s not part
[00:45:54] Tim: of your experience.
That wasn’t the case for you guys. So one watching news, when she puts that in the book, she’s throwing back to something of her experience perhaps. That you guys have no clue about
[00:46:05] Rebekah: and in the future the hunger games has a 24 hour host in Cesar Flickerman, which is what we’re used to is 24 hour news time specific people live stream Yeah, so that’s way more our culture.
Exactly. Not 60, but yeah 64 in the Hunger Games. Yes, not in our reality
[00:46:24] Josiah: 61 okay, not quite 60. I had an original trilogy question. It’s Caesar Flickerman have Resolution didn’t they keep him alive the district? Yeah
[00:46:35] Rebekah: He did the coverage for the entire like rebel war and all that stuff after like during the Mockingjay book He does like the final interviews with let’s see He interviewed PETA and was like doing stuff like that.
He was featured throughout. I don’t think that they resolved whether or not the rebels killed him or what they did with him though.
[00:46:54] Donna: Okay. Was Caesar, did Caesar have conversations with Lucky? Were there conversations about, what he would do or what would you do differently from the beginning, grandpa?
or dad. It’s probably his dad, honestly, according to their
[00:47:09] Rebekah: ages. 60 something. Lucky was in his maybe early thirties. He, if he had Caesar at that point. Just Googled
[00:47:18] Donna: that. Also see all those Caesar Flickerman specific ages never mentioned. It’s assumed he’s either in his seventies or eighties.
[00:47:26] Rebekah: It’s assumed he’s that old. So he’s the son. Wow. That’s wild.
[00:47:30] Donna: I remembered something in the book about them suggesting he’s a lot older than he looks because he’s had so much work done. He’s been
[00:47:38] Tim: doing it for 40 years.
[00:47:41] Josiah: Caesar.
[00:47:43] Rebekah: So when the last setting thing, I think in the arena that I just wanted to point out that I thought was interesting that I actually did not like the way they did it in the movies.
So in the book, the parcels that go to the tributes when their mentor send them for water or food or whatever. They did arrive too quickly. The first one broke, the water broke, as it was shown. However, they are not weapons. Like they couldn’t have been used as weapons in the arena. They came in too fast, but Coriolanus uses them in the games to literally hit people and injure them to help Lucy Gray.
I thought that it was interesting that they tried to change that technology, but like it felt disingenuous to me.
[00:48:24] Josiah: I thought that it could have been an okay change, but I had a, cause it was obviously like the drones were random and unpredictable. But the fact that every single drone hit a tribute was what I had a problem.
I was like, yeah, maybe if two of them hit two of the three of the pack. Yeah, I could see that. It was too easy. Literally every one of the six or seven drones he sent hit a tribute. And I was like, that’s, why would that have happened?
[00:48:54] Rebekah: So there were a lot of tributes in the games that We’re showed in the movie to die a very different way than they did in the film partly, because there were more of them obviously in the film.
And so we already talked about the bloodbath does not happen. So in the movie there’s like a bloodbath at the beginning where more of them die. But let’s see, Dill is the tribute from District 11, the female that is actually Felix Ravenstill’s tribute. She has tuberculosis, which is shown in the movie.
However, she in the book just like walks out of a tunnel and kind of coughs. and falls down and she is dead. She dies on camera, but it’s just of tuberculosis. She wasn’t killed by Lucy Gray. She, Lucy Gray, does not kill Tanner either, who’s one of those three pack members. Coral, Mizzen, and Tanner are like the three tributes that do travel together in the book.
They also do so in the movie, but it’s got a little bit of a different taste to it. In the movie, Lucy Gray, like she sprinkles some of her poison through a vent down onto Tanner when they’re looking for her up in the vent and Tanner just like falls and his nose starts to bleed in the book. Tanner actually dies during the snake attack.
Also Reaper was shown to have died in the snake attack. He doesn’t die like that in the book. Lucy Gray noticed that her teammate Jessup or her, like her, 12 counterpart. He had coughed or spit in Reaper’s eye and she had noticed the early signs of rabies. So she called it a mercy killing. She tells Coriolanus about this in the third part of the book in 12.
So we don’t know it at the time, but she poisons Reaper’s puddle of water that he’d been drinking from around where he was collecting the bodies. And so she called it a mercy killing. And I think they also show Wovee being killed by snakes, which also does not happen that way.
[00:50:40] Josiah: Yes, in the book Wovee does not get killed by snakes.
She tragically is killed by Lucy Gray. Now, I think in the film, it appears as though the actress and character playing Wovie has Down syndrome. In the books, Lucy Gray accidentally poisons her. She means to poison
[00:51:02] Rebekah: coral. Yes, she was aiming to poison coral or one of the other like pack members. Yes, pack
[00:51:09] Josiah: members.
Miz and her Tanner, but Wovie. Walks out into the public part of the arena with an empty water bottle in hand. And then she dies. This is in the book. And am I mistaken? Now, I’m OK if I’m dumb, but I vaguely remember that being the last death. Which one? Before the snakes? Wovie in the book. Before the snakes.
[00:51:32] Rebekah: There are six, seven tributes left when Wovie dies. So I’m on the page where they mention it. Reaper. Mizen, Coral. Yeah, there’s several of them still
[00:51:42] Josiah: alive. Are they all killed in the snake
[00:51:45] Rebekah: attack? Coral kills Mizen, her teammate. She does stab him as she does in the movie. That is also in the book. Reaper is killed by Lucy Gray’s poisoning.
And then I think the other four remaining other than Lucy Gray. Were killed by the snakes and one of them Lucy specifically like thought that her Singing made the snake kill one of the tributes. That’s what she tells Corio later in the book
[00:52:12] Donna: Do you think that they had wovie cast as a person with Down syndrome?
Do you think that was to just? broaden the different kinds of Children to show you the games don’t question the games don’t harshness of it there’s no discrimination between You don’t get a pass because you have this or that disability or anything like that It doesn’t matter you just get picked but then do you
[00:52:40] Josiah: really get picked there were multiple aspects That were especially disturbing to me in a thematically appropriate way, including Woe V being sent out into the arena or, as a tribute.
And I, that was another time I teared up was when I saw Woe V in the ring. Remember
[00:52:59] Donna: at the end of the last movie of the last Mockingjay. He says to her, I’m not above killing children, but it has a purpose to, to think about the depravity there.
[00:53:14] Rebekah: Make sure that they know no one is safe. It’s worth it.
Yeah.
[00:53:18] Josiah: Yeah. I think that it was a step too far that the filmmakers did not want to show any of the tributes killing Wovie. And I think that was probably a good choice. I don’t think that, I think so too, really could have handled that very much. And so to have it be volumnia galls snakes indirectly, Killing her, I think, was the least sickening way to kill Woevee.
The other thing I found really disturbing was that the way that Marcus was hung up and portrayed by a black actor, I think, is something that very few movies would ever do nowadays, but I thought it was very tragically and sadly appropriate to show what effect, what effectively… Boils down to a lynching to show and he was hung with his arms out like that.
Yeah That made it creepy. Yeah, and on one hand, I don’t think there was a racial element in universe There doesn’t seem to be any racism in It’s just districts versus capital racism at least
[00:54:33] Rebekah: It is racism, but it’s more like your capitalist or your district is your class is, and I guess
[00:54:39] Josiah: instead, but I thought that was very horrific imagery that was used to portray a point that they portrayed.
Okay. I have a question in the movie. It does not go into detail in the book. Does this specify that only capital people can bet, can sponsor? Yes.
[00:54:59] Rebekah: Okay. And you have to be a capital citizen and not related to anyone, like a mentor or someone involved in the creation of the games.
[00:55:08] Josiah: I liked that the girl who cut down Marcus got a bunch of sponsorships.
Me too. Yeah, that was cool. I would have also liked, was it Reaper who started to pile up the bodies? Yes. And maybe before he tears down the banner. I would have liked for him to be getting sponsorships, too. One
[00:55:25] Tim: thing that was a bit different from book to movie Corio’s handkerchief idea about getting it into the, to the aquarium with the snakes in the book that seemed to be a split second decision.
In the movie, it seemed to be much more premeditated. He tore his stitches out so he could go to Dr. Gall to have her redo them. In the book, it’s something that just happens because it’s a regular checkup and he notices them and he suddenly thinks of it. So that’s a bit of a change. That made him more calculating than the book
[00:55:57] Josiah: did at that
[00:55:57] Rebekah: point.
I also think it was hand holding the audience more, which I liked. It was making sure they totally understood what
[00:56:04] Josiah: was happening.
[00:56:04] Tim: Eventually, when they’re in District 12, the book doesn’t talk about Corey Alanis offering to take Lucy Gray back to the Capitol. Lucy Gray is in the Capitol, or we’re going to escape to this unknown place.
But he never talks about taking her back to the Capitol in the book. There’s one thing that I think is missing from the movie. He makes a massive deal about how district people are so different than Capitol people. They’re almost another species. And he goes on and on about it. But it is a, it’s a dialogue in his own, a monologue in his own head.
That we get in the book, but you don’t get quite as much of that in the movie because at the very beginning, he thinks they’re a second class of people during the games. Lucy Gray’s different because maybe she’s Covey and she’s not really district. And so that in his mind makes her different enough.
And then eventually he decides left that. And eventually he decides, yeah, capital and district are nothing alike again. So he cements that in his thought process.
[00:57:15] Rebekah: So we are into the third section of the book. So just to clarify again, for those of you, I know we did a short recap, but for those of you who haven’t read the third section of the book is fairly long, like it’s about a third of the book in the movie.
It was. Less time, and so the third section is all Coriolanus in District 12, and then his interactions with Lucy Gray and all that, just to clarify. One
[00:57:38] Donna: big time, it could have been a time sucker if they’d chosen to use it and not done it well, but they decided to use no no evidence of Corio’s officer training.
In the book, there’s a lot of description about what they went through. And the requirements and what was expected of them and that kind of thing. And you see a little bit of Corio mentally preparing himself. Can I do this and spend this amount of time to get myself out of here, blah, blah, blah.
But the other thing that’s not in that, when they take out the training part, there’s also no description of how they retrieve the jabber days. More of Dr. K, who’s like in charge of that. Yeah, Dr. K’s not in there at all. And Corio sees how to do it, and of course he does, he records Sejanus in the film.
Yeah he figures, she shows him how to do it earlier, and he somehow remembers, he’s just got a good mind, right? So he gets a chance and uses it. None of that training part, and none of the people he was with. None of his other soldier. You don’t get to
[00:58:43] Rebekah: know the other officers and stuff like that.
Yeah. So one of the things I thought was interesting was just the difference between the book and the movie where Coriolanus in the book tries to pretend he’s on Sejanus’s side when he realizes Sejanus is about to become a betrayer and all this stuff in the movie. I think that they try to differentiate by showing snow as only ever demanding he stop.
And I think that was smart because a lot of what you hear in the book is. That internal monologue again, and so I think if you would put that in the movie, it would have been a little more confusing. You’d have to really, that would have been hard to act. I think also book choreo finds out that Sejanus is going to be hanged like the day that it’s going to happen, not in the middle of the hanging and stuff like that.
There was also another small change there where Sejanus, he gets dragged into it and they’re actually about to hang Lil. Which none of that is a huge deal. That part was in the book in terms of Lil and Sejanus being hung, hanged at the same time. But Spruce was actually never caught. So he was the one that Coriolanus thought, Oh my gosh, I told him to take the guns.
The guns have my fingerprints on them and all of that. Spruce was never captured. And so that was one of the reasons that Snow in the book like thought that he had no, Options but to run away he thought that because the guy who knew where the guns were was gone And so in the movie, I think it’s a little bit more of a stretch in my opinion because they kill that guy And so if he was already dead, there was no reasonable explanation Running off well no it’s I get that I get that he could have done that and then been arrested and stuff, but I think the book did a better job of making it clear that Spruce at any time could have used those guns to get Corio arrested, whereas in the movie he was already dead, and so like, why do you go off with Lucy Gray and stuff like
[01:00:34] Josiah: that? And I think the point was that Snow saw that Spruce was captured, and so He wanted to escape with Lucy thinking he could squeal at any time. But once Spruce is dead, I do think that lowers the stakes in the movie.
Unfortunately, I agree. There’s less motivation.
[01:00:56] Rebekah: Just as we’re wrapping up plot things that were different when Coriolanus and Lucy Gray. Go out to the cabin. One thing that my husband caught that I thought was interesting, like that he was confused by. So I looked it back up in the book was that Lucy, essentially Lucy Gray in the movie says the things that Coriolanus thinks in the book, which was.
Essentially, she is a loose end. She could turn me in, but would she doesn’t want to turn me in. And so Lucy Gray in the movie, it’s a weird choice because Josh, when he was talking about it to me, he was like, why would she do that? There’s no reasonable explanation for her to essentially verbalize things like snow in the movie.
Doesn’t look like he’s about to kill her. And then she’s I’m the only loose end and all. I don’t know. It was weird to add that she said that rather than him coming to that conclusion. Most of those interactions are the same until she says the things that, he thought in the book.
I
[01:01:54] Donna: think that Lucy Grace saying some of those things. In the movie, instead of them being in Coriolanus’s mind in the book, I thought that really broadened her character. Like she’s not afraid to say hard things. And that was her through the whole book and movie. They portrayed that well. She wasn’t afraid to speak out.
She’s not afraid to stand up for herself. Or say things on her mind. At the end in the epilogue of the book, Corio does not refer to the morphing from Sejana’s personal effects. When he’s talking to Dean Highbottom, he just sweeps them into the trash during their conversation. hoping Highbottom will pick them up himself.
In the movie, they make a bigger deal of it, and I’m glad they did for the visual because I think it was important to Snow’s his brazen nature, his bra the brazenness with which He’ll carry out whatever he needs to further his success and to show some of the madness coming on to him. This, that took madness to another level from the beginning of the movie where he’s telling them, yes, of course the cooks had, we had so much steak for breakfast that she had to put half of it away.
That was so well done. Yeah. The, them making that point and him being so willing to lie about something. That could probably pretty easily be mis disproven and then get to the end and he’s Poisoning his professor, I thought that was a spree brazen
[01:03:36] Josiah: I think that I like in the book that he put it in the trash I was confused at why he just left Sejanus’s stuff on Highbottom’s desk So I would have liked him to visually with the camera making a big deal out of the morphing, but then for him to put it in the trash.
I think it also works that he made Dean Highbottom rifle through the trash and abandon his dignity for his addiction. Dean Highbottom. It’s the crux of why this movie might not work for a lot of people. Really? How I thought that the final scene, even to me who has context, felt like it came out of nowhere.
[01:04:21] Rebekah: So why don’t we talk a little about how different characters changed from the book to the movie, their casting, if we think it worked, didn’t work, and all of that kind of stuff. Dean
[01:04:29] Tim: Highbottom despises Coriolanus from before the book begins, before the film begins. But the surface level reason for it, Corio thinks is because he nicknamed him with the other students high as a kite bottom.
And he assumes that nickname somehow got back to him and that’s why he’s always upset with him and always treats him very badly. I liked Dinklage as high bottom. I thought he did a really good job. And you learned that the reason that he’s taking the morphling and all that. It’s because he created the games in a drunken stupor and Coriolanus’s dad sent it to the professor and it has become something that he’s known for and he hates.
So
[01:05:15] Rebekah: yeah, I did think it was weird to not introduce any reason to the audience for the movie as to why he hates Coriolanus because he doesn’t hate the rest of the students. And so it’s, it does seem odd to me.
[01:05:29] Josiah: I think it was awful. I think that was one of the worst changes from book to movie Because it turns from the beginning Peter Dinklage as Dean Highbottom is Relatable from the beginning.
I see that he’s a drug addict that he doesn’t want to be doing any of this I see that he cringes when he’s mentioned as the creator of the Hunger Games And then he’s mean to Koryo and I’m not fully understanding why in the movie, but in the movie, they don’t make him a bad guy. And whenever he sends Koryo to be a peacekeeper it doesn’t land the same way it does in the book.
And whenever Koryo poisons Dean Highbottom at the end, I think that it comes out of nowhere because Mom, you said something about it being used to further his career. I’m like I think it was purely out of petty vengeance, because I think with the plinth for as heir to the plinth fortune, I think Coriolanus at the end.
was in a better position than Dean Highbottom and I don’t know that Dean Highbottom could have threatened his career anymore. It was literally just vengeance.
[01:06:39] Donna: I’m unintentionally relating this to Harry Potter. Highbottom is a shorter Severus Snape and he was under, and difference being he’s under Gaul’s thumb basically where at least Snape had Found allegiance with Dumbledore.
There’s a, there’s some differences there, but I think he felt, trapped by her Understandably because oh my gosh, she was insane and I loved it Every I loved every moment of her and high bottom both
[01:07:12] Rebekah: I think my only complaint is that I like Dean Highbottom and that Snape sucks and he always sucked forever.
I hate Snape. I think his character is so stupid and not believable and I hate him so much anyway. We’re not talking about Harry Potter. Snape so
[01:07:29] Donna: much. The film does not reinforce the fact that the Academy students are long time friends who have grown up together. Could they have established that a little bit more?
There were nods to it, but…
[01:07:41] Josiah: I think the core of the film, at the end of the day, is Coriolanus and Sejanus. And Coriolanus and Lucy Gray and so it’s just one of those things you cut because it doesn’t have a satisfying ending to the arc of any of the other academy students.
[01:07:57] Rebekah: I think the reason it stuck out or was more powerful in the book is because Coriolanus loses those friends.
Several of them die and he’s reflecting on, when Arachne dies, she like, as a child, they grew up together, they used to play games and… At the same time.
[01:08:14] Donna: Wasn’t Arachne the one that he made fun of and said she gets all this credit? for being this amazing capital citizen when she got killed because she was taunting the girl
[01:08:29] Rebekah: for food.
I think in the movie, you just get the sense that there’s, it’s, it feels larger scale as if the students eat the academy. Like it’s like a private high school that you had to get into, whereas it’s actually a bunch of kids who were all kids together. I don’t know. Anyway. I think it was a good choice.
I thought it was interesting.
[01:08:46] Donna: And all live through war at the same time.
[01:08:49] Josiah: I think the film deemphasizes Coriolanus’s perspective uh, not only because you lose his internal monologue. which I think makes the film maybe not work for film only viewers completely. But you also emphasize Lucy Gray’s perspective, which I think really works.
And I think that a weird book to movie change was that the book tributes were cared for by a veterinarian. Ugh. Which could have been a one second… Background shot of a veterinarian just in the background of the zoo when snow is talking to Lucy Like when a rat arachnid gets killed or something, but it was never mentioned Carry
[01:09:32] Donna: a dog with him.
I guess they would look like
[01:09:37] Rebekah: a doctor. They would have a
[01:09:40] Josiah: badge No, he would look The dog would look like a doc. Zoo Veterinary. Coriolanus would say something. The
[01:09:48] Donna: dog would look like a doctor. Yep,
[01:09:49] Josiah: that’s what I meant. Coriolanus would say something like, I didn’t, oh, at least you’re getting some care.
And Lucy Grace says. He’s a veteran. Ah, that’s yeah.
[01:10:00] Donna: That
[01:10:00] Rebekah: could have been. How that take three seconds? I agree. That could have been a really
[01:10:04] Josiah: good.
[01:10:04] Donna: And I think that would add things. Yeah, I didn’t mean your point was bad. I was just trying to envision how they would make their point. You’re just making fun of me for no reason.
[01:10:10] Rebekah: I think that one of the things that speaks to in the whole book and movie comparison that I think you lose in the movie it’s hard not to lose it, but there’s some of it, which is when capital citizens do something, it’s justified. When district citizens do something, it’s not, it doesn’t matter how savage it is on either end.
When Coriolanus kills Bob and violently with a board beating his head in, in self defense, which is true. When that happens, it’s justified. He gets an extra hit. Yes, that’s true. But it’s justified. He doesn’t have any whatever. And in the movie you still get that, but I think there are fewer instances of it in the movie in the book.
There’s so much like that. The veterinarian is just one example of that. But like things happen a ton in the part in 12, there’s several little things where like mentors do things that seem unfair or have no compassion. And it is really interesting that there is this, they have a blindness to the fact that they are forcing district citizens to do things that they, as people in the Capitol, Also do they just pretend like it’s completely different or that there’s some justification for it.
And so throughout the whole book, I remember just having this underlying seething because you’re getting so much more exposure to it than in the original hunger games of capital citizens, just feeling like they’re doing the right thing, even though they’re doing the same things, and then pretending like it’s not okay on the other end.
[01:11:40] Josiah: Definitely. It’s unacceptable for one of the Capitol, the president’s nephew was killed.
[01:11:50] Donna: Oh my
[01:11:51] Josiah: gosh, he was
[01:11:52] Rebekah: killed in a bombing by the rebels. Yeah. And we only use that as an excuse to not show Reaper, like basically honoring the bodies. Actually, I will say that was something that Josh, I told him about in the book that he thought was better done in the book.
[01:12:09] Tim: Reaper from District 11 collects the tributes, the dead bodies in both the book and the film, but in the book, he did it throughout the games. He continually added to the number. Rather than like in the movie where he did it all at once at one time he did all that.
[01:12:28] Rebekah: Yeah, I thought that was more powerful in the book.
It was, I understand why they did it in the film the way that they did, but in the book it created this like really uncomfortable feeling that all the mentors had. They were just like freaked out by it. They didn’t understand it. They thought it was odd. Why is he doing it? Yeah, and it speaks to one of the reasons that I’m sure in the lore Coriolanus was probably one of the people that suggested We need to get the bodies in the arena as soon as they’re killed.
[01:12:54] Josiah: Makes sense
[01:12:56] Rebekah: One of which obviously happens in the original trilogy,
[01:12:58] Tim: right? One of the things that I personally did not care for an edit in the movie, taking something out of the book to tell it was Ma Plinth. She is very present. Ma Plinth is a character that just reinforces how different Corio thinks of district people.
You took her out of the district because they’re wealthy now, they’re very wealthy. But they’re still so district and so disgusting and it’s sad that she’s not in the film, except, the character appears, the actress is there, but there’s no lines. There’s no interaction. Or anything like that, and I think that was a missed opportunity because it would allow that inner monologue of Coriolanus to be spoken out loud.
The grand ma’am says some things about her, when she comes over to watch the games because she can’t find her son, so Janus is missing, and then they discover he’s in the arena. and all of that and it just gives that opportunity. It’s more fulfilling in understanding the change in Coriolanus at the end when he becomes heir to the fortune of these people that he can’t stand.
That he loads, but he becomes their heir apparent and he buddies up to them and all of those things. It just, it would make him an even deeper character, I think, if that arc would have been in there.
[01:14:28] Donna: I just remember at one point at the end of the book, he even is in a consulting, consulting with one another on something.
And then of course, Strabo says we’ve lost our son. You’ve lost our, Your parents and they go through this very convenient
[01:14:42] Tim: new arrangement. A new son.
[01:14:45] Rebekah: I liked Ma Plinth. I absolutely understand why they cut it. The movie was insanely long, but I do agree like there’s a lot that it showed about Corio’s character.
It actually showed a lot about Tigress’s character and I will just mention her a little bit. So Tigress was a really interesting addition to the book and even mom, you had finished the book and I remember you were like, Are we sure it’s the same Tigress? And there is no, there’s no way now that we can assume it would be a different person as the Tigress.
We meet briefly in Mockingjay, right? It’s a very unique name. Tigress was a stylist, which Tigress in Songbirds and Snakes wanted to become a stylist and all of that. And in the movie, I think that they did a really great job of Using makeup and styling so that the tigress in songbirds and snakes looks like a young version of the one in the future.
Like they dye her eyebrows. They’re very thin. She’s got a little bit of that going on. I thought her characterization in the book and film was very similar, but one of the things that kind of sets her apart where she. begins to see where Coriolanus is heading more towards where his father, like who his father was, and he’s heading in that direction versus she becomes a little more kind.
You don’t see in the book, in the movie, things that you saw in the book, like she got to know Lucy Gray a little bit and helped make he, she helped fix her dress so that it was really pretty and not dirty for the interview before the games. She also. Interacts with Ma Plinth and has a lot of compassion for them as former district members in a way that I think really just solidifies that like Tigris is Inherently a better person than Coriolanus.
They went through the exact same things grew up in a similar family Like obviously she was a cousin not a sister, but I thought that character wise She was a really fascinating addition to the book that in the movie She was good, but you don’t get quite as much of that depth. Obviously that I thought was very interesting And
[01:16:41] Donna: I thought that it was a missed opportunity in the movie because the visual of Tigress I, I was fine with what they did in.
But I thought the actress was flat for me. I thought that whether it was the script she was given or the way she, I don’t know, executed it. I don’t know. They made you see that she was kind. They made you see that she cared about choreo. And but I wanted to see something and maybe that relationship with Ma or maybe the fact that you didn’t see her interact with Grandmam.
Much and grandmam was just there a little bit. Maybe some of that would have filled it in, but to me, I thought that character was probably the least effective for me. Did you get, what about
[01:17:22] Rebekah: the boys? Did you agree? I thought
[01:17:24] Donna: she
[01:17:24] Tim: did well enough. I do think it was a missed opportunity for her to actually show a deeper character arc.
Especially when Mom Plinth was there at the house watching the games with them and Grandmam is making all sorts of suggestions that maybe she should leave. Maybe good, decent people would leave, those kinds of things. But I liked Tigress’s line when Corio asks her how he looks. She said, you have your father’s eyes.
And that was completely telling. It was
[01:17:53] Josiah: clearly, yeah. Now in
[01:17:55] Tim: the movie, I will say I made a comment to Donna in that latter section. The color of his eyes changed in the earlier parts of the movie. I felt like his eyes were almost an unnaturally bright blue to the point where the whites around his eyes were blue as if it were a special effect.
They were trying to make them particularly bright. And then at the end. They’re the darker blue.
[01:18:24] Donna: In contrast to what I thought about Tigris, in the book, I felt like Sejanus, I thought he had strong conviction, but he didn’t really know how to communicate that or hand he didn’t have enough control of his emotions.
to handle that well in the movie, I felt like it came across he was whiny. It was frustrating because I thought that in a few points in the book, he made Coriolanus pause to think. about some of the things he thought about the game. So Janus at least made him consider a different thing, except the path he was on.
But in the movie, I didn’t, wasn’t as crazy about him. So
[01:19:06] Rebekah: Janus didn’t super land for me. In the book, I was like, Okay, so Janus, you are spot on. Everything you’re saying is so accurate. You are the only sane person in the room most of the time. And in the movie, you’re right. I think it came off as shut up, OK?
It’s like somebody’s saying something.
[01:19:25] Josiah: Yeah. So Janus did not land for me in the book as much. Really?
[01:19:30] Rebekah: How
[01:19:31] Josiah: I didn’t think he was interesting enough. He was a little whiny. And I think, he did about what I expected in the movie, and just in the real world, I have already, I figured out, you change systems from the inside, you spend your adolescence and young adulthood being like, we need to change everything. And then you get into a system, and you’re like, oh. I can make incremental changes from within, and everyone’s fine with making changes. Cause I’m part of them and so it just made me upset that Sejanus I just disagreed with Sejanus politics.
I do believe the districts are oppressed. And I think that Sejanus is in a better place than anyone in the entire world Yep. To make positive changes for the district. Yeah. And just philosophically, I think it’s abhorrent that he doesn’t understand how to help make those changes and he fails.
[01:20:30] Rebekah: Very badly.
[01:20:31] Josiah: So I just don’t like him as a character. When you’re
[01:20:33] Donna: young, you think you can save the whole world. Yeah, he’s that age. You can change the whole
[01:20:37] Josiah: world. It’s still
[01:20:38] Donna: annoying to me. To me, I just felt like there, there was so little grasp. He had literally no containing of his emotions. Yeah. If he had some containing of his emotions.
There was a self control. And I thought maybe it was the way that, that Josh Ramirez was. Directed acted. I don’t know, maybe, but it didn’t come across great to me,
[01:20:59] Rebekah: but there was one other tribute thing that I just wanted to talk about characterization wise that I thought was another good change from book to movie.
So in the movie coral, who’s the short haired female tribute from district four is the leader of what they call. I think they only call it this in the movie, but they call it the pack. It’s her, Mizzen, and Tanner. I think Mizzen is her District 4 counterpart. Tanner is the male Tribute from X. But in the book, she’s there and she does she kills Mizzen with a trident when she gets mad at him.
And she does participate with them in trying to, scrounge for food and kill some of the other tributes just to survive the games. However, in the movie, coral is a brutal and very demanding leader. Like she’s the one in charge, she’s very reminiscent of the careers pack, the guy in the first hunger Games from the original trilogy.
So it points to the career packs in later games, but she’s actually got like a pretty significant amount of dialogue. I think in the book she speaks very little and I thought it was really interesting to introduce such a fascinating character in the games where it’s like you want to feel bad for her.
But just like the career tributes in that original trilogy, I didn’t, I wanted her to die because she seemed bloodthirsty and conniving and like calculating, which is so stupid because she was thrown in the games and of course you should be bloodthirsty and conniving and calculating. That’s how you’d win.
But I did think it was interesting and even in the final scene with the snakes I thought that was a very powerful performance where she’s like begging Lucy Gray to save her and all of this stuff. So a lot of that is not at all in the books, but I thought it was an excellent change for the visual medium.
[01:22:42] Donna: One other point in the book, Livia Cardew. Annoys, she’s the one who annoys Coriolanus the most, but then she’s the one he thinks about marrying when he goes back to the Capitol after he’d been out in district 12.
[01:23:00] Rebekah: After he breaks bad.
[01:23:01] Donna: Yes. Yes. The way the quote in the book is, if he’s, if he ever married, he’d choose someone incapable of swaying his heart, someone he hated so they could never manipulate him in the way Lucy Gray had.
Never make him feel jealous or weak. Livia Cardu would be perfect. So my question is, why did he even have to get married? Did he just want to have children? We knew we know he has children. I assume
[01:23:29] Rebekah: granddaughter in the game. I assume it’s heir related.
[01:23:31] Josiah: Yeah. Yeah. You have to get married for political reasons.
And
[01:23:35] Rebekah: in that way,
[01:23:36] Donna: he’s in a lot of ways today. He does totally fulfills the despot role. Of carry on the name course, his granddaughter doesn’t give him that satisfaction in the book because she wants to be Katniss. So that
[01:23:49] Rebekah: is our list of changes. There’s a lot of stuff that obviously went on there, and we did actually see this movie on the day it was said to have released.
It did have some Thursday showings a day earlier, so we’re recording this just a couple of days after the release, so we don’t have as much access to all of the information about how much money the movie is going to make and all of that. But I figured we could talk a little bit about how the movie’s performing, just some basic details about it.
And there were some interesting things that we wanted to chat about before we give our
[01:24:17] Josiah: verdicts. And I will say that as we get into the box office numbers, people aren’t going to the movies. There are a couple movies, the biggest movies people will go see. But people just don’t go to the movies the same way they did.
So it’s sad to me that I think we’re going to get less. We’re going to get fewer movies that are big budget or that are risks. But Rotten Tomatoes currently has it at a 60 percent. It was a little higher than that yesterday. Really? 60 is the lowest you can have to have a fresh rating. That’s currently on the threshold.
The estimated budget is a hundred
[01:24:53] Rebekah: million. Actually, that’s interesting. They spent less money on all of the original movies other than the Hunger Games. Which they, probably spent less on that, partly because you don’t know if the franchise is going to take off, so you have to protect what you make.
[01:25:06] Josiah: Opening weekend is going to be estimated to have about fifty million dollars. Pre COVID Hollywood likes to make its budget back in the opening weekend. So in that way, it may be a bomb, according to old standards. But we will see if it has legs. With such a high audience score, hopefully. The word spreads that it’s worth going out to watch.
[01:25:30] Rebekah: So the update post first weekend is that the movie made 44 million in North America, a little lower than estimates, 54. 5 million internationally, which is a little higher than estimates, which Adam Fogelson, vice chairman at Lionsgate said was a quote, great business result for the studio. So they did make their money back and they will make a profit.
It’s just not doing as well as those pre COVID blockbusters often did. So the jury’s obviously still out on whether or not sequels will be written and produced and put into film and all of those things.
[01:26:02] Josiah: It was filmed in Germany and Poland instead of America.
[01:26:05] Rebekah: Even that is interesting to me. They didn’t choose to film in the same place as the original Hunger Games for the section in District 12.
I thought that was a interesting decision. I think I
[01:26:15] Josiah: liked District 12 better in this movie. Really? Than the original trilogy. It felt more alive to me. Viola
[01:26:23] Donna: Davis makeup took about four hours to apply. It was, in 45 minutes to remove, she described to Jimmy Fallon that the fake nose was removed by more than one makeup artist taking hold of the nose, bracing their feet on the ground and pulling as hard as they could.
It was so hard to get off. Oh my word. And she said by the time they’d done this she said, we couldn’t hardly do it because we were laughing so hard. We couldn’t pull anything.
[01:26:52] Rebekah: But and I thought, by the way, her makeup was really like, I, Viola Davis is a gorgeous woman and she looks really bad.
Like they did a great job making her look very disturbing. It was fantastically
[01:27:06] Donna: done.
[01:27:08] Josiah: I think it was. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I think that Viola Davis could have easily done her character from Suicide Squad, Amanda Waller, I want to say. Yeah. Where it’s just I’m a tough woman who’s mean, but I am so glad that she went.
Full crazy.
[01:27:26] Donna: Same as much as I know a lot of Collins names mean things. She’s very descriptive in people’s names, but volumes of gall, the gall that she had to do what she did and that she didn’t care what people thought. I thought her name was incredible.
[01:27:41] Josiah: I think mom, you were telling me that this was one of the biggest films to secure an interim agreement during the SAG after a strike, meaning that the actors were still allowed to promote this film during the actors.
Yeah.
[01:27:55] Donna: Which has
[01:27:56] Rebekah: supposedly been one reason that a lot of recent films haven’t gotten as much viewership. I know. Post COVID that’s just been different in general. I’m curious, Josiah, do you think, I feel like you just have a little bit more of a pulse on that community than the rest of us. Do you think that’s actually true?
Do you think that the movie viewership is down because of COVID or because for the last very, several months or whatever, actors haven’t been able to promote their films? Do you think that they both play into it equally? Or do you think one of them is actually a bigger.
[01:28:29] Josiah: I think marketing is a hu
Fundamentally changed the world and it will never change back in a way that there are certain things that people just don’t care about as much. In 2019, people went to the movies for fun. In 2023, your average person does not do that. And
[01:28:50] Rebekah: if you’re listening to this, please go to the freaking movies. It’s such a good experience.
Oh, I hate that so much. I
[01:28:57] Josiah: wish on HBO Max.
[01:28:58] Rebekah: No, it’s OK, if you’re going to watch it the second time, sure. But man, movies were made to be seen on a big screen. And I don’t understand how people. Don’t get that. Like when I sit in a movie theater, even the bad ones like around here, our movie theater, honestly, I hate it.
I want a good one. But like the movie theater here is not great where I live. And I’m used to really great ones in Nashville. And even there, I like went in and watched this yesterday and thought how would you want to experience this the first time on your television screen if you have the option to experience it like this?
Just
[01:29:30] Donna: something Josiah said before for certain things. They’ll go out the weekend that Barbie and Oppenheimer were out. Yeah, we went. We saw Oppenheimer that weekend. We did. And did not see
[01:29:42] Rebekah: Barbie. . But Barbie spent so much on marketing though. Yes. You could not stop hearing about it. And the theaters
[01:29:48] Donna: where we went to see.
see the movie because I saw Oppenheimer twice. Both went to different theaters. Pink was everywhere. So you’re right, Josiah, in the fact that certain things, they’ll go. But I wonder if just costs of things in the world rising, you have to figure out what you can cut back on. So do
[01:30:09] Rebekah: you I do have a lot of friends right now that can’t go out to eat and Couldn’t go see this movie even as a matinee because of the economy So I do understand if you know about things like movie pass and the you know AMC or regal or whatever other theater chains where they have things that it’s cheaper If you know that and that can be useful, that’s great.
But at the same time, like a lot of my friends wouldn’t go see movies often enough to even make those things worth it. But I have another thought on this. I wonder if part of the reason that this movie did not get the kind of viewership that, the original hunger games trilogy did and all of that stuff.
I wonder if it’s partly because there are some of these trilogies that feel like they, They do supplementary material that’s just cash grabbing. So you have Harry Potter did that. Honestly, the first movie in the what was supposed to be five movies sequence of Fantastic Beasts, the first one I thought was interesting, but it wasn’t amazing.
The rest of them were absolute trash. I hated them. The Broadway play is awful. I went to see them because I’m obsessed with Harry Potter. But yeah, I read Cursed Child and it was like. In I don’t know, it messes up a lot of things. You have the same thing in Twilight, where she’s released three additional books.
Midnight Sun, The Short Second Life of Brie Tanner, and Life and Death. And those, Midnight Sun was interesting, Brie Tanner was the only one that was actually… Really different and really interesting. And then Stephanie Meyer released the host, which is like a whole other book, but like she released it because she’d become a popular author.
Guess what? The movie for the host was super terrible. And then there was another one. They also like they broke up these last books into two movies for Harry Potter, for Twilight, for Hunger Games. And honestly, in almost every one of those cases, you did not need two movies. for the individual book.
So I wonder if people are used to, okay, it’s a series I really love and I’ll go watch the original, right? But then if something else comes out later, I’m going to assume that it’s going to suck and it’s made as a cash grab, not that it’s going to be unique. I think
[01:32:15] Josiah: people are generally tired of series of movies.
I think that Avengers Endgame was like, good, we got. An Avengers endgame. We are done with series now. Yeah, I was like, we’re done with serialized movies. Yeah, that was great. That was a great lead up. We’re not going to do that for another 10 years. So I think that, and I think that it’s been more, it’s been even longer since.
The general public is done with Dystopian YA. It had its huge 08 15 heyday, but it is done, I think there’s a little less interest in it, even though I do think that the book is better than the original
[01:32:54] Rebekah: trilogy. Clarification, and I would be curious to hear all of your opinions on this. What is the next thing that you think is going to become the bigger trend in movies as we go forward?
[01:33:05] Tim: I personally think that the movie trend that will pick up will be frivolous and will have very little to do with real life. It will be just entertaining escapism. The reason I believe that is that’s what people need. When the world that you actually live in is having rough times you need escapism You don’t need reality or ultra reality like
[01:33:34] Rebekah: dystopia Or dystopian, dystopian, which makes you feel like
[01:33:38] Donna: I’m gonna 50
[01:33:39] Rebekah: years.
Yeah I think that’s what it is Speaking of the whole like MCU and all of that the Marvel’s came out the weekend before songbirds and snakes. And at a much higher production cost. So Songbirds and snakes was right around a hundred Marvel’s cost 275. So it was, almost three times. It made 47 million in its first weekend, which is about the same as what songbirds and snakes is going to make in its first weekend.
However, That is the lowest MCU opening weekend since the Hulk. Like it literally broke records for how bad it was in terms of that. And then it fell off. It fell off 80 percent into the next weekend. It’s going to make between nine and 10 million this weekend, which is that is wild. I did think it’s interesting though, because like for songbirds and snakes, it doesn’t feel.
like as much of a fail songbirds and snakes isn’t making as much as I’m sure that they hoped it would on opening weekend. But for the marvels, the same amount of money in an opening weekend is. Disastrous.
[01:34:42] Tim: I have a piece of trivia that relates to the movie, but also relates to the fact that most of the names in that, that Collins uses has have some type of meaning choreo.
It’s also the nickname for the Coriolis effect, which shows that objects in different parts of the planet move at a faster or slower rate, according to what they are, so that we’re all, we all appear to move at the same rate. The appearance is the same, but what’s actually happening is different, okay?
And I think that has something to do with it. Coriolanus is also a character, William Shakespeare. play. It’s based on the life of Caius Marcus Coriolanus. And here’s the plot in a real nutshell. He’s a Roman general. And after he defeat defeats one of the enemies, he has such a disdain.
for the plebeians, which are the lower class and mutual hostility for the tribunes, which is another class. He is banished from Rome. And in his banishment, he goes to the enemy that he had defeated, becomes their leader and con and attacks Rome. So I just,
[01:35:56] Josiah: I have a guess, it’s not the Gauls as well.
[01:36:00] Tim: I didn’t see the Gauls, but I didn’t read too far into the into the article about it. But it was I thought it was an interesting thing because I think that the names that she uses are very
[01:36:11] Donna: purposeful. I wondered as I was reading what they would do, tie the 10th games in that period of time in that world’s history to 64 years later, right?
Lucy’s bow, I saw a picture of the two of her bow, a mirror, a mirror of Katniss’s bow when she shot the arrow in the pig’s mouth. And she was just literally the same, it was that deep and looked up at them and raised her eyebrows. Zegler says that was a last minute improv for her. I don’t know her.
[01:36:44] Rebekah: That’s amazing acting.
[01:36:46] Donna: Look at that. Wow. That’s really cool. Lucy singing captivates people. PETA described Katniss as a child hearing her sing and it was exciting and he was mesmerized and everybody stopped to listen to her. And that’s exactly what. Pita got from his father about Katniss’s dad, he would sing and the birds would stop singing and then and all that backstory.
Then the Covey performing the Hob the same one that Katniss, they, and they call it the Hob, right? They do use the term the Hob, don’t they?
[01:37:17] Rebekah: In the book they do. I don’t think it’s mentioned in the movie cause I was listening for it. They don’t point out, you don’t realize in the movie that it’s the same place.
[01:37:24] Donna: President Snow. He had been in District 12 when he was talking to Seneca Crane about things that could get out of hand. He said, have you ever been in the district? Have you been to District 12? I have. And he says, no. And he said I have. And I didn’t think about that until this morning. Covey lives in the Seam, or as Lucy says, they were imprisoned or stuck there because normally they would be like gypsies or nomads.
Francis Lawrence placed a broken bow and a quiver of arrows in the arena. Didn’t
[01:37:57] Tim: he lean toward her and say, don’t pick up any weapons. You just need to run and hide.
[01:38:03] Donna: Yeah. Yeah. Which is what. Yeah. Which is what. Haymitch. told Katniss the hanging tree, of course, which we find is written by Lucy Gray.
Maude Ivory gives Lucy a Katniss tuber, which I was so glad they did, and I was hoping it wouldn’t be way too cheesy to think, oh, you’ve got to tie this. But I thought it was great, and she said it’s not ready yet, and that she loves that word, and she loves the flower, and snow is connected to Roses and the scent of Roses all through the movie.
You’re they’re bringing up the roses. Yeah. He gives Lucy Gray, the white rose at the train station. And then I immediately go to Katniss going back, going outta district 13 after it was bombed and the whole ground was filled with roses. And I was, I thought
[01:38:46] Josiah: about that. Yep. And it was snow’s mom who loved the roses most.
[01:38:49] Donna: It was his Grand. Grand ma’am. Grew the roses. But
[01:38:52] Rebekah: his mother smelled like roses. She smelled like roses. So his mother also?
[01:38:55] Donna: Yes. Yeah. And then Lucky Flickerman, Caesar Flickerman, so Arachne Crane, Seneca Crane, she’s dead, but he could probably still be in that family. Hilarious Heavensby and Plutarch Heavensby, Coriolanus and Tigress, of course, and then the fact that Tigress is a seamstress, and we talked about that a little bit.
If she’s three years older than Coriolanus. He’s 18, so she’s 21. So 21 and 64, 85, with all the things that they can have done to their body, I can see that she would still be alive. So now saying this, how much of Songbirds and Snakes, Did Collins have in her head or did she go back to Hunger Games and say what can I do that is a believable connection now that I want to write this prequel?
The second
[01:39:47] Rebekah: one. Definitely the second one.
[01:39:49] Donna: Yeah. No question. I mean I’m not disagreeing with you. I’m just looking at it
[01:39:52] Tim: saying wow. I think she may have had an idea of President Snow’s backstory. Something brought him to that point and
[01:39:59] Rebekah: had, yeah, she probably, I would say it’s fair that she would have written that out as she was like we interviewed Josiah about.
his book and how you wrote characters. I think it’s likely that he was fleshed out a little bit, but I absolutely think that this is one of those things where it’s really successful. He stuck out to her. She probably had the idea to say, Ooh, I, I would love to write about his maybe rise to power or something about him and landed on this and then started connecting it back to the book.
To the original trilogy before we do final verdicts. I really wanted to pose a question to you as a bit of a mini game today. There are a ton of theories about Katniss and how she may have descended from the Covey. Now, in the movie, you do not get to meet this character, or you meet the character, but you barely get to see her.
Maude Ivory is a younger member of the Covey who’s a little sister figure to Lucy Greybeard. And she’s a much more significant part of the book. If you haven’t read the book, Maude Ivory is one of my favorite parts of the book that they just simply didn’t have time for in the movie. The fan theory is that Katniss is either the granddaughter of Lucy Greybeard, Or the granddaughter of Maude Ivory, mom already listed off most of the things that make you think that the voices she wrote the hanging tree or Lucy Gray wrote the hanging tree Katniss.
His father showed her the cabin in the lake. He’s also the one who taught her how to swim. And most people in 12 didn’t know how to swim. So somehow he learned when he was a kid, somebody had to teach her probably Teach him probably. And he also taught Katniss how to identify edible food from the forest.
He taught her how to sing. He was from the seam, which is where the Covey lived that you mentioned. And Maude Ivory can memorize a song the first time she hears it. And she only heard it one time before Lucy Gray disappeared. Number one, do you think the fan theory is accurate that Katniss was descended from one of the Covey members?
And, which of them, Maud Ivory or Lucy Gray Baird, do you think is most likely in the lore to be Katniss grandmother? I
[01:42:00] Josiah: think that, with the timeline, Katniss could easily be one of their great granddaughters. Yeah, in my mind, Lucy Gray has a kid in a few, within a few years, or Maud Ivory has a kid within a few years.
I like the idea, because she likes the name Katniss, so I like the idea that she names her kid Katniss. Lucy, or? Lucy names her kid Katniss, and then Katniss. births Katniss’s father.
[01:42:30] Rebekah: Interesting.
[01:42:32] Josiah: Did Katniss Everdeen specifically say that she was just named after the tuber? She never said it was like a family member that she was named after or anything?
I don’t believe so. That makes more sense to me with how people actually name their children, but if it was never mentioned, it probably would have been mentioned if she were named after her. I like the idea that she descended from the cubby, though,
[01:42:55] Tim: I like to think that it’s probably Lucy Gray, but I think it’s more likely mod ivory.
There’s also the possibility in the book. It’s even more ambiguous than in the movie. There’s also the possibility that he might have injured her and she died. Yeah,
[01:43:10] Rebekah: that’s what I was gonna say. It’s like unclear whether or not she even lives past that because she certainly doesn’t return to district 12.
Okay, so
[01:43:17] Donna: I just found a little quote. I was looking up, seeing what I found about the origin of Katniss’s name. The root of the plant can be eaten, as Katniss does in the book. Her father once said, As long as you can find yourself, you’ll never starve. Wow. Great line. And that’s so totally, it could be Lucy Greybeard.
It could be Maude. Do you
[01:43:38] Rebekah: have an opinion on what you
[01:43:39] Donna: think it is? I want it to be Lucy, but I don’t know. I think it’s one of the two of them. If it. Exists at all. If the connect there has to be connection that there can’t not be a connection if Colin said there was no connection in her head. I think she would be delusional.
[01:43:54] Rebekah: I don’t know that I have a specific theory. I feel in the same way that I would really like it to be Lucy Gray. but that it is technically more likely to be mod ivory because Lucy Gray disappears. My only problem with it being mod ivory, and I guess this doesn’t really matter because that’s not how genetics works, but mod ivory Katniss’s mother are both blonde.
Like they’re both stated to be blonde, but Katniss’s father is brunette. And so there’s a part of me that’s Lucy Gray has darker hair. And so I’m like, also even trying to think about that. because Katniss has dark hair and whatever. And so I think whatever the case, Katniss is obviously supposed to be a foil for Lucy Gray, whether or not they were officially said to be like that.
All so we’ve arrived at the end of our information here. What are your final verdicts? Was the book Songbirds and Snakes better than the movie or did you prefer the movie? First of all,
[01:44:51] Josiah: I loved the book for multiple reasons. I thought it was better than the original trilogy of books. I love the book.
I prefer reading about characters like Coriolanus and Lucy Gray, for that matter. But from Coriolanus perspective, as opposed to Katniss perspective, She’s a great character. I do hate that the original Hunger Games trilogy is in first person. Present tense is in present.
[01:45:15] Rebekah: It is in present tense. It is
[01:45:17] Josiah: really weird.
And I, I hate that. So it was very in vogue 15 years ago. But with Ballad of Song of Birds and Snakes. I fell in love with Lucy Gray and Mom said something about it, her being Luna love Goodish, and I had a crush on Luna Love. Good. When I was a kid, , I was like, yeah, Lucy Gray. I like that, that crazy songbird weirdo.
I, I do love those characters. So I immediately fell in love with Lucy Gray in the book, and I immediately fell in love with Lucy Gray in the movie. I feel like she got a little more to do in the movie because it’s not just from Coriolanus’s perspective. I think that the biggest problem with the movie is that.
When you lose Coriolanus internal monologue, his actions in the movie seem more noble than they really are. In the book, whenever he’s talking, he’s thinking about being in love with Lucy Gray, you always… You’re you get swept away for a moment and then he mentions something about How really he wants to possess her and then it’s oh gosh I wish he hadn’t thought that it was so nice him thinking of and then it was that and He just has passing little comments in his own thought process about what do you expect from district trash and stuff like that reminds you that although this is a relatable character, Susan Collins did such a great job, the very beginning of Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.
With making him relatable because he’s poor and starving. Oh, so well. Yeah. Oh gosh. That’s awesome But losing that internal monologue it is weird when Coriolanus turns at the end and I really didn’t like the scene where he poisoned Dean Highbottom in the movie and I didn’t like that they didn’t kiss before The Hunger Games.
And really, just because of that collection of problems surrounding losing Coriolanus inner point of view, I gotta say that the book is better than the movie. Okay. I would
[01:47:34] Tim: lean in the same direction for some of the same reasons. I think some of the things that were left out of the movie were sadly left out of the movie.
I understand time and things like that, but I felt like maybe there were some other places that could have been cut and some things could have been put in. I love the visual of the movie. It’s well done. I like the costuming. I like the makeup. The characters look like and sound like and act like who I expected them to from the book.
And really, kudos to the movie. Unfortunately, it’s a four hour, gone with the wind length movie that they had to make a two and a half hour movie so that audiences would look at it. So they had to cut enough that I think the story pales a bit in comparison to
[01:48:24] Donna: the book.
I would agree with Dad that the visual effects of the movie were lovely. The costuming was great, contrasted against the fact that the capital still is in disarray. It’s not pretty yet. And you can definitely see at the end he comes out in that coat. I could just see the wheels in his mind. This is not going to look like this.
This is not the place that I will rule. But again, the book did fill in some places. That whether it was time or whatever, like we’ve said, that they couldn’t get in the movie or just chose not to put in the movie. I will say that I will pick the book. I think it edges out the movie. I think Francis Lawrence did a great job directing.
I thought their casting choices, for the most part, I think their casting choices were good. And it was a, I thought it was a good movie. But yeah, the book inched it out just a little bit just for some of the emotional Fill that the book
[01:49:27] Josiah: gave me I think I mean I would be remiss if I didn’t add that.
I do think the visuals were truly amazing in the film and I only say the book is better because the story does not work without Understanding where Coriolanus is coming from throughout the entire movie I’ve heard multiple people talk about how everything he did up until the end was for noble reasons.
Ah That’s not the point. You’re just missing out on Book stuff. I thought it was amazing visually, but it just didn’t quite work as a movie I’m about to
[01:50:03] Rebekah: drop a bomb this bomb Is that I liked the movie better. Okay. So let me give you my justification. I do think that I only liked the movie better because I read the book and I had all of the extra context.
And I love that books give you many extra scenes. More characters, you get to see all the Easter eggs that they throw in and all of those things. But in the book, when I listened to this one and then physically read half the book again. So I’ve read it like one and a half times. But the audio book reader for me, honestly, the fact that every song was not sung and it was just, he read things like this and it was read in a sing song voice, but it was not sung.
That did not connect with me. And so it was very hard for me to hear the music of it. And I think that this story in a lot of ways hinges on music. Even at the end you find out that in 12 the Covey’s no longer allowed to play in the hob. They’re forbidding music to be played, which means that in the future, like that’s why music is such a big deal in Katniss’s and her family’s life because music had been like taken away from them.
And I didn’t connect with the music. I honestly like. thought Lucy Gray’s character was weird. Like I didn’t connect with her in the book as much. I liked the look into snow’s character and his internal monologue that you do get in the book. However, with that context from the book, I actually really enjoyed the experience of the movie more.
I thought the games were interesting. They didn’t bore me like they did in the book. The things that they took out from his experience in District 12 for me made that part tighter and like I understand the purpose of it and I wasn’t thrown by it, which I know was a critic issue. A lot of people thought it was weird.
I loved Lucy Gray in the movie. I didn’t really care that mod ivory wasn’t there when I was watching the movie. I thought that the Capitol mentors along with snow were jerks. And I loved how gall portrayed who she was. I really liked Dean high bottom. And I thought his character was like very believable as this person who was like an unfortunate person in the games.
I liked Tigris and I loved the immersion I felt in it. And I don’t think I would feel that way if I had only. Gone to the movie as a movie standalone. It probably misses some elements. So I know that the reason I feel that way is because I know what’s going on in the background. But yeah, I actually like I found myself not wanting to take my eyes off the screen.
And when I was listening to the book, I kept putting it down and didn’t want to finish it. And that’s a sign to me that I wasn’t as engaged. I think I can
[01:52:47] Josiah: agree with a lot of that. I think having read the book, the movie was great. Yes. And I didn’t like the epilogue with Dean Highbottom. That was jarring even for me.
But I guess I say the book is better because the movie without the book doesn’t work. Yeah. But as someone who read the book first, the movie worked great for me. I loved a lot of the movie. Most of it. You can still… I think they’re both
[01:53:10] Tim: worthwhile. You can fill it in yourself with the book first.
And then the movie doesn’t detract from it. The movie is not a different story. Like every once in a while, like when we did the shining, it is a different story. Then the book, this is not, this augments that and for the visual medium.
[01:53:29] Rebekah: I believe that is the end of our episode. Thanks
[01:53:33] Josiah: so much.
Goodbye baby listeners. Bye everyone.
[01:53:37] Rebekah: Next Friday we drop our third and final episode in the Twilight Saga. In fact, as our Christmas gift to you, we are dropping an episode every single Friday from now until the end of 2023. If you enjoy listening, please leave us a five star rating, a review on your favorite pod catcher.
It helps us so much. If you have feedback or questions or ideas for future episodes, you can email us bookisbetterpod@gmail.com until then happy Thanksgiving.
[01:54:05] Tim: I’m so excited. I just can’t hide it. I’m about to lose control and I think I like it.
[01:54:12] Donna: Ooh wee.
[01:54:14] Rebekah: List of things dad would literally never say. Or at least never mean.