I wasn’t excited for The Hunger Games. No, not at all.
I haven’t been following the movie news ever since the production was first announced and casting was first done.
I didn’t start rounding up my friends two months ago, trying to figure out who would go to the midnight premiere of the movie.
I didn’t re-read the book and make a mental list of all the scenes I was most looking forward to (or most dreading…or both) seeing.
I didn’t buy a ridiculous amount of merchandise from Hot Topic, nor did I buy the soundtrack the second it came out.
I didn’t dye my hair last Wednesday night for a costume, or spend hours making Hunger Games-inspired food for a dinner party.
I didn’t tweet obnoxiously all day on the day of the midnight premiere about how excited I was for the movie.
No…not me…
Okay, you caught me. I was INSANELY excited for this movie. Insanely. And as is my norm, when I’m insanely excited for something…I may go a bit overboard. But I love every minute of it.
As I said above, I made a costume. Katniss. And, yes, I dyed my hair for it (to be fair, though, I’d been kind of wanting to dye my hair anyway). I also had a Hunger Games dinner party with a few friends the evening of the premiere…just because I had a few recipes I’d seen online that I’d been wanting to try anyway.
The most important things learned at the dinner party:
- lamb actually doesn’t taste much different than beef when in stew
- syrup tastes great on drop biscuits that only contain three ingredients
- goat milk actually just tastes like…milk. Huh.
- Peeta was definitely onto something when he was dipping rolls in hot chocolate
- customers in retail suck
All important things to know, of course.
The adventure officially started when I had to call one of my friends (Jessica, I’m looking at you) and talk her into getting her butt to the movie, regardless of how tired she was from work. My argument? “Know what will make you feel better? Watching teenagers kill each other!”
This made her laugh. So I won.
We left for the movie. Janet headed off to kidnap (er…pick up) Jess, and Caitlin needed to swing by her house to get a jacket before going to the theatre. Kathleen (one of my roommates) and I were driving separately. We were like, “we’re TOTALLY going to beat everyone there! We’re going straight to the theatre! Weeeee!” And then I got all excited about deep discussions regarding fandoms and cross-overs and how people totally underestimate the passion of the Hunger Games fans, because we’re just quieter than other ones…and totally missed the exit for the theatre. Oops. So this required us to go another couple miles down to another highway, and another couple miles down THAT highway, before we could turn around and come back.
We STILL beat everyone to the theatre. (This is why I need a GPS even in my hometown. At least the GPS lady would have been screaming for us to get off at the correct exit.)
Half an hour later, most of our group had arrived and we discovered that…barely anyone else in the theatre was in costume. The down side to being one of five people in full-on costume is that you get a lot of strange looks and you feel kind of ridiculous. The plus side is that people REALLY notice your costume, which is pretty epic.
Fast forward to the previews. One of the first previews was for the next Twilight movie. Between the little 13 year old girls sitting behind us screaming at the top of their lungs IN MY EAR, and my friend Caitlin throwing an anti-Twilight shit fit three seats over…I couldn’t hear a single word of the trailer. Which was vaguely annoying, because I was kind of curious what was being said (it’s really grating to see people’s mouths move and have no idea what’s going on).
The 20-somethings got their revenge as the next trailer started. First, there were humorous comments from the 13 year old girls about the “disaster related horror” warning that came before the trailer started. And as we were all wondering what on earth this could be for, we saw that famous opening shot of a little underwater robot descending into the deep unknown.
At which point all the 20-somethings in the audience started cheering and freaking out about Titanic.
And the 13 year olds were clearly VERY confused as to the freaking out. Which was hilarious.
I went into what I loved about the Hunger Games movie on the Fiction Flurry blog, but I will say that I thought the movie was exceptionally well-done. It was a great book-to-movie adaptation, I loved the cast, and I just can’t get over the amazingness. There was one moment toward the end where I jumped violently in my seat and made some weird quiet-screaming sound, which made my friend Jenn nearly pee herself because she was laughing at me so hard (I’m easily startled…I still jump when the Inferi grabs Harry’s ankle in the Half-Blood Prince movie and I’ve seen that sucker a hundred times).
All in all, it was a great midnight movie experience.
And then, two days later, I saw the movie again.
No…I wasn’t excited AT ALL.