The end is near

SPOILER ALERT! (I think.)

I went to watch The Hunger Games last weekend.

I read the first novel during my last semester in Shah Alam. If I'm not mistaken, I was the first person to borrow the novel, along with Mitch Albom's The Five People You Meet in Heaven and a bunch of Jodi Picoult's and Barbara Kingsolver's and ahem..romance novels. As I remember it, students can borrow up to 17 books at 1 go, the lending period for each book is 2 weeks and you can renew for an additional week. One of the few, few persons who liked to borrow up to 17 books at 1 go was.....

(yeap, you guessed it)

.....me. What I'm trying to say here is, even when I'm surrounded with people (I was roomed with 5 other people), I act like I don't have a life and that's a pretty sad revelation. Why I said so? Because I usually managed to finish reading all the 17 books in the space of 2-3 weeks.

I'm not lying. My ex-room-mates can vouch for that.

Buku belajar? Nota study? Apa benda tu?

So anyway, I remember that I borrowed the Hunger Games together with The Five People You Meet in Heaven because it only took me a couple of hours to finish the Five People (you just can't stop reading the novel once you started and it's pretty thin anyway) and after that I literally forced Ijan to read it too because I absolutely loved it.

Anyway, if you still don't get it after reading this blog for so long, I like to force people to love the things I love.

So after I passed Five People to Ijan, I started reading the Hunger Games. If you know jack about Hunger Games, the novels' main targets are young adults, like the Harry Potter series and that one shitty novel series of  a necrophiliac love story between a girl who cannot form any coherent thought all by herself and a sparkly vampire who farts glitters. So anyway, I can't say I absolutely loved the novel (Hunger Games, that is), but I couldn't put it down and I liked it. The novel is a bit gruesome for young adults actually, it's more suited to adults, in my opinion.

I read the the other 2 in the trilogy after I started working so it took me a while to finish the two. Can't say they held me as deeply as the first one though, but I think the length of time of which I took to finish the novels might be one of the reasons why it didn't.

So, I went to the cinema, without any hopes (despite the fresh rating in RT) and I have to say that I enjoyed it tremendously. The shaky camera movements annoyed me throughout the movie but it was good to see that the movie stayed true to the most important parts. Some parts were reaaaally draggy, but I really liked Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss. She's very badass.

I've read and watched both Hunger Games and Battle Royale (1 and 2 please) and I can actually believe when the Hunger Games author said she didn't get her inspirations from Battle Royale. The theme of dystopia actually pops out a lot in today's literature and movies, so it wouldn't surprise me if it was true. I'm not defending her claim that the idea is actually her own, I only say that it's believable.

Dystopia is a pretty interesting idea actually. There was a time when I was truly obsessed with dystopia that I read everything about it. Actually, I believe that we're living in an almost dystopian world. Don't you think  that we live in a repressive society and we face a number of coercion acts disguised as newly-made laws created by paranoias who hold the highest positions of authority? Don't you agree with me?

Maybe we can talk about this in more detail :)

Anyway if you're really interested to know more about dystopia, please please please watch Children of Men. One of the best movies in history (in my opinion lah), it will blow you away. The fact that Clive Owen is in the movie doesn't hurt either hehe.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NikEQy1XxDE

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