Catching Fire: This Is How You Spread Blood-Borne Pathogens!

On Thursday night, the roommate and I started texting about seeing Catching Fire and realized that it was actually being released at 8 pm on Thursday rather than midnight.

So, we saw a 10 pm showing at our local theater, surrounded by pajama-clad teenage girls. Which made it so we not only got the show of getting to see the movie based on the book we've both read, but getting to hear the reactions of the teenage girls and how they differed from our natural reactions AND I got an extra show in how indignant my roommate was about the Twilight-y behavior from our fellow audience members.

There was also then the fact that it was after 10 pm and we were both bone tired to begin with. We then also became a little punchy and started a rather terrible running joke of how various things in the movie are ways that you end up with a blood-borne pathogen of some sort. There were a lot of not-so-sterile looking needles happening, among other things.

But the other thing was that Catching Fire allows, among all the terrible death and destruction, to give Jennifer Lawrence some time to be hilarious. Her best moment, by far, being a silent moment.

It's all in the face, really.

I had to find a way to get a screen cap. It was too amazing. Okay, maybe not in this screen cap. But... go see the movie. It's amazing. Jennifer Lawrence is amazing.

Oh, but there is the fact that about an hour and a half into the movie, I suddenly remembered how much the last third of the book made my skin crawl and made me just want to read faster to get away from the ridiculousness. Holy crap, a lot of that stuff gets a lot more terrifying in the visual format.

I told the roommate that I wasn't sure at all if I would go see the third and fourth films in the theater when they came out. The Hunger Games is a diminishing returns series in book form. I don't know if they can (or, rather, will) fix Mockingjay to be a bit less like pulling teeth. Catching Fire is good, don't get me wrong, I just don't know if I ever want to sit through the last third or so of the book ever again. Also, this movie was ridiculously more violent. No more shaky cam trying to hide the violence for the tween audience. You see defenseless and innocent characters brutally beaten and/or killed with nary a cut away compared to Hunger Games. Also: swearing. But that comes with the Johanna territory.