I went to see The Hunger Games on Friday, at the Harrogate Odeon. Don’t go to the cinema very much, so it was a real treat.

What a cracking film – really enjoyed it.

The premise is that there is a brave new world order, with a ruling class and a lower class. The ruling class live in a hi-tech city and generally the lap of luxury. The ruled class live in ghettos (called Districts), growing crops, mining, generally eeking out an existance. Around 70 years before the start of the film, twelve of the districts rebelled. This rebellion was quashed, but the resultant “peace treaty” requires each of the twelve districts to provide a teenage boy and a teenage girl as a “tribute” to play the Hunger Games each year.

The Hunger Games involve these 24 young people fighting to the death, potentially aided by sponsers, live on TV. The Games take place in a large (several square miles) artifical forest called the Arena, and the weapons are blade and bow – although there are also pressure mines.

Analogies have been drawn with The Running Man, Lord of the Flies, and Battle Royale – not sure that the first two really hold water, but I haven’t seen Battle Royale so can’t comment there.

I’ll get the irritations out the way first. The camera work is horrible. Clever, but horrible. It’s almost entirely hand-held, and jiggers around a lot – think Blair Witch. A lot of the time it’s almost impossible to see what’s actually going on. It is semi-first person, in that it reflects what the person is experiencing – so if they’re hallucinating, everything’s going in and out of focus for instance. I did like that the soundtrack went ‘deaf’ after a paticularly big explosion though.

I should also add that this film isn’t actually about the fighting – the section in the arena is less than half the film, probably less than a third. Where 2 or more tributes do fight, it’s generally over in a few seconds.

Rather, this is very much the story of Katniss – how she ended up in, and surviving, the Hunger Games. I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say she’s still alive at the end (sorry if it was). In fact, the film is much more about social commentary for me, at societal and individual levels. How the different participants respond to this situation – kill or be killed. How the wider society deals with putting teenagers into this situation, either by ‘allowing’ them to be taken, or by taking them and training them. One poignant moment for me is when one of the characters reflects on not wanting to be turned into someone he’s not – even if he dies in the Games, that he’s still “him” when he dies.

One the Games start, there also quickly emerges two camps – those who are hunting down the other tributes, and actively killing them, and those who are running and hiding, and kill out of the self-defence/reflex (or possibly compassion). Of course, Katniss is in this second catgeory, and it enables her to win the games while preserving her moral core.

The acting is superb across the board, and very well casted. It’s been said before, but Jennifer Lawrence is awesome. She’s obvious drop dead gorgeous, which always helps, but she acts beautifully. I’ve not read the books yet, or seen her in anything else, but she is so sympathic as the lead. Her self-doubt, confidence, fear, bravery, pain, humour shine through. The violence is ‘airbushed’ out – there is almost no blood and guts, which on the one hand I like, but on the other hand dimishes the atrocity of the situation. The “kills” are all very easy – slash of the sword and the chap’s lying dead on the ground. There is a certain amount of discomfort in being turned into a consumer of the Hunger Games ourselves.

The before and after are also superbly filmed, I presume, on location. The ending is particularly interesting, as it’s very open-ended. Plenty of seeds are sown as to what’s to come, although it’s hard to imagine anything other than a full reform of society, with Katniss as Bodecia (not quite the right analogy, but you get my drift).

Final note – was very interested in the demographic of the audience, which was almost entirely 15 year old girls. I was a little surprised by this.. Ok, it does have a female lead, but it’s not a click-flick. That said, it seemed half of said young ladies where North American, and half sounded European (couldn’t quite catch the accent), so perhaps it was an arranged trip.

Final verdict – go see!

I love getting comments on my site, and getting some discussions going. I know I have a couple of friends who read this ‘blog (or who did, anyway), and I have also had several “out of the blue” comments and e-mails to certain posts. I am still very sorry that these historic comments are currently in limbo – it is still my intention to migrate them.

That said, since moving to WordPress, and doing the “advertise” thing, I’ve suddenly started getting spam comments – something I’ve never had before.

Just so it’s clear; my policy is to moderate all comments that are left, to ensure they are not offensive and fit with the spirit of this site. I will only approve genuine comments – that is comments that seem to be to have been written by a human and have some relevance to the post to which they are attributed.

I will not edit any that are left – it’s “all or nothing” – and constructive criticism and disagreement is welcomed, as long as it’s civil!

I get e-mailled when a comment is left, and aim to approve all comments within a day at most. People I know and who comment regularly will get flagged to be able to post without moderation, incidentally.

Just to do it formally – the RSS feed for my blog has moved, following the switch to WordPress.

Please point your favourite reader at the new feed.

Well, few weeks actually.

My Mum had a stroke 3 weeks ago, and while she is making a reasonable recovery, still can’t speak (and may never again), and has limited movement down her right side. With her being so far away, it makes it difficult.

The younger boy had Chickenpox before Easter, followed by a tummy bug afterwards. The elder managed to catch head lice from somewhere, and then got the tummy bug, and the younger appears to have forgotten how to sleep through the night. We reckon we’ve probably also had it, but thankfully it’s impact has been limited to discomfort.

More positively, the weather hasn’t been too bad, I’ve finally launched with WordPress (and the RSS feed is working, by the way). Shifting around our working and childcare patterns seems to be working really well (although various bits of time off and Bank Holidays have made it an unusual period anyway). Still enjoying my photography – only 22 more photos to go, and I’m a third of way through the DSLR skills course again.

In fact, as special treat, here is the first picture I submitted as homework (brief was “black and white”).

Well, that’s it – I decided to go for it. You’re only young once (and for me that was some time ago).

My site is now run by WordPress. I haven’t got the theme entirely to my liking – the archive pages and individual post views aren’t great, my twitter feed has vanished off the front page, and the formatting is a bit squiffy.

I will get around to fixing these things!

Other things to note are that the reviews are now all shuffled into the blog entries, and that the old RSS feeds don’t work no more. (sorry).

Oh yes, and unfortunately I’ve lost any comments people left along the way. I still have them in the old database, so I will investigate if there’s a way to transfer them. Apologies – it won’t happen again.

I will sort out the new RSS feed shortly (hopefully).

[Edit] Forgot to mention – huge thanks to Sam Parkinson for his tutorial on how to create a wordpress theme from scratch.

Ash Wednesday seems to have come around quickly this time!

I toyed with the idea of giving up social media, but e-mail, Twitter and Facebook are the way I keep in touch with several of my friends, so it would be a bit like giving up on those relationships for 6 weeks. I’m aware this is probably post-justification!

So this year I’ve decided to me more down to earth, and give up snacking between meals, and indeed snacks in general. Things like crisps, biscuits, cakes, scones, chocolate, sweets, etc. I’m allowed to have a pudding after meals, and allowed to have toast or fruit between meals (for instance if I come home from work and am starving).

The motivation is to stop buying snacks (and hence save some pennies), but also to try to increase my self-control. I find that if I buy a 6 pack of kit-kats, which I think I’ll have one a Friday and it will last 6 weeks, I often ending up eating 3 or 4 of them the same day!! Pretty poor really. If I don’t buy them in the first place then it’s not a problem – but if they’re there, I find it very hard to resist.

So anyway that’s me. I’m also pondering about moving my site over to WordPress! This would be a fairly major undertaking as I’d have to get to grips with themes, and transfer 500 odd entries (and work out what to do with my reviews), so we’ll see…

Anyway, wishing you a peaceful and challenging Lent!

Finally made it climbing again yesterday – first time since September (and I felt it!).

Rather over-did it on the bouldering at the start, and so had all but run out of arm when I moved onto some pitches, but I did manage 4 ascents, ranging from 5 to a 6a (which I was chuffed with).

I did 10 or 12 bouldering problems, but all down the bottom end of the scale (VB-V2).

I’ve booked up the next 2 months of climbing evenings with my mate, which will provide the motivation to get off my butt, and hopefully I’ll be able to return to form again!

Well. No. 2 is now well and truly walking. He still stumbles and lands on his rump, but now toddling around is his preferred means of locomotion.

He is a complete climber as well. He always has been that way inclined, but now he can climb up onto the sofa and the futon. These aren’t quite shoulder height for him (probably chest height), but his technique is to grab on for dear life, hook his leg up, and kind of drag himself up onto it. Pretty impressive.

All he needs to do now is sleep through the night consistently!!

No. 1 son has his final week of Beaver’s next week, and his first week of being a cub. We also just heard today that’s going to be another dance show later this year.

Their Mum and Dad – both pretty tired, although did some major dusting and hoovering today, which felt good. 272/366 of my photos done too.

It also snowed today – big proper snow. I’ve been doing a mini-series on my 365 about Danbo trying to “find himself”, and today he was going to pause his quest in order to go and play in the snow. In the end, I opted for a different snow picture for my 365 that I’d taken earlier, but I couldn’t waste my Danbo shot, so here he is making a snow angel: