The Hunger Games: The Ballad Of Songbirds & Snakes (2023) + Letterboxd Reviews

time and time again i am reminded that resistance is and will always be a team effort.

no matter how much capitalism tries to push us away and shove individualistic competitive culture down out throats, we band together and wield our strongest weapon. we love and thats our greatest strength.

"I love you like all-fire"

ill burn anything to a cd idgaf. ill burn the louis armand argument to cd. ill burn rain sounds to cd. next im burning you to cd. come here boy

I think the most radical thing the hunger games does is tell young people that the most revolutionary thing you can do is have unconditional love for humanity. Katniss throughout the entire series is guided by a deep sense of compassion for the people around her. It is what causes her to volunteer, to bury rue, to mercy kill cato, its why she tries to save peeta, why finnick telling her to remember who the real enemy is works, and even though her compassion for the larger world falters when peeta is kidnapped, it comes back when she visits hospitals and asks for mercy for other victors and ultimately, it is love and belief in a better humanity that makes her kill coin. Through it all, she maintains an unfaltering belief in the fundemental goodness of humanity, which is diametrically opposed to dr gaul's and snow's worldview. Peeta is even more unwaveringly compassionate

So the series tells young people that the most revolutionary thing you can be is compassionate. Let compassion drive your politics. Let yourself believe in the fundemental goodness of people. And i think that's deeply important in a world that touts the superiority of pure reason or logic, to allow yourself to be guided by something as emotional as compassion. Katniss everdeen tells us that your politics should be rooted in compassion in a world that thinks detatchment or cynicism is intelligence and i think thats v cool

So we all know the 75th Quell wasn’t just for Katniss now, right??

It was - get rid of Finnick, people tell him too much and like him too much

It was - get rid of Mags (she’ll volunteer to save anyone), she’s always been too much of a rebel and cares more about the tributes than the games (i.e. hiding Finnick from cameras)

It was - get rid of Beetee, we’re finally done with him (I want to know why he’s suddenly disposable though). But let’s make it as awful as possible and remind him every day what his son was feeling in his own last days

It was - get rid of Wiress (and also show the world what she’s become) because she never should have won (and we’ll show people what happens when you think you’re smarter than the Capitol)

It was - get rid of Johanna Mason, we killed everyone she loved and it didn’t break her enough so now we can’t control her

And of course, it was - get rid of those rebels from 12

But it wasn’t just punishment for Katniss. She had no idea how influential and volatile of a group they were.

Honestly, I feel like the 3rd Quell might have actually worked if the Capitol hadn’t decided to just send all the most rebellious and threatening victors into them. You can’t put 10+ people who rebelled in their own games back into an arena (and this time they’re all together) and expect it to go well for you???

shout out to suzanne collins for, in the middle of Everything Else she was doing in sotr, dropping a paragraph that’s just “btw fuck ai”

listen, listen. A few things:

Jennifer Lawrence did an outstanding job portraying Katniss in the movies. I cannot really imagine any other actress in her place.

THAT BEING SAID

it pisses me off that people conveniently forget that Katniss is a colored girl.

That's right, folks!

People from the Seam are described as dark skinned, with grey eyes. Katniss is personally described to have 'olive skin' in the books. I know that there's not much compensation that could have been done in the casting, since Jenn was such a perfect choice- but at least depict her as colored in fanart. Same as Haymitch. Haymitch is also from the Seam.

I also find it so beautiful that Suzanne Collins had a teenage colored girl to be the one to dismantle an oppressive and tyrannical government, acting as a huge symbol of rebillion.

And keep in mind, while the series is marketed as a 'dystopia' it has an alarming number of similarities to the current real-world.

If I see anyone justifying Snow's actions because he was traumatized I'm going to GUT THEM.

! TBOSAS SPOILERS

Honestly, after watching TBOSAS, I had so many questions. I was asking myself why Lucy Gray left Coryo, and even though after some reasearch I came to the conclusion that's it because even she became afraid of what he could do to her (kill her), I'm still not exactly sure. While watching that scene at the shack, I really felt like it deeply pained Lucy Gray to leave. I was so sure they loved each other and wondered; why, if she loves him, did she go? What is because since he turned his bestfriend in she was scared he would eventually do the same with her? I thought that if they were in love Lucy Gray would try to talk with him or something but then the scene in the woods really shook me. When he realised she tricked him with the snake (and still with that I'm not a hundred% sure) he turned mad. I feel like it was in this scene he realised he lost everything. Lucy Gray left him and I think it's then that he felt so much anger because HE helped her survived. If he hadn't given her scent to the snakes or hadn't given her poison she would've died, so maybe he felt betrayed that she would leave him so easily when he sacrificed so much for her.

I also wondered why he killed Dean and I think it's because he wanted to finish all that came his way and what/who contradicted what he had once believed? I mean their last dialogue is about the fact that it was because of him and Coryo's father that the Hunger Games began, and I thought Coryo, out of anger that Dean brought his father in the conversation, would kill him then, but the poison already was in the morphin. So I think after he lost Lucy Gray in the woods and came back to the Capitol, with the poisoned morphin, all he wanted was to prove to himself that all his efforts would come to an end, because honestly, at the end of the day, he did all of this for himself.

He exposed his best friend, which got him killed, only because it put him in danger. He was probably ready to kill Lucy Gray if ever she became a danger to his life. What I find confusing is the radical change, because in the first half of the movie all he wanted was for Lucy Gray to survive and sacrificied so much for her, so why and how did he change sides so fast? Killing the boy in the arena and feeling powerful is probably a factor of the questions appearing in his mind after that.

Overall I feel like he could have stayed in the light, and stayed good. My biggest question is If Lucy Gray stayed at the shack, would everything be different? Would they have runned together far away and establish a quiet life? Which is really to say that it's all Lucy Gray, and her leaving Coryo is what finally made him fall and turn evil.

(PS(?): The movie was amazing! Perfect cast, perfect everything! Loved it from start to finish.)

I literally hate every job in the world. I don’t want them. I don’t want ANY of them!