Games In 3, 2, 1...

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Can you guys even believe that The Hunger Games opens in three days? (That is if we fudge us towards Midnight, but whatever.) My heart is going to burst, I tells ya. Burst! We've been waiting for this for... pause while I go see when our first Hunger Games post was... we've been waiting for this for three years as of two weeks ago.

It's weird going back and reading my first post about the series on March 5th, 2009 - I'd already read the first book and was just mentioning the news that it was going to be turned into a movie. This was well before Catching Fire came out that September. I never really properly reviewed any of the books, but the couple of brief thoughts I plunked down there in my first post about the first book are strangely flat - I call it "a pretty decent yarn (although definitely and unmistakably written for young adults)." I don't disagree with any of that, but it would have several dorky exclamation points attached to it now. But just a couple of weeks later (exactly three years ago today, actually) when I was posting news about Catching Fire's Sept. release date my enthusiasms were already rising - "Bring it on, lady!" I hollered.

And obviously it only grew more and more crazed from there. And now here we are! Three days from the first movie's release. What a time it's been! Remember when we were getting daily casting updates on characters that won't have any lines? That was fun. Anyway EW chatted with Elizabeth Banks, somehow who most definitely has some lines, about her own HG fandom, and she tells how she formed her character Effie Trinket's distinctive look and sound:

“The voice took a long time for me,” says Banks. “Suzanne Collins talks about the Capitol accent the whole time and I just wanted to make sure I honored that without doing something too silly. And I’m really happy with where we ended up. I sent Gary a lot of recorded samples of myself — everything from super British to super Southern to impressions of Christine Baranski. Ultimately I looked at movies from the ’30s and ’40s and theatricality was at its height in the movies of the ’30s and ’40s. I looked to the Philadelphia Story, Katharine Hepburn, and Rosalind Russell in Auntie Mame.”

Next came crafting Effie’s thoroughly unique appearance. “There was two days in the trailer of putting the look together,” describes Banks. “The hair’s pink. Is it dark pink, light pink? What’s the shape of it, what’s the texture? What’s the shape of her generally — Is she big, is she small? Super white skin and then not white skin, a lot of color, no color. And the jumping off point was Joel Grey in Cabaret. And what that meant to us partially is that you feel like Effie’s striving for her ideal, her vision of perfection, but she’s missing it.”

So when are you guys going to see the movie? I'm waiting until Sunday afternoon, somehow. I don't know. I will have to chain myself to the floor for those two days in order to resist.
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