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I plan to do an ICFA update at some point.

Until then: if you have not yet seen the latest Britain's Got Talent clip and feel like getting your heartstrings tugged, check out this opera duo. The staging of this one irritates me a bit. But you know, at the end of the day these are nice kids with good voices, and BGT's "appearance does not equal talent" message is one we could stand to hear more often.

I'd feel better still about it if a) the BGT audience seemed to learn that message and b) the American talent shows would get behind it in the same way. But, you know. One internet clip at a time.

Hunger Games

On Friday night, me, the redoubtable Mike and rachel_swirsky, and the intrepid Rebecca Peters-Golden of the YA blog Crunchings & Munchings went to see The Hunger Games.

The Hunger Games is a film about a teenage girl struggling to negotiate relationships and gender roles in a hostile social environment. Along the way, trees explode, people die, and Lenny Kravitz proves the value of a good eyeliner.

You may have heard of it.

Anyway, the short version is: as an enthusiastic fan of the book, I thought the adaptation was awesome. As a film-goer I would give it a B+: it has strong acting and great direction in the opening 15 minutes, but suffers from the occasional bout of draggy pacing. It also wrestles with, and does not completely conquer, the challenge of transferring an intense first-person narrative into the 3rd person visuals of film.

But you know what? This is a very good adaptation of a rockin' novel. Hollywood seems to find that hard: for every Hunger Games there's twenty extremely annoying mutilations of The Dark is Rising (the horror! the horror!).

There was actually a moment about 50 minutes into the film - the first shot of the "Hunger Games studio" - when I thought, "In different hands, this is precisely the moment when things would start to suck." But the yawning pit of suckdom was avoided; goodness continued; and thus I could sleep peacefully at night and wake to face another day of ICFA with a soul lightened with the knowledge that Hunger Games had passed through the gates of film unscathed. Now:

( SPOILERAMA! )