Rebecca Keegan captures many different angles on the film in the LATimes:
The juvenile slaughterfest depicted in the film and its source material, Suzanne Collins’ trilogy of bestselling young adult novels, may give audiences (particularly parents) pause — is this what contemporary entertainment has come to? But violence committed by and against children has a long, grisly tradition in literature — as an allegory for adult cruelty, a representation of the emotional volatility of adolescence and a tension-raiser for audiences.

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/movies/la-et-hunger-games-heritage-20120326,0,1569396.story

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/25/books/review/stranger-magic-by-marina-warner.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=harold%20bloom&st=cse

Harold Bloom reviews Marina Warner’s wonderful new Stranger Magic, and he is as much in awe of it as I am.  Below an extract from the book, which he includes in his review.

“It did not seem enough to invoke escapism as the reason for the popularity of ‘The Arabian Nights’ in the age of reason. Something more seemed to be at stake. Magic is not simply a matter of the occult or the esoteric, of astrology, Wicca and Satanism; it follows processes inherent to human consciousness and connected to constructive and imaginative thought. The faculties of imagination — dream, projection, fantasy — are bound up with the faculties of reasoning and essential to making the leap beyond the known into the unknown. At one pole (myth), magic is associated with poetic truth, at another (the history of science) with inquiry and speculation. It was bound up with understanding physical forces in nature and led to technical ingenuity and discoveries. Magical thinking structures the processes of imagination, and imagining something can and sometimes must precede the fact or the act; it has shaped many features of Western civilization. But its influence has been constantly disavowed since the Enlightenment and its action and effects consequently ­misunderstood.”

Terrence Rafferty brings us up to speed on the latest film and television adaptations.

Fairy tales can come true, the old song goes; it can happen to you, apparently, if you’re young at heart. Whether one believes this hopeful sentiment, and regardless of the age of one’s internal organs, there’s no doubt that fairy tales have for the past couple of years — and into the foreseeable future — been coming pretty regularly to screens both big and small, achieving, you could say, at least the kind of quasi-truth that movies and television can concoct.

http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2012/03/25/movies/20120325-MIRROR.html

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/the-blaggers-guide-to–grimms-fairy-tales-7584306.html

“He has already taken on the story of the New Testament in The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ (Canongate, £10.99); now, Philip Pullman is to rewrite 50 Grimm fairy tales, to celebrate the 200th anniversary of their first publication. Penguin Classics will publish the tales on 6 September. Pullman has long counted himself as a fan of the stories, and has been working on his own versions for some time. Last year, he told the fansite bridgetothestars.net: “This isn’t a book for children only. I’m telling the best of the tales in my own voice, and I’m finding it a great purifier of narrative thinking, rather as a pianist relishes playing Bach’s preludes and fugues as a sort of palate-cleansing discipline.”

Pinch me–this is too good to be true.

Below a link to David Denby’s review of The Hunger Games film in The New Yorker.  I’m waiting until Wednesday to see the film with my students.  Read the full review, and you will find that he pulls no punches in telling us how much he hates the movie.  Would he prefer Battle Royale?  I’ve posted the trailer for that film below, and, just a warning, it does not have a Pg-13 rating.

“The Hunger Games” is a prime example of commercial hypocrisy. The filmmakers bait kids with a cruel idea, but they can’t risk being too intense or too graphic (the books are more explicit). After a while, we get the point: because children are the principal audience, the picture needs a PG-13 rating. The result is an evasive, baffling, unexciting production—anything but a classic.

And even scarier (be warned):

Annie Murphy Paul writes in the NYT about “Your Brain on Fiction”

The brain, it seems, does not make much of a distinction between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life; in each case, the same neurological regions are stimulated. Keith Oatley, an emeritus professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto (and a published novelist), has proposed that reading produces a vivid simulation of reality, one that “runs on minds of readers just as computer simulations run on computers.” Fiction — with its redolent details, imaginative metaphors and attentive descriptions of people and their actions — offers an especially rich replica. Indeed, in one respect novels go beyond simulating reality to give readers an experience unavailable off the page: the opportunity to enter fully into other people’s thoughts and feelings.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/opinion/sunday/the-neuroscience-of-your-brain-on-fiction.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&%2362;&ref=general&src=me

J.K. Rowling had that one figured out long ago:

“Tell me one last thing,” said Harry. “Is this real? Or has this been happening inside my head?”
Dumbledore beamed at him, and his voice sounded loud and strong in Harry’s ears even though the bright mist was descending again, obscuring his figure. “Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean it is not real?”

As did Vladimir Nabokov

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/03/long-lost-fairy-tales.html#comments

Our own culture, under the spell of Grimm and Perrault, has favored fairy tales starring girls rather than boys, princesses rather than princes. But Schönwerth’s stories show us that once upon a time, Cinderfellas evidently suffered right alongside Cinderellas, and handsome young men fell into slumbers nearly as deep as Briar Rose’s hundred-year nap. Just as girls became domestic drudges and suffered under the curse of evil mothers and stepmothers, boys, too, served out terms as gardeners and servants, sometimes banished into the woods by hostile fathers. Like Snow White, they had to plead with a hunter for their lives. And they are as good as they are beautiful—Schönwerth uses the German term “schön,” or beautiful, for both male and female protagonists.

Next week, I’ll add my translation from one of the tales in Prinz Rosszwifl.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/mar/05/five-hundred-fairytales-discovered-germany

A whole new world of magic animals, brave young princes and evil witches has come to light with the discovery of 500 new fairytales, which were locked away in an archive in Regensburg, Germany for over 150 years. The tales are part of a collection of myths, legends and fairytales, gathered by the local historian Franz Xaver von Schönwerth (1810–1886) in the Bavarian region of Oberpfalz at about the same time as the Grimm brothers were collecting the fairytales that have since charmed adults and children around the world.

Last year, the Oberpfalz cultural curator Erika Eichenseer published a selection of fairytales from Von Schönwerth’s collection, calling the book Prinz Roßzwifl. This is local dialect for “scarab beetle”. The scarab, also known as the “dung beetle”, buries its most valuable possession, its eggs, in dung, which it then rolls into a ball using its back legs. Eichenseer sees this as symbolic for fairytales, which she says hold the most valuable treasure known to man: ancient knowledge and wisdom to do with human development, testing our limits and salvation.

Here’s “The Turnip Princess”:

“Are Fairy Tales out of Fashion?” Libby Copeland asks in Slate, in response to a recent study by a British TV channel called Watch.

It’s no surprise that many parents have stopped reading fairy tales to their young children because they’re too scary, according to a new study by a British television channel. Why should they? Many were never really meant for children, not when the original folk tales were first gathered by collectors like the brothers Grimm.

It’s refreshing to discover a writer who has done the hard work of reading up on the tales and their histories.  Copeland understands the importance of preserving the versions told in times past when life was “nasty, brutish, and short,” and she also recognizes that Disney films, as appealing as they may be on many different levels, have created global master-narratives that may not reflect the values we want to impart to our children.  The stories were never written in granite, and we can make them our own by being irreverent about them.  There’s nothing wrong with editing, refashioning, and creating your own version for a child, or choosing a tale from the many different versions out there–one that is age-appropriate and also leaves something to the imagination–let’s you fill in the many blanks.  What I’ve always loved about fairy tales is that they are so compact and surreal—no one accepts the story at face value and we can’t help but react to the terms of the tale.  Fairy tales  get us talking about what you do when you meet a wolf  in the forest, encounter a beast at home, or find a talking frog in your backyard.  The story is just the beginning of a bigger conversation that continues over the years.   The best tales offer a worst-case scenario and provide a tool kit for surviving the great  “What If?”  And children have great instincts about stories–when it’s too much for them or too little and not just right, they let us know right away by turning away or falling asleep.

http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2012/02/why_i_don_t_want_to_read_fairy_tales_to_my_daughter_.html