OK, Maybe Katniss Won't Be So Bad ...

Well, what I was fearing has come to pass - Jennifer Lawrence has been cast as Katniss in "The Hunger Games."

But now I've read several articles about the casting, and I'm feeling a little bit better about it.

First of all, director Gary Ross feels like Lawrence will be a good Katniss. He told Entertainment Weekly, "...she came in and read for me and it just knocked me out. I don’t want to go into too many details, but we did a scene from the movie and it was so amazingly powerful that it was sort of stunning. You glimpsed every aspect of the role and the potential of the whole movie."

That sounds like a good sign, but movie directors always say things like that, even when the person they cast absolutely sucks.

But when I read that author Suzanne Collins approved of Katniss' casting, I was sold.

First of all, as a budding novelist, I can't imagine trying to find someone to embody a character that I created. I'm so glad that Collins was involved though - it lends a lot of credibility to the movie for me.

Of Lawrence, Collins wrote: In her remarkable audition piece, I watched Jennifer embody every essential quality necessary to play Katniss. I saw a girl who has the potential rage to send an arrow into the Gamemakers and the protectiveness to make Rue her ally. Who has conquered both Peeta and Gale’s hearts even though she’s done her best to wall herself off emotionally from anything that would lead to romance. Most of all, I believed that this was a girl who could hold out that handful of berries and incite the beaten down districts of Panem to rebel. I think that was the essential question for me. Could she believably inspire a rebellion? Did she project the strength, defiance and intellect you would need to follow her into certain war? For me, she did.

OK, fine. I'm sold on the Katniss casting. If the author approves, who am I to judge?

I am still not sold on the whole movie, though. It's going to be hard to make such a scary, violent story into a movie that will be rated PG-13, because I'm sure it will have to be PG-13 to get the kind of box office returns they want. How are they going to make this movie work? I'm not convinced.