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"tbosas bad because they made young Snow hot" babe. i'm gonna hold your hand when i say this, but some of us are attracted to donald sutherland as well.

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Sage (Salvia) “Peach”

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a feel like the new generation of fanfic readers NEED to understand that clicking on a fic (interaction) does nothing. ao3 has no algorithm. your private discord discussions of fic do not reach the authors. if you do not actively engage with writers they will stop posting. this isn’t social media this is community.

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"No waving and smiling this time. I want you to look straight ahead as if the audience and this whole event are beneath you." — CATCHING FIRE (2013)

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“I don’t know why he took me under his wing the way he did. He sent me a box of 50 books. In between takes, he asked me questions and gently gave me guidance. I will never forget his generosity.” - Jennifer Lawrence on Donald Sutherland who passed away today at 88. 🕊️🤍

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Tenjuan Temple, Kyoto, Japan

kyotophotograph

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So as many of you probably already know, I HATE the SOTR book with the passion of a thousand burning suns!! I can’t even put into words how much I hate it. Collins has completely mangled Haymitch’s (and Snow’s) characters beyond all recognition. She has taken away their brains, spines, balls and personalities and in Haymitch’s case replaced it with Lenore Dove. 🤮 In Snow’s case, it’s been replaced with incompetent buffoonery and a weird obsession with Lucy Gray. 🤮 They are NOT the characters we met in the OG trilogy. It also contradicts the OG trilogy as well as added in a bunch of stupid and unnecessary connections between everybody that honestly is just annoying.

But the movie is going to be 10x worse. When I saw that they had cast Ralph Fiennes as President Snow, I legit cried I was so upset. This just goes to show what a shameless cash grab this is. Everyone goes on and on about what a good actor he is, but he is a theatrical actor better suited for stage performances than film performances. His villains are always extremely one dimensional, over the top, cartoonish caricatures rather than real human beings with real emotions in their own right. He is completely wrong for this role and they’re only doing it because he’s a big name. This is such a shameless cash grab. And it honestly made me tear up a bit because Donald Sutherland cared so much about this role. He wasn’t even offered the role, he just read the script and liked it so much, he wrote and asked Gary Ross to be a part of the film. And Gary Ross wrote a bunch of scenes that weren’t in the book. He genuinely cared about this role, put his passion into this role. Not so with Fiennes. This is just a way to make a bunch of money for him. And look I get it, actors need to eat too. But it just won’t be the same. And I don’t care what he says. This all boils down to big pay day for him. He doesn’t have the same care for this character that Donald Sutherland did. It doesn’t have any of that meaning for him. It’s just another silly little franchise for him like Harry Potter. So I am deeply upset by this and want to punch people cheering for this in the face! Thanks for letting me rant on here tumblr!

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What do you think the most different thing about Sutherland and Fiennes as an actor regarding Snow casting?

Fiennes’ acting is more theatrical to me. As someone who did a lot of theater growing up and studied theatrical acting, you can definitely see he acts more with his brows and smaller micro-expressions in his face. It’s what lends well to his roles as Voldemort, the Chef in the Menu, etc.

Whereas Sutherland is a MASTER at the subtleties. If you just watch Snow throughout the series, you can see he doesn’t really use the muscles in his face a lot, most of his acting is done through his eyes and his vocal inflections. The few times we see Snow get angry he never LOOKS angry. He’s nearly always smiling, but his eyes tell the real story. One of the stand-out moments I always think of is when Seneca Crane is talking about how everyone loves an underdog, and you can just see the subtle way Sutherland’s expression shifts before he says “I don’t.” It’s a blink and you miss it moment.

A lot of classically trained film actors are taught that their best acting comes through the eyes. They’re trained to start there and move the rest down. One of the big exercises my acting coach used to make us do was to stand in front of a mirror, cover our mouth and eyebrows and try and emote as much as possible ONLY using our eyes. It’s VERY difficult.

One of my favorite roles of Sutherland’s outside of Snow is Mr Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, which I think shows off his mastery of his other skills, mainly how natural and versatile he is. It’s very easy to play Mr. Bennet as snobby or exasperated or frustrated with his wife, but through Sutherland’s performance, we see the empathetic and caring nature of him as well.

The moment when Lizzie tells him she wants to marry Darcy and he bursts into laughter and tears is one of my favorite moments of the film, because Sutherland manages to bring out the love he feels not just for Lizzie as his favorite but for his other daughters as well. It’s a hard line to walk as Mr Bennet, but he does it so masterfully and in a way where it feels natural to the character.

It’s also why Snow feels so chilling in the original film trilogy. Sutherland plays him in a way that feels like a real person you’d encounter. (His final scene with Katniss in Mockingjay is an excellent showcase of this).

Fiennes is a fantastic actor, but you can tell he’s coming from a theatrical background, particularly a Shakespearean background. A lot of characters feel like characters rather than real people, imo. Plus, most of my favorite acting moments of Fiennes have been when he’s onstage rather than onscreen.

Again, it lends itself well to the roles he decides to take on, but it makes me worry when dealing with Snow, who both Sutherland and Blyth used more subtle approaches with.

Blyth’s was a bit less so, but it made sense for a young eighteen year old Snow rather than an older, more experienced one.

The Snow we meet in SOTR is him at his prime. He should be the exact same cold, calculating way we meet him in the trilogy, but with a subtle hint of madness lingering behind his eyes, unsusceptible to anyone except Plutarch. Sutherland was excellent at capturing that without going overboard, I’m not sure Fiennes can do the same.

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I am still upset about the passing of Donald Sutherland. Here is an article from GQ that I like in which he talks about why he begged Gary Ross to give him the role of President Snow.

Nobody asked me to do it [play Snow]. I wasn’t offered it [the role]. I like to read scripts, and it captured my passion. I wrote them a letter. The role of the president had maybe a line in the script. Maybe two. Didn’t make any difference. I thought it was an incredibly important film, and I wanted to be a part of it. I thought it could wake up an electorate that had been dormant since the ’70s. I hadn’t read the books. To be truthful, I was unaware of them. But they showed my letter to the director, Gary Ross, and he thought it’d be a good idea if I did it. He wrote those wonderfully poetic scenes in the rose garden, and they formed the mind and wit of Coriolanus Snow.

in 2017, government documents revealed that Sutherland had been on a NSA watchlist due to his anti-war [Vietnam War] activities. Here's an article where his son, Keifer Sutherland, talks about how the FBI raided their house when he was a kid.

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Ralph Fiennes is a JKR supporter and transphobe and I'm very surprised at the casting and the author allowing it

Look, I’ve said my piece on JKR, I’m not beating this dead horse any further.

I will say, Suzanne Collins doesn’t have nearly the amount of pull you guys think she has. I definitely don’t like how most of the internet has positioned her as the “anti” JKR/her exact opposite when really Collins a) is pretty hands off with the movies and b) is still a white woman writing YA fiction, she’s not infallible.

Tbh I have my doubts about the SOTR movie—not just because the concept itself is very difficult for a skilled director to pull off, let alone Francis Lawerence, who I already had some doubts about—and the casting of Fiennes has slightly decreased my excitement for it.

So far everyone else they’ve casted has hit the nail on the head (esp with the tributes and victors) but Donald Sutherland will always be President Snow to me and his portrayal made me fall in love with the character. Tom Blythe added to that love because of how he expanded on Sutherland’s vision. I hope Fiennes will honor Sutherland with his portrayal but they’re such different actors it makes me nervous. I know Fiennes can pull off the villainous part of Snow, but I worry about how he can pull off the more nuanced parts of the character.

Sutherland had such a passion for the role, to the point where he begged Gary Ross to let him play the role and convinced Ross to write scenes expanding on the behind the scenes of the games and how Snow’s mind worked. I honestly believe that without Sutherland championing the character beyond an evil caricature, we probably wouldn’t have gotten TBOSAS.

The issue is, I don’t know who else they could’ve gotten outside of Kiefer, who has every valid reason to say no, (I saw someone suggest Neal McDonough which I wouldn’t have been mad at) so maybe this is the best direction they could’ve gone with. Idk.

The one thing that WILL definitely impact my opinion of this movie is the casting of LouLou/Louella. It’s such a delicate situation and I have faith they can make the right decision, but the fact that she’s the one tribute they haven’t announced makes me nervous.

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fireflies lighting up a rural Pennsylvania field at dusk

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Donald Sutherland young and old. I argue he was still very handsome in his old age.

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Mary Oliver, from “The Uses of Sorrow”

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The Helix Nebula © 1/2/3/4

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