The Cineaste's Lament.

The “Hunger Games” juggernaut barreled through the Easter weekend, breaking $300 million in domestic box office tallies. Courtesy of BoxOfficeMojo, here’s the weekend, by the numbers:

Meanwhile, in the New York Times, film critics A.O. Scott and Mahnola Dargis went deep on the symbolism of Jennifer Lawrence’s Katniss Everdeen in the flick, concluding that she may be one of the more radical female characters in recent cinematic history.

Here’s the nut graf:

A. O. SCOTT I see the outlines of a future American Studies dissertation emerging in the mist. In your review of “The Hunger Games” you perceptively align Katniss with James Fenimore Cooper’s Natty Bumppo, one of the archetypal figures in the literature of the American West. He is a socially marginal figure, a loner who defends the fragile society of the frontier without ever becoming part of it. His mythic descendants include the righteous loners of classic westerns: Shane, John Wayne, Clint Eastwood.

And also now Katniss. She is different, though, not only because she is a woman but also because she is anything but a free, rootless figure of the wilderness. The paradise she comes from has been colonized and enclosed. It looks like Daniel Boone’s Kentucky, but it has been given the soulless bureaucratic name District 12. She is transported to an artificial garden where the beasts are special effects, and cameras record every moment of solitude or intimacy. There she fights for her life, and for kin and home, cruelly pitted against other children who are doing the same.

Read the full story here.