So I'm reading 'The Hunger Games...'

...being the good North Carolinian that I am, and a citizen who wants to celebrate the biggest film made in this region in at least two decades. And I notice that (spoiler alert here) Katniss never kills anyone except 1) in self-defense or 2) as a mercy killing, after wild beasts have mauled him. (And she does so from a distance, so her hands stay literally clean.) Peeta, her boyfriend-in-the-making, doesn't kill anyone, as far as I could tell.

The book's cleverly thought out, smoothly written, inventive and acute in social commentary. But the hero and heroine remain strangely innocent for people thrown into a brutal arena where other "tributes" slay each other in a last-killer-standing contest. I expected to read about the transformation of a shy, decent girl into a person hardened by the ugly realities of combat, but...no.

Then I thought about the Harry Potter novels, all of which I have read, and couldn't remember whether Harry had actively snuffed anyone -- no matter how malevolent -- except in self-defense, and rarely then. That got me thinking about all the great children's literature I've read, back to "Treasure Island" and "Kidnapped" and beyond, and I realized that's almost always the way: However horrible the world may become, the hero(ine) must remain unspoiled by destructive impulses.

It was kind of refreshing to see that, over two centuries or so of books written for kids, this kind of naivete prevails. We don't force teenagers to participate fully in the cruel realities of life in the great written narratives -- which, sadly, is why we call them fables.

Where did all the real men go?

I waited until "Jersey Boys" had left town, so nobody would think I was complaining about the stratosphere-piercing falsetto of the guy playing Frankie Valli. I enjoyed him immensely, but I did wonder what happened to all the deep voices that once made Broadway great.

"Showboat," the first modern book musical (which celebrates its 85th anniversary in December), had leading men who were a baritone and a bass. All the great Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals -- among them "Oklahoma!" and "Carousel" and "The King and I" and "The Sound of Music" -- were written for lower male voices, as a rule. Emile DeBecque, dapper French hero of "South Pacific," is a true bass.

That's because most of the biggest pop singers from the late 1920s through the 1950s had lower voices: Al Jolson, Bing Crosby, Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra. They often  put show music on their albums, and theater composers generally wrote in their ranges. ("Kiss Me, Kate" has seven significant singing roles, and a baritone could do any of them.)

But when rock music came along, forcing high-voiced lead singers to roar over orchestras, live theater followed suit. Through the 1970s, as Boston and Aerosmith and the like hired high tenors as vocalists, Broadway began to do the same. "The Phantom of the Opera," "Les Miserables," "Chess" and other huge shows required guys with loud top notes and almost no bottom. (Traditional opera followed the same path, as orchestrations got heavier: You need a mighty-voiced tenor to ride atop a Wagnerian orchestra.)

The result: Deep voices fell out of favor. With luck, I'll see that trend reversed someday, but the high-pitched boys currently seem to have it all their own way.

It's either Hugh Jackman or me

After I complained about Billy Crystal's performance as the Oscar host, a reader e-mailed me to ask whom I'd rather see introducing the Academy Awards. The honest answer is, "Me." I can sing. I own a tux. I'm not afraid of crowds. I've been on television and know how to use cue cards. I watch a lot of movies (more than Billy Crystal, I'm sure). And millions of people would tune in out of sheer curiosity. (OK, they'd tune back out immediately. So measure the ratings for the first three minutes!)

Realistically, though, I'd say Hugh Jackman, who actually did host three years ago. He's urbane, funny, he can also sing, and he's such a good host that he once won an Emmy Award for hosting the Tony show. He wouldn't kiss up to celebrities, he wouldn't drag out routines, and he has a sense of humor about himself. He also -- and I say this reluctantly -- has a shade more charm than I do.

And unlike Crystal (or me), he'd appeal to somebody under 40. The problem with hiring Anne Hathaway and James Franco was they were too young to know how to run a show smoothly. Crystal, meanwhile, is now about as fresh and flexible as a year-old English muffin. Jackman falls right into the sweet spot between them, age- and experience-wise.

A story about him: Charlotte native Merwin Foard, whom we profiled in today's Observer (http://bit.ly/ySWWoz), has understudied or stood in for some of the biggest names on Broadway: Nathan Lane, Brian Stokes Mitchell, Michael Cerveris and others. But when offered a job as Hugh Jackman's stand-in for "The Boy From Oz," the 2003 show that won Jackman a Tony as best actor, he turned it down.

He realized that every person in the theater would be there only to see HJ. If a disembodied voice announced that Jackman was indisposed, and "Today the role will be played by Merwin Foard," he'd be likely to see a sea of backs moving toward the box office for refunds. Jackman is unique, and he ought to be hosting the 2013 Academy Awards.

We interrupt the Tchaikovsky orgy...

...that is, the frenzy around the Charlotte Symphony's all-Tchaikovsky concert March 30-31, Opera Carolina's "Eugene Onegin" March 17-25, N.C. Dance Theatre's "Sleeping Beauty" (which runs now through March 18) and various other events. Herewith, four factoids you may not encounter in the PR blitz:

1) He was a bad judge of his own abilities. While writing "Yolanta," the opera he wrongly thought would be embraced by future generations, he told a friend he was also working on a ballet of no consequence. It was "The Nutcracker."

2) His first piano concerto, probably the most popular in the classical repertoire, was a dud in Russian circles. His friend and mentor, Nikolai Rubenstein, deemed it unplayable: "There are only two or three pages that can be salvaged, and the rest must be thrown away." No Russians wanted to play or conduct it, so Tchaikovsky had to wait until a German conductor, Hans von Bulow, premiered it in Boston.

3) Speaking of Germans, Tchaikovsky hated Brahms. Called him "a giftless bastard" whose unemotional, tradition-bound writing had no merit. (That's unfair, of course.) Each may have been the last great Romantic composer in his country, but Tchaikovsky had zero empathy for old Johannes.

4) Tchaikovsky may have whacked himself. The jury's still out as to whether he got cholera from drinking untreated water during an epidemic or committed suicide at the behest of an informal tribunal, held after he began an affair with a member of the tsar's royal circle. (And, of course, the infected water could have been his way of doing that.) Whichever answer is correct, he died a wizened, white-haired, worn-out genius, looking far older than his age of 53.

Are you beautiful? Really? Are you sure?

The most interesting movie I've seen in the last few weeks was a six-minute video made by six members of Girl Scout Troop 445. You'll find it here: http://vimeo.com/37500778.

The camerawork's a little shaky, perhaps intentionally. The girls, who come mostly from the Highland Creek area and are roughly of late middle school age, use a technique I first saw in the 1967 documentary "Don't Look Back," where Bob Dylan wrote the lyrics to "Subterranean Homesick Blues" on flash cards and held them up before a camera. Like Dylan, this sextet has something serious to say.

"Beauty Redefined" starts with the girls revealing their anxieties: extra weight, eczema, unattractiveness, apathy, judgmentalism, impatience. Then the tide turns, almost literally. (They're at the beach.) Cards define "ugliness" as peer pressure, discrimination, demoralization, hatred. The cards urge patience, kindness, confidence, acceptance. One says "A girl's true beauty is a reflection of her inner happiness." The film ends with an affirmation that Abbie, Aslan, Johanna, McKayla, Sydney and Victoria are beautiful -- and so are you.

I'd have appreciated a film like this when I was a stout, spotty-faced eighth-grader. Membership in the Low Esteem Club is open to both boys and girls, though boys aren't exposed to the same cruel evaluations of body image that girls face. This video reminds us we're all good at something, valuable in some way, "beautiful" spiritually or emotionally whether we're good-looking or not. (And none of these girls happen to be unattractive.)

That's a message Hollywood and TV producers almost never convey, in their frantic and absurd assertions that being hot differentiates winners from losers in America. That's why "Beauty Redefined" sticks in the memoey, when so much frivolous entertainment trash blows away overnight.

Do we really need a Charlotte Film Festival?

You might think the question answers itself. Any film festival can't help but lend a little glitz and coolness to a city not conspicuous for either. But it's not that simple.

After all, Asheville had a delightful fest: premieres from major independent distributors, documentaries that went on to Oscar nominations, strange but satisfying feature narratives -- and it took place in early November, right after the peak of leaf season in the mountains. But it collapsed in 2010 after the city withdrew funding, partly because it hadn't brought new visitors to the city.

The Charlotte Film Festival begins today in a crowded field: The Charlotte Jewish Film Festival is going on, the Charlotte Black Film Festival ended Saturday, and the Projecting Hope Film Festival for family-oriented movies will start Friday. So do we even need an all-purpose festival?

I'd say we do. The other three all speak to specific audiences, however much they reach out beyond their communities. (Or don't, as the Black Film Festival didn't contact me; I found out about it by chance.) But the Charlotte Film Festival belongs to the whole city.

I judged student films this year, watching entries that ranged from a Kuwaiti political fable based on "Alice in Wonderland" to a British short about fairy tales with Julian Sands in a leading role. (Some of those students must be rolling in dough.) Even from those five films, I got a sense of the broad, fascinating world of cinema that no other festival locally gives us. And that's why we'd be poorer if the Charlotte Film Festival went away.

Davy Jones and the birth of "reality" TV

The death of Davy Jones this week got me thinking about my own mortality -- that happens, whenever anyone less than 10 years older than you joins the choir invisible -- and the Monkees, who were delightful or idiotic, depending on how old you were when they made their televised debut in 1966. (I was about to turn 12, so...delightful.)

Their true legacy isn't the long roster of hits on my two-CD collection, including the immortal "Daydream Believer" and "I'm a Believer." It's the long, undistinguished history of "reality" television which, as far as I can see, starts with them.

Bob Rafelson, who later became the Oscar-nominated writer-director of "Five Easy Pieces," and Bert Schneider were inspired by the success of the movie "A Hard Day's Night," in which the Beatles played characters based on themselves. They wanted to build a TV series around the Lovin' Spoonful, whose label wouldn't let them take part. So they auditioned for new band members.

Like the Beatles, the Monkees got their name by misspelling an animal and consisted of a cute lead singer, a snarky intellectual guitar player, a goofy drummer and a shy guy lost in the shadows. They used their own names for the characters, sang their own songs on the show and acted out exaggerated moments from entertainers' lives such as theirs.

Sure, the episodes were scripted. (So are modern reality shows, to some extent.) Yes, the characters  lacked the mean-spiritedness, vulgarity and obnoxious self-promotion of people on "The Bachelor" or "Jersey Shore." But in some way, the poisonous inanity that has swept across modern TV has its roots in the innocent "true-life" shenanigans of "The Monkees."