Do untrained children fighting each other make good television? Nothing about The Hunger Games makes any goddamn sense.

Just watch The Running Man again. That movie made all the same points, better, 20 years earlier, with dancers in spandex, Richard Dawson in place of Stanley Tucci doing Liberace in drag, and Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Conchita Alonzo in place of two talentless, white-bread-dough-faced Kentucky hicks.

Every time I see Jennifer Lawrence trying to smile for a camera, I just want to slap the Barbie-doll stare off her face. Seriously, those eyes are deader than Charo's lounge act. Your whole face has to be involved in the smile, honey, not just your lips.

/still trying to bring back some old-school Dennis Miller

It always amazes me how classy those dumbasses can be sometimes.

I can honestly say these two were a big part of why I love movies. I watched them on Chicago public television in the '70s right thru to their move to network TV in the '80s. They made it clear that it was okay for reasonable people to disagree, and it's okay to love cheesy movies as long as you check out the classics.

But they were both still very wrong about Anaconda being good. What a piece of crap.

I WNATED THIS MOVIE WOULD BE ABOUT HUNGARY HUNGARY HIPPOS.

It's a unpowered representation of something but not merely art and doesn't vary in size.... It's common enough to be seen in movies....

It can't be a statue, painting, cardboard movie advertising standee, or velour Elvis poster with LED lighting.

It has an intended purpose but you wouldn't really need it after a zombie apocalypse.... Is it money?

I give Teague seven magnificents.

I read that. Good fun.

SHYMALAAAAAN!

Sure, sure, it could be a RECREATIONAL emergency respirator.

I CALL TEAMS. FIDO AND AVATAR ARE NOT ON MY TEAM.

Bam! First try! It's the delightful young adult novel Bigger Than a Bread Box!

Is it a bottle of some kind?

Quick, Disney! Offer Sam Watterson four billion dollars!

Who was this movie aimed at? It wasn't funny enough to be a comedy. If it's a horror movie, it's one that hates horror movies. I wanted to love it (I liked Tucker and Dale vs Evil quite a lot), but it didn't give me much to hang on to. The film makers seemed to be fighting with themselves as to whether to follow the tropes or subvert them. The sequence that introduces the kids is a complete mess.

The movie is really well made, and I had some fun with it, but it seemed to indict a straw man for the most part (most horror movies don't have a cursed object, for example, and most horror movies trap the characters in a far more inventive way than blowing up a tunnel). The best part was Whitford and Jenkins' joyless reaction to the first kill.

And the ending... what the fuck? The reason you don't tell a story about the world ending is that the audience knows the world didn't end, so what the fuck point are you making by saying your characters made the world end?