Good news for everyone who loves watching hit movies get mercilessly mocked! The RiffTrax crew -- Michael J. Nelson, Kevin Murphy, and Bill Corbett -- have emerged from their secret bunker in Panem's Capitol to proudly present their commentary for the teenager-murdering blockbuster The Hunger Games! The MP3 track just became available today and is compatible with pretty much anything you can throw at it, including the Zune. So, in case you needed an excuse to buy the movie, here is a pretty darn good one!
Photo provided by RiffTrax Read the rest
NBC is taking advantage of its Olympics coverage by promoting its new fall and late summer shows. A particularly unnerving one is for a show called Stars Earn Stripes, a new reality/competition show hosted by former presidential candidate and Army general Wesley Clark that takes D-list celebrities and puts them through very realistic military exercises with real military personnel. Almost every single part of that sentence felt weird to type, but it gets even more uncomfortable when you realize that NBC was essentially plucking (or, rather, reaping) semi-famous people from their relative obscurity and making them engage in combat with each other -- not unlike The Hunger Games, which are not supposed to be real. And even though the contestants don't have to actually kill each other, the idea is to see who can perform on the same level as a soldier of the U.S. military by making them go through the same exercises as the actual U.S. military. The military is entertainment now. Entertainment is the military. Welcome to Idiocracy! It finally, actually happened.
(Should I mention how NBC is partly owned by GE, and GE has over a billion dollars in defense contracts? That's not weird, right?) Read the rest
Lionsgate has apparently cast the all-important role of Finnick Odair in the sequel to The Hunger Games, the victor from District 4 who is best known for being a bit of a firecracker and also for being very, very handsome. Sam Claflin (Snow White and the Huntsman) has reportedly snagged the role, beating out bigger names like Armie Hammer and Garrett Hedlund. Zap2It asks if this is the Finnick we pictured, and actually... yes! Cut his hair a bit shorter, and he comes pretty darn close. (via Zap2It) Read the rest
While it was news, it was hardly unpredictable that the third installment of The Hunger Games trilogy, Mockingjay, was going to be split into two movies. It makes perfect sense; it's the densest, heaviest book in the series. (Heavy as in "Doc, that's heavy.") But while the year-long gap in between these releases might be cause for alarm for die-hard fans, the part of that story that we should all be the most concerned with is how it's told and how it will be adapted. I'm referring to the first-person perspective of Katniss Everdeen.
The entire book is about things happening without her knowledge, and us (the readers) only finding out about really important things when she does. That really can't happen in a movie, let alone a two-parter. Because that will be very annoying.
Possible spoiler alert: I will be talking about things that happen in Mockingjay, which happen as a result of things that happen in Catching Fire, so if you don't want to be spoiled, you might not want to come any further. Instead, for something else to do, here are The Hunger Gifs. Read the rest
We all know that Philip Seymour Hoffman is an "actor's actor" -- a chameleon who can play all kinds of roles, whether they be dramatic or comedic, manipulative or a pushover. Now that we know he is playing head gamemaker Plutarch Heavensbee in Catching Fire (and, most likely, Mockingjay), let's look at a past role that probably didn't prepare him for this one, unless it totally did: Scotty from Boogie Nights. Read the rest
