Hunger games part 3 part 1 review

Okay, a couple of big caveats...

1) I haven't read any of the Hunger Games books. I'm not even familiar with them. So I won't have any "this was left out" or "they should have included this part from the book..."

That's not necessarily a disadvantage. Films shouldn't depend upon a lot of outside knowledge by their audience. If you can't portray something that was in the book that's a fault of the movie, not the moviegoer. Ya know, provided it's not a Bible movie or Sherlock Holmes or something.

2) this'll never be a movie blog. To really dissect a film you probably oughta watch it multiple times. So outside of the occasional Star Wars rant or my House of Cards binge, you won't see much "Men on Film" here...

That's already more preamble than this movie got... and that's a shame. It's full of characters making reference to past events Katniss "missed", and it's never shown to us, occurring or in flashbacks. 

That wouldn't be so bad, except what we get instead is about 1/3 a film of Katniss sorrowfully surveying the leftover rubble and about 1/4 a film of her buckling under the pressure of everything that happened (offscreen).

There's always a bit of watering down the punch when a trilogy is stretched into a... ummm... quadrilogy (is that a thing?). Suffice it to say this is a 90 minute movie that feels like it had 40 pages of script that just said "Katniss looks sorrowful."

There's a weird bit where the Rebel Alliance blows up The Emperor's hydroelectric dam (I'm just gonna go ahead and use Star Wars terms here because reasons). And so the ENTIRE Capital city is 100% dark. Not one generator, hell, no one lit a candle or started a fire. The Rebels in their Hoth base seem to all have lanterns and such and even use them freely when the base's oxygen is cut to 14% (which itself seems dodgy), so apparently they're not in short supply.

There were occasionally episodes of 24 or Hpuse of Cards where at the end of think "Well, shit... Nothing really happened. But then I guess someone can't die EVERY week. Sometimes you gotta have one that is really just moving chess pieces into position." 

So I guess ultimately that's what this was. A movie Millard Fillmore. Not good, not bad, just sorta caretaker to get you along.

It's just frustrating. You don't start Jedi by having your characters chat about Luke getting his hand chopped off and Han getting frozen, then show 30 mins of Leia mope. Throw the audience a bone.

How about a Jar Jar Binks prisoner exchange?

So, Sony is quashing The Interview in response to terrorist threats from interests in North Korea.

If they really wanted to get some international heft, the North Korean government shoulda blocked Matrix Reloaded. I think we could have given a Nobel Peace Prize for intervening there.

So my letters that they honor Demolition Man remain unanswered

So apparently Time's Person of the Year is "The Ebola Caregivers" or some such collective.

Meh.

I never care for it when they get cute and do something other than have the Person of the Year be, ya know, a Person. They've done this with increasing frequency recently... the person of the year will be "Earth" or "You" or some such vaguery.

It seems to be an attempt to be clever, but I think once they broke the seal by not having it be an individual they've since gone to the well too many times (how's that for a tortured mix of metaphors?)

Though to be fair, a bit of Wikipediaing (is that a verb yet?) sees apparently their first time being cute was 1950 with "The American fighting-man". What would a 1950 equivalent of "Meh." have been?

Also on the final list, apparently, was "Ferguson Protestors". I'm just glad at least they didn't pick that. Not for any haughty political or racial reasons... just that awards like this seem to suffer sometimes from a bias of recency. Whatever is freshest in our minds is the "biggest" thing that happened in the year. Apparently last year they very nearly gave it to Miley Cyrus, who "coincidentally" had just had the fococta twerking thing on MTV. At least cooler heads prevailed there, with his Popeliness just beating out the first woman who ever shook her ass while dancing.