Happy Thanksgiving from The Hunger Games

In movie-type news, Jesse Eisenberg is lighting a small fire in the world of fiction.  He apparently wrote a piece for The New Yorker.  It's a fake movie review by a fake critic and, of course, all the critics and HATERS out there are jumping all over it, just nitpicking away.  Okay, okay, so he's not Steve Martin.  But that's the deal these days: if you're a celebrity, your stuff is totally allowed to be lame.  Take that band Train, for instance.  Now, if you're like me, you probably think that their songs "San Francisco" and "Hey Soul Sister" that you used to hear at the gym all the time are some of the worst pieces of slick crap that you've ever heard, but lemme tell you something... it took them at least ten years to get to that level.  Think Phil Collins post-Peter Gabriel Genesis.  He had to ease his way towards "No Jacket Required."  That took about ten years!  But he tried, Lord how he tried to keep the torch lit, long rambling songs that take one whole side of an album.  Also, I'm like Ice T that way... I needs me my Phil Collins.  But like Paul Simon sez, every generation throws a hero up the pop charts.  Unfortunately, it's a young man's game... used to be, anyway.
It's all for laying the groundwork for that Batman v. Superman movie.  Finally my dream's coming true of a comic book villain acting like "The Weekly Standard"'s Bill Kristol.  But that's a ways off, and we've got Hunger Games to feast on... incidentally, how can Ben Affleck be both Daredevil AND Batman?  Doing both DC and Marvel characters?  Isn't that a conflict of interest?
Anyways, as expected, the last installment of The Hunger Games is #1 at the box office once again... although, much like the final installment of the Matrix trilogy, returns are a bit down.  Nothing to be worried about, of course, and J. Law will still get $20 million for whatever she does next but... man, that's a disappointment.  But that's the American moviegoing public for you: fickle, fickle, fickle.  I mean, you go to all that trouble to give them a CGI rainbow at the end of the movie, you kill off Trinity and everything... and where's the frickin' gratitude?  In damn short supply, my friends...  in damn short supply.  But I look forward to Suzanne Collins' next series of books, where she makes another successful trilogy about the struggles of a young heroine to get royalty payments out of those greedy, greedy book publishers and movie executives.
In other jaded sophisticate news, Pixar's latest only made it to #2.  Well, that's what they get for going up against The Hunger Games, frankly.  I guess people could tell that it's not an alpha effort from the jaded people over at Pixar University.  For 2015, that was clearly Inside Out.
At #3, Stallone has clearly accepted his fate in life, and he's graduated to the role Burgess Meredith once played in the first Rocky movies.  He's now the Mickey, if you will.  The character's named Mickey, of course, out of respect to Mickey Rooney, who wanted to get that part pretty badly... but clearly he didn't do enough episodes of the original "Twilight Zone" show.  And what on Earth is wrong with Carl Weathers?  Was he just that busy, that he couldn't be bothered with appearing in this movie?  Did Adam Sandler jinx it somehow?
And finally, the Oscar buzz starts up with Brooklyn, one of them fancy period piece romances.  Now, I hate to be so shallow and superficial, but when I think of Brooklyn, I think... I forgot already!  Brain... not... working.  Anyway, I think grit and gangsters and fuhgeddaboutit.  This movie looks a little too slick and clean, and the title's too simple.  Also, there's something about Saoirse Ronan.  She's too other-worldly for my taste, but that's just me.  I completely understand if she doesn't want to become a permanent fixture in Wes Anderson's Rolling Stock Company, but she wasn't meant to play normal roles.  Now, Hanna, sure.  Or The Host about aliens... well, nah, forget that one.  Apparently it's not going to spawn another successful franchise.  But maybe I'm wrong, and hopefully we won't get a repeat of ... what's her name.  Miranda Frost... Rosamund Pike!  That's the one.  Why, she's one of the few Bond girls who could've used her real name in the movie.  Anyway, let's hope that Ronan and Brooklyn have more luck with the Oscar statuettes than Gone Girl and Pike did.  It's a period piece, so it won't be as hipster-centric, which the Oscar voting block likes.  Reminds me of a dream I had about a movie that was supposed to be a period piece.  The scene was in a restaurant.  Someone started talking on a cell phone, and everyone in the restaurant verbally scolded the guy.  Wherever I was, I smiled.  Now, normally, it's the kind of thing you'd cut out of a movie entirely, but all these damn SmartPhones just aren't normal.