Trailer: ‘Catching Fire’ makes me miss Twilight

Seems like half the people posting the Catching Fire trailer today are talking about how the first Hunger Games was a disappointment, though you’d never know it from its 85% recommended rating on RottenTomatoes (count me staunchly among the other 15). I guess that was before people realized that we could enjoy Jennifer Lawrence in movies that were actually good. In any case, the hype train starts today, fittingly the day after the MTV Movie Awards, which used to be the industry’s foremost venue for premiering new Twilight trailers. I never thought I’d say this, but The Hunger Games actually makes me miss Twilight. Twilight was so dumb and so weird and it was so much fun to ridicule. The Hunger Games is full of fake-meaningful names and themes and there are just enough competing allusions that it never really adds up to anything, it just distracts you long enough to not make fun of it. And where’s the fun in that? Give me feats-of-strength abstinence sex and shirtless temptation wolves any day. You think Hunger Games is going to give us fan-made felt uteruses or a woman having to fight off a cat named Plutarch Heavensbee with her husband’s CPap machine? I doubt it. And that means we’ve all lost something, friends. We’ve lost something.

So yeah, Francis Lawrence takes over directing duties from Gary Ross, and from the looks of it, this one is much less of a blurry mess. Philip Seymour Hoffman plays the aforementioned Plutarch Heavensbee.

DUDE 1: She’s not who they think she is. She has become a beacon of hope. So she has to be eliminated.

DUDE 2: Katniss Everdeen is a symbol, you don’t have to destroy her, just her image. Show them that she is one of us now. Let them rally behind that. They’re gonna hate her so much they might just kill her for you.

She was supposed to be a distraction, but now she’s a beacon of hope, but they’ll turn her into a tool of the government so that the other victors don’t become a liability! Jesus Christ, does anything happen in these f*cking movies without some dude explaining their symbolic (and highly dubious) relevance? It’s like Jim Nantz is doing a running retrospective on it while it’s happening.

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