idk. The theater I went to was one of those really ultra-posh ones with the leather recliner seats and I was just kind of enjoying that. I had the choice of seeing the movie or doing an extra ten loops around Marcon and I'd seen about everything there was to see there, so what the hell.

I had a discussion with the concession stand guy about the movie and he upgraded my soda for free, so I thank Suzanne Collins for the gigantic coke zero.

However, I still maintain that she, a Hollywood screenwriter, who claims to have absolutely no prior knowledge of Battle Royale, Running Man, Most Dangerous Game, The Lottery, or even the story of the fucking Minotaur, or any of the other many stories with a nearly identical theme, she is either really poorly educated or lying, and that pisses me off.

Hunger Games went so far as to have nearly identical characters as Battle Royale, only the genders of the protagonists are reversed. Woody Harrelson is a slightly more amiable version of Beat Takeshi's character. They even have the "ringers" in the competition, the trained professional killers, who volunteer. In Hunger Games they're the "Careers" and in Battle Royale it was Kiriyama. Same same.

or gladiators

i saw it yesterday and for some reason i thought about warhammer 40k all the time also it will never be as good as the running man cause there are no chansaws to the dick

Battle Royal is overrated. OOPS DID I SAY THAT OUT LOUD

When you think about it, it all is.

I thought it was boring, and more than a little retarded. Its the real kind of overrated.

If you don't have the buy-in, you don't have the buy-in.

I think most of us have played way too many video games with these kind of scenarios. It's one thing to watch it happen, but when you play a character and survive, well movies just aren't good enough.

I liked it enough to read the manga. That was the first one I'd ever read, because fuck that shit, and it was pretty good once I got past all of the hilariously Caucasian features of the Japanese teenagers.

I guess I've played video games with similar scenarios, but it was really something the first time I saw a movie about kids killing each other to win a game. I've always thought it was pretty well done, for the most part.

First and last time Zomboid and I will ever agree probably

Battle royale is fucking awesome, hunger games is god damn lame.

If Jennifer Lawrence could act at all, that movie would have been tolerable. She's got the acting range of a brick. (Spare me the "but she won an oscar" bullcrap, so did Julia Roberts for essentially playing herself.)

I don't dislike her. She's personable. Although I have noticed that if you can do a good angry outburst/psychotic break, you're automatically oscar material. Lots of the clips they played during the "best actress" send-up were of tearful shouting.

I take exception to a professional Hollywood screenwriter feigning being unaware of roughly a zillion identical plotlines, mainly.

I'm also pissed that archery got appropriated into pop culture through this movie. Don't ask me to explain that.

Part of me wants to see Catching Fire to see how much like BRII it is.

Although, I think the Mockingjay one would be more like BRII, now that I've read the books.

are the books any good?

I wouldn't call them super-duper-sophisticated, but they're standard Young Adult Fiction and not quite as vapid as Twilight. I mean, this is a writer for Little Bear. It's entertaining enough.