And may the odds be ever in your favor!

As a human being, I am prone to detecting patterns in everything, from bathroom tiles to burns on toast to the marketing campaign and the film it's advertising. This can be self-sabotaging at times, my attempts at being too clever can remove me from just having a good time with a movie, but it's not like I could help it with The Hunger Games. The film was doing its best to push me away, from the dull performances, to its action beat pacing that refused to stop and take in a scene, to the shakeycam/Bourne Identity/Black Hawk Down cinematography that would pop up at the most inappropriate times, trying to get the audience seasick. So as the film ran through all the key moments of Suzanne Collins' fairly decent book, my mind ended up wandering to tall tales of producers and directors and marketeers.

There once was a major studio exec named Snow. He had been there in the late 1970s, when the baby boomers finally gave up on peace and San Francisco and became the sellout nuclear families that they sprung from. The rebellion had failed, Nixon and Vietnam had put everyone into a meat grinder. The people were broken and boring and needed to be entertained, out of fear of a second uprising. So Snow and other big producers created the Blockbusters, big over-advertised event movies. Every year, the studios would select a handful of interesting adventure films and put them in an arena and see which ones would come out on top. Early winners included Jaws and Star Wars. And it worked. Hippies haven't been seen since.

Snow was still one of Hollywood's head honchos when the 2012 Blockbusters rolled around. Many films had been chosen as tribute. The Avengers and The Dark Knight Rises from District 1, the superhero district. Two Snow White movies somehow got selected this year, weird. Finally, there was District 12, the pop literature district. At the reaping, Max Brooks' World War Z was selected, but The Hunger Games offered herself as a volunteer tribute. And so The Hunger Games was shipped into a magic train to be taken to Hollywood.

And if The Hunger Games is Katniss, then surely Twilight is Haymitch, the drunken bloated franchise that won the Blockbuster years ago. He teaches the District 12 tribute how to look pretty, how to punch up that love triangle, how to throw around shitty CGI dogs like sprinkles. And advertise, and advertise, and advertise, and advertise. Get those sponsors, make Hollywood love you before you even step out into theaters.

While the percentage of good/middling/bad films that come out every year hasn't really changed since the 1920s, the use of advertising campaigns and hype machines have built up to a radical level, artificially creating event movies out of what might otherwise have been simple films, which is what The Hunger Games is at its core. It takes no risks, it offers no surprises, and is ultimately hampered by poor decisions in camera work and pacing. Despite its popularity NOW, despite its box office NOW, I cannot see The Hunger Games lasting in the long run. Its bad enough that the story is a critique of current popular trends in reality television, which will surely date the film in ten years time, but it can't stand up on its own, even if it turns out to be the biggest film of the year.

Of course, this year's game isn't over, and there's the chance that The Hunger Games doesn't pull it off in the end, taking a spear in the chest from one of the equally-hyped summer films or maybe a fluke Oscar bait film this winter, but lord knows it's going to give a good run at it. The film that was on fire.