(Alternate) Box Office Blockbuster Tourney – Odd Numbered Conference Round One

Experiencing some déjà vu?  It’s because if you follow this blog regularly, this post will look very familiar.

It’s because as I explained at the championship to our recent Box Office Blockbuster Tourney, it was drawn to my attention that all my judges in that competition were men, and someone said they’d be interested in seeing how things would have turned out if the voters were women instead. So now I’m running this Alternate Box Office Blockbuster Tourney.

Box Office Blockbuster Tourney: Round Two

So as explained before, we are playing a seeded tournament-style elimination game amongst each of the US domestic box office champion movies from the last 32 years.  Seeding was done via Rotten Tomatoes scores, with ties broken with Metacritic scores.  Three of our six judges will vote on each match-up of two films, with the winner advancing to the next round and the loser skulking off into obscurity, until we have our overall Champion!

Box Office Blockbuster Tourney: Odd-Numbered Years Conference, Round One

So as explained last time, we are playing a seeded tournament-style elimination game amongst each of the US domestic box office champion movies from the last 32 years.  Seeding was done via Rotten Tomatoes scores, with ties broken with Metacritic scores.  Three of our six judges will vote on each match-up of two films, with the winner advancing to the next round and the loser skulking off into obscurity, until we have our overall Champion!

Insurgent (with some Spoilers, for those who are still interested)

This post is about Insurgent, the sequel to Divergent, but first, let me diverge…

Recently I’ve been around some deep conversations about The Hunger Games. There are many in my circles who don’t like the franchise (books or movies) on the basis of the premise alone—children killing children. It’s a perspective I can completely understand. I mean, I don’t like children killing children either. And that’s not a joke or anything—that reflects a lot of terrible stuff that’s going on in a lot of the world, with child soldiers and so on.

Still, there are many others who don’t mind The Hunger Games and even enjoy it, presumably because it’s a gripping story with lots of action, drama and heart. Some say they can excuse the premise because the killing isn’t glorified. I’m not completely sure that’s true—I think it might be glorifying it a bit just by making something about it—but at the same time I can agree that the movies (I’ve never read the books) certainly seem to agree that what is going on is really really terrible.

I think that’s the thing that gripped my attention with them. It was clear from the beginning of the first film that this world was terribly unjust and wicked, and it’s largely because I’m really hoping I get to see Katniss Everdeen tear it to shreds that I have been sticking around ever since.

All that leads us to Insurgent, which got mentioned in those same conversations as an alternative take on the some of the same ideas from the Hunger Games. Of course, we knew that much—the story has been accused of being a massive rip-off of the Hunger Games, and certainly it owes some of its popularity to the fact that the Hunger Games has helped make this kind of story kind of big.

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire

There are friends of mine for whom this movie was the most anticipated film of the year – even more than Man of Steel, which I found incomprehensible.  But it turned out…they were right!  At least insofar as this was a better movie than the Superman reboot, or at least, less disappointing.

2013: Sequels, continuations, and reboots

2013 is shaping up to be a big year for movie / TV if you are fans of particular superhero, science fiction, or action-adventure franchises.  And naturally, I am!  I was thinking of all that I was anticipating this year, as well as a few things that I’m not really in order to fill out the numbers, and here is what I came up with.  In ascending order of level of anticipation and excitement: