Last year I decided it would be in my, and by extension your, best interest to do a year-end review in the Flickchartiest way possible. The four people who read it were very vocal about how it was an adequate way of spending their break at work therefore I decided to repeat the feat this year. Luckily for you I watched an absurd amount of movies this year – too many – and to make me feel like I didn’t waste much of my time and money I will be doing a series of battles throughout the next few weeks. To get us warmed up for the ensuing blood bath, the first movie will be about a bunch of teenagers killing each other…

Women Be Shootin’

The Hunger Games was the first big release box office wise of the year. While it seemed to satisfy most of the diehard fans of the franchise many people who hadn’t smashed through the books in 5 total days had reservations. The biggest complaint was that it took too many ideas from Battle Royale, but it also garnered a heavy amount of questions beyond potential idea borrowing. Why did the elite have such bizarre hair styles? Why did the citizens of District 12 give their children such dumb names? What the hell was going on in those shaky-cam action scenes? Am I not supposed to be disconcerted with the idea of children killing each other? Some of these complaints will be satiated by Gary Ross being replaced by a new director for the sequels. A director who hopefully doesn’t keep his camera at the end of a rope that he is swinging around in a circle above his head.

Not to be outdone in the “first” department, Brave was the first big disappointment of the year for most people. Pixar has been spoiling us for so long that when they released a movie that was simply “good” we as a society rejected it and marked it as a major let down. While it had its problems I still think it was a good movie and a nice change of pace from the normal princesses that young girls get to see in movies. It’s important that they see strong females on the screen whose sole purposes in life are not finding the perfect man.

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