— Incinerater

'Is this the best you can do?'

Throughout “The Hunger Games,” Jennifer Lawrence’s heroine, Katniss Everdeen, is referred to as the “girl on fire.” It’s  too bad the movie doesn’t share in that heat. The first in the adaptation of the Suzanne Collins franchise, in which a poor 16-year-old girl must fight to death for the entertainment of the 1%, is woefully average. It looks alright, the actors aren’t terrible (though, poor Lawrence, is acting her boots off for a character that isn’t written particularly meatily for the screen) and it doesn’t try to jam a tome into 2.5 hours (like “Twilight” did), but that ain’t saying much.

The problem is that there is very little of that pulse-racing, mind-blowing life and death feeling that the book purports to have (full disclosure: I haven’t read it but I’m a proponent of the-movie-should-stand-on-its-own theory). There is a lack of urgency and drama to the entire movie — maybe it’s because of the lack of build-up, but one (particularly one who hasn’t read the book) never gets the sense that the Hunger Games are as foreboding as everyone says. And being that they are the foundation upon which the suspense of the entire franchise lies, that’s not a good thing.

'I don't understand my character either.'

With “Young Adult,” Diablo Cody proves, yet again, she’s a dab hand at one liners. But the shtick is getting a little old. In this case, quite literally. If Mavis Gary (Charlize Theron) weren’t so contrived, I would have imagined she was the product of the same writing error as Angela Chase’s mom, who speaks in the same language as her daughter despite the twenty years between them (that modern day version of the religious painter who has difficulty making baby angels look like babies, though in this case it’s adults with baby voices). Instead, considering Cody clearly wanted to create an unlikable immature character (“Everyone gets old, not everyone grows up,” is “Young Adult’s” tagline), I was left wondering whether Mavis was anything more than the personnification of graffiti on the bathroom wall.

Mavis is a fiction writer who returns to her hometown of Minnesota to win back her ex, a now happily married semi-moron named Buddy (Patrick Watson), who also dotes on his newborn daughter. Basically, Mavis is what you would imagine “Mean Girls’” Regina George to be as an adult if she failed to undergo any semblance of growth or change between her teens and age 37. So, either Mavis has a DeLorean handy or those reality TV shows she’s been watching have fried her brain.

'I know, the dialogue sucks. It'll be over soon.'

With all the remakes and reboots and re-everythings that are being released lately, original ideas are being prized even more than Gollum’s precious. That may be why Andrew Niccol’s “In Time” is being lauded for its “brilliant” premise (besides the fact that it is tremendously timely, having come out right smack in the middle of OWS), which may be a cool idea but never really goes beyond that.

“In Time” is a sci fi “thriller” in which people stop aging at 25 and, at that point, a neon clock starts ticking on their arm. Because “time is money” literally,  your glowing arm determines how rich you are. Justin Timberlake’s character (Will Salas) starts out poor, meets a rich dude (Henry), gets all his time and is suddenly on the run from the timekeepers with a Kewpie-doll rich girl, the daughter of a dude (Philippe Weis) who is even richer than the previous rich dude. Cue a million non-witty repartees about “hands” “clocks” “hours” “minutes” and… I could go on until the end of time.

Plenty of reviewers have mentioned how Niccol failed to deliver on such a promising premise (but why does no one else have a problem with everyone at 25 being good looking? I know plenty of homely 20-somethings. I was one of them!) but very few have noted the one major problem with the film that may have allowed audiences to overlook the behemothic plot holes: the dialogue.