by Grace Crawford

Images courtesy of Lionsgate.

Well, hello there! Bet you weren’t expecting a review from me. But I figured I’d swing by during my fall hiatus and let you know what I thought of Mockingjay Part 1, the third instalment of the Hunger Games trilogy-that’s-actually-a-series-now-and-what’s-it-even-called-when-it’s-four-of-something-anyway.

In Mockingjay Part 1, Katniss Everdeen is struggling to cope with life now that District 12 has been destroyed and all of Panem is in open rebellion. She’s expected to be the Mockingjay, the face of the revolution, but it’s proving difficult when every minute is plagued by the thought of Peeta and the other tributes being tortured in the Capitol.

She manages to pull through in splendid fashion, using her innate awesomeness to be the Mockingjay and rally the country behind the flag of President Coin and District 13. There’s also some emotional stuff with Gale, who’s drifting further away from her and being fairly nasty about it.

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by Grace Crawford

All images courtesy of 20th Century Fox.

There’s an old saying that goes something like “All women marry men exactly like their fathers.”

Personally, I believe something that sounds similar but is in fact pretty different: that women, whether consciously or not, choose their partners based on their own experience with their fathers. And what I mean by that is that women’s relationships with men will always be coloured by their relationships with their fathers.

Even if they haven’t seen Say Anything, everyone knows about that one scene in the movie where John Cusack stands outside a girl’s window and holds a boom box over his head. It’s an iconic scene that’s set the standard for romantic gestures in modern relationships, even though nobody actually has a boom box anymore, and the more I say it, the stupider the word “boom box” sounds.

From that one scene, it’s easy to extrapolate what the rest of the movie is about: it’s a love story. But what a lot of people — including me, until recently — don’t know about this movie is more than just “boy meets girl.” It’s a love triangle between a girl, her dad, and her boyfriend, and it’s far less creepy than it sounds.

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What if there is no tomorrow? There wasn’t one today.

by Grace Crawford

Images courtesy of Columbia Pictures.

My favourite Stargate episode is season 3, episode 14: “Window of Opportunity.” A lonely scientist tries to save his wife by going back in time, but he only succeeds in starting a time loop that repeats a chunk of the day over and over again. Both O’Neill and Teal’c are aware of what’s happening; at first they’re confused, then angry, then doing everything they’ve always wanted without fear of repercussions, then trying feverishly to fix the problem.

I always liked that episode because it married humour with an outlandish and unsolvable problem, while simultaneously dealing with the human condition and what it does when faced with the idea of no consequences. Basically — and I didn’t realize it until I watched Groundhog Day for the first time — I liked it because it mimicked said movie, only with familiar characters and context.

But for all that I liked “Window of Opportunity,” Groundhog Day was so much better. And even though technically it isn’t older than I am, I went ahead and reviewed it anyway.

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