he gonzo box office success of Lions Gate Entertainment’s new film The Hunger Games has drawn criticism from North Korea’s beloved madman Kim Jong-un this week, as the diminutive leader called bullshit on the killing of teenagers in ritualized sport suddenly becoming cool after his country had been doing it for decades.

"Once again a Hollywood movie has made a mockery of the glorious North Korean lifestyle," griped Kim. "Same thing happen in Dark City and Mad Max."

Kim Jong-un, back in power after the nation’s failed experiment with Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom was rapidly abandoned due to Dotcom being jailed for paying to see The Smurfs, violating North Korea’s longstanding policy regarding the mandatory pirating of Hollywood films, added that The Hunger Games was "popcorn bullshit" and that unlike Westerners, the fortunate citizens of North Korea don’t have to pay exorbitant movie theater prices to see that kind of thing every day.

The insular nation, which subjects its citizens to harrowing games of life and death on a daily basis, is no stranger to televised competitions that would probably be called The Hunger Games if they’d thought of that first. These include the capital city’s weekly "Fight For Your Food Fun Fight" events, which critics have condemned as a natural result of the state’s failed economy and collapsed chain of food production disguised as a trumped-up game show where regular citizens punch each other to death over the last canned ham in the entire city. Regardless, the North Korean tourism board has been quick to capitalize on the success of the Hunger Games film, already advertising tourism packages where Hunger Games fans can tour the Pyongyang Deathdrome and kill an actual North Korean teenager with their bare hands for less than the average New Yorker spends on "Whoops, I ran over another homeless person" insurance.

The Hunger Games opened to a gangbusters $155 million in its first weekend in theaters, a figure described by Hollywood pundits as "fucking bananas" and "bigger than $154 million," and representing the biggest box-office opening in history for a non-sequel film. Critics dispute the importance of this claim, however, since it was also the first non-sequel film to be released since 2007.

Based on the first of a berserkly popular series of young adult novels by writer Suzanne Collins, the books and film alike have been criticized for being heavily derivative of previous source materials, such as the Japanese film Battle Royale, the American films The Running Man, Series 7, The Condemned, The Most Dangerous Game, Lord of the Files, The Truman Show, Spartacus and Death Race 2000, the Italian film The 10th Victim, the Stephen King story The Long Walk and the Shirley Jackson novel The Lottery. In honor of this long chain of shit being ripped off, the CW has already begun filming the pilot for their own Hunger Games knock-off television series, The Selection, which involves a cast of lesser-known actors rehashing the plot of The Hunger Games on a weekly basis.

When asked recently if she thought her novels were derivative of these previous works, Collins responded "What? I can’t hear you because of the noise from all the money I’m drowning in over here," before literally drowning in an avalanche of hundred dollar bills. Funeral services will be held Tuesday at the cash landfill in North Hollywood where rich people are buried.

In spite of the author’s death, the white-hot success of the first film all but guarantees that Lions Gate will return to Collins’ grave at least twice more to adapt the other two books in the series, 2009’s Catching Fire and 2010’s Oxycute ’em! in hopes of sating the bloodlust of twelve-year-old American girls. Stars Jennifer Lawrence and Josh Hutcherson have reportedly already signed on for three sequels, with a uniquely ironic clause in their contracts stating that if they back out of the sequels for any reason, they’ll be hunted by hordes of teenaged fans out for blood.

Meanwhile, North Korea’s Jong-un has demanded that Hollywood filmmakers stop ripping off ideas from his country for their dystopian sci-fi visions.

"You get your own ideas," the beloved "Supreme Tall Sunshine Man" spat into a microphone shaped like a hamburger. "I don’t want to see any more movie with robots that look like humans but are spies for government, or people with clocks stuck in their arms ticking down to time when they die, or genetic-engineered battle giraffes, or desalination plant that run on dead babies."

"In closing," Jong-un decreed, while eating a roll of Fruit-by-the-Foot, "I also downloaded bittorrent of The Smurfs, and there’s not goddamned thing you people can do about it."

iscount quasi-airline JetBlue has announced that in-flight movies will be cancelled for all future flights and replaced with a live variety show put on by the flight crew, in response to the glowing praise the airline received for an improvised show put on by the crew of JetBlue flight 191 from New York to Las Vegas this morning.

"We had to do something," explained stewardess Theresa Bower. "The scheduled movie for the flight was supposed to be Ides of March but I accidentally sent that disc back to Netflix instead of the Bumfights DVD I was supposed to put in the envelope, and the only other DVD we had on the plane was Space Jam. And nobody wanted to subject people to that. Thankfully Captain Dave came through when the chips were down. We had no idea he was such an electric performer."

The show began with Captain Dave Westman "accidentally" locking himself out of the cockpit after getting up and wandering around the plane for several minutes, at one point standing in the middle of the aisle and eating the lunch meat out of several sandwiches from the stewardess’ service cart and loudly complaining that they didn’t have any bologna. The captain was later seen trying to insert his car keys into the doorknob of one of the plane’s unoccupied lavatories, then arguing with a pregnant woman in coach that she was sitting in his seat. Upon returning to the cockpit and finding the door locked, the uproarious comedy began.

"It was like the best Flintstones episode ever," raved passenger Laura Styles of Brooklyn. "The way he was whining in that sing-songy voice about being let back into the cockpit, I pulled a Bush and totally almost choked on a pretzel."

"It was Laurel and Hardy with air marshals," agreed Styles’ seatmate, Sandra Pullium. "Nobody expected him to drop his pants like that. I was laughing so hard when he tried to knock down the cockpit door with his dick that I didn’t even know what was going on."

"We gotta pull the throttle back, we’re gonna fucking die!" screamed the captain, while furiously pounding on the cockpit door. According to witnesses, the co-pilot responded "Dave’s not here, man," to a raucous round of applause and wolf-whistles from the flight’s passengers.

A hilarious slapstick routine followed, with flight attendants attempting to wrap the irate captain in a comically clichéd straight-jacket, then ending up accidentally whipping off their tops instead and dancing atop the first row of seats to the theme song from Austin Powers.

While the stewardesses were dancing, the captain screamed "There is a bomb on this plane and all you motherless fucks will die in the cleansing fire if we don’t land in downtown Chicago right fucking now! Say your fucking prayers!" before unleashing a fearsomely awkward karate kick to the cockpit door.

"Oh my God," reminisced passenger Todd Franklin of Carson City, Nevada. "When he did that karate thing I almost shit my pants. I had to stick my face in the air sickness bag because I was hyperventilating from laughing so hard."

The flight suddenly plummeted 10,000 feet after the captain bashed down the cockpit door with a fire extinguisher and began comically wrestling the co-pilot for the plane’s controls, resulting in a sissy slap fight that had all the children on the plane calling out for more.

The show proved so popular the flight had to be diverted to Rick Husband International Airport in Amarillo, Texas, so more passengers could be let on for the sold-out evening show.

"When those strippers dressed as cops led the captain off the plane in fake handcuffs, we just all stood up and applauded," explained passenger Lisa Redgraves. "We all wanted an encore but they never came back."

"I hope JetBlue realizes what they have here," mused passenger Roger Trenton of Nardswallow, Nevada. "This show could run for years. I guarantee you the other airlines are going to have copycat shows before the month is out. I only hope they do it right. I could see room for a hilarious inept terrorist character or something like that being worked into other airlines’ shows, but you’ve got to do it right and not just play the smoking bomb underwear for cheap laughs."

Apologies for the sudden end to last week’s column, communistas. The sheer epic scope of the commune’s tale got the better of me and I had to take three Excedrin Migraine and spend a few hours feeding the ducks behind the Shanesly Arby’s.

When I left you last, the Crochet! staffers had just packed up and left town like those front-running little bear assholes in The Lorax. I have to tell you, commune readers, this was a personal low point in the life of Emil Zender. However, that didn’t last long as the very next week there was the lawsuit, which made Crochet! jumping ship seem like a trip to Six Flags.

It turns out that all these years there was a website called The Onion that people tell me is quite popular. And apparently various individuals with law degrees felt that the commune’s brand of insouciant truth-telling was a bit too close to The Onion’s jam for comfort. I don’t see it personally, but that may be due in part to our lack of a working internet connection. For all I know they may have a Homer Brinks working there who tortures their downstairs neighbors at Sew What? magazine, that really would be weird and possibly actionable. But either way, there was a lawsuit, and it turned out that our "friends" at Hipsoda.com were just archiving our site for use as evidence in the trial, just like they had repeatedly told us they were doing. It even turned out they weren’t being sarcastic! Note to the world: We really need to develop a sarcasm font, pronto.

Before you get too excited however, the lawsuit turned out to be about 97% sizzle and only 3% steak-like polyurethane. It turns out they’d spent years carefully amassing evidence against the commune without bothering to check in on our assets, which turned out to total -$47.39. Yes, Kinkos, I got your collections call. After realizing that even recouping their legal expenses was an absurd pipe dream, the lawyers attempted to have our site shut down so as to cease and desist damaging The Onion’s reputation. However it was quickly uncovered that for most of the commune’s existence, due to various technical fuckups the site had only been accessible through off-brand love tester machines in various Southern California Pioneer Chicken locations, and had never actually been posted on the wider internet until Hipsoda.com started collecting evidence for the lawsuit. So by a strange twist of fate The Onion had damaged its own reputation, spreading the commune’s unique brand of verve to seven new fans in the intervening years.

This seemed to embarrass everyone into just dropping the whole thing, well that and the fact that Boris Utzov got confused and went home with The Onion’s lawyers at the end of our last meeting with them, and the last I heard they’ve been unable to get him to leave.

But sadly, the commune’s triumph was short-lived. Without their shared hatred of Crochet! or the law to rally around, the commune staffers soon began to splinter. Some followed Omar when he left to start a cult in Gambia. Some -shudder- got jobs at the Shanesly Department of Public Works. Some are employed at the local strip club, Twerks because they typed in "Works" wrong on the nav. Some, I am certain, were eaten by the Gnarlap living in the crawl space under the basement, after it ran out of regretted mail-order brides and Pomeranians to eat.

Raoul Dunkin left to start a new political news site, TwinkInc.com, a hopefully more palatably-named successor to his deeply mourned spankrag.com. Red Bagel did stop by briefly, dressed as Colonel Sanders and insisting that everyone refer to him as such for tax purposes, but he quickly lost interest and left to work on his "Donald Trump" character.

My most loyal boarder was of course Ivan Nacutchacokov, who stayed the longest due to his fierce love for the commune and deep fear of his ex-wife, in uncertain proportions. But even his ticket was punched one night a few months back when the NSA came for him, apparently after finally getting around to reading some long-forgotten commune article that laid their nefarious plans bare for all to see. I would suggest they were tapping our phones or internet, but we had neither, and I’m not sure they’ve learned how to intercept bulk Valpak coupon mailers marked RETURN TO SENDER, which had been our main means of economical correspondence.

After Ivan was dragged screaming out my front door, then calmed way down and went along happily after discovering it was the NSA and not goons hired by Ivana, I must admit I fell into a bit of a funk, commune readers. Was this all my grand plans had come to? A brief smattering of articles over the years, countless unexplainable holes in my walls, some kind of insatiable beast living under my basement and an attic that smells like a sanitarium for dogs? Sometimes I question if it was all worth it.

And then I remember that all those dolls in the attic still have little walkie talkies in them. And man if my mom’s boyfriend Doug isn’t afraid of those dolls.

The spirit of the commune lives on!

Zincerely,
Emil Zender

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