Expelled Grey Matter

I have said it before, and I'm just beating a dead horse on which everyone else has already gotten their licks.  It seems that almost every action/adventure/fantasy/science fiction movie these days is based on comic book characters.  Most of the films seem to follow the same formula of grand battles that barely move the plot along, villains who do next to nothing until the last few minutes of the film and all the CGI that the studio can afford.  Maybe it's the fact that it's origin story after origin story, but after awhile I get the same feeling I do when I watch horror films in October: almost all of them blur together, and they could largely be the same movie. So, it is no surprise that as the Marvel universe gradually falls into self-parody (except, so far, the Captain America films), it shouldn't come as a surprise that the character that is largely parody should show up: Deadpool.  It is also no surprise that this breathes some life back into the Marvel fil...

The Hunger Games got lambasted for being too close in plot to Battle Royale , but once the story really delivered in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire a lot of those comparisons ceased.  Where Battle Royale was more concerned with the immediate story with a bare minimum of framing, it became clear that The Hunger Games was more concerned with the boiling revolution against the decadent society of Panem than about the titular games themselves.  The second movie unfolded like a great science fiction novel, cutting off at just the right point to where the audience was left waiting for more. Well, for some reason, the decision came down to divide Mockingjay into two parts.  This seems a recent trend, unnecessarily stretching out The Hobbit through three films and dividing The Deathly Hallows into two parts.  The fact that this seems to be particularly a trend with movie adaptations of young adult novels clearly points to the reason for this less to flesh out the deta...