Expelled Grey Matter

More and more I have had the feeling that the Marvel movies are taking pages from the old Universal monster films.  As those movies began to run out of ideas, became cheaper and tried to keep audiences, they spent more time trying to jam as many monsters as possible.  Problem is, the promised creatures (usually the poor Frankenstein monster) usually got screen time that added up to a minute or less, while the big bad each time was usually another mad scientist bent on immortality, bringing a dead relative back to life or proving that they were the ones that could do what every mad scientist before them couldn't.  Eventually the returns diminished to the point where Universal had no choice but to just start teaming them with Abbott and Costello and going full parody. Marvel hasn't reached that point yet, but I was afraid they might with Avengers: Infinity War .  This movie is jam-packed with almost every superhero they could get together.  Combine that with the fact that th

It is perhaps not the best idea to star in two alien invasion films back to back within the span of a year.  Because almost every trailer seems the same these days, as does most of the big-budget sci-fi spectaculars, they tend to all jumble up in my brain unless something really stands out.  Edge of Tomorrow stood out because it started to get some serious attention after it was out of the theaters and people started to realize it was actually a pretty good movie.  Oblivion , on the other hand, didn't do too bad in theaters, but it also stars Tom Cruise, and I am quite sure that at least for a time I couldn't remember which film was which. For the record, Edge of Tomorrow is definitely the better of the two, and it was helped to stand out more by the fact that its own confusing marketing (the tagline "Live, Die, Repeat" being bigger than the actual title, thus leading many to believe that was the title of the film) where there is nothing really that stood out ab

It should be of no surprise that maybe Paul W. S. Anderson's Resident Evil series isn't the most consistent with sticking to continuity.  Despite this he managed to produce a successful run of six films even if originally three were all that were planned.  He also may have wrote them, but the sequels got handed off to other directors, most notably Russell Mulcahy for Resident Evil: Extinction .  When we last left Alice (Milla Jovovich) most of the world had been turned to uninhabitable desert.  She had run into a bunch of survivors in a caravan led by Claire Redfield (Ali Larter), and helped them escape to a town called Arcadia, located in Alaska and promising refuge.  Meanwhile, she infiltrated an Umbrella Corporation facility in the Mojave Desert, killing the evil doctor in charge of the place and gaining herself a clone army in the process. As Resident Evil: Afterlife  begins we see Alice making good on her promise from the end of the last movie, using her clones to a

The James Bond series was a bit of an anomaly when it came to British film making.  The UK movie industry, while not poverty row by any stretch of the imagination, still was like most film industries outside the United States: you got a budget, usually nowhere near that of a Hollywood film, and did what you could with it.  Often studios like Hammer did quite a bit, making their movies look much more expensive than they really were.  With its exotic Jamaica location and elaborate sets at Pinewood Studio, Dr. No managed to do what it was designed to.  It was low budget, had so many elements that hid that fact. It was such a hit that its sequels, From Russia with Love and Goldfinger , received bigger budgets and became even more elaborate.  It was only fitting that Thunderball would be the biggest budgeted Bond movie yet, and after taking a break from Goldfinger , original director Terence Young was back.  The problem is when someone hands you a bunch of money for a project like