Expelled Grey Matter

The original Jurassic Park was such an innovation in many ways.  Number one, even though much of the science was spotty (or has since been updated by the fossil record), it was one of the first movies to try and show dinosaurs in a realistic form.  Instead of city-stomping monsters, they were portrayed as animals filling similar ecological niches as modern-day animals.  A lot of this could be credited to Michael Crichton, the author of the original novel, but a lot of work went into bringing the creatures to the screen.  That brings us to number two.  Digital effects often still looked unnatural, like the owl at the beginning of Labyrinth or the flat textures in The Last Starfighter .  Using a combination of computer generated effects and traditional practical animatronics, the fictional park on the equally fictional Costa Rican island of Isla Nublar came to spectacular life.  Yes, in the end it was a simple "escape the monsters" movie, but it was...

Before Deadpool succeeded in making the humorous anti-hero version of the current superhero films a viable thing, the main Marvel universe (Deadpool is part of the X-Men universe) tried a similar approach with Ant-Man .  The Russo Brothers also managed to make Ant-Man work during his appearance in the latest Captain America film.  Too bad his origin film isn't that interesting. Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) is a master thief.  Well, not too much of a master, because he got caught, and has served his time.  He wants to go straight, but unfortunately the world doesn't have much use for ex-cons.  Neither does his ex-wife Maggie (Judy Greer) or her new beau, who do everything to keep him away from his daughter Cassie (Abby Ryder Fortson). Out of desperation he agrees to go along with a scheme cooked up by his friend Luis (Michael Peña) to rob the estate of Hank Pym (Michael Douglas).  He succeeds, but instead of the money they were expecting he finds a suit....

The key to successful exploitation is to take any idea, no matter how ridiculous, and push it to its limit.  Too often exploitation, instead of showing what is promised, plays a bait and switch.  The concept of the movie may cause controversy, but the actual movie falls way short of what was promised.  That is the problem I had with The Purge. The set-up is that in the late part of this decade the United States is still officially the constitutional republic it has always been, but a party calling itself the New Founding Fathers has been elected to power.  They promised to make America great again or some such nonsense, and now they control a government that is a fascistic, oligarchical theocracy.  The key is that every March 21st, starting at sundown, all laws are suspended for 12 hours.  There are some rules: can't kill political officials, can't use explosives or nuclear devices, etc.  In every other way, all bets are off. It sounds like a gr...

The Goonies is one of those movies that managed to escape the '80s with its reputation intact, if not enhanced.  Most of the kids in it have had further careers and are better known as adult actors (except for the Corey Feldman).  The movie looks and feels '80s, and, with Steven Spielberg as the producer, it has that feel associated with the rest of his films from this point in his career, despite being directed by Richard Donner of Superman and Lethal Weapon fame. So, why is this movie, which has no real monsters and no supernatural happenings (unlike similar Spielberg offerings) a survivor instead of, say, The Monster Squad ?  For me it's certainly not nostalgia, since I didn't really like the movie when it first came out, due to the fact that it didn't have gremlins, aliens, pirate ghosts or anything as interesting as most of the other movies that were similar.  I think, even though it was a movie aimed nominally at kids, that I was too old to enjoy it when ...

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...

I am one of those weird people who loved The Chronicles of Riddick .  I thought Pitch Black was okay, but Chronicles is what sold the character, and the universe he inhabits, to me.  Through the efforts of low-budget director David Twohy (whose films, like The Arrival and Terminal Velocity , I had enjoyed previously) and Vin Diesel, they scraped up what they needed to make a grand space adventure.  And it failed, miserably. This was largely due to a number of cuts to make it PG-13, and a good part of the story being lost.  Happily, I never saw that version.  I saw the version, as Twohy and Diesel intended, once it came out on DVD.  So did a number of other people, and the movie was somewhat redeemed.  What both of them had in common, though, was an abrupt ending.  Riddick (Diesel) had become the Lord Marshall of the Necromongers, a barbaric scourge upon the galaxy that destroys entire civilizations in their quest to find the mythical Underver...